The vulgarity of pop-reaction is matched only by the stupidity of mainstream conservatism:

I bring this up because I suppose it’s possible that some conservatives might embrace this term without fully understanding the racial and sexual implications. To some, it might be seen as an innocent jab — like calling someone a “squish” or a “RINO.” But as Erickson correctly observes, “Remember, if you hear the term ‘cuckservative,’ it is a slur against Christian voters coined by white-supremacists.”

If anyone deserves a gutter-fight with degenerates, it’s the GOP. It seems quite probable that they’ll lose.

(If you’re tempted to roll out your degeneracy in the comments thread, think again. We gibbet people for such things in these parts.)

Suddenly, with private space activity re-setting the cost calculus, all kinds of things become realistic:

… a new NASA-commission study has found that we can now afford to set up a permanent base on the moon, by mining for lunar resources and partnering with private companies. […] Returning humans to the moon could cost 90 percent less than expected, bringing estimated costs down from $100 billion to $10 billion. That’s something that NASA could afford on its current deep space human spaceflight budget. […] “A factor of ten reduction in cost changes everything,” said Mark Hopkins, executive committee chair of the National Space Society, in a press release. […] The study, released today, was conducted by the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation — two non-profit organizations that advocate building human settlements beyond Earth — and it was reviewed by an independent team of former NASA executives, astronauts, and space policy experts.

To dramatically reduce costs, NASA would have to take advantage of private and international partnerships — perhaps one of which would be the European Space Agency, whose director recently announced that he wants to build a town on the moon. The new estimates also assume that Boeing and SpaceX, NASA’s commercial crew partners, will be involved and competing for contracts. SpaceX famously spent just $443 million developing its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon crew capsule, where NASA would have spent $4 billion. The authors of the new report are hoping that 89 percent discount will extend beyond low Earth orbit as well.

The most interesting reasons for wanting to do this stuff are politically edgy in the extreme, and if the whole process gets started, no one involved will want to discuss them. The helpful approach is to treat them as unmentionable in advance. Best to concentrate on the techno-economic practicalities, until the lunar neocameral splinter Human extraterrestrial foothold is safely in place.

A persuasive argument for why the Chinese authorities are looking forward to Hillary-v-Jeb in 2016:

The ruling Chinese Communist Party is deeply sensitive to charges that it is non-democratic and the playground of “princelings” — a pejorative term for the class of Chinese business tycoons and political power players who trace their lineages to Communist veterans. Nothing helps to blunt that charge as much as the idea that American democracy is similarly corrupt. “The Chinese media, especially the Party media, has been using American elections as a way to discredit democracy,” says Kecheng Fang, a former reporter for the Southern Weekly in Guangzhou who now researches Chinese media at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think much of Chinese media has been referring to this election as Clinton 2.0 versus Bush 3.0, so it’s a very trendy topic.” As Weihua Chen, chief Washington correspondent for the China Daily, the government’s largest English-language newspaper, put it to me in an interview: “You guys always talk about being the greatest democracy, but now you have a democracy run by two families for more than a decade?”

Scrape down past the popcorn topsoil, and it’s a depressing story. Democratic hegemony is so solidly entrenched as a benchmark of global regime legitimacy, that even China resorts to pointing the finger and taunting: call that a real democracy. The Zeitgeist hasn’t remotely begun to turn, and the world’s most powerful autocracies are still deferring to it submissively, even as they beg for some tolerance in respect to timing.

If NRx has one serious task — and in fact, an overwhelmingly intimidating one — it is to contribute to the establishment of an alternative principle of political legitimation. To imagine that significant steps had yet been taken in this regard would be to court extreme self-delusion. The road ahead is hard.

It looks as if this was a lot more flippant than it needed to be.

Via @asilentsky (via), the question: Was Walt Disney practically exploring a prototypical Neoreaction in the 1960s? Such anachronism typically merits extreme skepticism, but here are some videos to hone your doubt upon: Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT (his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), parts 1, 2, and 3. Plus some select tweet support:

In a very real sense Walt Disney is #NRx

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) July 20, 2015

A for profit city that is also an industrial park for cutting edge industry, with room for future technology, designed to be updated. #NRx

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) July 20, 2015

They called Lee's brilliant Singapore Disneyworld with the Death Penalty. This is closer to truth than it seems. And a deep compliment. #NRx

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) July 20, 2015

(That last is a Gibson quote, btw.)

From the EPCOT videos: “Whatever worked became the code … We’re ready to go right now.”

There has to be a discussion about this.

(Open thread + links)

Thinking through Exit (remember this). NIO thinks it’s been a little too quiet around here recently (recalling). The resilience of politics (plus, and double-plus). Burnham the prophet. Errors of altruism, and tolerance (plus). Lessons of reality TV. Ideological security (also). Spreading deviancy. Propaganda. Georgist epistemology. New blog of the week (make that two). Regular staples, Friday frags and the weekly–round.

President Sanders? (At last!) Enter the Trump popcorn wagon (more, and more, and more). Progressive Gothic (comprehended). A name that will live in infamy. A brief history of left libertarianism. Greekshit (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, it’s endless). America‘s Greece. The China crash.

A climate of unreality (plus 1, 2, 3).

“It makes a big difference where your immigrants come from.” Taleb and tribalism. Chinese privilege. Reddit is the worst (unless maybe for these folks). Questioning WN. The Left’s Nordic dream. Does racism exist? Racist computers. Taylor on Raspail.

