Ezra Levant evaluates the new social hierarchy:

[First, the background:] Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo. … Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives. … Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too. … McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk give her a haircut.

[…]

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(Click on image to enlarge.)

(Via.)

One thing to emphasize — ‘science’ is the data, as well as the error. This is not a picture of black hole, uncorrectable reality denial, of the kind familiar from political economy. That said, the speculative hypothesis was turned into a story for public promotion, and then into something very close to an official dogma. Now that it isn’t holding together, this type of thing starts happening.

Has the scientific establishment ever been so off-beam, in the entire history of the West? Not only wrong, but aggressively doctrinaire, and politically assertive in the direction of error? For anybody who esteems the development of natural science as the single greatest historical achievement of the Occidental world, the AGW saga has been a hideous embarrassment. Our institutions are broken.

ADDED: It’s war.

ADDED: “This is the original sin of the global warming theory: that it was founded in a presumption of guilt against industrial civilization. All of the billions of dollars in government research funding and the entire cultural establishment that has been built up around global warming were founded on the presumption that we already knew the conclusion — we’re ‘ravaging the planet’ — and we’re only interested in evidence that supports that conclusion.”

Zombies are targeted in advance for the application of uninhibited violence. Their arrival announces a conflict in which all moral considerations are definitively suspended. Since they have no ‘souls’ there is nothing they will not do, and they are expected to do the worst. Reciprocally, they merit exactly zero humanitarian concern. The relationship to the zombie is one in which all sympathy is absolutely annulled (殺殺殺殺殺殺殺).

No surprise, then, that the identification of the zombie has become a critical conflict, waged across the terrain of popular culture. It implicitly describes a free-fire zone, or an anticipated gradient in the social direction of violence. Zombies are either scum or they are drones.

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Is intersectionality just the greatest thing ever, or what?

Both [Laurie] Penny and [Richard] Seymour have made a point of arguing, moreover, for the latest fad in leftist thinking: intersectionality. “Intersectionality” supposedly means taking seriously the many different oppressions, and how they intersect. “My socialism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Seymour has made a point of saying. Given that they are so keen to speak out against oppression in all its multi-layered forms, it seems really bad luck that they should be accused of being “racist crackers” and “white settlers.”

The entire article is comedy gold.

The Obama presidency AND intersectionality — does anyone still doubt that God is hardcore NRx?

Some accidental sense in The Guardian (from Theo Hobson):

Atheism derives from religion? Surely it just says that no gods exist, that rationalism, or ‘scientific naturalism’, is to be preferred to any form of supernaturalism. Actually, no: in reality what we call atheism is a form of secular humanism; it presupposes a moral vision, of progressive humanitarianism, of trust that universal moral values will triumph. (Of course there is also the atheism of Nietzsche, which rejects humanism, but this is not what is normally meant by ‘atheism’).

So what we know as atheism should really be understood as an offshoot of deism. For it sees rationalism as a benign force that can liberate our natural goodness. It has a vision of rationalism saving us, uniting us. For example, AC Grayling, in his recent book The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, argues that, with the withering of religion, ‘an ethical outlook which can serve everyone everywhere, and can bring the world together into a single moral community, will at last be possible’. This is really Rousseau’s idea, that if we all listened to our hearts, there would be ‘one religion on earth’.

(It probably goes without saying that Hobson thinks this feels-fueled ultra-leftist secularized evangelism is a jolly good thing.)

ADDED: Handle on the new evangelism. (Superb, even by Handle’s high standards.)

Patri Friedman is both extremely smart and, for this blog among others in the ‘sphere, highly influential. So when he promises us “a more politically correct dark enligh[t]enment” (“adding anti-racism and anti-sexism to my controversial new pro-monogamy stance”), that’s a thing. It accentuates concerns about ‘entryism’ and ideological entropy, leading to some thoughtful responses such as this (from Avenging Red Hand).

