Chris Edwards puts together an impressive short (and implicit) demolition.

Fernandez’ summary of the Edwards post is even better (so I’ve left the link to him):

Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure. He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures. The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.

A price tag doesn’t do justice to these calamities, which are not only wasteful, but positively and perversely harmful, but it’s a start. The category of ‘waste’ itself fails here, because it would actually be less culturally toxic for all the resources squandered on social programs to be simply annihilated into hyperspace without remainder. Ruinous dependency incentives would then be hugely lessened.

Of course, the idea that dysfunctional political institutions will cooperate with their own public humiliation is also a piece of lunacy (and this time, one that beltway libertarians are peculiarly prone to).

ADDED: Highly relevant.

(Thanks to Bryce for the link.)

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.

Congress, one of the most despicable political organizations on earth, has been crushed like a bug. The implications of that are roughly comparable to the detonation of a dirty nuke at Davos, so a modest period of celebration would be wholly understandable. Unfortunately, while Modi’s historic victory is a massive global lurch to reaction, it is also a surreptitious triumph of democracy, and we’ve seen the way this plays out before.

From the Thatcher / Reagan experience in the West, there are lessons about the democratic limitation of general application to the Right. The first, already briefly touched upon in the previous Modi post, is that democracy demands populism. Since capitalistic deregulation triggers a demagogic counter-attack from the Left, it is inevitably supported — politically — by a platform of ‘social conservatism’ that is driven into ever cruder atavism, until it cannibalizes the policy agenda of the government. The more a regime seeks, under democratic conditions, to move the economy rightwards, the more it is politically compelled to appeal to tribal emotion, while diverting its energies into totemism. Eventually, all that remains is a culture war, in which a confused Right is reduced to the pre-defeated posture of seeking to slow change down. When the pendulum swings — as democracy ensures it will — it exposes the archetypal political truth: a fast-left party then replaces a slow-left party, with the eventually victory of ‘progress’ never having been seriously in doubt.

Any democratic ‘right-wing’ party in power has won an election, and is thus infused with a sense of  its popular virility. This is a psychological catastrophe — and in fact a latent psychosis — from which it never recovers. The ratchet, patiently, continues.

Democratic politics also corrodes right-wing economic policy even more directly. The lesson from Reaganism is especially stark. From the beginning, political competence is expressed by a single dominant insight: any gains made by a right-wing administration in the direction of fiscal responsibility is simply a savings account for the opposition. It can be predicated, with absolute confidence, that each step painfully taken away from public insolvency will be reversed, with opposite political sign, as soon as the Left gets its turn once again. Thus, the Reaganite stance that any intelligent conservative government is bound to the proclamation ‘deficits don’t matter’. It is only by keeping public finances hard up against the edge of bankruptcy that fiscal laxity can be prevented from reverting to its natural state, as a fund available for the promotion of leftward social acceleration. Private saving is profoundly compromised by democratic governance. Public saving — or even moderated indebtedness — is simply impossible.

There is no way at all that Modi can restore Indian fiscal health under the democratic conditions he inherits (and which he will certainly preserve). The idea that he might attempt to do so is a delusion.

Nevertheless, there are things a Modi regime could do, which are worth doing. In rough order of priority and practicality they include:

(1) A holocaust of red-tape, in the interest of industrialization. The Indian manufacturing sector, employing approximately 15% of the workforce, is half the size that might be expected if business conditions were less impaired by legal-bureaucratic obstruction. Huge economic gains could be made relatively quickly if companies could be created more easily and closed down without any need for official permission, while hiring and firing employees according to market signals. Modi knows enough to see what is required. First ask the Marxists to describe their most nightmarish conception of an exploitative capitalist labor-market, and then do that.

(2) While fiscal continence is politically impossible,  it should at least be possible to re-orient public spending towards infrastructure (and away from transfer payments). Copying China would be sensible. High-speed rail networks, urban mass-transit systems, roads, power grids, water and sewerage, high-bandwidth communications, space-programs … since vast amounts of public money have to be wasted, those are the ways to do it. They accumulate capital, create business opportunities and employment, teach technical skills, and leave something real behind when the bubbles pop.

