13
Jan
Half a sentence this time, from Charles Hugh-Smith. It’s rare for me to agree with anything quite this much:
… deflation is the natural result of a competitive economy experiencing productivity gains.
(He continues: “isn’t this the ideal environment for innovation, enterprise and consumers? Yes, it is.”)
According to the Outside in definition, deflation is the basic signature of capitalism. It’s the politically-undirected (i.e. spontaneous) distribution of positive externalities from sound economic order. Inflation — or mere deflation-suppression — is the unambiguous signal that something very different is going on.
ADDED: Related.
12
Jan
The inherent destiny of democracy is fascism. That’s the principal reason to despise it, rather than any cause for celebration.
Does anyone seriously doubt the West is going to die ugly?
31
Dec
This one earns its ‘moron’ status strictly at the point of consumption. At the point of delivery it is by no means unintelligent, and is in fact strategically adept (if crude). Its cynicism approaches the sublime. (By “they” is meant the “us” of NRx.)
The only way this doesn’t consolidate massively in 2015 is for NRx to fall off a cliff.
28
Sep
(Weekly open thread, and stuff)
The Hong Kong situation is a nightmare. This tweet gets it right:
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.)
Continue Reading
06
Aug
The Umlaut has long been doing an embarrassing amount of our thinking for us, and perhaps even more of our controversy. The latest installment, by Dalibor Rohac, is here. The connections it makes are frankly disturbing to this blog, whose pro-capitalist, post-libertarian, and general Atlantean sympathies have been pushed as hard as realistically possible, along with an explicit attempt at differentiation from those tendencies with an opposite — I would argue self-evidently anti-Moldbuggian — valency. It is going to be difficult to condemn conflations of NRx with the ENR for so long as the ‘voice’ of Neoreaction includes remarks of this kind:
NRx, across its whole spectrum, is neither libertarian nor fascist. There is, however, a remarkable polarity — our axis of fission — which is based upon which of these associations is found most disreputable. From my perspective, this distinction lines up extremely neatly with Alexander Dugin’s Hyperborean / Atlantean continental forever war. It seems to me beyond any serious question that the inheritance from Mencius Moldbug lies unproblematically on the Atlantean side of this divide. The standing Outside in prophecy is that, by the end of this year, a definitive break along these lines will have taken place. There’s no reason I can see to back-track on that expectation.
ADDED: “One could see a situation in which libertarian inattentiveness to political concerns, in the face of masses of people that are growing frustrated with democracy, abets extremism. If freedom and democracy are incompatible, like Peter Thiel thinks, it is important to articulate ways to preserve freedom.”
03
Aug
(Open thread.)
Some bits and pieces, which everyone if of course free to ignore:
Commercialization of war (video). This trend seems to be huge.
The (first) Age of Unqualified Reservations has now formally passed: “I think it’s clear that UR has gone on de facto hiatus, so it seems best to adhere to my own philosophy and make it official. … UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon – and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives.”
Nydwracu crafts a conceptual tool of great value.
Action at Reddit.
William Gibson and Hyperstition (or not): “… was Gibson just a smart reader of the way things were already going, or — as Jack Womack suggested in the afterword to the novel’s 2000 re-issue — has ‘the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?'”
Alain de Benoist interviewed.
Either an extraordinary techno-scientific breakthrough, or not. (This, I’m supremely confident, isn’t.)
Singularity won’t save us (a conclusion I share, for entirely different reasons).
My Russian isn’t good enough to understand what the hell is going on in this, but NYC looks spectacular even when it’s teeming with Slavo-fascists.
Hate.
12
Jun
The whole of Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2004) is available here. In the final pages (p.218), following detailed historical analysis, it cautiously advances a cultural-political definition:
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraint goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Since the topic regularly re-surfaces, it seems worth recording Paxton’s formulation as a reference point, especially as its emphases differ significantly from those this blog (and its critics) have tended to stress. An important conclusion of Paxton’s study is that no purely ideological account of fascism is able to capture what is an essentially historical phenomenon, which is to say a process, rooted in the degeneration of democracy. (Wikipedia offers some background on his work.)
03
Jun
As the foggiest two-thirds of ‘NRx’ continues its devolution into ENR-style ethno-socialism and activist voluntarism, it is inevitable that Europe’s populist ‘far right’ will increasingly be seized upon as a source of inspiration, and even as a model for emulation. This is, of course, an indication of degenerate insanity, and all the more to be expected on that account. On the positive side, the practical incompetence of ‘activist neoreaction’ will most probably spare it from the full measure of the embarrassment it is due. Nevertheless, whatever applause it offers to the vile antics of the European mob will not be soon forgotten.
It would be a distraction at this point to seek to distinguish the classical (Aristotelian) conception of action from the mire of modern political activism, or mass mobilization. That is the topic for another occasion. It suffices here to accept the integrated democratic understanding of popular activism for what it is, and to seek distance from it with unreserved disdain, under any convenient sign. If passivism makes this point, the suitability of the term is thereby ensured. The important thing is to make no contribution to the triumph of the mob and, secondarily, to draw no vicarious satisfaction from its advances.
To be as clear as possible: What the ‘far right’ advance in Continental Europe represents is a consummation of democratic morbidity. It is nothing at all like a restoration. At best, it is what ‘hitting bottom’ is to an alcoholic — the crisis at the end of a deteriorating trend, after which something else can begin. (The bottom, it has to be noted, is a very long way down.)
Continue Reading
13
Feb
John Michael Greer on the triumph of fascism (spot on):
National socialist parties argued that business firms should be made subject to government regulation and coordination in order to keep them from acting against the interests of society as a whole, and that the working classes ought to receive a range of government benefits paid for by taxes on corporate income and the well-to-do. Those points were central to the program of the National Socialist German Workers Party from the time it got that name— it was founded as the German Workers Party, and got the rest of the moniker at the urging of a little man with a Charlie Chaplin mustache who became the party’s leader not long after its founding — and those were the policies that the same party enacted when it took power in Germany in 1933.
If those policies sound familiar, dear reader, they should. That’s the other reason why next to nobody outside of specialist historical works mentions national socialism by name: the Western nations that defeated national socialism in Germany promptly adopted its core economic policies, the main source of its mass appeal, to forestall any attempt to revive it in the postwar world.
(via @PuzzlePirate)
ADDED: A point of clarification and a question:
Fascism isn’t a problem because it triggers scary feelings about the Nazis. It’s a problem because it’s running the world.
Question: Is there anybody among the critics of this contention who seeks to defend fascism against sloppy criticism and ‘spin’ who doesn’t also want — at least partially — to defend elements of socialist governance?
The sample size of the commentary so far is too small to tell, but it’s looking as if the answer is ‘no’. If so, it would suggest that Hayek and even (*gasp*) Jonah Goldberg are right in suggesting that the fundamental controversy is about spontaneous social organization, and not about any unambiguous argument of Left v. Right.
02
Feb
Race, science, and pseudo-science … it’s complicated. Radish presents a blood-chilling review essay on the subject, which isn’t to be missed (whatever your priors). As might be expected, it leads to a discussion of crazed fascist experimentation on human guinea pigs (aka ‘pajama ferrets’):
… perhaps you were wondering where I’m going with this. Well, here’s a hint: in 2012, experimental psychologists, psychiatric neuroscientists, and even a pair of “practical ethicists” put their heads together and came up with an honest-to-God cure for racism.
You could say the argument was over, if there had been an argument.
(Meanwhile, it’s probably best not to put yourself at risk by noticing this (from here))
