Some initial reacto-chatter — Sex and natural law (don’t miss the comment thread). Prepare for World War P. Inception politics. Battered West syndrome. The new alchemy. A new behaviorism. Exosemantics (are we going to get a Coles Notes for this?). A routine that’s still working well. Social Matter audio. “We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property” (apparently). Secular religion. Whose side is history on? Round-ups from FN and Steves, and continuous flow here.

The compression of ritual space (and a reading list from hell). Scale-free patterns.

Putin, international man of misery. A Pope beyond hope. Romney is perfect (for 1996). Awkward words in China (related). Unthinkable fears. Much of interest here (especially this).

Gibson’s ‘the Jackpot’ — or cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe — makes a real contribution to contemporary apocalypticism (this article offers no more than a hazy clue).

More Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare reactionary succulence.

Much entertaining frivolity this week (unless it’s just me) — “quite possibly the most racist article you will ever read” (I doubt it, but still …). Racism. Racism and hate. More racism and hate. Not racist. (This is how it used to be done.)

The strong Chinese reaction against splinter groups — in this case, five death sentences—sometimes surprises Western observers, but we only need to look to China’s history to see why such groups give Beijing officials the willies. In the 19th-century, the catastrophic Taiping Rebellion involved a group not wholly unlike the Church of the Almighty God. In that rebellion a millenarian sect lead by Hong Xiuquan claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus, rose up against the Qing dynasty. At least twenty million people died in the ensuing conflict.

There’s another reason that the rise of an apocalyptic cult would be of such concern. China’s long history of rising and falling dynasties has given rise to a school of historical analysis that looks for patterns in Chinese history. This approach, shared by many ordinary people and many distinguished Chinese intellectuals down through the ages, seeks to identify recurring features of the decline and fall phase of a dynasty’s cycle. The rise of apocalyptic religious cults is one of the classic signs of dynastic decadence, as is the rise of a pervasive culture of corruption among officials and the spread of local unrest.

Since the 18th century, the divorce of theological innovation from social revolution in Occidental public consciousness has pushed the religious question — originally identical with tolerance — into ever deeper eclipse. Until very recently, within the West, any attribution of genuine political consequence to such matters had seemed no more than eccentric anachronism, although this situation is quite rapidly changing. Elsewhere in the world, religious issues retained far greater socio-political pertinence, largely because the common millenarian root of enthusiasm and rebellion had not been effaced.

It is possible that the Chinese approach to dissident religion remains ‘strange’ to many in the West. There can surely be little doubt, however, that whatever convergence takes place will tend to a traditional Chinese understanding far more than a contemporary Western one. The gravity of the stakes ensures it.

Blindly copying Western-style democracy can only bring disaster, an influential Chinese Communist Party journal wrote in its latest edition following more than a week of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
Citing enduring violence and turmoil in countries like Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, which have tried to adopt such a system of government, the fortnightly magazine Qiushi said that Western democracy did not suit all countries.
“The West always brags that its own democracy is a ‘universal value’, and denies there is any other form of democracy,” said Qiushi, which means “seeking truth”, in the issue distributed over the weekend.
“Western democracy has innate internal flaws and certainly is not a ‘universal value'; its blind copying can only lead to disaster,” Qiushi added.

It shouldn’t be disappointing to hear such pious invocations of an “other form of democracy”, but only coldly confirming of the worst. It’s all clearly stated.

In the present global order, the Cathedral has no serious external enemies, but only awkward students, who refuse to learn the one and only imaginable lesson in exactly the way, and at exactly the speed, expected of them. The idea that democracy as such, and intrinsically, is fundamentally inconsistent with sustainable social order (as explained by Hoppe, acknowledged by Thiel, and thematized by Moldbug), finds no official representation, anywhere in the world. Even the North Koreans think they’re democrats. At the ideological level, the calamity has already happened, universally.

NRx bores itself by repeating this. It’s a simple and — to ‘us’ — apparently obvious thing. Doubtless it’s correct that mechanical repetition adds vanishingly little at this point, although there’s probably still the need for a succinct statement of the proposition, tightly encapsulated and incandescently lucid, for incessant future reference.

What cannot be long-buried beneath the ennui is the extreme dissident radicality of the counter-revolutionary thesis. To depart from the democratic or evangelical-egalitarian (i.e. Jacobin) faith remains the ultimate heresy against teleo-political modernity. To suggest, even, that there is a question of democracy is countenanced by effectively no one, anywhere. In China, as the narrative goes, the populace is still to be convinced the country is ‘ready yet’ for accelerated democratization (on the Cathedral model — the only one). Look at this, then this, and synthesize. Religious ‘hold outs’ are all that remain. Once the faith moves people, the direction has already been decided — everyone is agreed on that. (OK, not these guys, yet.)

If this topic becomes tedious, it’s all over. Democratization isn’t boring to them. It’s the most exciting thing in the world, and they’re not going to stop doing it.

Our work here has scarcely begun.

Hail Hydra!

The Hong Kong situation is a nightmare. This tweet gets it right:

Very worrisome. No one should be under any illusions about what Beijing may do if it believes there is a budding color revolution in HK SAR

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) September 28, 2014

Soap Jackal is putting together a Cameralism reading list, so far (that I’ve seen) it includes:
(1) Mercantilism Re-Imagined (essay collection)
(2) The Cameralists: The Pioneers of German Social Polity (Albion W Small)
(3)Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (Murray N. Rothbard)

Neoreaction @ 8chan, and 8chan @ the Encyclopedia Dramatica. (XS is still reeling from the sudden intelligence is explosion the seems to have taken place in the reactopunk net.) The fact it all seem to have followed upon a black op. makes the situation especially exquisite. Predictable response: More beatings necessary. (Free Northener is on it. NIO urges moderation. Anarcho-Papist tries to stay out, fails.)

