There *are* black fraternities, and they’re a very interesting case study of racial politics in action.

For example, this article *isn’t* about black fraternities. Obviously.

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https://twitter.com/vaubanbooks/status/1787246699070504960

Normal fraternities, ie 95% white, are under constant scrutiny by IFC and school admin. They are regularly disciplined, fined, or banned from campus for minor infractions.

National orgs do not defend chapters, and are rather controlling in general.

58% of you are members of the Elect. I will now harass the other 42%.

Why train fighting? Why do I always harp on this being so important?

Thread:

https://twitter.com/0xalaric/status/1785404834864156825

1. Fitness

There’s a reason they call it “being in fighting shape.”

Fight training will lean you out, build muscle, strengthen your tendons and joints, make you faster, and make your cardio incredible.

When young white men take themselves seriously, the cultural Left has a conniption. If they have fun, the Right loses its mind.

For the former: political engagement, fitness, scholarly interest. For the latter: watching sports, drinking, music.

The intersection is fraternities Examples of point A:

- Derision & mocking of politically-active young white men, especially on the Right (but really anywhere)
- Extreme distaste for bodybuilding
- Freakouts about "extremist interest in the Classics" or other academic topics
- Mockery of any earnest emotion

This is true, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Global military dominance by the West was largely due to drill & discipline, standardization, engineering, and immense feats of logistics & infrastructure.

Technics and organization are spurned today as “soulless” but they are what built the modern world. This isn’t to say that warrior cultures in the West were built upon nerd-ism or technics alone; I would be the last person to ever say that.

But global dominance does not come from guts & vril alone, or else Gurkhas or some other military people would have conquered the world

All very old martial arts have a sort of oddness to them, a disorienting underlying philosophy of movement that throws off a modern revivalist because it’s just so *odd*

It’s near-impossible to cut through centuries of unwritten, unspoken ways of movement. Then the natural esotericism of things like kata or manuals make it even harder.

But if these arts (often the only athletic tradition surviving from their time, perhaps aside from dances) can be decoded… broken into phonemes and morphemes, like ancient unwritten languages… much could be learned about their respective cultures

Perhaps about mankind’s development overall, too — the same intangible “flavor” of systematized motion runs through many of these long-lost systems

The key would be reverse-engineering the physical assumptions & surrounding habitus of each one, then drawing connections or distinctions; by way of comparison one could find “lineages” of underlying assumptions about combat & motion, a vast unrecorded network of silent languages

Really look at all these people. They’re the exact kind of people that would set up a group picture flipping off the camera to “dunk” on a Twitter anon for wrongthink

Imagine the conversation that led to this. None of them are even attractive! What were they expecting?

https://twitter.com/airbagged/status/1779000326701355124

Let’s go one by one

The Navy today is facing the same problems that the Navy faced in the interwar period — really the same problems faced by any peacetime naval force throughout history.

The good news is that it’s fixable. The bad news is that it takes a lot for the Navy to fix anything.

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https://twitter.com/6voodoo/status/1778512775519568260

Compared to every other element of warfare doctrine, naval doctrine moves at a snail’s pace.

It is the most rigid, traditional, and slowly-evolving theater.

This applies to grand strategy — note that Mahan is still relevant — down to specific tactics & technology.

Haiti is poised to form yet another "transitional" government to wrest control back from gang leaders like Barbecue.

Port-au-Prince is a disaster, gangs run the streets, cargo ships with food aid face hijackings, and the country is yet again failing.

How did it get here?

1/ Since its independence from France, Haiti has been an unmitigated failure.

It has never developed to any meaningful extent, does not maintain meaningful international relationships, and its people generally live in squalor.

Trump was right. It is a veritable "shithole."

The way we’re taught to read primary sources is nonsense.

The general line is “what are the author’s biases?”

As if this is the full extent of what matters in analyzing a source. As if identifying and criticizing those “biases” is about as deep as you’re supposed to go.

1/ There’s a bizarre notion that these “biases” can reach through the pages and infect your reading of the relevant history.

They act as if Herodotus or any other chronicler/historian was writing for an audience of 21st-century readers, instead of his contemporaries.

It's really weird how little people actually know about interpersonal violence, weapons, and firearms.

You see stuff like this circulating all the time, especially among the "Abolish Police!" crowd.

So, let's talk a little bit about how violence actually works.

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https://twitter.com/Ali_Najmi/status/1773569248528408603

Despite how it's portrayed in movies, a knife fight is a very ugly affair. People don't make big Psycho-type swings, they prison-rush and stab as quickly as possible.

A short, bladed weapon is the deadliest thing possible at close range. And usually it's concealed until then.

A lot of people believe in a sort of magical X factor in fighting — some call it grit, heart, spirit, etc.

