(Open thread, links …)

Some reactosphere highlights: Questioning secession, basedness and other values, racial double-binds, doomed boomers, a call to order, warfare in the progressive-style, Dugin on IR, deconstruction in the mosh-pit. Why capitalism really sucks (a response, in part, to this lamentable development?) — highly related. Propertarianism versus NRx (hard to distinguish from a tech-comm ‘correction’ of NRx). Bonfire of the sanities. The return of Satan (see also these). Thoughts on torture. Narrative games (link mania). “This ends the third cycle …” Fragmentation continues. Mega-meta.

A gateway to Silicon Valley Cyber-Apocalypticism. “In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for in-stance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.”

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(Open thread + links (I’ve been in Hangzhou over the weekend so some symptoms of partial disconnection are probable))

Jim’s ‘Death of Christianity’ post is the latest installment in a series defending Restoration England. It seems to me that people are being unusually cagey about arguing this out — perhaps a little scared? The religious topic, in particular, tends to draw a high level of interest, which is significant in itself. This might the place to stir the hornets nest with the latest from Pope Francis: The Koran is a prophetic book of peace. It’s not so much the appeasement, moral equivalence, or other red-rags to the right issues that intrigue me most about this — and not even the accommodation of ‘prophecy’ to an outcome that brings it close to sarcasm — but the sheer oddity of the theology behind the remark. To be trolled by the Pope is really something (but what?). (Patheos places the quote in context — which suggests the quality of the trolling is even higher than initially evident.)

Sensible strategic advice. Law and violence. Paleo-humanism. Don’t count on the robocops. 4GW lessons. Anissimov on Brin. Supplementing this link assortment, there’s a whole bunch more from ‘|||||’ here.

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This contrarian argument, on the resilience of America’s shale industry in the face of the unfolding OPEC “price war”, is the pretext to host a discussion about a topic that is at once too huge to ignore, and too byzantine to elegantly comprehend. The most obvious complication — bypassed entirely by this article — is the harsher oil geopolitics, shaped by a Saudi-Russian proxy war over developments in the Middle East (and Russian backing of the Assad regime in Damascus, most particularly). I’m not expecting people here to be so ready to leave that aside.

Clearly, though, the attempt to strangle the new tight-oil industry in its cradle is a blatantly telegraphed dimension of the present Saudi oil-pricing strategy, and one conforming to a consistent pattern. If Mullaney’s figures can be trusted, things could get intense:

… data from the state of North Dakota says the average cost per barrel in America’s top oil-producing state is only $42 — to make a 10% return for rig owners. In McKenzie County, which boasts 72 of the state’s 188 oil rigs, the average production cost is just $30, the state says. Another 27 rigs are around $29.

If oil-price chicken is going to be exploring these depths, there’s going to be some exceptional pain among the world’s principal producers. Russia is being economically cornered in a way that is disturbingly reminiscent of policy towards Japan pre-WWII, when oil geopolitics was notoriously translated into military desperation. Venezuela will collapse. Iran is also under obvious pressure.

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(Open thread, links …)

It has been difficult to keep up with Henry Dampier recently, on feminist predictions, discount slaves, incoherent elites, brittanus americanus, globalization and war … and more, and more, and more (plus some genuinely useful advice). This blog is not among those immediately assuming the explanation lies in methamphetamine. Category theorizing. Yuray is digging up some authoritative support for the restoration of Latin. Meta-fragmentation. Hawk politics. No enemies to the left. Greetings! Unity (I don’t get it) — this seems to be related. The basic dissymmetry. Reliable nets.

Paleao-reaction goes mainstream.

Casual Marxism. Curricular Satanism. General Gruberism.

Malthusian mechanics (in pre-industrial England). Escaping the Malthusian trap. Evolution of culture, chain-letters, dark nets, and the (ancient) Egyptian state. Predation games. Killer apes. Genetic ontology. Shrinking brains. Social media hooks. Hmmmm.

Amerika on The Peripheral. Troll points. Auto-cannibalization watch (1, 2, 3). Sound convictions.

British decay in context. East Asia does it better, Japan notably excepted. Hold the fix. Peak delusions. McCloskey on Piketty.

Uses of racism. Race in your face. Villains of Ferguson. Last gasps. Amnesty and disillusionment.

Weekly golden oldies.

Japan accelerates into Keynesian fiscal singularity. This one is for our honored commenter ‘Kgaard’, who is sure to have some problems with it. (From David Stockman, this blog’s candidate for the most based economic analyst on the planet.)

Let’s not mess around:

Prime Minister Abe is proving himself to be a certifiable madman.

