What’s stopping Detroit from becoming a new Hong Kong? asks James Pethokoukis. After all “Out of options, it might just make the China choice.”
From the appallingly realism-afflicted comments thread that follows:
Did you know that Wikipedia has a plan for the end of the world? (It’s not something I would have suspected, before Tyler Cowan pointed to this.)
In the course of the deliberations of the Wikipedia Data Preservation Taskforce, it was realized that although many catastrophes would be survivable, the possibility had to be faced that an extinction level event was possible, albeit unlikely, and plans should be initiated to preserve the encyclopedia in a non-terrestrial environment. To this end, Wikimedia has come to arrangements with many of the world’s scientific institutions for the provision of access to the vast majority of the world’s radio telescopes. [… ] While this is indeed a last-ditch attempt to save the knowledge of humanity, it can be hoped that someday, many years in the future and many light-years from Earth, minds immeasurably different from ours might look upon the works of humanity and understand. To quote Jimmy Wales’ message to the stars:
“While the light of humanity may flicker and die, we go gently into this dark night, comforted in the knowledge that someday Wikipedia shall take its rightful place as part of a consensus-built Galactic Encyclopedia, editable by all sentient beings.”
[The date at the end comes as a slight disappointment]
Testifying to the effectiveness of radically illiberal zero-tolerance policies, Outside in has just two semi-regular trolls. One, from the right, pops in occasionally to berate me for promoting the genocide of the white Volk. The other, from the left, specializes in cod psychoanalysis, directed primarily at my recent ancestors. Due to incontinent potty-mouths, mood-control issues, and addiction to argumentum ad hominum, in neither case can they be trusted with the door-key. Sporadically, however, some fragment of a spittle-flecked rant is worth passing on.
Quickly following upon the recommendation to readers here that the Archdruid Report contained some highly intelligent discussion of historical models (or ‘time shapes’), Left Troll turned up, in a slightly less deranged fury than usual, to denounce ‘our’ flirtation with druidic villainy. After scolding ‘us’ for the “ignorance displayed in this thread about the latest happenings in fusion research … [which] is just astounding” (remedial education here), he noted that “No one has mentioned methane hydrate.”
Some unusually brilliant Druidic prophecy from John Michael Greer:
Whether the crisis is contained by federal loan guarantees and bank nationalizations that keep farms, factories, and stores supplied with the credit they need, by the repudiation of debts and the issuance of a new currency, by martial law and the government seizure of unused acreage, or by ordinary citizens cobbling together new systems of exchange in a hurry, as happened in Argentina, Russia, and other places where the economy suddenly went to pieces, the crisis will be contained. The negative feedback here is provided by the simple facts that people are willing to do almost anything to put food on the table, governments are willing to do even more to stay in power, and in hundreds of previous crises, their actions have proven more than sufficient to stop the positive feedback loops of economic crisis in their tracks, and stabilize the situation at some level.
None of this means the crisis will be easy to get through, nor does it mean that the world that emerges once the rubble stops bouncing and the dust settles will be anything like as prosperous, as comfortable, or as familiar as the one we have today. That’s true of all three of the situations I’ve sketched out in this post. While the next round of crisis along the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall will likely be over by 2070 of so, living through the interval between then and now will probably have more than a little in common with living through the First World War, the waves of political and social crises that followed it, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, followed by the Second World War and its aftermath—and this time the United States is unlikely to be sheltered from the worst impacts of crisis, as it was between 1914 and 1954. [Read the whole thing]
(Combining large-scale historical vision, cybernetic theory, and extraordinary native intelligence, Greer is one of the most important voices on the reality-relevant blogosphere. His model of Catabolic Collapse, in particular, is an indispensable reference. Outside in will be visiting his ideas repeatedly over the next few weeks.)
Claus Offe lucidly explains what the proponents of ‘solidarity’ are hoping for utterly hopeless about in Europe. The entire article is so thoroughly saturated in doom-drenched, soul-scouring melancholia that by the end I was searching for Odysseus-style restraints to prevent myself doing a wild happy-dance around the office. From the Euro-progressive perspective, things look seriously bleak.
