A synthetic slogan this time, integrating a suggestion from Ex-Pat in Oz and Mai La Dreapta (here) with a discovery by Alrenous (here) to produce something singular.

Winter Is Coming
333

Envisaging a dark camo background, which would match both of these intersecting sign-lines. Fusional pop-culture crypsis is the way forward. Everywhere, yet unseen.

(It would take the fake-archaism “Winter ’tis Coming” or ominous Teutonism “Winter Ist Coming” to get the numbers to work out perfectly.)

This excitable but nevertheless broadly convincing application of the Strauss & Howe generational theory of historical cycles to recent news headlines is a reminder of the inevitability of story-telling. (Outside in has touched upon this particular tale before.)

The Cathedral is above all a meta-story, a secular-revolutionary usurpation of the traditional Western ‘Grand Narrative‘ (inherited from eschatological monotheism), and its survival is inseparable from the preservation of narrative credibility. As it frays, alternative stories obtain a niche. The Strauss & Howe account of rhythmic historical pattern is highly competitive in such an environment. Events subtracting from the plausibility of progressive expectations are exactly those that strengthen omens of an impending cyclic ‘winter’. Winter is coming, as popularized by Game of Thrones, might have been designed as a promotional tool for The Fourth Turning.

Anarchopapist begins his most recent musings on ‘The Neoreactionary Project’ by asking “What is a meme?” It is a better starting point, in this context, than the question: How correct are Strauss & Howe? Memetics subsumes questions of factual application (as aspects of adaptive fitness), but it reaches beyond them. The successful meme is characterized by aesthetic features irreducible to representational adequacy, from elegance of construction to dramatic form. Even more importantly, it is able to operate as a causal factor itself, and thus to produce the very effects it accommodates itself to. A society enthralled by its passage through the winter gate of a fourth turning would in very large measure be staging the same theatrical production its ‘beliefs’ had anticipated.

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Urbanomic‘s old (2007?) qabbalistic engine — the ‘gematrix’ — is back on line after a petulant disappearance. Only the AQ numerization is recommended — the alternatives are degenerate digital randomizations. (Concentrate upon the intact numerizations — the digitally-reduced values are usually too rudimentary for significant insight.)

To immediately understand a number of things (simultaneously) type in the Law of Thelema:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

This tool, and more especially the method — or specific gematria — it incarnates, is the consummation of rigorous Anglophone Occult Tradition. While its value is almost certainly lost on the moderns, it is once again freely available to be used.

It is now an Open Secret.

ADDED: DARK ENLIGHTENMENT = 333. (This needs to be here for reference.)

‘Dark Enlightenment’ describes a form of government as well as ‘Enlightenment’ does, which is to say: it doesn’t at all. On those grounds alone, George Dvorsky’s inclusion of DE among twelve possible “Futuristic Forms of Government That Could One Day Rule the World” is profoundly misguided. This is not to say the list is entirely without interest.

Its greatest value lies in the abundance of mutually inconsistent political futures, few if any of which will happen. It therefore provides the opportunity for negative thoughts, and more particularly for systematic negative idealization. Which futures are most deserving of prevention?

This blog has no doubt. The epitome of political disaster occupies fourth place in Dvorsky’s list (among a number of other hideous outcomes): Democratic World Government.

Dvorsky seems to quite like it:

We may very well be on our way to achieving the Star Trek-like vision of a global-scale liberal democracy — one capable of ending nuclear proliferation, ensuring global security, intervening to end genocide, defending human rights, and putting a stop to human-caused climate change.

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Taken from the second chapter of Matt Ridley’s Genome (1999), a superb popularization of human genetics:

… the remarkable truth is that we [humans] come from a long line of failures. We are apes, a group that almost went extinct fifteen million years ago in competition with the better-designed monkeys. We are primates, a group of mammals that almost went extinct forty-five million years ago in competition with the better-designed rodents. We are synapsid tetrapods, a group of reptiles that almost went extinct 200 million years ago in competition with the better-designed dinosaurs. We are descended from limbed fishes, which almost went extinct 360 million years ago in competition with the better-designed ray-finned fishes. We are chordates, a phylum that survived the Cambrian era 500 million years ago by the skin of its teeth in competition with the brilliantly successful arthropods. Our ecological success came against humbling odds.

Chaos Patches are going to be transformed into a regular (weekly) facility, starting now, so there should always be one within reach. This is to solemnly recognize where the real ballast of this blog is to be found (in the comment threads). I’ll try to update the post with indications of the principal lines of discussion.

The re-surfacing of this classic is only the most recent of recent distractions. I’m sure the commentariat here have much more significant matters to discuss.

I’ll throw in John Derbyshire on Richard Lynn as a semi-random prompt (there’s more JD here, contributing to a highly-stimulating series of dissident right doom-futurism pieces).

A few cryptic link pushes: The recent trend to frag-blogging in the reactosphere is capturing my attention (no doubt, in part, because I’ve been doing so much of that myself recently). For instance, I’m eager to learn where this is going. At the other extreme, there’s this. If you haven’t already ventured over here, it’s highly recommended.

Insanity night continues here in Shanghai with this perfected distillation of Leftist delirium:

.@Paulskemp @monsterhunter45 If ppl are equal, then equality of opportunity will by definition lead to equality of outcomes

— Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) June 12, 2014

Spoiler: He actually believes the initial hypothetical is true.

This one is actually pretty interesting (as well as reaching a whole new level of batshit insane).

ADDED: One hit piece in a week? Oh come on!

ADDED: A micro-crucial moment —

How much of received history is the result of decisions like this? pic.twitter.com/jaj5Y3dpx7

— Sister Sarah (@sarahdoingthing) June 14, 2014

Michael A. Woodley, Jan te Nijenhuis, and Raegan Murphy respond (in detail) to critics of their 2013 paper on the dysgenic implications of Galton’s reaction time data. Their adjusted evidence indicates an increase in reaction times among US/UK males over the period 1889-2004 from 187.1 ms to 237.1 ms (44.6 ms over 115 years), equivalent to a decline in g of 13.9 points, or 1.21 points per decade. They propose that 68% of this decline is due to dysgenic selection, with the remaining 32% attributed to increasing mutation load.

If these figures are even remotely accurate, they portray a phenomenon — and indeed a catastrophe — that would have to be considered a fundamental determinant of recent world history. Given the scale and rapidity of dysgenic collapse suggested here, skepticism is natural, and indeed all-but inevitable. (The proposed rate of decline seems incredible to this, radically inexpert, blog.) It should nevertheless be reasonable to expect counter-arguments to exhibit the same intellectual seriousness and respect for evidence that this paper so impressively demonstrates.

The whole of Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) is available here. In the final pages (p.218), following detailed historical analysis, it cautiously advances a cultural-political definition:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Since the topic regularly re-surfaces, it seems worth recording Paxton’s formulation as a reference point, especially as its emphases differ significantly from those this blog (and its critics) have tended to stress. An important conclusion of Paxton’s study is that no purely ideological account of fascism is able to capture what is an essentially historical phenomenon, which is to say a process, rooted in the degeneration of democracy. (Wikipedia offers some background on his work.)