I think this is a cynical take on people's motives and their attention spans. I think more people remember Alvin Burnell than you suppose. I suspect it was the shock of seeing a young man take his life that made people realize they couldn't live up to Burndale's legacy and perhaps took a step back. But for some, those most vocal on social media, Alden Busstop's actions will live on forever...
And indeed you are correct. All the posturing just becomes tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper, or at least it used to. Round our way it is fancy greaseproof paper stuff they use nowadays since no one buys papers.
Do you think some of them are aware of the shortness of their attention spans? Or is the emotion just too consuming? I remember the protests about Gaza and they are all gone. The fervour is spent.
Also, I can’t think of anything less Western, less European than self-immolating for some non-white foreigner. Sure European man may jump on a grenade to save his comrades or make a Thermopylae-like last stand for something…but self-immolating for some brown people from another continent who hate you? Bushnell was basically an alien to me.
This nails perfectly the reason almost no one will ever really learn anything thoroughly again. Attention spans have been destroyed by the internet. You said something very poignant in your gauntlet interview, which was brilliant btw. Speaking of William Blake you said that you would never be able to fully appreciate Blake the way someone with a classical education would, that you would never write as well as you would’ve with such an education. No one has received such an education in many years. The classic canon which educated so many so well for centuries has been totally jettisoned for a long while now, and the people responsible for it were supposed to be the ones charged with passing it down. I guess that means they never really believed in it, which is the most disturbing part of it.
I do. I passionately believe in the value of the British literary canon, with a few American and Russian authors thrown in. And I fear that we are destroying it it a way that may make it impossible to revive it.
I was upset to hear your denigrating your talents though. I have followed your writing and videos for a while now, and have gone back through all your older work. Your writing has improved tremendously over that time, although you started out strong, good writing comes from copious reading, there is no shortcut, and yours shows. Blake wrote to be read, not dissected, if you enjoy his poems that is enough. I have read enough bad literary criticism to know that. And he is rather obscure, with a very strange worldview that I’m not sure he meant to be understood.
I’ve been quiet for a while, honestly the state of the world is starting to get to me, but I wanted to express my appreciation for your work, and that gauntlet interview was a great pleasure to listen to.
The searing hot-takers on Telegram who insisted that Bushmill's self-immolation was a laudable example of conviction still haven't set themselves on fire. Maybe they've just been delayed by six weeks and are still out there, desperately trying to find a shop that sells matches.
Excellent piece Morgoth on how the Internet and Social Media are literally changing the very nature of our consciousness and attention.
And not for the better.
Everyone knows of the burning Vietnamese monk sat at the crossroad over 60 years ago and why he did it, even if for cultural reasons they can't remember his name.
But is The Balllad of "Alan Bushmill" just due to this new intrusive technology? Is there not also a genuine quickening of reality? A sense of being punched in the face virtually every day with some potentially existential event? It certainly seems that way, or is it as you put it, just all due to us all now being Children of the Attention Economy?
I'm stuck behind enemy lines (just outside Paris) in a shitty hotel with a single digit left on my phone battery and sans charger.
But when Morgoth posts, I'm there.
My thoughts being: What a waste of potential. He could have been a loving father of 3-4 whyte children. But instead, probably as a teenager, his impressionable mind was bombarded by anti-whyte, Marxist images. The sick joke is that Marxism is joon ideology designed to destroy Goy societies. And now he's using that ideology to make a stand against the creators of that ideology.
This would have been shocking to my grandfather's generation. It would have been spoken about in pubs, people would have gotten angry, a kitty would have been collected to help any family he had left behind. But now, his face and his deed is looked-at for several seconds before being flicked away for the next dopamine hit on Facebook.
What saddens me the is that all this was written about in 1984. We've been warned about what was planned for us for decades. I go through cycles of really hating the Normie. Thinking that he deserves what's planned for him. But then I look deep inside myself for some humanity and forgiveness. I see some beautiful whyte child with her parents and remind myself what I fight for and push on.
This article thinking about all the terror attacks and rapes that pass by. Such instances indict the elites as treasonous scumbags, and yet they are so readily forgotten. I hope someone has a list somewhere, I would like to bookmark it.
