My Vietnam is like my China: accessed from the South, from the mega-urban, commercial culture, and from pre-communist traditions. It’s very much the view from Saigon (and that isn’t something I regret). Saigon would be a great place to live (in small part because the idea of calling it Ho Chi Minh City is a transparent joke).

Doi Moi looks like it should work a lot like Gaige Kaifeng (as a local version of generic ‘Reform and Opening’ in a ‘Market Leninist’ regime) — but it doesn’t seem to be quite working out. If rationalized corruptocracy is close to ideal limit of effective government among large states, Vietnam seems to have managed the corruptocracy far better than the rationalization. Infrastructure development — the magic sauce of recent Chinese hyper-growth — has not reached ignition. The country is too small to fund its own ambitions, and too chaotically kleptocratic to bring in foreign investment on the scale required. Despite many excellent things going for it, the country is floundering with a morose economic spirit that is almost Western.

Continue Reading

Since predictions solicit feedback from reality they constrain dishonesty, and indicate where correction is needed. This is an outline of what Outside in anticipates from the year.

World

Punctual catastrophes resist remotely confident prediction, unless negative ones. Neither Artificial Intelligence explosion nor Drexlerian nanotechnology will impact in 2014. Nuclear fusion will not be (de-)cracked. A super-volcano will not destroy what remains of human civilization. Global influenza epidemic? Mega-meteorite strike? A malign black swan of cataclysmic scale? — nobody knows.

The three potential catastrophes of greatest prominence heading into 2014 are Asia Pacific war; Sunni-Shia nuclear confrontation; and US dollar (or Japanese Yen) collapse. The probability that any one of these crosses the crisis threshold this year is substantially less than 50% (but possibly greater than 10%). If any does, the chance of a cascading disaster involving one or both of the others spikes dramatically. The probability of a secondary, but still major crisis, is of course far larger (i.e. likely).

The doctrinal neoreactionary prediction for the year is continued, steadily accelerating, general collapse, with an intensity broadly correlated to democratic progress. There will be no economic recovery, or significant resolution of international security issues. All the fixes on offer are fake. In the developed world, underlying human capital deterioration will subvert every proposed remedy, dragged downwards by morbid cultural variations on a remorseless dysgenic theme. The default fascist solution will be undermined by Internet-enabled exit options, exacerbated by inter-state non-cooperation. The Cathedral will fray, but not snap.

Continue Reading

If you’re reading this, you’ve strayed into my appreciation zone.

Massive thanks to everybody who has made the last year such a hotbed of occurrence. 2013 was truly extraordinary — I’ve never known a New Year birthed among such overflowing gratitude. If 2014 doesn’t shake the earth, we’ll be answerable to something. The boost-stage that set the trajectory was certainly working just fine …

I won’t make a serious attempt to express my delight in the last year’s visitor commentary here, because rapturous sobbing is unbecoming. It’s been simply dazzling, and everyone knows it has made this place. Whatever it is that leads people to think here, rather than to signal, I can only hope it continues.

I’m allowing myself up to (roughly) the Chinese New Year for some substantive 2014 prognoses.

May 2014 carry you beyond limits you never expected to traverse.

Continue Reading

Multiply the world population by 365 and it comes out as something significantly north of two trillion human days in which to make things happen. It has impressed me, then, to note that roughly 20% of the last year’s Gross Global Occurrence Volume has taken place in the comments threads of this blog. (I received an activity report from WordPress this evening that suggested I thank VXXC, fotrkd, Spandrell, and Thales in particular for being cranked-up comment monkeys.) Tack on the rest of the reactosphere, and what remains of the planet has been fighting over scraps (which we’ll get to later).

