In the end, it’s all comes down to harsh realism.

Socialists imagine there are no wolves, so democracy is easy.

Conservatives imagine democracy as a way for wolves to apologize.

Libertarians imagine democracy as two wolves and a sheep deciding on the main course for dinner.

Neoreactionaries see democracy as two sheep and a wolf deciding on the merits of mandatory vegetarianism.

ADDED: Survivingbabel anticipates (6 months ago, no link available):
Democracy is closer to two sheep and a wolf voting on what’s for dinner. The sheep unite in collective action to fight off the wolf. The wolf, stripped of its natural power, must graze alongside the sheep. Eventually it dies from malnutrition, and the sheep, having lost their natural predator, soon overpopulate and overgraze their land. Then they die too, usually replaced by another species entirely.

Outside in requires a determined professional for challenging work with low remuneration. Proven private investigation skills are essential. The sole responsibility attached to this (full-time) position will be to hunt the elusive James Goulding through the blogosphere. Our quarry was last spotted here. Applications gratefully received in the comments thread below.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is the greatest work ever written in the English language. It might easily seem absurd, therefore, to spend time justifying its importance, especially when the question of justification is this work’s own most explicit topic, tested at the edge of impossibility, where the entire poem is drawn. Perhaps it makes more sense, preliminarily, to narrow our ambition, seeking only to justify the words of Milton to modern men, especially to those for whom modernity has become a distressing cultural problem.

In regards to what is today called the Cathedral, Milton is both disease and cure. Both simultaneously, cryptically entangled, complicated by strange collisions, opening multitudinous, obscure paths.

As the most articulate anglophone voice of revolutionary Puritanism, he arrives amongst Carlyleans in the mask of “the Arch-Enemy” (I:81) and “Author of Evil” (VI:262): a scourge of clerical and monarchical authority, a pamphleteer in defense of regicide and the liberalization of divorce, an Arian, and a Roundhead of truly Euclidean spheritude.

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That brings to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere,
Till pride and worse ambition threw me down,
Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s Matchless King
— Paradise Lost, IV:38-41

Get it together Satan. He’s got a Zippo the size of Jupiter and full-spectrum dominance angelic hosts armed with white phosphorous lances. He doesn’t need fricking matches!

The Richwine witch-hunt has triggered a wave of high-quality crimethink (much gathered here (via)).

Nydwracu contributes this gem:

I don’t know whether the IQ gap will close, but I do know that, given our current political structures, we’ll never find out.

ADDED: Peter Brimelow:
Earlier this week, I was talking to a Harvard academic who is familiar with Richwine’s work. He commented that there were simply some subjects the study of which is incompatible with an academic career.
“That’s a remarkable thing in a free country,” I said.
“This isn’t a free country,” he replied.

ADDED: HBD* Chick digs deeper into the latest Puritan witch-craze.

Scharlach’s Habitable Worlds was created less than a month ago, and is presently expanding faster than the known universe. Then this massive brain-cycle munching machine appeared. Then this one. And then there’s this. That’s a selective list of blogs that I know I want to follow closely, none of which existed four weeks ago. Keeping up with this chaos of creation is becoming impossible. Can someone please hurry up with the delivery of my brain-accelerator chip.

Urumqi this time. I’ll fill things out a little when I get a chance (more for my own sake than under any pretence of communication).
That Baijiu holocaust problem I worried needlessly about in Kashgar? Urumqi is a very different city …

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Heartiste (via Jim):

Stick a fork in the West, she’s done.

Reaction – even Neoreaction – tends to be hard on Modernity. God knows (so to speak) there are innumerable reasons for that.

If the criterion of judgment is set by the Occident, whether determined through its once dominant faith or its once dominant people, the case against Modernity is perhaps unanswerable. The Western civilization in which Modernity ignited was ultimately combusted by it. From an Occidental Traditionalist perspective, Modernity is a complex and prolonged suicide.

An Ultra-Modernist, who affirms the creative destruction of anything in modernization’s path, assumes an alternative criterion, inherent to Modernity itself. It asks: What had to happen to the West for it to become modern? What was the essential event? The answer (and our basic postulate): Zero arrived.

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In case there’s anyone out there who hasn’t yet seen this quote from Andrew Zalotocky (at Samizdata, or Instapundit):

If you want to introduce someone to libertarian thinking, encourage them to try this experiment. Spend a few days reading nothing but technology news. Then spend a few days reading nothing but political news. For the first few days they’ll see an exciting world of innovation and creativity where everything is getting better all the time. In the second period they’ll see a miserable world of cynicism and treachery where everything is falling apart. Then ask them to explain the difference.

An introduction to libertarian thinking? Discuss.

ADDED: And it’s not only libertarians who are sounding like neoreactionaries — here‘s Jonah Goldberg on the (utterly fascinating) ‘Ferguson Affair':

What I find interesting about the Ferguson controversy is how disconnected it is from the past. Even academics I respect reacted to Ferguson’s comments as if they bordered on unimaginable, unheard-of madness. I understand that we live in a moment where any negative comment connected to homosexuality is not only wrong but “gay bashing.” But Ferguson was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago. Now, because of a combination of indifference to intellectual history and politically correct piety he must don the dunce cap. Good to know.

Goldberg’s whole post is excellent, but he misses one very significant case of Cathedralist persecution attending this argument (that homosexuality can be expected to shorten time horizons): Hoppe.

WRM goes full Cathedral on the issue. (Because he’s smart, and intermittently honest, I sometimes forget he’s the enemy.)