Where I grew up (the worst area of Belfast for sectarian violence in ‘the Troubles’) this Bushnell character might have been part of a community. He might have mattered to someone and been fighting for a clear cause. When a paramilitary on either side of the conflict in Ulster died, there would be a ceremony, a parade, and shots fired over his coffin. Most important of all, he would be memorialised in a mural on a wall. There were murals all over my home area to memorialise the life of notorious LVF (loyalist) leader Billy Wright, who was murdered in prison in 1997 by INLA (republican) prisoners. I still remember Billy Wright’s face to this day. I have literally no idea who this Bushnell is and I don’t care about him. He was utterly atomised - he might have been part of an on-line community on Telegram but who really cared about him? As Sansa Stark says to Ramsay Bolton at the end of Season 6 of Games of Thrones “Your words will disappear, your house will disappear, your name will disappear, all memory of you will disappear…”
Do you think it's purely cynical on the part of the hot take industry? Playing hot take hungry hippos with the latest thing for engagement? Or is it less conscious than that and social media has shaped people this way and the memory hole operates on suction more than has things thrown in?
“The individual ranting in disappointment at me in messages had, I concurred, been ‘‘influenced’’ by others with large platforms, larger than mine, in fact. I knew who they were, knew what platforms they used, and was keenly aware of how they would frame Bushnell’s immolation, why, and how it was dressed up as something more than it was to assuage doubts as to Bushnell’s own politics in the minds of those they influenced.”
I’ve long ago come to the realization that most people, including perhaps myself, do not have and are not capable of having their own thoughts and insights.
It's as if we've lost the ability to convert cultural memory from short- to long-term; in an individual this would indicate significant neurological damage, in a society it's...strange, more subtly wrong. I suppose short-term memory can be trivial, disconnected; but long-term memories require a surrounding emotional field, a deeper significance, and maybe the flattening-out of the human means everything becomes, ultimately, trivia.
I think this is a cynical take on people's motives and their attention spans. I think more people remember Alvin Burnell than you suppose. I suspect it was the shock of seeing a young man take his life that made people realize they couldn't live up to Burndale's legacy and perhaps took a step back. But for some, those most vocal on social media, Alden Busstop's actions will live on forever...
And indeed you are correct. All the posturing just becomes tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper, or at least it used to. Round our way it is fancy greaseproof paper stuff they use nowadays since no one buys papers.
Do you think some of them are aware of the shortness of their attention spans? Or is the emotion just too consuming? I remember the protests about Gaza and they are all gone. The fervour is spent.
Also, I can’t think of anything less Western, less European than self-immolating for some non-white foreigner. Sure European man may jump on a grenade to save his comrades or make a Thermopylae-like last stand for something…but self-immolating for some brown people from another continent who hate you? Bushnell was basically an alien to me.
This nails perfectly the reason almost no one will ever really learn anything thoroughly again. Attention spans have been destroyed by the internet. You said something very poignant in your gauntlet interview, which was brilliant btw. Speaking of William Blake you said that you would never be able to fully appreciate Blake the way someone with a classical education would, that you would never write as well as you would’ve with such an education. No one has received such an education in many years. The classic canon which educated so many so well for centuries has been totally jettisoned for a long while now, and the people responsible for it were supposed to be the ones charged with passing it down. I guess that means they never really believed in it, which is the most disturbing part of it.
I do. I passionately believe in the value of the British literary canon, with a few American and Russian authors thrown in. And I fear that we are destroying it it a way that may make it impossible to revive it.
I was upset to hear your denigrating your talents though. I have followed your writing and videos for a while now, and have gone back through all your older work. Your writing has improved tremendously over that time, although you started out strong, good writing comes from copious reading, there is no shortcut, and yours shows. Blake wrote to be read, not dissected, if you enjoy his poems that is enough. I have read enough bad literary criticism to know that. And he is rather obscure, with a very strange worldview that I’m not sure he meant to be understood.
I’ve been quiet for a while, honestly the state of the world is starting to get to me, but I wanted to express my appreciation for your work, and that gauntlet interview was a great pleasure to listen to.
The searing hot-takers on Telegram who insisted that Bushmill's self-immolation was a laudable example of conviction still haven't set themselves on fire. Maybe they've just been delayed by six weeks and are still out there, desperately trying to find a shop that sells matches.
Excellent piece Morgoth on how the Internet and Social Media are literally changing the very nature of our consciousness and attention.
