On the persistence of Lovecraft’s influence:

Lovecraft, who died five months before his 47th birthday, also “shrewdly created an American pantheon of horror,” [Leslie S.] Klinger said of the hardcore New Englander. “He was the first writer of supernatural literature to understand the psychological consequences of the generations of Puritanism and the warping of the human psyche that resulted.”

Lovecraft’s influence on [Alan] Moore lay in how the author was able to link the cosmic to the familiar. “Lovecraft’s most enduring influence on my own work is the way in which, consciously or otherwise, he managed to imbue the familiar New England landscape that was so dear and immediate to him with a sense of the universe’s dispiriting vastness and the blind, random nature of the forces governing it, a perspective drawn from his keen interest in contemporary science and astronomy,” Moore wrote to Speakeasy. “As the familiar worlds around us are increasingly invaded by alien ideas, today’s writers could do worse than look to the strategies of antiquarian-modernist H.P. Lovecraft.”

(If Neoreaction was still looking for a name, ‘antiquarian-modernism’ would be a definite candidate.)

Michael Totten covers an impressive amount of ground in his overview of contemporary zombie culture. It might be called the Dark Anthropocene: An emerging world spooked by the thickening dread that everybody else on the planet is a latent zombie threat. Beneath a thin, rapidly-shredding skin of civility, your increasingly incomprehensible neighbors are mindless cannibals, awaiting a trigger. Dysfunctional Nation States offer no credible protection, but they’ve hung around long enough to ensure that you’ve been drastically disarmed of basic survival competences. Some residual amygdala-pulse is telling you to start thinking-through how you’ll cope when it all finally caves in.

No surprise to anyone that Outside in sees this, quite straightforwardly, as democratic introspection. It only takes people to start feasting directly in the same way they vote, and we’re Zacked. The entire culture is saying — and by now practically screaming — that this is the way socio-political modernity ends.

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 …

From the moment of its inception, Outside in has been camped at the edge of the ‘reactosphere’ — and everything that occurs under the label ‘NRx’ is (at least nominally) its concern. As this territory has expanded, from a compact redoubt to sprawling tracts whose boundaries are lost beyond misty horizons, close and comprehensive scrutiny has become impractical. Instead, themes and trends emerge, absorbing and carrying mere incidents. Like climatic changes, or vague weather-systems, they suggest patterns of persistent and diffuse development.

Among these rumblings, the most indefinite, tentative, and unresolved tend to the aesthetic. Without settled criteria of evaluation, there is little obvious basis for productive collision. Instead, there are idiosyncratic statements of appreciation, expressed as such, or adamant judgments of affirmation or negation, surging forth, draped in the heraldic finery of the absolute, before collapsing back into the hollowness of their unsustainable pretensions. As things stand, when somebody posts a picture of some architectural treasure, or classical painting, remarking (or more commonly merely insinuating) “You should all esteem this,” there is no truly appropriate response but laughter. If there were not a profound problem exactly in this regard, NRx would not exist. Criteria are broken, strewn, and dispossessed, authoritative tradition is smashed, infected, or reduced to self-parody, the Muses raped and butchered. That’s where we are in the land of the dying sun.

An associated, insistent murmur concerns communicative lucidity. This is not solely a question of aesthetics, but in its quavering groundlessness, it behaves as one. It arises most typically as the assertion — initially unsupported and subsequently undeveloped — that clearly, ‘unnecessary obscurity’ should be condemned.

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Time for a new occasional series here — devoted to persistent minimum-intelligence memes unworthy of serious attention, except as socio-cultural symptoms. To be exhibited in this series, an ‘argument’ has to be strictly beneath contempt. It’s sheer zombie thought — which means it isn’t thought at all. (Recommendations will be collected, with gratitude.)

To initiate Moron bites, it would surely be difficult to improve upon this:

Why do the neoreactionaries all assume that they'll be aristocrats in the new ancien regime? Won't some of then shovel pig shit?

— Matt H. (@raucousflytings) October 1, 2014

It is obviously essential to the genre that its instances are inter-changeable, and familiar. They do not rise to a level of sophistication consistent with significant differentiation, and the moron reservoir from whose shallows they flop out onto the bubbling ooze, is thrashed by a ceaseless ritual of zombie generation. This one is of course a classic ad hominem argument, the laziest way to bury a provocation beneath a slur, and the refuge of the half-wit throughout history. Michael Anissimov has already done a sound job of incinerating it, noting its roots in infantile projection. Nothing further is really necessary (if, in fact, anything at all was).

