ARC, etc.

Scotty does a summary of the ARC conference, and the past 2 months.

I’ve been a little busy since Donald-John took office, in January 2025. With JD Vance and Donald-John Trump, we have a fairly Celtic/Scottish connection at the heart of power in the American empire. Which is something of a relief.

It feels like the revolutionary argument advanced by Obama, since about 2007, has finally been defeated.

So, now what?

Rehab, and spiritual warfare, I guess. Repentance and integration. America needs to live the example and spread the good word.

God, it’s exhausting.

I was in the US over Christmas and New Year, so I didn’t have much work on over winter. I finished a training product for a client, but then basically had a couple of months where I was just doing training and looking for my next project. I renewed my skipper’s tickets, but the last bit I had to do was update my Proficiency in Medical Care course. That’s a 5-day crash course where you do sutures, catheters, medical diagnoses, transport of patients, triage for mass casualty events etc. To be a skipper, you are basically trained to about the same standard as a nurse, for when you sail on ship’s with fewer than 100 crew and don’t carry a full time medic.

Thanks to the prevalence of idle rotating machinery in the offshore wind sector, there is now a significant emphasis on the use of tourniquets when treating severed limbs.

It’s interesting to see how maritime training is cycling back to its post-World War 2 roots. Although now we’re advised to give amputees a fentanyl lollipop, instead of the morphine and a cigarette prescribed in days gone by.

We’re all victims of fashion, I guess.

I thoroughly enjoyed that course. I like practicing stitches and things. And there was a good bunch of lads on it, mostly all small boat skippers. Scottish and South Africans (white refugees living in the highlands of Scotland). The instructor was new to maritime and was full of anecdotes from his 15 years as a frontline medic in the British Army. His theory, after 2 tours of Afghan, 2 tours of Iraq, and various other deployments in Africa and worldwide, was that the Ukraine-Russia conflict was largely bullshit, and if were serious about defeating Russia we could do it in a week. He reckoned this was all about sharpening up an archaic Russian war machine and bringing it up to 21^st century capabilities.

I certainly think that could be a part of the bigger picture. With Trump and Putin meeting in Saudi Arabia, and Zelensky off sulking at a Viagra-fuelled piano recital somewhere, it’s clear that whatever scam was going on with Burisma and Biden is coming to an end, and the two last Christian empires are sitting down to talk energy with the real big boys now.

After updating my medical care cert in Glasgow, I went down to the ARC conference in London. Which was pretty good, and quite surprising in many ways. Although it was easy to identify the performative contradictions.

ARC, in one sentence, felt a bit like semi-secular Sunday school for upper middle-class boomers from the former colonies.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed the conference. Going down to London for it was a slightly innervating experience. I was meeting some marine people in London during the same week, and I didn’t tell them what conference I was attending. Being associated with supposedly ‘alt-right’ toxic masculinity figures as Jordan Peterson and his cronies still carries a certain hazard with it in 2025. Although, I think that slight sense that we’re doing something naughty and dangerous by gathering to talk about how Net Zero is a scam, mass immigration has some negative effects, and how it would be quite nice if we didn’t just hand over our entire civilisation to, let’s say, ‘strangers’, who might not care for it as much we sort of still do.

The opening of the conference was a little jarring. Jordan Peterson’s initial speech felt ‘off’. Like, man, he is getting old. But, on reflection, I believe that must have been at least partly jet-lag, and part work-a-holism, because he regained his strength and composure through the week.

But thankfully – and this was my main niggling apprehension about attending -It wasn’t about Jordan Peterson. It wasn’t the little cult that I feared it might be. It really did seem to be a genuine attempt to feel out and fertilise a new network of concerned citizens to stand as a counterweight to the influence of the WEF/Davosian/Branch-Covidian community that nearly dissolved our collective will to live over the past 5 years.

In fact, what I think has happened, is that the Christian socially democratic left, last seen in the 1950s, has woken up and decided to extract itself from the Neo-Con right and the crazy woke left, where it has been subsumed since the 1970s. As such, for me, they’re never going to go far enough. They’re still too concerned about being seen to be reasonable.

Our enemies have no such qualms.

But reason was definitely on the menu. As were the other supposed enlightenment values. Liberty, fairness, economics, rationalism, empiricism and cosmopolitanism. Which was interesting, because there was a huge catholic presence at the conference. I haven’t seen so many dog collars since my wife and I were in Amsterdam last summer. (I have been instructed not to ‘kink shame’ people anymore. Although I’m not sure a deficiency of shame is helping anyone).

As a habitual but calculated risk-taker, it really annoys me when people try to play it safe. In my experience, the only thing that makes life get better is putting yourself into a position where you have no option but to succeed.

You have to be willing to lose everything, to gain anything.