As a bonus, there’s a great gloss on degenerative ratchets: “… those fatal errors which, once committed, prove irreversible, closing off any return to the status quo ante.” By carrying everything relentlessly to the brink, they’re more of a nightmare for the perceptive left than they are for us. By this stage in history, the left has much more to lose. It’s their regime that is going over the cliff. (Yes, I realize this reboot-friendly Schadenfreude will earn a spanking from Goulding.)
ADDED: France is in its worst shape for more than three decades, since François Mitterrand nearly blew up the economy in the early 1980s trying to stimulate growth through government deficits and nationalisations. Unemployment is at 10.5 per cent and climbing. The economy is contracting. And overseeing the shambles is the suety, confidence-draining face of François Hollande.
However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is original sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does not hesitate. Its name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden. Whilst burning philosophers is no longer socially acceptable, our canonical order of cultural prohibition – at its root — can only consider such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers are permitted to live, established civilization is over.
For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it is not one that matters philosophically. There can be no refusal of any accessible information. This is an assumption so basic that philosophy cannot exist until it has passed beyond question. Ultimate religious transgression is the initiation.
To translate ‘neoreaction’ into ‘the new reaction’ is in no way objectionable. It is new, and open to novelty. Apprehended historically, it dates back no more than a few years. The writings of Mencius Moldbug have been a critical catalyst.
Neoreaction is also a species of reactionary political analysis, inheriting a deep suspicion of ‘progress’ in its ideological usage. It accepts that the dominant sociopolitical order of the world has ‘progressed’ solely on the condition that such advance, or relentless forward movement, is entirely stripped of moral endorsement, and is in fact bound to a primary association with worsening. The model is that of a progressive disease.
Neoreactionary excitement has generated a wave of strategy discussions, focused upon Moldbug’s Antiversity model of organized dissident knowledge. The most energetic example (orchestrated by Nydwracu) can be followed here, here, and here. Francis St. Pol’s substantial contribution is here.
Beyond curmudgeonly cynicism about youthful enthusiasm, these concerns, and a strain of pessimism that accompanies the recognition that the Cathedral owns media like the USN owns carrier groups, is there any explanation for Outside in hanging back from all this, and smoking sulkily in the corner? If there’s a single term that accounts for our reluctance, it’s cold turkey.
It took over seven decades for Soviet communism to implode. Arguments could no doubt be made — and they would have to be right — that given certain quite limited counter-factual revisions of historical contingency, this period might have been significantly extended. Austrians nevertheless consider the eventual termination of comparatively pure communism as a vindication (of the Calculation Problem, in particular). They are not simply wrong to do so.
Fascist economics is far more formidably resilient than its now-defunct soviet antagonist. Any attempt to quantify this functional superiority as a predicted system duration is transparently impractical. Margins of theoretical error or imprecision, given very modestly transformed variables, could translate into many decades of extended (or decreased) longevity. Coldly considered, there is no reason to confidently expect a theoretically constructed collapse schedule to hold its range of probable error to much under a century. (Darker reflection might lead to the conclusion that even this level of ‘precision’ betrays unwarranted hubris.) There might be crushing lessons to be learned from the history of Messianic expectation.
Noureddine Krichene at ATol:
There are contrasts and similarities between the extinguished communism of Mao and the rising one of Bernanke-Obama. Both reject Hayek’s theory and the private sector, and believe in a provident state; wealth has to be redistributed equally. Both believe that capital has no remuneration and the interest rate has to be zero.
Nonetheless, there are contrasts between Mao’s Red Book and Bernanke-Obama collectivism. The former called for confiscation of private poverty and forced labor to work with hands and small tools; unemployment was not allowed and workers earned deservedly a share in the product. The Bernanke-Obama model is based on Keynesian economics and calls for creating as much demand as possible through fiscal deficits and money printing.