According to the White Nationalist fraternity, the Dark Enlightenment tends to like civilized people even when they aren’t really white. I think that’s right (and Right), although — of course — it’s supposed to be a problem.

It’s certainly amusing that the only people who don’t think we’re Nazis are the Nazis. They recognize that “cognitive elitists” are inherently prone to race treachery — which could be pushed all the way out to species treachery (if I have anything to do with it). Optimize for intelligence isn’t any kind of key to racial solidarity, or solidarity of any other kind. Even HBD, they generally insist, isn’t them (it’s too attentive to PISA ratings and such). There are some seriously interesting controversies implicit in all this, although rage is likely to break them up before they get very far. It makes me realize that one thing I appreciate about the Neoreaction is its anger management, which is inextricable from its taste for irony (and probably also from its decadence).

At Amos & Gromar there’s some worthwhile comment, and commentators.

Boundaries should always be appreciated, whoever is drawing them.

Mass idiocy diagnosed at AoS:

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

Give a man a Cult of Fish, which talks a lot about the Wonders of Fish and the cult-leaders’ ability to provide fish to all who want them (despite not doing so), and then he won’t mind that you’re not giving him any fish or teaching him how to fish either.

Because you’ve given him something better. You’ve given his empty life a semblance of meaning, and you’ve given his incoherent and craven thoughts some structure.

And he’ll thank you for that forever. Even though, still, no fish.

He’ll blame the Cult’s list of approved devils for the lack of fish, and he’ll praise you for your wondrous intentions to provide fish.

Or at least your determination to talk a lot about fish.

Sensation — media nourishment — is situated on a border. It tells the inside something about the outside, and is shaped from both sides. The outside is what it is, which might not be perceptible, or acceptable. The inside wants relevant information, selected and formatted to its purposes. Sensation is therefore where subject and object meet.

… that’s an attempt to express preliminary sympathy for Matt Sigl’s situation, caught between an uncanny thing and a definite agenda. Concretely; research collides with editing, with Sigl’s brain as ground zero. The encounter of Neoreaction with the media is a peculiarly vicious one, with the sensations to match.

Crudely speaking, Neoreaction is disgust at the media condensed into an ideology. While generally contemptuous of the human fodder making up modern democracies, Neoreaction principally targets the media-academic complex (or ‘Cathedral’) for antagonism, because it is the media that is the real ‘electorate’ — telling voters what to do. This foundational critique, on its own, would be enough to ensure intense reciprocal loathing. Of course, it is not on its own. Neoreaction is in almost every respect the Cathedral anti-message, which is to say that it is consistently, radically, and defiantly ‘off-message’ on every topic of significance, and is thus something unutterably horrible. Yet utterance — it now seems — there has to be …

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Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating the long-standing thesis:

America is a communist country.

The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these paragraphs:

When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not personally have supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?

Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,” “change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.

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The story that follows was stolen from somewhere, but I’ve not been able to recover the source. It has a definite neoconservative edge to it, which isn’t surprising given the early-nullities brain-feed it was no doubt extracted from, but it’s neat enough to be passed on.

If Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires in space, the First World War was the equivalent burial ground in time. The German Second Reich, the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire, the Russian (Romanov) Empire, and the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire were all interred by it. In their place arose new geopolitical entities based upon an unstable mixture of ethno-nationalist self-determination and moral-universalist internationalism. The role of American ideas in the New Order – most immediately conveyed by the vehicle of ‘Wilsonism’ – was both substantial and ambiguous. A tight swirl of Americanization and Anti-Americanism would be essential to everything that followed.

If Austro-Germanic imperial collapse can be considered one thing, for the sake of elegance, the true narrative marvel of this story can unfold, because each dead empire was the germ of a world war, structuring history in its fundamentals up to the present day. From each imperial grave, in succession, came a challenge to the Anglophone global order, distinct in certain respects, but also displaying common, recognizable features.

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‘Smart government‘ doesn’t even need a sarc. tag.

That’s why we’ll see no future Marinettis (in the West, at least).

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.

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Andrew Fox discusses the principal political weapon of the Western Left, and its mobilization against political incorrectness in science fiction:

Coincidentally, the same years which have witnessed the emergency of speech codes on many campuses have also witnessed an accelerated symbiosis between the pro SF community and academia (in that greater numbers of SF/fantasy writers have as day jobs teaching at the post-high school level, and SF literature and film has become an increasingly respectable and popular subject of university courses). … For many individuals under the age of forty who have been through the university system, mau-mauing may seem normative, or at least unremarkable. They have seen it at work through divestment campaigns of various kinds (divestment from Israeli companies or U.S. companies which provide goods to Israel which might be used in security operations against Palestinians, or from companies involved in fossil fuel production, or from companies connected to certain figures active on the Right, such as the Koch brothers) and through shout-downs and other disruptions of speakers invited to campus whose backgrounds or viewpoints are contrary to those favored by student activists. (via)

It’s deeply disturbing, as pretty much everything is these days. (Those who know anything about China’s Cultural Revolution will find their pattern recognition centers sparking up.)

ADDED: Mau-Mauing is the perfect illustration of the fact that political ‘voice’ and ‘freedom of speech’, far from being near synonyms, are closer to antonyms.

Glenn Reynolds notices an emerging interpretation of PRISM as a phenomenon internally connected to geopolitical pacifism. Making unilateral peace requires infinite vigilance.

First Steyn:

The same bureaucracy that takes the terror threat so seriously that it needs the phone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of law-abiding persons would never dream of doing a little more pre-screening in its immigration system … Because the formal, visible state has been neutered by political correctness, the dark, furtive shadow state has to expand massively to make, in secret, the judgment calls that can no longer be made in public.

Then WRM:

PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle.

Richard Fernandez comments.

There’s some kind of conservation law at work there, and they always have the potential to trip people up. Bad outcomes are conserved might be too harsh, but it gets close to something.

What to make of them? Scharlach muses (on this comment thread):

I’ve never ventured into WN territory. Is there anything worthwhile there? I’ve always thought the difference between Derbyshire-esque race realism and straight-up, codified, black-bashing White Supremacy is the difference between, say, not eating at the bad sushi restaurant down the street, maybe writing a bad review on Yelp, telling people they shouldn’t eat there … and actively seeking out the restaurant owner, dragging him behind a truck, and burning the restaurant down.