Palladium Magazine is Trash: The Glue Huffing of a Dying Caste of Psueds

     There is an interesting new subtype of pseudo-intellectual that I have seen popping up on the internet more frequently as of late. These people, if you want to be that generous as they seem to be lacking the capability for generative thought, are interesting not because they are actually interesting, but rather because they are completely uninteresting and useless. They are the people who start “magazines” on the internet and do limited print runs of “magazine”, both of which are unprofitable failures that never get anywhere outside of being used as some sort of symbol that is attractive to other psueds. This is funny, and that funniness is why it’s probably interesting to me, but it is quite unimpressive and not impactful at all to anybody who isn’t looking for a laugh.

            One example of this new class of glue huffing pseudo-intellectual is the group of people over at Palladium Magazine. They are the whipping boy of this essay, as most of the losers and failures at Palladium Magazine have already blocked me on twitter after I have poked holes in their stupid twitter threads and openly mocked them in a manner which was disrespectful. I would have refrained from whipping them in this manner had they not blocked me, but since they have and are not capable of even minimal banter or rebuttal, I have no reason to go easy on them. My empathy is real, and I don’t generally beat on mental invalids, but my empathy is primarily cognitive and most mental invalids are not trustfund kids with imaginary titles larping as what I actually am capable of. As such, I am turning my empathy off for this essay and being honest in an unfiltered manner, even though I know that my honesty is quite unpleasant in this particular case.

            Palladium “Magazine” is not a unique case, over the years there have been various pseudo-intellectual e-rags pushed by pseudo-intellectuals trying to make their name on the internet. For example, my own circle of the internet had a few iterations of this doomed sort of venture, one of which was called “Thermidor”, and as doomed sort of ventures tend to do, they all failed miserably. Zooming out from individual cases, there are some interesting common factors that can be observed and analyzed.

            The first thing that can be noted about Palladium and the blogs similar to it are the quality of the people attached to them. There are always one or two exceptions to any rule, but the overwhelming majority of participants in these projects are failed normies born into the upper middle-class and in the process of failing out of the upper middle-class.

What is a failed normie? Simply put, it is a neurotypical with no real interesting perspective or capability for genuine generative thought, who has some severe flaw in their mentality that causes them to not slot into any successful life strategy. As a result, they are a loser who then drifts around and attaches themselves to various actually interesting subcultures in an attempt to differentiate themselves. Because these are failed normies and not genuine aneurotypicals, they are not really part of these subcultures they leech onto. They are just barely passable mimics to people not paying attention. To people like me who notice: they are absurdly embarrassing mediocrities.

These pseudo-intellectual webzines like to choose pseudo-respectable names and use pseudo-classical designs on their websites. These websites are always just reskinned blogger or wordpress or some other mass market blogging platform sites, because the people creating and running them have no real skills or talent, or else they wouldn’t be making pseudo-intellectual webzines with pseudo-respectable names and pseudo-classical designs. The reason this point is important will be elaborated on shortly, but essentially it is because these are the upper middle-class loser versions of African bushmen building cargo-cult airports and airplanes out of bamboo in hopes of getting food from some abstract god they don’t understand.

The Palladium-tier pseud like Samo Burja is, like stated in the prior paragraph, completely lost as to what they’re doing and how the world works. These are people born into privilege who have “gone to the right schools” and “read the right books” and “made friends with the right people” and ultimately understood none of it. They have, because they lack a soul or any self-actualization (most likely due to being sheltered from cradle to grave), confused the signs and symbols of wisdom with wisdom itself. They have fallen in love with the shadow cast by some object and are completely unaware that the shadow isn’t a real thing -- it is just a time-lagged indicator of something that is real.

            As I have written before, the model of magazines and more broadly collective, curated publishing is dying. There are shambling zombies and rotting institutions that still engage in it, as collective publishing is what they were built on and how their corporate structure was formed, but these things are on their way out and no longer attract any quality talent. The reason for this, as I have written before, is that resources and resource distribution have been abstracted and disconnected from physical geography. The psychic economy has begun to eat the physical economy, and so the chokepoints of publishing (which included distribution) which used to require immense capital no longer exist. As such, the resource flows that allowed for the old physical institutions to build magazine, newspaper, music, and all other forms of publisher dynasties no longer exist in any meaningful sense. You can see this by how all the talented writers are going independent and directly interfacing with their audiences through sites like Substack. The people who are now writing for physical institutions (and their poor digital mimics like Palladium) are pseuds who lack understanding of reality and are chasing after status and respect not through the quality of their work, but rather the reputation of the institution they are latching onto.

As synthetic methods of distribution and consumption have reduced informational entropy and increased the strength of individual expression of biological will, the proper biological surface area of an organism that a creative person needs to be successful has shrunk from a magazine, movie studio, book publisher, record label, etc. to simply themselves and some website that consumers can use to access their materials. The successful and actually clever individuals who have innate talent have recognized this (if not intellectually, instinctually) and moved to these internet platforms. The pseuds or failed normies who do not understand reality as it is and confuse signs and symbols with The Thing itself are still chasing after physical institutions that used to have prestige. The chasing may come in the form of writing for the NYTimes or some “elite” newspaper, sucking up to the people connected to those organisms, or in the case of Palladium and Thermidor, some bizarre attempt to replicate the appearance and feel of these sorts of dying, obsolete institutions. It must be stressed that this behavior is indicative of complete idiocy, of classless mimicry, of a failed normie.