I believe in it too. I just don’t believe it’s magical.

It can be broken down and systematized, just like strength training and technique. 🧵 Most of this is mental, which means that the only way to really put in quality reps looks a lot like “woo” nonsense.

But it’s not — and, critically, the only way for training to work is for the trainee to fully buy into it.

The indoor heating thread: REDUX

When leftists post stuff like this, it’s a deep betrayal of their psychology.

They say the quiet part out loud.

1/ It’s the culmination of a desire to see their enemies suffer, the worship of low culture, Soviet-tier word games…

And unfathomably massive cope.

The most potent political battlegrounds for the young are in niche, online spheres that nobody cares about or will remember, except as part of a “vibe” that is later defined as the dominant ideology.

“SONIC IS A LESBIAN” / “NO HE’S FUCKING NOT” literally defines the future. It’s all of these tiny, insignificant subcultural victories for either side come together to build the zeitgeist.

Leftists have been playing this for years, mostly subconsciously but very directed on a financial level.

Today, men are socially not allowed to exist as sexual beings.

The bizarre result is this form of Reddit sexuality, in which guys try to make themselves as non-threatening as possible in order to express “permitted” sexual energy

This falls into a few main pathologies: 1. Fox in the henhouse / “acting gay to get in the sleepover”

Straight men will put on gay affectations and take on feminine hobbies/interests, in order to be seen as “one of the girls” and thus not a threat

Usually this type is very predatory.

Conservatives will often say “I just want normal media, old-fashioned clean fun, clean black-and-white roles for heroes and villains”, and it’s constantly mocked.

Yet nobody objects to plot grayness like leftists. Just a total inability to process nuance.

If you wade into any “fandom” on here, always very lefty spaces, it seems like there’s a constant race to eliminate any “grayness” within the left-wing moral frame

It’s Problematic to show Problematic things, if your characters are bad you are bad, etc.

The radical Left is not “antisemitic” in any real sense of the word; pretending this is the case is a failed attempt by some conservatives to appeal to leftist diversity thought.

“Dems are the real racists,” etc.

1/ Right now they lash out against Jews on behalf of “oppressed” Palestinians, because they see the colonizer-colonized dynamic as white/non-white.

It’s easy to see why — one side is a shade lighter and has a modern military, while the other lobs rocks at tanks.

"Weird skinny dudes in tights carrying guns" were, quite literally, the most lethal men on the planet in the Early Modern period.

German and Swiss mercenaries perfected the techniques and tactics of pike and shot warfare, in battles with extremely high casualty rates.

https://twitter.com/K1mSamu/status/1759641070130942024

They would advance in tight formations, with swordsmen and halberdiers forming the front, backed up by pikemen and flanked by arquebusiers.

The swordsmen famously wielded zweihanders, a massive two-handed sword, using them in brutal melees across the European continent.

Everybody’s heard the story of the first four-minute mile — nobody could do it until it was done, at which point a sort of collective mental block was released. Then many began running below 4:00.

This applies to *everything*.

I’ll talk a bit about martial arts here.

1/ As the competitive “meta” of fighting has evolved, it’s selected for the best techniques and strategies. All of the fat was trimmed in the early evolutions of MMA, down to forms of kickboxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu.

But it isn’t static.

Everybody’s heard the same line about Greek statues and their… endowment.

“A small penis was considered aristocratic in Greece, the epitome of self-control and correct proportions”

I don’t think that’s the full case.

Greek sculptures often depict men in motion, exercising… …or in combat.

During athletic effort, blood would be elsewhere. Wrestling, running, or otherwise training reduce the size.

A quasi-nudist society (with a focus on anatomy and proportions) would understand this implicitly.

Social media is full of “scenes” like this, many from TV/movies but often made 100% for the internet.

Clumsy, ridiculous depictions of things that don’t actually happen.

I recently stumbled onto a page full of them. Some great insight into the programming below.

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https://twitter.com/NEETOCRACY/status/1753964195249525121

I apologize in advance for subjecting you all to these clips, but these are what create The Lib Worldview.

Hidden neo-Nazis everywhere, to be defeated with Snappy Quips by Ethnically Ambiguous Girlbosses

This is *reality* to many people.

How do you end up with this absurdity?

Part of it is just pop feminism (obviously).

But the reinterpretation of the Classics in order to form potent new cultural memes is a concerted effort, and an important one.

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https://twitter.com/_nomadic_soul/status/1751451047518937227

The Classics (Greek mythology & poetry in particular) have always been a common reference point in the Western world.

Even in hyper-Christian medieval Europe, you’ll find constant references to Zeus, Troy, etc.

They are *literally* memes: universal shorthand for complex ideas.