Still, there is something that can be added, and it is articulated very clearly by Hans Hermann Hoppe in this talk (about 29 minutes in). Aristocratic privileges are not difficult to acquire today, by anyone of even very modest natural capability. They are distributed lavishly in exchange for services to the Cathedral, even of the most nominal kind. One need not rise to a position of special prestige within the academy, media, or state bureaucracy to enjoy a complacent sense of spiritual superiority, it suffices merely to identify with the Elect. Linking this (again) is irresistible. When you feel entitled — as a white person — to denounce white people in general without the slightest concern that such derision might be mistaken for self-criticism, you are not socially positioned as a revolutionary, but as a degenerate aristocrat. Your assumption of impregnable moral and social advantage is so great that it has become entirely invisible to itself.

NRx is formalist. Insofar as it obsesses on questions of aristocratic hierarchy — and this is far from a prevailing syndrome — it does to in order to draw attention to the conservation of social rank even (if not quite especially) in those social orders which most tediously flaunt their demotist credentials. Those reiterating moron bite #1 are unlikely to be the new nobles, but more probably low-grade flunkies, who nevertheless esteem themselves through the spiritual bond with their (academic and media) masters. In other words, they are scum posing as members of an aristocracy. Their facility at projection is remarkable.

ADDED: Classy (and then ‘interesting’) response from Matt H. —

@Outsideness I'm not the slightest bit offended. I'd happily buy you a drink and clink glasses.

— Matt H. (@raucousflytings) October 8, 2014

@Outsideness But if all your opinions match Anissimov's, I'd also chide you for the misogyny and xenophobia.

— Matt H. (@raucousflytings) October 8, 2014

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.

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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.)

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NRx has been accused, by its friends more than its enemies, of talking about itself too much. Here XS is, doing that again, not only stuck in ‘meta’ but determinedly pushing ever deeper in. There are some easily communicable reasons for that — an attachment to methodical nonlinearity perhaps foremost among them — and then there are cryptic drivers or attachments, unsuited to immediate publicization. These latter are many (even Legion). It is the firm assertion of this blog that Neoreaction is intrinsically arcane.

We do not talk very much about Leo Strauss. Once again, there are some obvious reasons for this, but also others.

Steve Sailer’s recent Takimag article on Strauss makes for a convenient introduction, because — despite its light touch — it moves a number of issues into place. The constellation of voices is complex from the start. There is the (now notorious) ‘Neo-Conservatism’ of Strauss and his disciples, or manipulators, and the other conservatism of Sailer, each working to manage, openly and in secret, its own peculiar mix of public statement and discretion. Out beyond them — because even the shadowiest figures have further shadows — are more alien, scarcely perceptible shapes.

Sailer’s article is typically smart, but also deliberately crude. It glosses the Straussian idea of esoteric writing as “talking out of both sides of your mouth” — as if hermetic traditionalism were reducible to a lucid political strategy, or simple conspiracy — to ‘Illuminism’, politically conceived. In the wake of its Neo-Con trauma, conservatism has little patience for “secret decoder rings”. Yet, despite his aversion to the recent workings of inner-circle ‘conservative’ sophisticates, Sailer does not let his distaste lure him into stupidity:

We haven’t heard much about Straussianism lately due to the unfortunate series of events in Iraq that befell the best-laid plans of the sages. But that doesn’t mean that Strauss was necessarily wrong about the ancients. And that has interesting implications for how we should read current works.

As the approaching 20th anniversary of the publication of The Bell Curve reminds us, the best minds of our age have reasons for being less than wholly frank.

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(Weekly open thread.) XS is sticking with the settled schedule, despite the risk of chaos overdose. It’s been that kind of week. Spotty coverage of 4chan craziness and failed secession in the Anglosphere heartland doesn’t begin to exhaust it.

For anybody tugging at the scorched /pol/ thread, this is an interesting — and impressively sophisticated — strand to pull at (+ some Ebola-Chan context). ++ Trolls are Kulaks — Science. Free Northener on #Gamergate (+ NIO anticipates the storm).

The regular Mitrailleuse secession round-up makes serves as a good Scottish re-dependence portal. Some now dated, but stimulating Scotland-related commentary here, here, here, and here. (Also loosely related, and highly-recommended, from Mitrailleuse.) This might also be the place to throw in some Proprietary Cities links (1, 2, 3).

Anything — however embryonic — proposing to synthesize Neoreaction and Accelerationism is bound to get a hearing here. This is the sign. From a left-slanted sensibility, but related.

Dark comedy on the civilization-morbidity front at the MacArthur Genius Grants. (Some residual seriousness still apparent.) Grants and awards are clearly a crucial zone of conflict.

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