After Such Knowledge

Raphael Patai was trying to explain a historical survival strategy, not an innate cultural destiny. When you read him charitably, the core claim is something like this: 1. Repeated conquest → preference for kin-based security.  Across the Arabian Peninsula and much of the Fertile Crescent, political authority was: - frequently overturned   - externally imposed   - unreliable as a guarantor of justice or property   - often extractive rather than protective   In such an environment, impersonal public authority was not a stable bet. What was stable? - your clan   - your lineage   - your reciprocal obligations   - your honor network   - your ability to mobilize kin for protection   This is not unique to Arabs. It’s the same pattern you see in: - the Pashtun highlands   - the Caucasus   - premodern Sicily   - the Scottish Highlands   - the Balkans  ...

My protest began as an involuntary esthetic revulsion. The moral panic and existential dread came later. One of my sources believed Western civilization didn’t grow continuously but in pulses, each one emerging after a trough,  reorganizing institutions, producing a burst of creativity, and then stabilizing into a plateau. Greek letters were his way of marking these pulses as structural phases, not moral judgments. Well, I made some. Never forget that Hitler was an artist manqué. I can't really say the same thing about Napoleon, but he became necessary after the French Revolution failed to solve its problem. This is where Kroeber is more subtle than people often remember. He acknowledge that conflict, war, and coercive power are part of culture. What he resisted was letting war drive the structure of his cultural‑growth model. As if to prove this, napoleon did solve France's problem; then he went to war - after he made it unnecessary. By reforming France's provincial struct...

or, my structural, neurodivergent, systems-level way of seeing the world vs. my friends’ moral-phenomenological, outrage-driven framing... Ima gonna dismiss the Epstein Files because of how my framework functions, not because I'm unaware of the Rothschild references. My worldview treats scandals like Epstein as symptoms of a system, not drivers of it, so individual names—Rothschild or otherwise—don’t change my analysis.  You'd think humans hate to be humans. This seems especially true of Faustians, Spengler's name for Westerners. The renegade version of WAIP taught how to style one's rhetoric to do three things consistently: Replace individual actors with structural forces. This entire analytic style is to "de-personalize" power. The argument is that global capital operates through impersonal systems—logistics, supply chains, financialization—not through cabals of specific families or individuals. This is why I avoid focusing on “who” and instead focus on “wha...

Here’s the most up‑to‑date picture of what Malcolm Nance is saying right now about Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon, based strictly on the latest public statements surfaced. I’ll synthesize his positions across the three fronts so you can see the through‑line of his thinking. Malcolm Nance’s current stance is that the center of gravity is Iran—not Gaza or Lebanon—and that the region is entering a long, grinding conflict driven by Iran’s new leadership, U.S. missteps, and Israel’s escalatory posture. He frames Gaza as a humanitarian catastrophe with strategic blowback, Iran as a dangerously underestimated adversary, and Lebanon as a secondary front shaped entirely by Iran’s decisions. “This war is going to be long, ugly, and far harder than Washington understands." (Paraphrasing from his Warcast and recent interviews.) Key points: He sees Iran as the true strategic driver of the current Middle East crisis—not Gaza or Lebanon. In the Harry Cole Saves the West interview, he warns that Mojtaba...

A deliciously volatile premise — a Chinese asset posing as an Asimov‑style psychohistorian. It practically begs for a thriller that oscillates between intellectual seduction and geopolitical dread. A man (or woman) presents themselves to the West as a brilliant, eccentric mathematician in the Hari Seldon mold — a visionary who claims to have developed a predictive science of mass behavior. Think: equations, trendlines, elegant inevitabilities. They’re embraced by think tanks, governments, and tech elites hungry for certainty. But the “psychohistorian” is actually a deep-cover Chinese intelligence asset whose real mission is to shape Western decision‑making by feeding it a seductive but subtly warped model of the future. The twist:   They’re not just lying.   They’re brilliant enough that their model almost works. That “almost” is where the thriller lives. Psychohistory is the perfect cover. A psychohistorian is expected to be: - cryptic   - aloof ...

I bet I could find a connection, and here 'tis. The 1979 overthrow of the Shah did indeedy emerge from the same global structural forces that produced neoliberalism—but the crucial twist is that Iran’s revolution was the counter‑movement side of that same world‑system shock, not the market-liberalizing side. In other words: Likud and neoliberalism were expressions of the new order; the Iranian Revolution was an eruption produced by the collapse of the old order. I lack the charm. The way it fits together is this: the global system was already breaking down (1973–1980). Across the world, the post‑WWII economic order—anchored in fixed exchange rates, cheap energy, U.S.-centered financial stability, and developmentalist states — was collapsing. This collapse created two kinds of political outcomes. There was the market-liberalizing realignment like New York’s 1975–76 fiscal restructuring (the origin of neoliberalism itself, Thatcher's "Glorious Capitulation" to the City ...