It’s going to be a challenge cranking-up the chaos level this week, but away you go. First, in accordance with the emerging ritual, a few miscellaneous links.

Moldbug mainstreaming watch. Also (quickly) from in and around the reactosphere: Triune critique. This post captures the quintessence of Anissimovite new reaction. An almost-equally characteristic overview from Nydwracu. Another IQ shredder? An 8chan podcast on NRx. “They woke up confused from fractured dreams, then groggily dug through memories to remember only a strange hooded figure, a brief pinch near the neck and then blackness …”

Over in the more traditional New Right, there’s some spectacular internecine conflict taking place. This is the best guide. Sample commentary from Counter-Currents and Alternative Right, who are both fully pitched in (on approximately the same side — here‘s the other). It seems to have been ignited by this preposterously entertaining series of events, embarrassments, apologies, and discombobulations. Simply noticing this has your brain curving back towards /pol/. … then there was the whole Budapest brouhaha, which seems to have driven the usually level-headed Jared Taylor into WN Utopian race nuttiness. (If you managed to save a little of that popcorn, you’ll be glad you did.)

As Ebola gets increasingly terrifying (*ahem*), it has begun to provoke an ever wider range of political commentary. (I like Gary North’s prediction: “An Ebola pandemic will create a ‘distrust in government’ pandemic.”)

Brevity.

On Jaynes and ancient mythology (from 2010)

IQ and autism (some facts).

Boltzmann Brains.

Galton’s awkward legacy. Also, Byron Roth on Immigration and Dysgenics.

Some critical guidance for qabbalists on the mind-traps of small numbers.

Steve Sailer’s remarks on the twentieth anniversary of The Bell Curve make a strong case for his conclusion:

A decade ago, I was interviewing an expert psychometrician who had been head of testing for one of the major branches of the military. He proudly recounted that he had given Charles Murray access to the Pentagon’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth data that makes up the central spine of The Bell Curve. He had only one objection to Herrnstein and Murray’s interpretation of his numbers: they were too cautious, too nice.

That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.

(Robert VerBruggen’s more cautious commentary is also surprisingly sane for a comparatively mainstream media channel.)

Note: As you can see, the new Archenemied capacities of this blog includes a tidied-up block-quote function — but it strips out the caps (going all hbdchick). Is this a tolerable format? I’d be inclined against it, but I know there’s a passionate block-quote chorus out there …

A humorous access-gate into a serious insight at AoS:

This is not a government; this a corporate PR firm. The PR firm has a smaller child corporation that is tangentially in the business of government, and its chief stock in trade is failure.
The PR firm runs the show, and the corporate PR firm is here to tell you two things:
1, everything’s fine, nothing to see here, errors were made but by the way errors weren’t even made,
and,
2, if you don’t agree, there’s something wrong with you. Perhaps racism.

A social machine designed for accelerating system-collapse would be built pretty much exactly like this. (Read the whole post for explanatory context.)

Don’t be alarmed: “Ebola now has its first diagnosis in the U.S., and while concerning, it’s not entirely surprising. Given how interconnected our world is, the CDC has long said that it’s possible Ebola could make it here, though it’s unlikely it would spread widely. Here’s what you need to know …” (Well, maybe just a little alarmed. (Or …))

Ezra Klein is on my unbelievably annoying people list, but he was only a kid when he got there, and this (interview) is really good work. Some additional recent articles, in escalating order of panic, plus some geopolitical complication.

Continue Reading

Scott Alexander makes a striking observation:

… take creationists. According to Gallup polls, about 46% of Americans are creationists. Not just in the sense of believing God helped guide evolution. I mean they think evolution is a vile atheist lie and God created humans exactly as they exist right now. That’s half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

(The entire — long — post is fascinating. One of SA’s all-time greats.)