Others have criticised the conference online, but as far as I can make out, the majority of such criticism seems to have missed the point of the conference entirely. Various Christian podcasters, and Douglas Murray, were bemoaning the fact that the conference wasn’t intimate enough. Too many people were invited. It was too hard for introverts to meet people in unstructured activites. Why couldn’t it have been held in one of the many beautiful religious buildings or country estates around the UK. Etc.

This criticism is asinine.

If you want to go to a Christian retreat in the Cotswolds, or connect with your Arthurian feeling of ancestry at Glastonbury, Tintagel or Bamburgh, go do it on your own time. If you can find a hotel that isn’t full of migrants.

The Excel in London is a grim, but appropriate, testimony to the state of our nation.

How appropriate to have Bjorn Lomborg speaking on climate realism at the Excel, which has banners hanging in the hall advertising its commitment to Net Zero?

How appropriate to champion cosmopolitanism throughout the former commonwealth by hosting regional drinks parties, where the majority ‘white’ attendees were served by catering staff, 90% of whom were clearly non-white ethnicities. There was definitely a colonial period feeling in that respect.

How appropriate to discuss the rebuilding of families, and increasing the birth rate, and championing women’s rights with panellists like divorced-dad Nigel Farage, or famous homosexual men like Douglas Murray and Dave Rubin?

How appropriate to discuss re-industrialising the West and introducing tariffs and protectionism, with Michael Gove, in an airport-architecture conference hall, surrounded by ghostly cranes of the wastelands of a formerly productive east London?

Quite fitting, actually.

I think it’s pretty good that all of these fairly well-to-do boomers from the former colonies get to come back and see the state of London. Especially a few weeks before King sausage-fingers decided to commit pan-heresy and insult all faiths equally from now on, by pretending that syncretism can somehow compensate for the fact that each migrant imported to the UK is costing the taxpayer more than the median salary for British men at £41K a year, per migrant, as we speak. For the record, the average salary in the UK is £34K, and the Median for a man is currently £40K. In Scotland, higher rate tax kicks in at £45K.

I’d say that the upper classes in London benefit from this evil because it means they get to keep inflating the over-leveraged bubble value of their property portfolio with the magic money tree. But with the majority of London real estate now owned by Indian citizens, you can’t even say that anymore.

The empire strikes back, eh?

I loved the conference, overall. I met some true intellectual heroes of mine, as well as being introduced to really inspiring people. It has given me a lot to think about, and renewed my commitment to bringing values back into my profession. The artists and the Christian element of the conference really made it something special. The politics, not so much.

The main reason I wanted to go and look these people in the eye was to get a ‘gut-feeling’ for whether all of these online intellectual heroes of mine were genuine people of integrity, or fraudsters. And honestly, I think Nigel Farage was the only fraudster there, out of 4500 people. Or, at least, the primary one. Which was disappointing to fully realise.

Everyone else seemed legitimately trying to look after their part of ship as best they could. I loved meeting the artists. Jonathan Pageau was the star of the show for me, as usual.

About 20% of people there seemed to be media professionals, think-tankers or wealthy graduate students who were there for work or credit. Another 30 to 40% seemed to be overtly Christian, and looking for a new political home. Maybe 10 or 15% had something to sell or promote. The remainder, like me, were figuring out if we had something to hope for anymore.

Having been falsely reassured in the 80’s, growing up with climate catastrophe lies in the 90s and 2000s, being subsidised to get a useless degree in Grodon Brown’s early 2000, graduation into the Great Finacial Crash (& a catastrophic job market) in 2007-8, becoming chief mate just in time for the oil price crash of 2015, and living through covid tyranny, and whatever the hell this economic/hybrid/human-terrain warfare that we’re living through now is, I could use some hope.

What I think Jordan Peterson and ARC are struggling with is a losing battle. They seem to want to move forward while bringing what they see as the best, most admirable parts of the Enlightenment project and Liberal-Representative-Democracy with them.

If anything, with technology the way it is, we should be looking at direct-democratic rights, limited by a republican constitution. Such previously unthinkable things could actually be possible now, and a good use of the same tech that totalitarian regimes, and technocratic aristocracies would use to subjugate and enslave us.

I don’t think that is a possibility for the following reasons:

· Blank slate theory is dead.

· The view from nowhere is dead.

· Technology has made the spatial element of governance obsolete.

· The clash of civilisations is taking place in human terrain, not on or in physical borders.

· Reindustrialisation is not desirable to most people, especially in SE England, and especially if they can live off of the taxpayer forever.

· Debt and inflation are robbing us of hope faster than it is being produced.

How can you square the circle whereby ‘industrialisation’ makes it harder to have families, and is typically associated with population decline, and yet still want pro-natalist policies? More people typically equals more wealth, when there is a homestead or argricultural economy. How are you going to bring that back to central London? Are the new migrants all control systems engineers ready to automate everything?

