Links 06.2026
On a Personal Note
Yo, people. This one is reaching you late. I returned from Berlin with a bit of a cold, so my energy was low today. On the other side, I am quite happy I didn’t hurt myself more. Because, as usual, Berlin displayed all the qualities of a failed state by basically banning the most basic technology (i.e., de-icing salt) from use on the sidewalks completely glazed in ice lmao.
But anyway, the reason I went to Berlin was very cheerful in the first place: We hosted the first ævum workshop. We made use of the fact that the great Alexandre Lefebvre was in Europe. Together with a group of young scholars (and me lol), we discussed his book Liberalism as a Way of Life and his new book project based on his essay From Statecraft To Soulcraft (which I also covered here when it came out). It was absolutely fantastic.
Earlier last year, I wrote this:
I’ve been hyping up Alex Lefebvre for a while now—not just here in the newsletter, but also by inviting him to speak at my seminars, hosting him on our podcast, and writing about his book for a German audience. I vibe with him on a personal level too, which doesn’t hurt. In my books, he’s easily in the TOP10 of the most interesting liberal thinkers out there right now.
Well, it turns out that spending a whole day discussing ideas with him was exactly as brilliant as expected. Keep Alex on your radar, and finally give our podcast episode a listen. How you’ve been missing out on such prime content is beyond me :P
Speaking of prime content:
Why Liberalism is failing
While I disagree with quite a few parts of the essay, I think it offers a pretty clever (mainly because it is so blatantly straightforward) analysis of what is going on with liberalism as a political movement. We cannot answer questions that any serious political theory should be able to answer, such as: What are the optimal levels of your own policy prescriptions (e.g., migration, international trade, etc.)? By becoming too reactionary, liberals have too often been forced into maximalist positions on these issues. But obviously that doesn’t make sense. Even the most delulu liberal must recognize that this won’t lead to any political equilibrium—and hence to instability.
Read the whole thing. I found the paragraph on the perception of the average European voter especially disarmingly, ngl. This article would make for a good podcast episode.
I think the main reason for the failure of Liberalism is the fact that it is currently just an attempt to get away from Fascism as far as possible. In the interpretation practically used by policymakers, Liberalism is not trying to achieve an absolute state. Instead, it is a relative ideology that tries to move ever further away from what Fascism would do. In practice, this means ever more globalization, more immigration, more “diversity”, and so on. It is not clear where these trends would lead and whether we have already passed the optimal levels. Most importantly, we have likely passed the optimal levels in the eyes of most voters, such that the Liberal trend is now pushing us toward an ever less preferred state of the world. Thus, Liberalism is bound to ultimately lose everyone’s support. Its relative nature makes it fundamentally unsustainable in the long run.
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I claim that Liberals will basically always aim to move the status quo further away from the Fascist value. For instance, Fascism promotes lower levels of globalization than we have currently. Based on this, you can predict that Liberals will aim for more globalization relative to the status quo. I do not claim that the perception of these positions is causing liberals to act, but that they behave as if it were. In short, modern Liberalism is reactionary to Fascism.
In aggregate, such behaviour leads to a process in which policy changes are only made in one direction. The problem with this process is that it can never stabilize at some inner level. Instead, it can only lead to a corner solution, pushing all kinds of variables to the maximum possible, which is rarely welfare optimal. By running further and further to the left, each new generation of politicians had the only goal in mind to out-flank the previous generation of Liberals; they ultimately stood to the left of so many people that they lost too much support for their system.
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A new type of political party has now consolidated itself across the Western World: right-wing populists. These populists are usually the only parties that try to stop or reverse the liberal trends discussed. To many liberals, it is a great mystery why these parties are on the rise. I think that their rise was the inevitable consequence of their lack of moderation and ignorance toward voters.
Consider the situation from the perspective of the average European native (who is about 45 years old): You grew up in a country that was nearly 95%+ White and ethnically homogeneous. The Muslim population was well below 5%. Regarding basically every measure, your country was considered one of the most prosperous and advanced in the world. You always reasoned that there is too much immigration from Muslim or African countries, which you consider underdeveloped. However, immigration continues to increase, regardless of which party is in power. Politicians assure you that immigration will not notably affect the ethnic composition of your country and that such ideas are conspiracy theories. Still, as you expected, immigrants from Muslim and African countries increase crime rates and are a net-strain on the welfare system, such that you have to finance their social security benefits. At the same time, the economic situation of your country deteriorates. Some developing countries, which you remember receiving development aid from your country a few decades ago, are now more prosperous. You notice that people like you are increasingly vilified in the media while immigrants are glorified. A conservative party promises to curb immigration, and you vote for them. However, once they are in power, immigration continues to accelerate, a large share of it being irregular. You learn that irregular immigrants often exploit an asylum system that your country finances for humanitarian reasons and allows everyone to immigrate, independent of qualifications. You see how politicians and journalists shut down and shun the few people who express your concerns in the media (“just a bigoted woman”). They continue to label predictions of ethnic change as a conspiracy theory and assure you that the asylum seekers will soon leave. You see how immigrants and their descendants vote for candidates in their home country who prioritize Islam over Democracy. You hear how these same leaders call on the immigrants in your country to “Make not three, but five children. Because you are the future of Europe. That will be the best response to the injustices against you.“ You hear how the descendants of immigrants, whose parents you did not want to immigrate in the first place, say that “Demography will create facts.” You see how left-wing politicians regularize hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and say things like “I hope we can sweep out the fascists from this country with migrant people, with working people… of course, we want them to vote.”
