Just Wrote for 24 Hours Straight

I just spent 24 hours pretty much doing nothing but writing. Well to be precise, I was writing and reading – reading stuff to research for my writing, but it was all for the same project.

And I couldn’t be happier. I was happy as a clam the whole time. It wasn’t even work really. It was more like going on vacation or going off somewhere fun for the weekend. It’s pretty much of a joke to even call this work. It would be like having a job where you got paid for doing nothing but having fun.

Of course it was stressful in a sense (but I enjoy that sort of stress) because the sort of work I was doing was sort of like academic research that might go into a journal or an academic publication, something along those lines. So it’s scientific writing in a sense. One thing about doing scientific writing or any sort of scientific research is that you’re wrong.You’re wrong all of the time. And you’re always figuring out how you were wrong and going back and changing stuff. Eventually after however many revisions, you probably have something down that is more or less correct at least for now.

There is also a lot of reorganization going on for flow and structure and at the sentence level for typos and better structured and flowing sentences. Redundant material needs to be removed, all the time. You are always finding different parts of the paper that finally start matching up to each other, and you spent a lot of time marrying them.

Furthermore, your source material is often simply wrong or even unscientific.

I have to deal with nationalism a lot in my work, and nationalism is hardly ever rational, scientific or even correct. It’s just wrong, usually a good part of the time. Nationalist narrative for most any nationalist group tends to be an endless series of lies with a fair amount of correct material thrown in. But the correct material gets exaggerated or extended. Ethnic nationalist ideology boils down to

Our group is 10

Nationalist discourse is not only not rational or logical, it’s usually not even correct. Why not just read fairy tales instead?

Given that nationalist discourse is usually just an endless pack of lies, exhaltations and condemnations, it’s hard to see how any rational person could be taken in by it. But you will find in Europe that in any country you study, most any person you meet is some sort of an ethnic nationalist retard. This includes PhD students, full PhD professors, celebrities, noted scholars, etc. That these folks are said to be scientists is particularly shocking because they are so full of shit. However, they are social scientists, and most social scientists are not even practicing science anyway.

Please follow and like us:
error3
fb-share-icon20
Tweet 20
fb-share-icon20

0 thoughts on “Just Wrote for 24 Hours Straight”

  1. HI Robert.
    I think you’re missing the point about ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism is the equivalent of loving your family, or in that case, the people with whom you are sharing a culture, a way of life and sometimes a religion/spirituality. This does not equate with an unconditionnal approval of anything (at least not in educated societies) – on the contrary in Europe it often involves ciriticism and debate about what is best for the people. Of course it can degenerate into chauvinism, like any kind of thinking can become extreme. Maybe the fact that you are an american prevents you from understanding this feeling since you’re living in a multiethnic society without much of a traditionnal culture (nowadays at least). And by the way I’m working in a university in Western Europe and almost 100% of the people working there is a hardcore cultural leftist that cringes at the slightest mention of any kind of nationalism.

  2. This is semi-related.

    I have this large book titled “The Ants”. It’s about their physiology, ecology, artifacts and behavior. I bring this up because it was striking how much of the information in the book was gathered by amateurs. Without the amateur contributions, it would have amounted to one of those booklets one gets with a new chainsaw.

    1. There was a point to my earlier comment, but I had to go somewhere.

      The contributions to a field of study by non-academicians are important. In a group of fields like those called social sciences I expect them to be more vital and often more accurate than those which lead to professorships. I see the academicians using rhetoric when they would be more useful using logic.

      I have noticed that many people who work in offices tend to consider themselves more intelligent than those who work with their hands. I will grant that many blue collar jobs don’t take much mental activity, but neither do most white collar jobs. Being stupid in an office might get one fired; being stupid on a farm might get one killed.

  3. Maybe you are asking the wrong question. The real question is not whether nationalist thought leads to a more accurate representation of reality, but whether it increases fitness. And considering current left-liberal thought – as I believe you have amply demonstrated on this blog – it sure seems to increase fitness (or at least does not decrease as much). In other words, doublethink works, and is adaptive. Applying it to in and out-group members has a long record of success.
    And you might not be completely free of it regarding those pesky nationalists.

  4. Nationalism and religion are both held dear by many highly educated people, whom you’d think would be too “grown up” for such stuff. I even heard of some PHD engineer who heads the Voodoo cult in Haiti. No joke.

  5. Could it be that humans are pack animals? We are drawn toward sports, nationalism, religion, anything which makes feel like belonging to something. Some highly educated might doubt this stuff, but many educated people do like “group” things. On the other hand, I’m sure some of the less educated might look with cynicism at some group things.

  6. Some people might say they are free spirits opposed to confomity, that is, until belonging to a group gets you laid. 😆 In that case, they’re all for conformity.

  7. To what extent Kevin MacDonald’s work is based on nationalist lies? To be fair, MacDonald accurately assesses that many aspects of lies were better in the 1950 (and the liberal Paul Krugman shares this sentiment in Conscience of a Liberal.)

    1. I meant to say “many aspects of life”.

      Yes, Kevin MacDonald is alluring because it is true. True in the way that many works that exonerate or mitigate Stalin (or his culpability) from alleged historical crimes are true.

Leave a Reply to Jason Y Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)