It could all be over a lot sooner than I’d expected.

The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination with decline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s not easy to see how it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such intimidating enormity that even beginning to heap up link support seems futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough guide reveals the pattern starkly:
(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the Reformation to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.
(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic destruction driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race politics.
(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by cancerous Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining economic incentives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery into fiat noise.
In each case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing the respective deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to conveniently apprehend. What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m now hardening this up, into a definition) is the adamantine confidence that the basic socio-political process is radically morbid, and is leading inexorably to utter ruin.

No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in our camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on Dark Age America resonates with particular strength. The most recent installment, which discusses the impending collapse of the market system, through quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many centuries of neo-feudalism, is bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it nevertheless occupies the same broad forecast space. If people are stocking their basements with ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rather than Stockman ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not going to stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.

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An engagement with this (extraordinarily interesting) monetary analysis isn’t going to reach any kind of remotely convincing state tonight. Perhaps I can buy people off for a while with a few of these:

It actually says pretty much everything that needs to be said, in compressed form.

There’s an additional Weiner post of special relevance here. (His definition of inflation as ‘counterfeit credit’ does a lot of theoretical work, very quickly.)

If you want to break an economy, democracy is the solution you’re looking for. The crucial reference is to this paper (via Cowan), dedicated to the The $42 Trillion Question: Will Rapid Growth in China and India Persist? The economic consequences of socio-political ‘progress’ are spelled out about as clearly as anyone could want:

… nearly every country that experienced a large democratic transition after a period of above-average growth (more than the cross-country average of 2 percent) experienced a sharp deceleration in growth in the 10 years following the democratizing transition. Among 22 countries in which episodes of large democratic transition coincided with above-average growth, all but one (Korea in 1987 with an acceleration of only 0.22 percent) experienced a growth deceleration. The combination of high initial growth and democratic transition seems to make some deceleration all but inevitable. The magnitude of the decelerations was very large: The median deceleration across the 22 countries was 2.99 percent and the average deceleration was 3.53 percent.

The phenomenon of demosclerosis is already theoretically well-grounded. It appears to be a more rapidly-acting poison than even its fiercest critics have acknowledged.

(Open thread, and links.)

Ebola! Stories from Nigeria (good) and Europe (not so good). Contagion math (and from Taleb). “The End of the World: it’s sooner than you think.” Ebola as a morbid cultural indicator. Oddness and lunacy.

Fertility transitions and dysgenics. (Related.)

Some (old) background to Singularity and time preference. There’s a lot more to discuss about technology, reaction, and time horizons at some point (given time).

Secrets.

Taking trolls seriously.

Dampier on van Creveld on sexual privilege. Mangan on masculinity and politics. Goddesses and man at Harvard. Phalanx: “… we envision a group of men meeting regularly to do things like the following: Go to church …”

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SoBL on the next stage for Japan:

The Japanese had their forty-first straight month of trade deficits. This is the problem when a nation imports raw materials and energy and exports finished goods in a world of sluggish demand. The Japanese are one of the export dollar recyclers. They are not reliable anymore, which might be why tiny Belgium holds hundreds of billions of US Treasuries now. The Japanese are now moving to invest more abroad, but curiously, they are not investing in hot spots like China but instead in America. The Japanese are investing in US insurance companies as a proxy for investing directly in the US. They want to use insurance companies as a way to learn about the US market more before digging in deeper. This is beyond direct purchases of manufacturing firms and what not. They did this in the ’80s when Japanese automakers partnered with US firms to learn the psychology of the US worker as they then invested in US sitused plants.

At the core of all of this is finding ways to earn non-yen denominated revenue. Currency diversification to prepare for a domestic shock. They are preparing for the devaluing of the yen, and they expect it to happen to the yen first and the dollar later. Many have bet against the yen and lost, including recently Kyle Bass, but if the Japanese themselves are starting to bail, the end must be approaching. It is an interesting island culture shaping up. Greying and shrinking population, growing robotics industry, worlds’ largest creditor nation with trillions in net assets, “xenophobic” immigration policy, shrinking working population… it is like they are setting up an island of a homogenous, rentier class.

If this analysis is correct, it suggests that Japanese capital is set to become a major resource for world-wide trends with an NRx (anti-demotic propertarian) orientation. Sustaining foreign investment revenue streams will become an existential necessity for a grayed Japan, which is enough to establish a definite agenda regarding governance models in the functional fragments of the world system.

Does a ‘rentier nation’ spontaneously produce a Neocameral geopolitical entity?