Given all of this, I do not find it surprising that a large and rapidly increasing share of natives vote for the most extreme anti-immigration and anti-liberal party available, in a desperate attempt to stop a trend that threatens their group.
Flying Taxis? China Has Them. And Drone Lunch Deliveries, Too.
On this week’s installment of #Sinofuturism, I want to point you towards this NYT article. China is indeed living in 2050—and gaining ever more on the soft power front.
Use my gift link and watch the video material. That’s the future!
As an American reporter living in Beijing, I’ve watched both China and the rest of the world flirt with cutting-edge technologies involving robots, drones and self-driving vehicles.
But China has now raced far beyond the flirtation stage. It’s rolling out fleets of autonomous delivery trucks, experimenting with flying cars and installing parking lot robots that can swap out your E.V.’s dying battery in just minutes. There are drones that deliver lunch by lowering it from the sky on a cable.
If all that sounds futuristic and perhaps bizarre, it also shows China’s ambition to dominate clean energy technologies of all kinds, not just solar panels or battery-powered cars, then sell them to the rest of the world. China has incurred huge debts to put trillions of dollars into efforts like these, along with the full force of its state-planned economy. […] I checked them all out. The battery-swapping robots, the self-driving delivery trucks, the lunches from the sky. Starting with flying taxis, no pilot on board.
Outdoor physical activity is more beneficial than indoor physical activity for cognition in young people
Let your kids go outside and touch grass. That’s the whole message!
(Probably true for all of us. I always felt best when I had my daily walks outside)
Abstract
Substantial evidence demonstrates the beneficial acute effect of physical activity and the outdoor environment independently on cognitive function. However, evidence for their potential synergistic effects remain unknown. Following familiarisation, forty-five children (aged 11–13 years) took part in an identical physical activity session outdoors and indoors; and completed a battery of cognitive tests before, immediately post-, and 45 min post-physical activity. Following outdoor, compared to indoor, physical activity response time was improved more immediately post-physical activity […] This is the first study to demonstrate superior cognitive benefits of outdoor, compared to indoor, physical activity. The overarching finding of this investigation is that physical activity performed outdoors significantly improves cognitive function more than when performed indoors, suggesting a synergistic effect between physical activity and the outdoor environment.
Why young Danes are still having sex
We’ve talked about the Anti-Social Century on this program before. However, while something is rotten in the state of the world, there is one notable exception: Denmark.
It’s not only the sole Western country where social trust has actually increased over time; but also still a place where young people still do the fun stuff: sex, drugs, party, and (!) TikTok. Obviously, there are many things that Denmark does get right (maybe more on this in the future). The one lesson here is: Abundance works!
When everyday goods are available and affordable, people feel optimistic about the future. Only then do they display the character traits that make an open society successful. And if liberalism wants to survive, it might need to also channel its libertine energy…
Gen Z, as is well known, is having significantly less sex than their parents. They also drink less, smoke less, and have fewer close friends. The rise of the internet is often blamed for this development – the anxious generation is having less sex because they are porn-addled and distracted. But a new report shows that, alone in the West, the Danes are bucking the trend. Young Danes between 15–25 are not having less sex than previous generations; in fact, the rate has remained more or less constant since the 1970s. Most people report satisfaction with their sex lives. In Denmark, the sexless Zoomer has been proven a myth.
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The happy young Danes, meanwhile, have the highest rates of alcohol consumption in Europe; needless to say, there is a strong correlation between those who drink and those who shag. There is much to learn from a country so like Britain in many ways, but that manages to drink more than any other European nation, without losing its reputation for being skinny, beautiful and happy in the process.
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The lesson from Denmark is that getting people shagging again will require something different from age limits on porn and mental health support. Young people will find a way to have sex in spite of those modern distractions if they do not live with their parents, their careers are progressing, and they feel their lives are going in the right direction. The human sex drive will triumph over the algorithm under the right conditions; instead of focusing on regulating the internet, governments should focus on improving the alternatives. But this is of course a taller order.
Like their British counterparts, young Danes are facing an increasingly forbidding housing market and rising cost of living, but the rental market is better. A beer is still expensive, but at least you can bring a girl and a six-pack back to your apartment. The young Danes are drinking and having sex, in short, because they are more self-confident and have less to worry about. Who cares if your screen time is above what you would want it to be? Social media cannot be blamed for Britain’s sexless Zoomers: it is the consequence of the entirely unsexy circumstances that keep them from growing up.
Peace,
SG