Continue Reading

‘To Beat ISIS, the Arab World Must Promote Political and Religious Reforms’, Rule Jebreal tells us. Picking on a writer for a headline is a mistake — who knows where it came from in the editorial process? — and, besides, this one employs (the exhortative) ‘must’ in its sole appropriate usage — as the completion of a hypothetical imperative. “If you want X, you must do Y” — that’s OK. (Y is a necessary condition for the accomplishment of X.) ‘Must’ is tolerable if it’s kept on a leash.

Once it slips the collar, ‘must’ reverts to its status as the most preposterous word in the English language, an instrument of sheer obfuscation. Watch it go:

The United States must review its policies across the Middle East. … It must take a stand against Riyadh’s promotion of exclusionary Wahhabism. […] … Likewise, pressure must be placed on Egypt to abandon its witch hunt of the Muslim Brotherhood. In undertaking an effective counter terrorism strategy, the United States must partner with the Arab states to undertake political reforms that ultimately lead to underwriting a social contract in which every group of the population are represented and protected. […] … If the United States and Iraqi government want to defeat ISIS, they must now ensure the inclusion and protection of Iraqi Sunnis, Kurds and Yazidis, along with the majority Shi’ites [this one is minimally OK]. […] … Eventually, a process of reconciliation must be initiated between Shi’ites and Sunnis. This centuries-old dispute is played out today in a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which has produced a monster that threatens the national security of not only Middle Eastern nations, but also the United States. It must come to an end. […] … The Obama Administration must pursue a policy of severe sanctions against any and all countries that finance jihadist — even if they are our own allies. … What will ultimately turn the tide in the Middle East are groups that actively advocate for a democratic culture and its values around the Arab world. A campaign to promote these ideas on every level must begin, as part of the counterterrorism initiative launched by Kerry. [Emphases added.]

Must they, really? Will they? Can they?

It’s irritating to see moral fanaticism — betrayed by its distinctive combination of groundless certainty and communicative fervor — masquerading as realistic analysis. The disguise is only necessary because the prescription so exorbitantly exceeds the diagnosis, tripping eagerly into glassy-eyed deontological intellectual abandonment.

“The Middle East must stop being the Middle East, and America must help to make this happen.” It can’t, and it won’t, on both counts. The musty smell is simply annoying.

Tobin Grant (of the Religious News Service) charts political ideology by religious affiliation:

Continue Reading

The only thing that Neoconservatism has to offer a non-psychotic policy analyst is bitching, but sometimes the bitching can be pretty good. Bret Stephens (via Brett Stevens (sorry, I had to do that)):

… None of these fiascos — for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting to one side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset, the mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva conferences on Syria, the catastrophic interim agreement with Iran, the de facto death of the U.S. free-trade agenda, the overhyped opening to Burma, the orphaned victory in Libya, the poisoned relationship with Egypt, and the disastrous cuts to the Defense budget — can be explained away as a matter of tough geopolitical luck. Where, then, does the source of failure lie? […] The myth of Obama’s brilliance paradoxically obscures the fact that he’s no fool. The point is especially important to note because the failure of Obama’s foreign policy is not, ultimately, a reflection of his character or IQ. It is the consequence of an ideology.

The ‘ideology’ at its root, of course, is evangelical egalitarian universalism, and it is one the Neoconservatives entirely share. At the limit, which is now being encountered, what America is makes it impossible for it to succeed at what it wants.

(Open thread, random links, spontaneous disorder.)

@antidemblog was the first voice I heard comparing Ferguson to a Rorschach blot. That seems right. Here are some communists (++), tortured left liberals, tortured conservatives (+), establishment libertarians, outer right curmudgeons, white nationalists. This line of approach makes a lot of sense to me. Ferguson (allusively) here, and (more overtly) at UF.

The bottom-line of the recent 4GW explorations being pushed by TNIO is that fertility becomes an unanswerable weapon under conditions of Cathedral dominion. The analysis needs a little more hardening up, but prognosis will remain elusive because it leads into biopolitical darknesses no one is keen to coldly investigate. Instead, there’s just elevated shrieking.

Continue Reading

An executive summary of Ali Khedery’s open letter to President Obama: Face it, ISIS is your ally bro.