Whenever I go out to these offshore construction jobs, in Taiwan, the North Sea, Middle East, Brasil, Africa, etc, guaranteed there is a Scotsman or a Geordie on every single boat. And usually various other Northern English folk as well. There is plenty of industrial talent in the UK. We just can’t work in the UK, because our governing class and the South East are completely delusional ideologues. We are doing the industry anyway. Just not in Britain!

What the working class know in the West, and what the post-modern globalists have pathologically eroded over time, is that it actually matters to whom profits accrue.

You can’t ‘save the west’, because there is no definable thing to save. What do you mean? The Holy Roman Empire? Frankia? The British Empire? It’s too late.

And what version of the ‘west’ are you trying to save anyway? The Freemasonic plot of the Enlightenment? That seemed to be what many ‘conservatives’ at ARC were interested in. While very little comment was made on the failures of the enlightenment project, the symptoms of radical individualism, borderless-ness, nihilism, and green-communism did weigh heavy on discussions.

Since Napoleon invaded Egypt, the Enlightenment project has believed that radical, Sunni, sharia-supporting Islam would naturally be assimilated when they see how great it is to love materialism, empirical, industrial rationality. Now those people operate 50+ Islamic councils in the UK, and over 150 Sharia courts. The most common child’s name in England is the one beginning with M that they all share, and they are typically having 6 children, whereas native English couples are having fewer than 2.

Enlightenment led us here. What mitigations do we need to put in place, so it doesn’t lead us here again?

The secular, post-war boom, ultra-liberal, welfare/warfare, pseudo-universalist materialist project is dead and defeated. It’s just not gone yet.

The only way to save Scotland is to make the argument that the crown has failed in its fundamental duties to protect the realm and the faith. To find an alternate monarch, end the union, and put up a big, beautiful wall. And if the Geordies and Yorkies would have it, maybe draw the line from the Humber to the Mersey? Then, screw Greenland. It makes far more sense for Scotland to be the 51^st state.

I’d vote for that.

Does anyone know if Franz von Bayern of the House of Wittelsbach is still a Jacobite? What’s he up to these days? Perhaps he could schedule a Zoom call with Uncle Donald?

I am glad that these glaring contradictions were so discomforting to the North American Christian delegates who attended. The reality is that the American empire has abandoned it’s cultural Alma Mater. And that it’s about time they paid attention to that, given their isolated place in the world.

We may be an island nation, but they are the ones insulated from the reality of the world now.

If I hear another American interpretation of the causes of either of the two world wars again for the rest of this year, I just might puke.

After ARC I got some survey work. I spent time in an old soviet shipyard in Szczecin (Stettin) in Poland. After spending a week loading that ship with offshore wind farm parts, I went up to Swinoujscie, in Poland. Both cities were effectively German cities, built in a German style before being run by the Soviet-controlled Polish People’s Republic, between 1952 and 1989.

I was told not much has changed in Poland since the Soviet times. That the people who lived through the 30s had few regrets. Except now they also have freedom. Or was that just shopping malls? I forget the difference sometimes.

I like the yard there in Poland, but it was pretty tired-looking, and a bit rough around the edges. The grimness of soviet architecture did, however, remind me of Scotland, with its own postwar hatred of hierarchy, and therefore beauty.

The concrete uniformity we see all across Europe and here in Taiwan was riven, not built. Battle scars of the twentieth century, that came logically out of the 17th century.

How much we have lost.

All perfectly rational, empirical and utilitarian, though. The ‘pedestrian-worker’ occupies the centre of the boulevards and avenues of the city centre. Faceless communistic art expresses dull, drone-worker angst. Only a modern statue of Pope John Paul II offers any hope or aspiration, as he faces West, and commands forward motion out of the waves of historical chaos.

John Paul II, my childhood Pope.

I spent 2 weeks in Poland to load those ships. Then I went home for 2 days. Then I flew out to Thyborøn, Denmark to unload the same vessels.

Denmark was lovely.

If only we had some sort of common history and culture with Denmark that we could tap into, and find out their secret? Civilised working hours. High worker productivity. Good infrastructure. Strict tax laws for foreign workers. Excellent public services that actually serve working parents. School hours that match working hours.

Oh well. Never mind.

I did feel really sorry for the chief mate though. On one of the ship’s, the cargo super and the chief officer were Ukrainian. The captain and the chief engineer were Russian, and they were clearly giving him a really hard time. But he was enduring it because what else is he going to do? Quit, and then go home and get blown up by a drone a week later?

He had been on board for 10 months, and had no plans to go home in place.

He was married with one child. They are living in an area that gets attacked from time to time, but I got the feeling he wasn’t sure how protected his family were.