(3) Scrap as many affirmative action quotas as possible. This is an opportunity to do cynical culture wars stuff that actually does some good.

(4) Prepare for the return of the Left, by decentralizing government, empowering the states, reducing inter-regional economic transfers, innovating constitutional obstacles to socialist policy, and building right-wing economic redoubts capable of resisting a future Leftist central administration. This is all very obvious, but it’s equally obvious why even seriously conservative central governments find it difficult to do. It would help if they more clearly understood that they’re going to lose — that’s what democracy means — so they should seize the opportunity to get their revenge in first.

NRx shouldn’t make a fool of itself by getting excited about Modi. What’s happening in India isn’t nothing, though. It’s nowhere close to being nothing.

ADDED: Tavleen Singh —

…  I tweeted that I had covered every election since 1977 and had never seen anything like the frenetic fervour of the crowds on the streets of Benaras. This caused a torrent of insults on Twitter, so I went that evening to Papu’s chai shop for a reality check. At this teashop in a teeming, squalid square near the Assi Ghat gather politicians, thinkers, philosophers, political analysts and students. They sit on wooden benches near an open drain and discuss the problems of the world. On an earlier visit, I discovered that the level of political discourse was higher than in Delhi because people speak without worrying about being labelled ‘fascist’ or ‘communal’.

ADDED: Some cautious optimism from Geeta Anand and Gordon Fairclough in the WSJ, but: “Modi is unlikely to substantially undo any of the subsidy programs on which millions rely for jobs and food. […] Analysts think big-bang reforms, such as changing labor laws to let companies hire and fire more easily or undertaking large-scale privatizations of state enterprises, are unlikely.” Still — “Tales of [Modi’s] bravery are chronicled in a comic book that shows him swimming through crocodile-infested waters to plant a flag on top of a Hindu temple.”

The first thing — kind of almost finished now — is the latest in a string of Accelerationism papers and posts. (The previous one, entitled Teleoplexy and devoted primarily to twisted historical entelechy, is coming out in this.) The new piece is structured as a contribution to security analysis, or preemptive, cryptographic, Butlerian Jihad. If acceleration to hard singularity were directed as a Terminator-style resistance drama, how would a strategically-rational Human Security System be depicted? Fuse MIRI with the CSER in a virtual / clandestine species-defense apparatus (Anthropol), then ask how it would operate to prevent the emergence of the ultimate enemy. It’s not at all easy. One almost begins to sympathize with the wretched creatures.

***

The second essay is the second-installment of a two-part Bitcoin series, for a Dutch online magazine (I’ll link the first part when it’s published). It aims to situate the digital monetary revolution within a global economic and geopolitical context. In a nutshell, the argument runs: The Triffin Dilemma explains why international reserve currency status is a poisoned chalice, and since everyone now understands this, it is unlikely that USD financial hegemony will be supplanted by an alternative national currency (meaning the Chinese Yuan). Given the unsustainable status quo, and the implausibility of a global SDR-based regime, a virtual chasm yawns in the world economic order. Blockchain cryptocurrency is emerging at exactly the point in history when the road is wide open to it.

***

The third piece attempts to rigorize a philosophical idea of the occult, or integral obscurity (for these guys). I’m aiming to assemble some working (semiotic) machinery for it.

***

The Better Half is putting together the syllabus for a Chinese Cyberculture course, which provides the opportunity to discuss the foundations of a yet-unformulated discipline. One clear lineage is based upon the centrality of Chinese digitization problems on the country’s tormented path to modernity. This paper is quite a nice introduction. Theories of the Great Divergence tend to under-stress this side of things.

***

Doom Machines — the long-impending Outside in Trike-trek through neoreaction (oriented by the skein of time-structured issues around freedom and fate)  keeps getting pushed down the road by the triple-accursed perfectionist-procrastination complex. I’m determined to break through, by the end of the month at the latest, and get started. Some kind of fragmentary prelude material might be a good way in. I started delving into the Anaximander fragment with this in mind, but got lost in the abyss.

***

My @dblbd qabbalo-horror twitter ID is appropriately corpse-like at the moment. It was set up under the numerical inspiration 222 as a deposit for experiments in micro-memetic horrorism. This weekend, I had two family restaurant receipts in succession each amounting to exactly RMB 222. Something is trying to infiltrate some extra darkness into my life … (I obviously need to get Out more).

