Ezra Levant evaluates the new social hierarchy:

[First, the background:] Faith McGregor is the lesbian who doesn’t like the girly cuts that they do at a salon. She wants the boy’s hairdo. … Omar Mahrouk is the owner of the Terminal Barber Shop in Toronto. He follows Shariah law, so he thinks women have cooties. As Mahrouk and the other barbers there say, they don’t believe in touching women other than their own wives. … Mahrouk’s view is illiberal. But in Canada we believe in property rights and freedom of association — and in this case, freedom of religion, too. … McGregor ran to the Human Rights Tribunal and demanded that Mahrouk give her a haircut.

[…]

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Even UK Cathedral mouthpiece The Economist seems to be getting the message that democracy is cooked. While careful to code the most sensitive perceptions, it givers every indication of recognizing that democracy can’t be transplanted beyond a dying ethnic core, that it relentlessly collapses time-horizons, and that it systematically selects for demagogic leaders (among numerous other problems). The Chinese model, despite its manifold imperfections, works far better.

No worries though — The Economist has some solutions. All democracies have to do is practice government self-restraint, reverse the growth of the state, and suppress majoritarianism, and everything will turn around for them. In other words, if democracy could just stop being democracy, it would have a future. (It can’t, and it doesn’t.)

When democratic societies were far less deeply degenerate, they degenerated. Now they’ve become social wastelands of super-entitled dependency, led by professional pop-star liars, the idea that they have the cultural resources to reverse their morbid course is pure comedy.

It’s all going down. (Learn Mandarin.)

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By coincidence I was recalling this Cato-hosted essay by Peter Thiel, in which he states: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” It isn’t a message the Cato Institute is able to digest.

Consider this article by Juan Carlos Hidalgo (from the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity). Headlined ‘How socialism has destroyed Venezuela’ it tracks the descent of what “was once South America’s richest country” into a hellish, crime-wracked, economic ruin. Socialist insanity is, of course, the immediate cause. How, though, did socialism become Venezuelan public policy? This is a question Hidalgo seems unable to imagine, let alone answer.

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What can Exit do? It looks as if France is going to provide an important demonstration:

France has become a defeatist nation.

A striking indicator of this attitude is the massive emigration that the country has witnessed over the last decade, with nearly 2 million French citizens choosing to leave their country and take their chances in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the United States and other locales. The last such collective exodus from France came during the French Revolution, when a large part of the aristocracy left to await (futilely) the king’s return. Today’s migration isn’t politically motivated, however; it’s economic.

This departing population consists disproportionately of young people — 70% of the migrants are under 40 — and advanced-degree holders, who do their studies in France but offer their skills elsewhere. The migrants, discouraged by the economy’s comparatively low salaries and persistently high unemployment — currently at 10.9% — have only grown in number since Socialist Francois Hollande became president.

The young and enterprising in France soon realize that elsewhere — in London, say — obstacles to success are fewer and opportunities greater. The British capital is now France’s sixth-largest city, with 200,000 to 400,000 emigres.

The exile rolls also include hundreds of thousands of French retirees, presumably well-off, who are spending at least part of their golden years in other countries. Tired of France’s high cost of living, they seek out more welcoming environments.

My beloved country, in other words, has been losing not only its dynamic and intelligent young people but also older people with some money. I’m not sure that this social model can work over the long term.

It will be extremely interesting to see.

Arthur R. Harrison (@AvengingRedHand) makes the incisive observation: “Well the thing is NRx is a specific kind of post-libertarianism, or it was. Now it seems to be just a name for reaction post-Moldbug.” There could be people who don’t see that as degeneration. In fact, it seems there are.

Reactotwitter is lurching into sheer delirium (as *ahem* forecast). To begin with, it seems no longer to concur on what it begins with:

Evola outranks Moldbug. The accomplishments and credentials of the former are far higher.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) February 17, 2014

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Fernandez on the coming catastrophes hidden within a surreptitiously gutted world:

The reason why collapse, especially that caused by socialism, is so utterly complete is that the damage remains hidden for so long. The design margin is used up; savings are depleted; the institutions are hollowed out; public morality becomes perverted and education becomes nothing but a credential — and it all happens out of the public eye. Only when everything is used up, as in Venezuela, when the whole edifice implodes, as if by magic, does the cumulative effect become manifest.

Most people are spurred into resistance by a crisis. But they remain lulled into complacency while the crisis remains imperceptible. Progressive tyranny benefits from image management, and takes great pains to keep crisis from view. The most insidious thing about a secret police is its very secrecy, because the mayhem it wreaks is upon the intangibles, among things we call legitimacy. So it goes until only a facade is left. Until the day of death the victim is largely asymptomatic, except for a gradual weakening. When the onset comes he discovers that his immune system is completely gone and the end is sudden.

That’s how disaster sneaks up on a world determined never to see it coming.

Is intersectionality just the greatest thing ever, or what?

Both [Laurie] Penny and [Richard] Seymour have made a point of arguing, moreover, for the latest fad in leftist thinking: intersectionality. “Intersectionality” supposedly means taking seriously the many different oppressions, and how they intersect. “My socialism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Seymour has made a point of saying. Given that they are so keen to speak out against oppression in all its multi-layered forms, it seems really bad luck that they should be accused of being “racist crackers” and “white settlers.”

The entire article is comedy gold.

The Obama presidency AND intersectionality — does anyone still doubt that God is hardcore NRx?

Linking this on Twitter catalyzed a far more animated discussion than I had anticipated. Fundamental question: Is Bane NRx?

Outside in has no settled position on this (yet), and hadn’t expected to need one. A tentative proposal though: The League of Shadows is so radically neoreactionary it doesn’t relate to the Left as a political option, but solely as a mindless pathogen — as germ warfare to be guided against a decaying social order. That militant leftist activism will produce nothing but ruin is an assumption held so firmly it doesn’t require explicit acknowledgement — and the movie audience has to tacitly identify with this analysis for Bane’s strategy to make any sense. The Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.

To try to work something like that outside a movie, it would really be necessary to be the functional equivalent of the League of Shadows (manipulating mainstream politics dexterously, from above, or beyond). It’s probably agreed that NRx isn’t there yet … unless what we see hides something else.

ADDED: In the Twitter chat, it has pointed out that my understanding of the background story is profoundly confused (especially regarding Bane’s troubled relationship with the League of Shadows). Hopefully, by the time people have finished with me in the ensuing comments thread, I’ll have been properly schooled. This (suggested by @CineRobert) might help.

It’s time for our source of perpetual sunshine Kevin C. to get some T-shirts printed:

Things will get worse … and that’s it

From Henry Dampier’s ‘Shooting an Elephant':

Destroying the GOP is the best way to undermine support for democracy on the right. The reason for this is that, without hope for electoral success, the rank and file of the right will be forced to abandon their hopes for electoral redemption. When the typical “Joe Plumber” recognizes that it’s fruitless to go to the polls or to send money to their favorite politician, the GOP will fold in more states, which cedes to progressives the right to ruin more towns and cities in the service of their ideological goals.

This would limit the available options of the right wing population to either accept destruction or secede. Cutting off the option of winning elections, and making it obvious that it’s no longer possible to win elections, is key to achieving this goal.

(via @Nick_B_Steves)

The GOP is the Cathedral’s first aid kit. Taking it out of the equation makes perfect sense.