Theodore Dalrymple on TV:

To my shame, and against my principles, I have occasionally agreed to appear on television, though even less frequently than I have been asked. I have found those who work for TV broadcasting companies to be the most disagreeable people that I have ever encountered. I far preferred the criminals whom I encountered in my work as a prison doctor, who were more honest and upright than TV people. 

In my experience, TV people are as lying, insincere, obsequious, unscrupulous, fickle, exploitative, shallow, cynical, untrustworthy, treacherous, dishonest, mercenary, low, and untruthful a group of people as is to be found on the face of this Earth. They make the average Western politician seem like a moral giant.

Whilst pedestrian in its rehearsal of common knowledge, and inane in its tortured liberalism, this article helpfully schematizes the arena of Anglophone racial politics, at least on its defining black-white dimension (and accidentally). By counterposing the tradition of Black American self-advancement (represented by Booker T. Washington) with that of Afro-Marxist agitation (represented by W. E. B. Du Bois), it implicitly describes an ideological quadrant.

1. To side with Du Bois against Washington is the position of the radical Left.

2. To seek a reconciliation of the two is an agonized equivocation, tilting inevitably to Leftist advantage, of the kind that has predominated in the development of Anglophone political culture. This is is position of the author, of mainstream liberalism and conservatism, and of progressive Cathedralization.

3. To admire Washington, whilst repulsed by Du Bois, is the neoreactionary stance Outside in defends.

4. To dismiss both Washington and Du Bois as irrelevant Black nonsense is a departure into confrontational White Nationalism, of a kind that has no imaginable reach beyond itself.

Thomas Sowell, as the most articulate inheritor of the ‘outsider’ Washington tradition, is the emblem of this racial ideology test today. Neoreaction is indisputably mostly a White thing, but if it is to have any additional significance whatsoever, Sowell has to be supported. There’s nowhere further Right he could possibly go, except into some species of Black ethnomasochistic suicidalism — and we should know, more than anybody, that’s a corner no one should be backed into.

This blog has zero confidence in ethno-nationalist street-fighting to achieve anything beyond an even more deeply vulgarized demotism, as inchoate mob impulses erupt under demagogic direction. So we consider the ‘decision‘ by Tommy Robinson to step back from the hooligan counter-barbarism of the EDL to be a defeat only for those who misguidedly think crypto-fascist politics might have the key to the out-house, along with those who find a crypto-fascist enemy convenient.

Politics in the streets is the primary indication of de-civilization in the modern age, and nothing could ever make it worthy of ultra-right support. Since street politics can occur only under government sanction — which is to say in the absence of grape-shot — any claim it might make to oppositional authenticity is wholly bogus. A right-wing riot is an absurdity.

The story here has a genuinely important angle, however. Robinson’s conversion to “better, democratic ideas” followed upon a carefully-crafted diplomatic exercise by Britain’s state broadcaster, which arranged for him to meet with Muslim ‘representatives’ — under the supervision of the Quilliam Foundation — in order to learn how nice and reasonable they are.

In other words, the BBC seems to have acknowledged its responsibility as the country’s effective government to directly settle the few remaining awkward ideological misalignments among the people. Neoreactionaries have learned that any democratic regime is really governed by its least democratic elements, and the more fanatical its democratization, the less democracy has to do with its rule. As with any Popular Protectorate under advanced democratic conditions, therefore, elections for the governing BBC Trust are not under consideration — because democracy is too important to throw like chum amongst the people (except of course in Hong Kong).

(Thanks to ZD for the pointer.)

Stage-1 (Denial): “What is this naziish-sounding “HBD” of which you speak? Actually, I’d rather you didn’t answer that.”

Stage-2 (Anger): “RAAAAAAACISSSST!!!”

Stage-3 (Bargaining): “… but even if HBD is real, it doesn’t mean anything, does it? You know, comparative advantage, or postmodernism … (or something).”

Stage-4 (Depression): “Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?”

Stage-5 (Acceptance): “Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn’t it? Guess it’s time for it to die …”

[Thanks to Thales for the prompt]

Whilst it’s undoubtedly flattering to be the target of a brutal, lazy, and dishonest hit piece, it’s also vaguely irritating. Couldn’t Kuznicki have stoked the hate sufficiently with the rejection of democracy, HBD sympathies, anti-egalitarianism, market-fundamentalism, disintegrationism, and Shoggoth-whispering, without also making up a bunch of stuff?

Anyway, just for the record:

* I’m not a proponent of “white nationalistic race ‘realism’.”
* I nowhere make the “case that white nationalism and market liberalism somehow belong together.”
* I have never made a “case against markets” of any kind, let alone that they “stand behind democracy with a tyrannical, unpredictable veto” [whatever than means]
* I have never advocated for “racial purity”

There’s no doubt a number of people who turn up here who wish that I did make some of these arguments, and by distancing myself from them I’m not wanting to endorse Kuznicki’s suggestion that they’re mere slurs.

As far as Kuznicki’s own substantial points are concerned — defense of dialectics, voice, meliorative politics — I’m not really interested enough to engage.

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When political polarization is modeled as a game the result is Chicken. The technical basics are not very complicated.

Reiterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (RPD) is socially integrative. An equilibrium, conforming to maximal aggregate utility, arises through reciprocal convergence upon an optimum strategy: defaulting to trust, punishing defections, and rapidly forgiving corrected behavior. Any society adopting these rule-of-thumb principles consolidates. When everyone norms on this strategy, individual and collective interests are harmonized. Things work.

Chicken is very different. Someone blinks first, so the trust-trust mutual optimum of RPD is subtracted in advance. Rather than the four possible outcomes of a single PD round (A and B do OK, A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose) there are just three possible outcomes (A wins B loses, B wins A loses, A and B both lose extremely). In Chicken, it is the avoidance of outcome three, rather than the non-existent chance of PD outcome one, that moderates behavior, and then asymmetrically (someone always blinks first).

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Salon has been bat-shit crazy for a long time, but right now it’s really going over the edge. It’s almost as if the people there are getting worried about something.

[Thanks to VXXC for pointers into the bin]

My personal pick for comedy gold goes to the article on right-wing brain washing (5th link), which includes this priceless classic: “He believed it when Rush Limbaugh told him that climate change is a hoax. He called Al Gore an ‘asshole’ even after watching the entire An Inconvenient Truth …” (Especially funny for me because I knew someone like that once — he thought Hitler was a dangerous demagogue, even after watching Triumph of the Will.)

Panic! They’re so brain-washed they don’t even believe our propaganda any more.

ADDED: Da Tech Guy EBT follow-up.

Steve Sailer (on sex sifting between life and death sciences):

The colossal prestige of physics was permanently cemented on July 16, 1945 at Trinity, NM. As the shockwave from the first ever atomic bomb passed beyond the Los Alamos physicists’ observation post, J. Robert Oppenheimer reflected, in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita:

To a highly intelligent adolescent female mind, this most famous quote from the history of 20th Century physics is alien and horrifying. To a certain number of highly intelligent adolescent male minds, however, “destroyer of worlds” is the most awesome thing anybody ever said outside of a comic book.