A short aside must be made at this point to stress that it is not the engaging in a losing strategy that I find particularly objectionable. Collective publishing sites for writing are fine if they’re done for fun or by genuinely creative people who are trying to figure out how best to organize themselves. While the future is essentially just individuals self-publishing and self-promoting instead of teaming up, pro-social attempts at teamwork are not something I insult or deride. I know a few people who run various publishing sites and I’m a big fan of them, even though I think all the people in them would most likely best be suited (if success is what they’re after rather than friendship) if they struck out on their own and developed their own personas and websites. What is objectionable is when people with no talent or consciousness poorly fail to emulate that which they find “classy” or “impressive”, like some prole buying designer consumer goods or a tacky Rolex in an attempt to pass themselves off as something they’re fundamentally not, and aren’t capable of being. That, as somebody who is actually influential and successful and capable of original thought, offends me as a gentleman and person with inherent dignity. Of course, the people at Palladium Mag won’t understand what this means, because they have no inborn taste and thus confuse signs of a dead old paradigm with what it is I am engaging in.

Neo-Nazis are silly not because they romanticize an era that is gone and LARP as people who are dead who existed in a country and context that is dead, neo-nazis are silly because their conception of reality is outdated and not relevant. The romanticization and LARPing are simply symptoms of their silliness that flow out of their fundamental silliness. The Palladium Mag and Thermidor glue huffing failed normies in the process of failing  out of the upper middle-class (that their parents or grandparents placed them in and they did not earn) are silly and embarrassing not because of their conspicuously clumsy romanticization of old markers of success, but rather because of their lack of understanding of how the world works from which their conspicuously clumsy romanticization of old markers of success flows out of. The Stalhelm wearing white power marching hillbilly using racial slurs is fundamentally the same creature as Samo Burja, a lost and soon to be extinct creature possessed and mentally dominated by phantoms and ghosts of the losers of the past. The phenomenological expression of Burja and OhioWhiteWulfPagan1488 is just different, because Burja was born into privilege and has a safety net that allows his embarrassing LARP to take a more subtle form. Of course, Burja’s LARP is more disgraceful, as being born into privilege that OhioWhiteWulfPagan1488 was denied means that he has no excuse for ending up the sorry pseud he had, while OhioWhiteWulfPagan1488’s outcome is mostly the result of being abused by a system around him.

It is precisely the waste of potential and privilege displayed by pseudo-intellectual upper middle-class failed normies like Burja and most of the people at Palladium Mag so tragic, as well as darkly funny. These psueds were given all the opportunities to make something of life, to create actually interesting works of art or intellectual thought, or just to enjoy the fruits of their ancestors’ hard work, and yet they ended up how they ended up. The “white trash” blue collar worker who ends up dead in a pool of his own vomit from an opioid overdose has more dignity in his end than the over-educated and under-intelligent pseudo-intellectuals that populate all the glorified blogsites popping up as of late. Those people have excuses and disadvantages they were born into that make their outcome something that should elicit sympathy, the upper middle-class losers writing about “governance” and using buzzwords from pop philosophy and silicon valley have no such excuses or disadvantages to humanize them. These are people who were handed the world and are now humiliating themselves because their fundamental character is mushy, weak, undefined, and completely degenerated to that below the lowest class imaginable.

What the over-educated psueds do not understand, fundamentally, is that the world is not heading in the direction they imagine it to be heading. The rationalism and “progress” and humanism that underwrite their thinking are completely phenomenological and phantasmagorical in nature. Their beliefs, because they were raised in excess and comfort, are the ghosts of Anglo sickness that can only exist in a paradigm of the physical economy being superior and dominant over the psychic economy. They do not understand the physical economy, just like they don’t understand the psychic economy, but they do have a loose grip on phenomenological symptoms of the physical economy being dominant over the psychic, so in the old paradigm they could have written enough fluff to seem intelligent to people who are slightly dumber than them. Now, because we are in a new paradigm with new resource flows, these people are showing themselves for what they are: frauds. Now, people like me who understand what is going on are going to be able to exploit and beat on them mentally for our own benefit.

I am the first person I’m aware of to openly mock and brutalize the pseudo-intellectuals building cargo-cult digital institutions, but I won’t be the last. There are many people who agree with my position, most likely on an instinctual level rather than a cognitive one, but these people are too nice to express their thoughts and are incapable of acting in the consciously predatory manner in which I am operating. Right now, as I write this, the things I write probably seem excessive and cruel, but this is because I need to “overshoot” what is seen as appropriate in order to be noticed for my behavior and disagreed with, so in the future the people who disagree with me eventually realize that everything I’ve written is 100% correct. Not now, but in ten to twenty years, this essay will be seen as ahead of its time and lucid, as none of the people I attack will have produced or done anything of worth and I will be even more successful than I am now.

It must be noted that I am quite young and have already contributed more to any intellectual field of thought than anybody I am attacking. I have built out systems of thought and conceptions of reality that are not yet understood or even able to be grasped by the majority of “intellectuals” at all. I am solidly in the new paradigm and grasp it on an intuitive level, and I am one of the first public writers who has done this and has the internal constitution and social skills to capitalize on it. The haphazard disrespect I show to those who are older and “more established” and have “more credentials” is because I have seen the future, and in the future all the successful people know what I know and all the losers and victims are the people who currently think of themselves as intellectuals and educated. I am not writing this in hopes that I fix anything or save the world or western civilization or “governance”, I am writing this to display my clear superiority, so when my clear superiority is obvious to everybody, everybody can refer back to this and realize that I knew what I was doing the whole time. It is quite easy to disregard politeness or social norms with regards to the pseudo-intellectual class that is dying, because I do not need their parents’ money they will inherit, their respect, their connections, or anything they have to win. I’ve already won, they’ve already lost, and it’s just a matter of time until even they will be forced to realize this. The game is completely rigged in my favor. I spit on the losers.