Michael Anissimov anticipated this in a post at More Right on the ‘Premises of Reactionary Thought’, which begins: “To make progress in any area of intellectual endeavor requires discourse among those who agree with basic premises and the exclusion of those who do not.” (The commentary by Cathedral Whatever is also well worth a look.) Anissimov’s original five premises, subsequently updated to six (with a new #1 added) are:

1. People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all its forms.
2. Right is right and left is wrong.
3. Hierarchy is basically a good idea. 
4. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.
5. Libertarianism is retarded.
6. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.

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Race, science, and pseudo-science … it’s complicated. Radish presents a blood-chilling review essay on the subject, which isn’t to be missed (whatever your priors). As might be expected, it leads to a discussion of crazed fascist experimentation on human guinea pigs (aka ‘pajama ferrets’):

… perhaps you were wondering where I’m going with this. Well, here’s a hint: in 2012, experimental psychologists, psychiatric neuroscientists, and even a pair of “practical ethicists” put their heads together and came up with an honest-to-God cure for racism.

You could say the argument was over, if there had been an argument.

(Meanwhile, it’s probably best not to put yourself at risk by noticing this (from here))

There’s a post on H. P. Lovecraft’s extreme racism on the way, and given the abundance of stimulating material on the topic, a small taster is irresistible. This highly representative essay by Nicole Cushing serves as an occasion. She writes:

Broaching this subject is also difficult because it has to be handled with some nuance (which is difficult to achieve in a discussion of a topic as justifiably emotionally-charged as American racism). It would be too easy to point to Lovecraft’s racism (and some of his other failings as an author), and dismiss him as an undistinguished crackpot who deserved nothing better than publication in the pulps. I’m not going to do that here. My stance is that Lovecraft made an important contribution to horror and science fiction by focusing (in a persistent and compellingly imaginative way) on the terror induced by the revelation of human non-significance in the cosmos. […] Lovecraft has had a meaningful influence over horror fiction (in particular) for many years, an influence that transcends his racism. … All of this is just a long-winded way of explaining that Lovecraft’s racism doesn’t negate his accomplishments.

But his accomplishments don’t negate his racism. (Enter, cognitive dissonance).

Among the most fascinating aspects of this commentary is its blatant misdirection, since — of course — the phenomenon indicated has nothing whatsoever to do with cognitive dissonance. There is an encounter here with an abnormal species of literary genius, associated with profound metaphysical truth, which at the same time — and for inextricably tangled reasons — triggers a reaction of moral panic, tilting over into deep somatic revulsion. In other words, and perhaps even quite simply, what is being related by Nicole Cushing is — horror.

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Why the Left lies:

Cathedral leftoids loathe the idea that they might give aid and comfort to their non-leftoid enemies. In this scenario, they know the truth on some level, but refuse to acknowledge it (despite any journalistic ethical strictures commanding them to do so) because they believe acknowledging it will embolden and gird the spirits of those they consider horrible, no good people. To these leftoids, the prospect of Heartland Joe (Votech, Class of 1975) beaming with satisfaction that his intuition about the way the world works was right all along drives them insane with rage. Even worse, the thought that a sadistic demon like me would take an eviscerating scalpel to their egos armed with their de facto surrender papers keeps them awake at night in terror.

(The entire post is highly recommended.)

… why does the American MSM almost never mention tribes, except occasionally as an afterthought, and never speak about how countries like Libya are organized socially, and how that affects their politics? There are so many examples of this that it cannot simply be a coincidence. This is not the place to go into detail, but it comes down, I think, to a form of political correctness that tacitly prohibits any mention of what might be taken even to imply that Libyans (or Yemenis or Syrians or Egyptians, or Pashtuns, or…) might in some way be pre-modern, as we understand the term. (Actually, they’re less aptly described as pre-modern than simply as different, but lowest-common-denominator Enlightenment universalism is very bad at acknowledging the dignity of difference.) That kind of appellation is considered just this side of racist in the higher etiquette of American Enlightenment liberalism, deeply dented, as it has been, by the nonsense of anti-“Orientalism” regnant now for more than a generation in academe. Yes, it was at university where our elite press reporters and their august editors learned this stuff.