And not for the better.
Everyone knows of the burning Vietnamese monk sat at the crossroad over 60 years ago and why he did it, even if for cultural reasons they can't remember his name.
But is The Balllad of "Alan Bushmill" just due to this new intrusive technology? Is there not also a genuine quickening of reality? A sense of being punched in the face virtually every day with some potentially existential event? It certainly seems that way, or is it as you put it, just all due to us all now being Children of the Attention Economy?
I just typed in Bushnell, it brings up golf rangefinders.
I'm stuck behind enemy lines (just outside Paris) in a shitty hotel with a single digit left on my phone battery and sans charger.
But when Morgoth posts, I'm there.
My thoughts being: What a waste of potential. He could have been a loving father of 3-4 whyte children. But instead, probably as a teenager, his impressionable mind was bombarded by anti-whyte, Marxist images. The sick joke is that Marxism is joon ideology designed to destroy Goy societies. And now he's using that ideology to make a stand against the creators of that ideology.
This would have been shocking to my grandfather's generation. It would have been spoken about in pubs, people would have gotten angry, a kitty would have been collected to help any family he had left behind. But now, his face and his deed is looked-at for several seconds before being flicked away for the next dopamine hit on Facebook.
What saddens me the is that all this was written about in 1984. We've been warned about what was planned for us for decades. I go through cycles of really hating the Normie. Thinking that he deserves what's planned for him. But then I look deep inside myself for some humanity and forgiveness. I see some beautiful whyte child with her parents and remind myself what I fight for and push on.
This article thinking about all the terror attacks and rapes that pass by. Such instances indict the elites as treasonous scumbags, and yet they are so readily forgotten. I hope someone has a list somewhere, I would like to bookmark it.
Where I grew up (the worst area of Belfast for sectarian violence in ‘the Troubles’) this Bushnell character might have been part of a community. He might have mattered to someone and been fighting for a clear cause. When a paramilitary on either side of the conflict in Ulster died, there would be a ceremony, a parade, and shots fired over his coffin. Most important of all, he would be memorialised in a mural on a wall. There were murals all over my home area to memorialise the life of notorious LVF (loyalist) leader Billy Wright, who was murdered in prison in 1997 by INLA (republican) prisoners. I still remember Billy Wright’s face to this day. I have literally no idea who this Bushnell is and I don’t care about him. He was utterly atomised - he might have been part of an on-line community on Telegram but who really cared about him? As Sansa Stark says to Ramsay Bolton at the end of Season 6 of Games of Thrones “Your words will disappear, your house will disappear, your name will disappear, all memory of you will disappear…”
https://youtu.be/qMzKPCV82sM?si=e5wz29jpYKp3Ek-s
I admit I didn't catch the change, Morgoth. Very clever way of proving a valid point.
Do you think it's purely cynical on the part of the hot take industry? Playing hot take hungry hippos with the latest thing for engagement? Or is it less conscious than that and social media has shaped people this way and the memory hole operates on suction more than has things thrown in?
That was a thoroughly bleak read, yet it stands as an apt analysis of the death of the communal attention span, and of meaning.
oof I feel very 'seen' there and had to check it wasnt me who went off at you on X
it wasnt but I do think I overreacted to this guy at the time
ironically he'd live longer in the memory if I thought of him every time I'd a glasseen of Bushmills whisky
you may not have been popular but you were right, as usual mate
“The individual ranting in disappointment at me in messages had, I concurred, been ‘‘influenced’’ by others with large platforms, larger than mine, in fact. I knew who they were, knew what platforms they used, and was keenly aware of how they would frame Bushnell’s immolation, why, and how it was dressed up as something more than it was to assuage doubts as to Bushnell’s own politics in the minds of those they influenced.”
I’ve long ago come to the realization that most people, including perhaps myself, do not have and are not capable of having their own thoughts and insights.
It's so sad that this mentally compromised white guy was not dissuaded from suicide and turned towards a wholesome lifestyle.
It's as if we've lost the ability to convert cultural memory from short- to long-term; in an individual this would indicate significant neurological damage, in a society it's...strange, more subtly wrong. I suppose short-term memory can be trivial, disconnected; but long-term memories require a surrounding emotional field, a deeper significance, and maybe the flattening-out of the human means everything becomes, ultimately, trivia.