The cargo super reckoned that the numbers dead in Ukraine have been massively suppressed. He reckoned Mariupol alone has seen 150K+ civilian fatalities. He thinks the real total number of civilian fatalities is in the millions. He drove back to Odessa the night we finished the first load out. He didn’t think much of his president Zelensky’s performance at the Whitehouse. I can imagine the pain. When ordinary people like him are expected to maintain a level of self-control and self-discipline every day that is far higher than his president could seemingly maintain for a 10 minute press conference.

After unloading in Denmark, it was a quick flight to Berlin, and a hire car back to Poland.

Driving on the Hitler roads was fun, if a little confusing. No speed limit sounds like a fun idea, but what I couldn’t understand was how someone could be driving at 80 kph in the slow lane, while someone in the overtaking lane might be doing 200 kph. All I can say is, if it’s your first time on the Autobahn, try to travel during daylight hours.

I did manage to have a few hours off in Berlin. A friend recommended I check out Museum Island, which turned out to be a good call.

Berlin, Obviously.

Berlin too bears the scars of post-enlightenment, post-Marxist idealism. Concrete, concrete, everywhere, and not a spot to think. Giant, Nephilim-sized statues of Lenin and Marx sit in the square, facing North-East. Children and college students posed to have their photo taken with these murderous icons. Weirdly surrounded by steel pairs of twin towers. Appropriately, they were facing the Berlin television tower, as if surveying the technological progress of mass-demoralisation.

If they could see us now.

I managed to attend Berlin Cathedral for a midday prayer service and organ recital. The sermon was a bit cause-and-effect, new-age, self-helpy, but at least it was half in English for me to follow along.

The building was exquisitely beautiful, and the tombs of various Kaisers (or Neo-Caesars, in case you hadn’t made that connection), were amazing to behold. The Second Reich really had something else going for it. If only they’d stopped there. (Or maybe if Britain had sided with the German monarchy inWW1, instead of the French?)

What made me feel weird about Berlin, apart from the commie students fawning over Marx and Lenin, was a statue of Martin Luther.

The iconic, Martin Luther.

How come John Knox made us Scots destroy the relics of Saint Andrew at St Andrew’s Cathedral and smash the beautiful sculptures of local saints that had been crafted by Pictish and Scottish communities all over the country for 1000 years, but Luther gets to have his statue left intact, all through Nazism and Communism?

Living through the real iconoclasm of mandatory covid face-masks, I think, has made me eternally suspicious of artistic iconoclasms of the past. Online censorship is an age-old battle for good and evil, transferred to new technology.

The more I look back on history, the more I feel that the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution were deeply ‘elitist’ projects. They were overly materialistic and rationalistic. They have led us to the destruction of tradition, family and nation that we are now experiencing. ‘Elitist’ in the sense that these people were of elite competence, knowledge or ability. But rather, like Marx, they managed to provide a good enough story to provide cover for a top-down transformation of society, and to hell with the consequences.

I think the natural suspicion of government in America and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is probably more the product of the collective trauma induced by these conflicts that defined our history. Much more so than as a positive result of their values, or more than Magna Carta, the English, American or French revolutions.

I think we need to be done with that story.

I agree with Eric Weinstein. We need to stop calling these people ‘Elites’, as if they know what they are doing. They are the least competent among us. They just happen to have power.

That, I think, is a real defining element of this thing called ‘the West’ that we are supposed to try and preserve. But, ironically, I think we need America to start acknowledging the imperium that it actually has, in order to secure the future and recognise the reality of our situation.

I don’t know.

I then flew back from Berlin, and had about a week off at home, where I finished off framing out a treehouse I was building for the children. That was the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.

We also celebrated Iranian new year with our Iranian friends, which was lovely. They love Uncle Trump too. Apparently that’s a common name for him, on the streets of Tehran. They can’t wait until he beheads the regime there. And no, they don’t support Hamas. Islam isn’t a single blob, thank goodness. We had a good old chuckle about when people get upset about Britain forming Israel in 1948, but have no problem with them forming Pakistan in 1947.

Trump had better deliver. There are a lot of good people counting on him to kill the bad guys that the radical revolutionary American leftists have been funding and encouraging for the past 35 years or more.

I then flew out to Taiwan about a week ago. It’s nice to be out of the anglosphere.

Weird, but nice.

We’re offshore riding out some bad weather at the moment. Waiting to bury some subsea cables. I’ll probably be back in Scotland in a couple of weeks.

I’m changing the name of the blog because it doesn’t fit my identity anymore, and that is kind of inhibiting me. I was thinking of ‘Scotty Does’, because my nickname in the Navy Unit was ‘Scotty Don’t’.

I didn’t use that identity anymore because I was a little scared of that side of my personality coming out. But I think now might be the right time. I dunno. What do you think? Should we start letting the chips fall where they may, a little more often?

Ciao for now.

---