… 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.

Does anyone seriously doubt the West is going to die ugly?

@DurrutiOvercloc @YakovPettersson Yeah, they seem to have been the most successful at rebranding fascism for libertarians.

— William Gillies (@williamrgillies) December 31, 2014

The only way this doesn’t consolidate massively in 2015 is for NRx to fall off a cliff.

The Hong Kong situation is a nightmare. This tweet gets it right:

Very worrisome. No one should be under any illusions about what Beijing may do if it believes there is a budding color revolution in HK SAR

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) September 28, 2014

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.)

An incredible hoard of high-minded sensualism (3D cellular automata, Prime number, visualization, Strange attractors, and more …).

Crab weaponry.

Some numerate crime-think contributions, on mathematics and political correctness, the demographic death of liberal Jews, 23andMe data, and twins.

This is what Golden Dawn stands for (ethno-socialism).

Whatever happened to libertarianism?

Hard not to notice that three-quarters of NRx seems to have sunk into a blog coma, when it hasn’t actually died. Are blogs already an obsolescing medium?

On those hard times coming. Amerika lays it out clearly:

… dependents of the world, they will cut you out. You are not necessary. You serve no role and contribute nothing. At some point, whether for pure financial reasons or to preserve themselves, the others will cut you out. You will descend into third world poverty and the rest will will take their money and prosper elsewhere. The “benefits for no riots” scam will have come to an end.

Neoreaction in the DRC. (Added.)

.@DaliborRohac is scared by nationalist stirrings. https://t.co/OhzEVKTBsR

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) August 6, 2014

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.”

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.

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.)

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.)

Writing in The Telegraph, Roger Bootle casts a cold eye upon the prospects for France:
What is going to happen? I cannot see much prospect of France recovering to match Germany again without really fundamental reform – which French governments have traditionally been incapable of delivering. Accordingly, France will continue to decline relative to Germany. Interestingly, the recent beneficiary of French voters’ protests, Marine Le Pen, does not want to open France up to more competition but rather to use withdrawal from the EU to strengthen the powers of the French state to overrule market forces. This does not bode well.

Indeed, far from being part of the hard northern core of the euro, France is increasingly coming to resemble the soft southern underbelly. Accordingly, for how much longer can the Franco-German “motor” continue to drive the EU? Won’t Germany increasingly realise its own strength and want to break free from its shackles to France? And won’t France increasingly resent the increased power of her neighbour?

I don’t know how this is going to happen or when but I suspect that we are coming close to one of those periodic explosions that have shaped French history. When this happens the EU will never be the same again.

Europe is almost certainly going to complete its descent into Hell. It would be the ultimate condemnation of NRx — definitive proof that it had learnt nothing of value — if the specific shape of Europe’s damnation, as it reaches its nadir, were to be confused with a rightist ideal.

ADDED: Convergence on a different line of thought. [Don’t bother clicking, NBS has just pulled this (excellent) post for some reason yet to be disclosed.] Update:

@Outsideness It will come back up. It may have a different eponym. I’m waiting for permission from The Dude.

— Nicholas B Stevenson (@Nick_B_Steves) June 3, 2014

OK.

Update: It’s back (with a much better name).

ADDED: Paul Gottfried’s take.

ADDED: Der Spiegel interviews Marine Le Pen.

Purely for entertainment value, an apocalyptic quasi-fnording of Marine Le Pen, edited irresponsibly into grossly misleading Cathedral-media nightmare fuel:

I want to destroy the EU … Europe is war. Economic war. It is the increase of hostilities between the countries. … The EU is deeply harmful, it is an anti-democratic monster. I want to prevent it from becoming fatter, from continuing to breathe, from grabbing everything with its paws and from extending its tentacles into all areas of our legislation. … A strong euro is ruining our economy. … It was created by Germany, for Germany. … the model we are advocating is less positive for Germany than the current model. Germany has become the economic heart of Europe because our leaders are weak. But Germany should never forget that France is Europe’s political heart. … Be careful Ms. Merkel. If you don’t see the suffering that has been imposed on the rest of the European people, then Germany will make itself hated. … she wants to impose her policies on others. This will lead to an explosion of the European Union. … If we don’t all leave the euro behind, it will explode. Either there will be a popular revolt because the people no longer want to be bled out. Or the Germans will say: Stop, we can’t pay for the poor anymore. … David Cameron says that UKIP members are crazy and racist. I think it is good that UKIP is as strong as we are. … We have the same fundamental approach to Europe. … We used to be one of the richest countries in the world, but we are now on a path towards under-development. This austerity that has been imposed on the people doesn’t work. The people will not allow themselves to be throttled without revolting. … We need an intelligent protectionism. We need customs duties again … The problem is the total opening of borders and allowing the law of the jungle to prevail: The further a company goes today to find slaves, which it then treats like animals and pays a pittance, without regard for environmental laws, the more it earns. … I don’t want (Germany’s) Siemens to buy Alstom. I want Alstom to remain French. That is strategically important for my country’s independence. … One could nationalize a company, even if only temporarily, in order to stabilize it. … democracy is collapsing here in France. … I have a certain admiration for Vladimir Putin because he doesn’t allow decisions to be forced upon him by other countries. I think he focuses first and foremost on what is good for Russia and the Russians. … there are many things said about Russia because they have been demonized for years at the behest of the USA. … The Americans are trying to expand their influence in the world, particularly in Europe … defending their own interests, not ours. 

Plus: Who’s going to shrink the state?

ADDED: Communism good, fascism bad. (This is apparently what passes for intelligence among the chatterati.)

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.

… 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))