Mark Shea might not quite be the most ludicrous idiot alive (judge for yourself), but he earnestly shares the following warning — received from one of his readers. I’m putting the whole story here, because Shea’s credulity about it is so radically humiliating I can only assume he’ll want to take it down.
The Dark Enlightenment Exposed
Is intersectionality just the greatest thing ever, or what?
Both [Laurie] Penny and [Richard] Seymour have made a point of arguing, moreover, for the latest fad in leftist thinking: intersectionality. “Intersectionality” supposedly means taking seriously the many different oppressions, and how they intersect. “My socialism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,” Seymour has made a point of saying. Given that they are so keen to speak out against oppression in all its multi-layered forms, it seems really bad luck that they should be accused of being “racist crackers” and “white settlers.”
The entire article is comedy gold.
The Obama presidency AND intersectionality — does anyone still doubt that God is hardcore NRx?
As part of the ongoing celebrations of Prophecy Month at Outside in, we present a (short) three part series by Lars Seier Christensen of Saxo Bank on the historical prescience of Ayn Rand (one, two, three). While some distance from high theory, even the most Rand-averse should be able to take something interesting away from this series, whether by considering it as a significant ethnographic — and even religious — phenomenon, or by appraising it as a structured forecast. The foundations (laid in part one) certainly seem realistic enough: “… free capitalism has not really been experienced by many people alive today. […] The strange hybrid of western societies … allows only limited capitalism to create enough wealth to support a wider range of political and social ambitions, largely controlled by anti-capitalists.”
Christensen asks: does the world look increasingly like the politically saturated, anti-capitalist stagnatopia she envisaged? If the evaluation of Rand is restricted to these terms, her claim to attention seems assured. The conclusion:
If we don’t succeed in changing the values and direction of at least the next generation, I fear the full prediction of Atlas Shrugged will become reality and while that may hold some promise for the distant future, it is not something that I think people of my age feel like going through if we can avoid it.
Given the Cathedral — which is to say, pedagogical (and propagandistic) anti-capitalism in power — Christensen’s hope for a generational shift in “values and direction” sounds like a prayer to a dead God. That leaves only Cassandra, and tragic truths.
(Via.)
Why the Left lies:
Cathedral leftoids loathe the idea that they might give aid and comfort to their non-leftoid enemies. In this scenario, they know the truth on some level, but refuse to acknowledge it (despite any journalistic ethical strictures commanding them to do so) because they believe acknowledging it will embolden and gird the spirits of those they consider horrible, no good people. To these leftoids, the prospect of Heartland Joe (Votech, Class of 1975) beaming with satisfaction that his intuition about the way the world works was right all along drives them insane with rage. Even worse, the thought that a sadistic demon like me would take an eviscerating scalpel to their egos armed with their de facto surrender papers keeps them awake at night in terror.
(The entire post is highly recommended.)
It’s called the ‘canary’ in the coal mine, because everyone is waiting for it to be canned. After the Derbyshire whacking, Mark Steyn became the obvious follow up candidate. Are we approaching the final wheezy chirp? (What a truly repulsive piece of clotted cowardice that magazine is.)
ADDED: Not to forget the other prominent word crime story of the week (the Left eating its own).
ADDED: At NRO, a line in the sand? Also.
ADDED: Handle has some suggestions to make.
Guilt is basically a North-West European thing, argues Peter Frost. That would certainly explain the conspicuous abnormality of white ethnomasochism, which has a claim to be the social fact of greatest significance in the world today. There’s a certain type of fanatically universalist moral argument that — even when encountered anonymously on the Internet — indicates (absolutely reliably) that one is dealing with a self-hating pale-face. When someone tells you that some incontestable principle requires self-sacrifice without reservation to the wretched global Other, the obvious melanin deficiency almost sucks holes in the screen. None of this is seriously controversial (although more hard data would, of course, be nice).
Take one additional step, and hypothesize that the Cathedral latches onto white guilt as its sole natural territory. Much then follows. Clearly, whatever ‘globalization’ the Cathedral will ever achieve cannot be analogous to its domestic dominion. It is a plug that only fits the white guilt socket, so that every attempt to propagate it more widely encounters complexities. To a degree, this is initially masked by the fact that a racial revenge narrative sells well, even when its original moral axioms are entirely non-communicative. ‘Post-colonialism’ would therefore be expected to mark the limit of Cathedralist global contagion — a limit that has already been in large measure reached (or even exceeded). Nobody other than whites wants white guilt for themselves. Non-whites will, however, often be delighted that whites have white guilt, especially when this has metastasized to its self-abolitional phase, and this second reaction — under the specific conditions of ‘post-colonial / anti-racist discourse’ — is easily confused with the first.
If the progressivism-guilt plug-socket arrangement doesn’t travel racially, than Cathedralist globalization has to fall back upon far cruder mechanisms of power — of the “Red Foreign Policy” type. The experience of the last decade suggests that, in doing so, it is no longer remotely playing to its own strengths. Democratic evangelism, at home and abroad, are two very different things. Bloody international disorder is strongly predicted as the complement of its domestic New Jerusalem.
Just one more effort citizens, and the white race will have consummated its destiny as the cancer of human history.
While I expect frantic grief over the death of Nelson Mandela to be quite restrained on the Outer Right, it surely has to be admitted that — as Afro-Marxist terrorists go — he was a comparatively moderate type. He represented global Cathedralism well, accepted the unforced surrender offered by this guy with ceremonial dignity, and seems to have made no attempt to accelerate the genocide of the Boers to spasm phase. Things will probably deteriorate significantly with him gone.
Commenter ‘augurae’ at the TC Colloseum:
I believe these people are stupidest and most dangerous people on the planet. But it would be lying if I said I didn’t share some of their ideas: for exemple, I think that if prior to, or after the second world war, we killed all the reactionaries and other fascists-friendly people, we would’ve prevented the situation we are in today and be way further in term of technology, medicine, economy, social and global peace…
People who prone social darwinism are the people who don’t invent or change shit, except for the worse, and I mean the worse periods in humanity’s History like the Middle Age or WWII. Moreover they are dangerous, racist, retrograde people who should be killed.
Liberal humanists — you have to love them.
Salon has been bat-shit crazy for a long time, but right now it’s really going over the edge. It’s almost as if the people there are getting worried about something.
[Thanks to VXXC for pointers into the bin]
My personal pick for comedy gold goes to the article on right-wing brain washing (5th link), which includes this priceless classic: “He believed it when Rush Limbaugh told him that climate change is a hoax. He called Al Gore an ‘asshole’ even after watching the entire An Inconvenient Truth …” (Especially funny for me because I knew someone like that once — he thought Hitler was a dangerous demagogue, even after watching Triumph of the Will.)
Panic! They’re so brain-washed they don’t even believe our propaganda any more.
ADDED: Da Tech Guy EBT follow-up.
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.