An incredible hoard of high-minded sensualism (3D cellular automata, Prime number, visualization, Strange attractors, and more …).

Crab weaponry.

Some numerate crime-think contributions, on mathematics and political correctness, the demographic death of liberal Jews, 23andMe data, and twins.

This is what Golden Dawn stands for (ethno-socialism).

Whatever happened to libertarianism?

Hard not to notice that three-quarters of NRx seems to have sunk into a blog coma, when it hasn’t actually died. Are blogs already an obsolescing medium?

On those hard times coming. Amerika lays it out clearly:

… dependents of the world, they will cut you out. You are not necessary. You serve no role and contribute nothing. At some point, whether for pure financial reasons or to preserve themselves, the others will cut you out. You will descend into third world poverty and the rest will will take their money and prosper elsewhere. The “benefits for no riots” scam will have come to an end.

Neoreaction in the DRC. (Added.)

Sucking up to the specter of Sino-Capitalism:

Ironically, my connectivity here is so bad it’s driving me out of my mind, so this is arriving in pieces …

Our hotel is in Huaqiang Bei, the center of the Shenzhen electronic market zone. The area is packed with emporia, which are in turn packed with products — and more specifically commodities. Rather than masking the traits of commercial mass-production under a veneer of ’boutique’ rarity, the Shenzhen spirit is most gloriously manifested in the naked exhibition of hyper-alienated, techno-proliferated, trade-format volumes. Chips (of all kinds) come in sheets, which are then stacked into piles, and tessalated into display places designed to minutely explore minimal differences (product micro-specifications and volume-linked price slices). This is capitalism. It’s easy — in a decline-phase Westernized world — to forget what it looks like.

Cables:

Skynet embryo chips in the Huitong Professional Security Market:

The drone market is only just getting started (at least, we didn’t see any stacks):

Saw Jesus Camp for the first time (and enjoyed it a lot). It should have been subtitled ‘A Study in Pwnedness’. There was the liberal anti-fundamentalist radio host who seemed to think America doesn’t have a State Religion. Then there were the radical evangelicals at the heart of the movie, who think their holy war is doing something other than sliding inexorably, culturally and politically, to the left. (Both sides were apparently convinced that the Pentacostal take-over of the SCOTUS was advancing smoothly according to the plan.) Some more recent debate about Christianity and politics here.

The rise of ODMS (On-Demand Mobile Services).

How Chinese Internet censorship works.

… the “war on terror” … has demonstrably failed … Unless we’re missing something critical about the game. (This probably plunges a little too far down the rabbit-hole.)

An involved discussion of corporate personality (and ‘rights‘) is long overdue.

I wanted this for a T-shirt, but couldn’t think of a way to sneak off with it:

"Which outside are you on?"

— Friedrice Nietzsche (@tinynietzsche) August 21, 2014

ADDED: I think the path to dictatorship Gödel feared starts with something like this: The President of the Senate declares that a rules issue is a Constitutional question. This enables a bare majority, exploiting the gaps in Article I, to rewrite the rules of the Senate. Such a rule change can enable the uncontested appointment of Federal judges. Those judges in turn can… Well, anyway, nothing like that would ever actually happen. (It’s not exactly the FDR approach, but it’s surely close enough.)

Some highlights from a week in chaos.

A month ago, China overtook the US to become the largest economy in the world by one measure. By 2030 it is projected that the Chinese economy will be twice as large as America’s and larger than the European Union and America combined, accounting for one third of global GDP. This is the world that is coming into being, that we must learn to adapt to and thrive in. It is a far cry from the comfort zone we are used to, a globe dominated by the West and Japan: in the Seventies, between them they were responsible for two thirds of global GDP; by 2030 it will be a mere one third

During the preponderant part of the modern period, China’s civilizational competences were oriented to keeping the Pandora’s box of runaway modernization firmly sealed. Western intervention put an end to that, and the escape is now almost certainly irreversible. That is why, in broad outline, Jacques’ prognosis is correct. An accommodation to fate is in order.

(‘Doom’ — as tagged — means no more than fate, as we have begun to explain, or at least to explore.)

Why can’t America be more like China?

(a) Stay out
(b) If you have to interfere, help whoever’s losing (but not too much)
(c) Recognize there’s an intricate theological argument going on that we can’t hope to understand:

Let's keep it civil guys. pic.twitter.com/bjqmbY4Sxk

— CB Langille (@CBLangille) June 20, 2014

ADDED:

Good search terms if you want to go down a rabbit hole of sectarian youtube videos: 'rafidah', 'takfiri'

— CB Langille (@CBLangille) June 20, 2014

… Damn, POS pseudo-connection can‘t even manage that.

(Have they hung Bryce yet?)

ADDED: Looks like it’s possible (finally) to put up a few tropical retreat snaps (and seems like they’re clickable):

(I can’t get enough of this arborohorror.) One more:

ADDED: The two posts that have made all this (‘Trannygate’) craziness worthwhile —

(1) Nyan Sandwich at More Right “… is Neoreaction a heretical political-insight-seeking movement, or a right-wing activist movement?”

(2) Nick B Steves on the Official Neoreactionary Position (endorsed by the most right-wing person on the Internet).