ADDED: Part-1 of the Bitcoin argument is now up at WdW Review.

After seven years in an apartment at the edge of Xujiahui, we have moved to a slightly larger one in the Jing’an District (with space for each of the kids to have their own room). It’s up on the 19th floor — above the mosquito level — with a view of the Wheelock Square tower (an impressive KPF structure). The move was only completed over the last couple of days. So life this end has been vastly more chaotic, is becoming a little more spacious, and is already far more high-rise. Some of the recent gusts of disorder stem from this.

The scrap-reduced sub-cognitive fragment goes something like this: NRx has its own micro-decadence, which is expressed through a fixation on values, asserted as an alternative to thought. This is, I realize, overtly and dramatically controversial. If thought is confused with reason, and values identified with inherited intuitions, it might easily appear as a direct attack upon the most sacred commitments of the reactionary attitude. What, after all, are the feeble tremblings of embryonic intellect compared to the grandeur of what has been received?

What, though, has truly been received? Do we think we know? It is worth a digression into this peculiar usage of ‘think’. “I think the Old Way is best” is really close to an implicit contradiction, or even a presumption, in both directions. If the Old Way is being thought, it remains incompletely accessed. Either thought has been bypassed — by far the most probable case, were this in fact simply possible — or a claim of gargantuan hubris is being made to the completion of thought, in this particular case at least. Is it more likely that thought has indeed been pursued to its end, or that an insincere — in fact merely thoughtless — claim to the accomplishment of thought has been inserted groundlessly and subliminally, programmed by trivial considerations of grammatical or rhetorical convenience?

The anticipated rejoinder might be: “we are reactionaries precisely because we believe before we think, and this claim is itself a belief, adamantly thoughtless, and thus immune to the corrosive uncertainties of the wandering mind. What we know best is that which has not passed through thought, but rather through revelatory tradition and its social institutions, safeguarded against the chaotic hazards of the reflective individual, that miserable prey of pride, demonism, and darkness.”

Religion tightly binds philosophy … but then, when the turtles of obedience run out into the absolute, an insidious question arises. It is a difficult one, when thought about, even slightly: Does God think?

[Apologies for a little insulting hand-holding, but my enormous confidence in human thoughtlessness leads me to suspect that both theists and atheists might be more accepting of the decompressed formulation: What is it to think of a God who thinks? Could thought be anything in eternity, or in the absence of the unknown? And if God does not think (whether through his nature, as eternal, or through the necessity of his non-existence) what could it mean for there to be a ‘God of the Philosophers’?]

Click on image to expand.

(The only illumination comes from the right.)

I’m heading back to SH late tomorrow. The return to full-spectrum connectivity and production time will be nice, but I’ll miss this kind of stuff:

Click on image to expand.

[I’ve put up a couple of snaps here too]

Short summary: We have a duty to lie.

In Dreher’s own words:

Given the history of the 20th century, I flat-out don’t trust our species to handle the knowledge of human biodiversity without turning it into an ideology of dehumanization, racism, and at worst, genocide. Put another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true — and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of truth. […] My point is simply that all of us believe that some facts are too dangerous to be known; they are like the Ring Of Power, in that the temptation to abuse them is too great for our natures to bear. […] Admittedly, this puts me in a tight spot. Am I saying that we should ignore reality? I suppose I am.

So there we have it — we have to ban acknowledgement of reality, because Hitler. This stuff is all going to fall apart so quickly (and nastily) that it will shock everyone.

(Like Moldbug, and the DE in general, I think it’s seriously unwise to set things up in such a way that only Nazis get to tell the truth.)

ADDED: Some thoughts on the Dreher piece from Occam’s Razor.

ADDED: Henry Dampier on Noble Lies.

AI is a hard problem, and even if we had a healthy society, we might still be stuck. That buildings are not getting taller and that fabs are not getting cheaper and not making smaller and smaller devices is social decay. That we are stuck on AI is more that it is high hanging fruit.

Do we need a theory of consciousness to close the deal? (Alrenous  has a long-standing commitment to this topic — see the comments.)