The first — tentative and unconvinced — post here went up in mid-February, so Outside in is a creature of 2013. There’s nothing remotely unusual about that. Other 2013 reactionary monster babies include Radish, Anarchopapist and Occam’s Razor (January); Habitable Worlds, The Reactivity Place, and Amos & Gromar (April); More Right (May); Theden (July); Handleshaus and The Legionnaire (August) … which is just to scoop from my regular reading list. The sheer quantity of explicitly reactionary writing has to have surged by at least an order of magnitude this year. This timeline (by Handle) sharpens the contours of the phenomenon (expanded to encompass the burgeoning new genre of excited anti-reactionary push-back). Even if many of the greatest Outer Right blogs preexisted this wave of dark energy, 2013 was surely the year in which Neoreaction really established itself as a thing.

Continue Reading

This is the Yule-hibernation edition of an open thread, based on the strong suspicion that even maintenance-level blogging is going to take a serious hit over the next several days. There are a number of things I’d like to do here really soon, including a semi-substantial Basilisk post, and a heavy-duty Machineries of Fate series, which would work its way systematically through the Trichotomy, treating the exercise as an opportunity to consolidate some structured ideas on the workings of time. There are also a number of increasingly desperate promises to be kept, not all of which are likely to be conveniently forgotten — a review of Bryce’s book, a response to insightful questions about the politics of accelerationism, and several lamentably incomplete series to crank-forward. Some kind of 2013 round-up has to take scheduling priority.

Instead of advancing these tasks right now, there’s a lot of unproductive shivering in front of the computer happening, with steady interference from a minor daemon that wants to hijack all residual cognitive function in order to write a phenomenology of extreme exhaustion (you can at least be thankful that isn’t going to fly).  It’s the dead of winter, after a truly extraordinary year, and the deep chatter in the basement is all about succumbing to replenishment mode for what looks like being a high-intensity 2014.

Retrospective and prospective analysis would be great to see, but you’re the Lords of Chaos, so whatever …

There’s nothing there yet. (Putting the link up was an irresistible opportunity to torture myself.)

When things start happening, I’ll make some kind of noise about it.

As anticipated, the organization of the Outside in blogroll is transforming itself from a mechanical task into an engaging cultural-political and philosophical problem. My sense is that people generally resolve this type of quandary on a fairly hasty, ad hoc basis, but it already seems too late to do that. There are legacy considerations, and intricacies of coalitional variety at stake. Ultimately, there is a question about the core significance of the term ‘neoreaction’ — Is it a mere rallying point, flung into prominence by arbitrary historical opportunity, or is it a dense concept, whose semantic components are to be scrupulously respected?

My temptation would be to tactically elude the word, in order to access a more flexible, differentiated terminology. What prevents me from doing so is the arrogant sense that I respect the word more than anyone else it is applied to. ‘Neoreaction’ is an inherently paradoxical, fissional term, splitting in-itself on a temporal axis. It follows that I am extremely reluctant to see it relegated to a mere categorical marker, employed to designate ideological tendencies whose substantial content is better — or more fully — explicated in other terms. The word Neoreaction declares, intrinsically, that it belongs to fissionalist time-junkies exploring historical dissociation. That’s what it says, irrespective of how it is used.

The problem of categorization, therefore, remains, indissolubly. Any suggestions?

Whatever the prejudices you might harbor against Urumqi Internet connections in second rate hotels, they’re probably over-generous. I’ve been effectively de-twitterized by sheer technological crappitude rather than anything more sinister, but this channel seems to be (barely) OK. (Annoyingly, they provide a computer in the room, which locks everything into chronic dysfunction.) So apologies for the deteriorated state of communications over the next few days.

The main objective of this trip is to explore Xinjiang’s Buddhist heritage, which is so vast and rich that even some superficial scratching should turn up some interesting stuff. The main current of Buddhist influence into China passed this way, hybridizing wildly with other cultures in one of the world’s great mixing zones. After arriving off the steps, the Uyghurs were Buddhist for centuries, before Islam got a grip around the turning point of the first millennium (I’ll try to fill in some dates with greater precision later on). 

Updates as events, energy, and time permit.

Continue Reading

Now twittering.

Because cognitive micro-fragmentation needs all the help it can get …

This is pretty much a naked attempt to divert attention from this blog’s temporary impact with a rotary neural de-cultivator. (But that’s not a serious challenge for you guys, is it?)