AGAINST THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY

by James Lawrence

@JWLawrence85

It is a good and necessary thing to take the red pill: to start seeing things as they really are, not as the delusional ruling ideology of a corrupted civilisation tells you they must be. But the red pill, in itself, is not a sufficient condition for true understanding.

Perhaps we can grasp this point by taking a second look at the iconic scene from The Matrix that inspired the ‘red pill’ metaphor. In this scene, Neo takes a red pill and wakes up from his simulated reality, to find himself in the real world: an ugly and dystopian future, ruled by intelligent machines, in which he has been serving all his life as one of countless human batteries in a huge electrical system called the Matrix. Weak from muscular atrophy, he is flushed out of the Matrix into an underground sewer, in which he flounders helplessly until a flying craft winches him out and takes him to safety. From this point, he is brought into the community of free humans, who teach him both the nature of the real world and how to act and fight within it. 

IN PRAISE OF DECONSTRUCTING RACE AND GENDER

by James Lawrence

The year 2018 has only just started, and it’s already shaping up to be a very bad year for the proponents of the “horseshoe theory”. Last week, classical liberal and horseshoe enthusiast ‘Sargon of Akkad’ took on Richard Spencer in a three-hour Youtube debate – and not only made a fool of himself from the beginning, but had to be helped later on by SJW and male cat lady Kevin Logan, who according to Sargon’s theory should have sided instinctively with Spencer. The peddlers of watered-down red pills on the periphery of the Alt-Right must be wondering how long they can stay in business, taking money for blowing hot air at the Left while dismissing as “collectivist” and “immoral” the only sociopolitical movement that can actually fight it.

So let’s be magnanimous in victory, and throw the poor beleagured gatekeepers a vaguely horseshoe-shaped bone for them to crow over. Here it is: what if the Alt-Right stopped directly resisting progressivist efforts to “deconstruct” race, nation and gender, and instead started turning these critiques to its own advantage?

THE WISCONSIN IDEA MEETS THE AMERICAN REALITY

Scott Walker, or "Harley," as he would have liked to have been called, would seem to be a pretty traditionally Wisconsin guy. His political rise though, was actually only made possible by the decline of traditional Wisconsin.

by Ryan Andrews

The official center of Downtown Madison is a pedestrian-only, shopping/dining district called, fittingly, "State Street." It runs for about a mile, and at one end is the State Capitol, while at the other end is UW-Madison, Wisconsin’s flagship university. Locals probably associate the area more with raucous Halloween parties and homeless people than anything else, but State Street is obviously designed to be the symbolic cultural center of the state, physically linking the two great institutional expressions of its people.

It is a nice touch, I think, and it has long been much more than symbolic. Many readers, I am sure, are at least somewhat familiar with "the Wisconsin Idea"—the idea that "the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state." This means that the university is to expand the benefits of its knowledge to every citizen of the state.