The prospect of a neo-eugenic arms race. What inbreeding doesn’t mean. Race on the brain.

Lenin on Malthusianism. Philip on Malthus. The trouble with Social Darwinism. Some Druidic conclusions from Darwin. Constructor Theory. Death.

Luther and the origins of Modernity. A leftist homage to the Puritans. Yes, the Pope is a communist (and everyone knows it). An improbable path to Christendom.

On transhumanism (with the Nietzsche cut out).

Musk.

Collective scams. Bent science.

“Congratulations, you won. No one will help you.”

Futurisms. Political theory from the future (via). OIW on Anathem.

Zora Neale Hurston on Zombies.

Tests and diversions: text-based personality analyzer, political geometry, Reform insolence. (Relevant.)

Steven Sailer makes room for a smidgen of gentle cynicism about the economic driver behind the Obama Administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” initiative:

Clearly, racial justice demands forcing suburbs/exurbs to subsidize affordable housing to encourage blacks to move to more convenient locations currently dominated by evil white racists, such as, perhaps, Murrieta, Hemet, Coachella, Twentynine Palms, and Hesperia. […] Seriously, sixty years ago, “urban renewal” was all the rage, although cynics joked that cities, in effect, were attempting to engage in “Negro removal.” […] Nowadays, everybody who is anybody wants to move back into the city, so white progressives have become obsessed with exposing all those vicious racists in the suburbs and exurbs, and using disparate impact thinking to force them to take more blacks from the city. […] It’s only a coincidence that this would open up more prime urban real estate for gentrification, right?

There can be little doubt that it’s a low tolerance for hypocrisy, beyond anything, that pushes people into the crime-think zone. A cheerful acceptance that evangelical political correctness is entirely compatible with profitable ethnic-clearing exercises — perhaps even a crucial tool in this regard — would make it wholly unnecessary to ever make those awkward, socially-taboo remarks. It’s not as if anyone is going to be called out about it (except by the Sailers of this world, who’ve been carefully locked-up in the muffled cell). There’s not even any need to be a hick Republican about the whole business. Clearly, the left wing of the Democratic Party is the place from which to really clean up. Simply recognize that words are a perfectly empty social ritual, designed by the Holy Zeitgeist for the public expression of convenient tribal emotions, and all the confusion goes away. Dollars follow, and life is beautiful.

We can laugh (darkly), as Sailer does, but that’s most probably a maladaptive relic. There’s certainly plenty of laughter to go around on the other side.

There’s a potential prologue to this post that I’m reluctant to be distracted by. It’s introvertedly about NRx, as a cultural mutation, and the way this is defined by a strategic — or merely ornery — indifference to deeply-settled modes of ethico-political condemnation. Terms designed as pathblockers — ‘fascist’ or ‘racist’ most obviously — are stepped over, perhaps laughed at, but in any case, and most importantly, exposed as bearers of a religious terror. They are signs of a control regime, marking the unthinkable wastes where be dragons, effective precisely insofar as they cannot be entertained. ‘Satanic’ was once such a word (before it became a joke). These words cannot be understood except as invocations of the sacred, in its negative, or limitative role.

Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather than self-estimation, the least fascistic current of political philosophy presently in existence, although this requires a minimal comprehension of what fascism actually is, which the word itself in its contemporary usage is designed to obstruct. Is NRx racist? Probably. The term is so entirely plastic in the service of those who utilize it that it is difficult, with any real clarity, to say.

What NRx most definitely is, at least in the firm opinion of this blog, is Social Darwinist. When this term is hurled at NRx as a negative epithet, it is nor a cause for stoic resignation, stiffened by humor, but rather for grim delight. Of course, this term is culturally processed — thought through — no more competently than those previously noted. It is our task to do this.

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As a corrective to the disturbingly unironic Donald Trump enthusiasm affecting certain sections of NRx, here‘s Ace (of Spades) exiting the circus:

… several years ago, I actually believed in America, and participatory democracy, and all that. […] Now I don’t. So now I find myself agreeing with Chomsky, albeit from a rightward direction. I don’t agree with him about who controls the country, or to what political ends; but I do with agree with him that it is controlled. […] Now this brings me to … Manufactured Consent … So this is why I have become a radical: I agree with a left-wing socialist/communist about the fundamental rotten lie at the heart of the American democracy. […] … I am turning off the TV, I am turning off the Bob Corker & Mitch McConnell show, and, frankly, I am cutting the cord on America.

(He’s even turning off the computer for a day, which is perhaps edging into excessive extremism.)

There’s still some definite suggestion in the post that democracy itself could be exculpated, so the journey is not yet complete. Give it time.

Within the next half-century, the American West Coast faces a far from insignificant threat of massive geological calamity:

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west — losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater. … The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable. Kenneth Murphy, who directs FEMA’s Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska, says, “Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”

In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.

Realistic accommodation to the prospect of black swan events is psychologically — and even epistemologically — impossible. It’s worth trying to hold onto the thought, however, that unpredictable, singular events, utterly senseless within the principal narrative structures of human history, could at any point throw all expectations for the ordered unfolding of developments off a cliff.

There’s some serious upgrading going on. Alan Stern (in safe black shirt) just called Charon a planet.