FWIW, Outside in is strongly emergentist on the question: doing AI and understanding AI might not be tightly — or even positively — related. (Catallaxy and AI are not finally distinguishable.) Of course, that makes the relevance of social decay even more critical.

Starting meta, there are two media-reaction compilation resources which everyone needs to know about (and I’m sure just about everyone already does). Both are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up. Handle’s (here) might by updating sluggishly for a few weeks, because the Hausmeister is taking a well-earned break. It might fall upon Amos & Gromar (here) to track developments, which are getting steadily more encouraging.

The American Thinker isn’t exactly MSM, but it’s still highly significant that Christopher Chantrill has written the first Dark Enlightenment commentary for a relatively mainstream conservative site that doesn’t engage in any skirt-clutching whatsoever. It’s a short, friendly piece that is best understood as a deliberate exercise in de-toxification. Prediction: this brewing media storm is going to start opening consequential fault-lines in the conservative movement, which as far as any DE strategic schedule is concerned, gets us to first base. It follows, of course, that establishment conservative responses will get even more hysterical (and that also counts as a win).

Some substantial engagement from beyond the reactosphere is also in prospect from Adam Gurri (who has some genuinely productive lines of criticism). There’s also Patri Friedman (link?– can’t get it to work from here),  who commits to exploring “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” (via @MikeAnissimov twitter) which has to — at the very least — be extremely entertaining. Given the prevailing distribution of forces, confusion has to be our friend (right?).

Related developments of interest include a tendency within the HBD ‘community’ to seize the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ (brand) for themselves, chucking out all the awkward right-wingery (via rumorous twitter). I’ve no sense at all of the mechanism by which ‘they’ think they can achieve that, but the impulse is disorganizing, and therefore probably to be approved (although, of course, at the same time fiercely contested).

Accepting that chaos is ‘bad’, it seems to me that it is especially bad for our opponents, whose piecemeal suppression strategy requires social conditioning by a maximally-simple aversion response. Their stage-1 campaign is based on something like a “Neoreaction — yuk, Nazis!” reflex. Anything that leads instead to “What? Hang on a minute …” reaction counts (for them) as a major fail. There can be no serious doubt that we’re well into that (as the comment threads of all the hit-pieces so far attest). So, prediction-2: we’re going to see a second phase hostile media approach emerging really soon — over the next few months — adapted to important constituencies who are refusing the desired stimulus-response programming. I’ve no idea what this will look like, but it’s almost bound to be more intellectually engaging than anything we’ve seen so far.

Some straggly extras:

At the risk of getting Matt Sigl into trouble, it’s quite obvious that he’s a thoughtful guy who deserves better editors. Are we going to see another piece by him (stripped of the Cathedral tics) some time this year?

Tim Stanley is a pathetic tool, but there are some impressive Telegraph writers (Ed West, James Dellingpole …), are they going to jump in at some point?

If the Telegraph can be cracked (still uncertain), how about the National Review? If Steyn has problems with us, they won’t be stupid, and he really doesn’t like witch hunters.

We’ll get so bored by this expression, if we aren’t already, but — interesting times.

ADDED: See this by Amos & Gromar. The people who seem to be getting front rank exposure in the current media wave are Mencius Moldbug (naturally), Michael Anissimov, and me. To make a very obvious point explicit, however, this is wildly disproportionate, and — I suspect — not long sustainable. Moldbug is a transcendental master, about whom enough can never be said, but Mike and I are both highly atypical representatives of (very different) neoreactionary extremes. If Amos & Gromar (for non-random instance) was shifted to center stage, the whole phenomenon would become vastly more sane. (In this particular case, I suspect that an A&G has a branding issue, because media get confused about ‘who’ exactly they’re pointing at — and frankly I think I’m pretty good at that stuff. MARKETING people!)

ADDED: Nicholas Pell has written a thoughtful piece on the DE for takimag that has garnered glowing responses from all corners so far. (I’m certainly highly appreciative.)

ADDED: John Derbyshire is in the house.

ADDED: The Daily Telegraph is done:

Shame to see James Delingpole leaving DT blogs. despite being a warmist I always find his writing amusing http://t.co/vHVhAyunpR

— Ed West (@edwestonline) February 12, 2014