(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.

From the perspective of an intrigued (and thoughtfully critical) libertarian, Andrea Castillo offers an initial appraisal of Neoreaction. It’s definitely the most dispassionate yet, and in various ways the most perceptive (which isn’t to forget how admirable Adam Gurri’s more obviously polemical engagement was).

The greatest structural merit of the piece is the firm positioning of Mencius Moldbug at the foundations of the phenomenon. Unlike most of the critical NRx commentary so far, Castillo has clearly read Moldbug with some care. This is basically enough in itself to ensure that something real is being seen.

Steve Sailer, who served Castillo unwittingly as a gateway into the darkness, receives disproportionate attention given his manifest lack of affiliation with NRx. Of course, he’s hugely-respected throughout the reactosphere due to his rare refusal to stop ‘noticing‘ upon firm request. Beyond the fact he hasn’t let the Cathedral put his eyes out, however, there’s nothing very much to differentiate him from mainstream American conservatism. Still, Sailer’s presence in the piece does much useful work. In particular, it helps to mark out the boundary controversies defining contemporary libertarianism (the immigration topic prominent among them).

Since she’s already got herself into trouble, it can’t make much more to add that @anjiecast was already one of my favorite people in the world (remember this for instance?). A little bit more now.

Colin Liddell, amid an impressively cool-headed discussion of John Engelman and racial neuralgia:

Jared Taylor is trying very, very hard to avoid the Jewish question. Naturally I disagree with this, but I can understand why Taylor wishes to do so, as the Jewish Question has become a kind of lightning rod for a lot of angst and rage in our society that does not have the time, sophistication, or emotional equilibrium to attain to a more complex understanding of the challenges of modernity.

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So, it’s happened:

Read Mencius Moldbug.

— Justine Tunney (@JustineTunney) April 28, 2014

This strikes me as a poly-dimensional crisis moment — or at least cultural storm signal — (for NRx, for Google, and for the USA), so I’m obviously on tenterhooks to hear what people think.

ADDED: The anti-Tunney (or one of them).

Racial fear is a complicated thing. It’s worth trying to break it down, without blinking too much.

As one regresses through history, and into pre-history, the pattern of encounters between large-scale human groups of markedly distinct ancestry is modeled — with ever-greater fidelity — upon a genocidal ideal. The ‘other’ needs to be killed, or at the very least broken in its otherness. To butcher all males, beginning with those of military age, and then assimilate the females as breeding stock might suffice as a solution (Yahweh specifically warns the ancient Hebrews against such half-hearted measures). Anything less is sheer procrastination. When economic imperatives and high levels of civilizational confidence start to overwhelm more primordial considerations, it is possible for the suppression of other peoples to take the humanized form of social obliteration combined with mass enslavement, but such softness is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For almost the entire period in which recognizably ‘human’ animals have existed on this planet, racial difference has been thought sufficient motive for extermination, with limited contact and inadequacy of socio-technical means serving as the only significant brakes upon inter-racial violence. The sole deep-historical alternative to racial oppression has been racial eradication, except where geographical separation has postponed resolution. This is the simple side of the ‘race problem’, but it too begins to get complicated … (we’ll pick it up again after a detour).

For the moment, we need only note the archaic, subterranean ocean of racial animosity that laps upon the sunless chasms of the brain, directed by genomes sculpted by aeons of genocidal war. Call it racial terror. It’s not our principal concern here.

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First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism apprehended in its most abstract features, through the coining of a provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Carolina, while encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to notice.)

Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)

The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of crucial clues:

nydwracu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the patchwork and find out. …

RiverC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a ‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also invented an operating system (a system for implementing software systems.)

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This is going to continue happening, and to get more intense. The superficial cause is obvious, both Michael Anissimov and myself are extreme, twitchy ideologues, massively invested in NRx, with utterly divergent understandings of its implications. We both know this fight has to come, and that tactical timing is everything. (It’s really not personal, and I hope it doesn’t become so, but when monarchical ideas are involved it’s very easy for “the personal is political” to take a right-wing form.)

It’s worth remembering this diagram, before going further. It suggests that divergence is essential to the far right, which yawns open across an anarcho-autocratic spectrum. Since a disinclination to moderation has already been indicated by anyone arriving at the far right fringe, it should scarcely be surprising when this same tendency rifts the far right itself. Then consider this:

@Outsideness @_Hurlock_ Identitarianism, belonging, and community is what the Far Right is all about.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) March 22, 2014

The strict Outside in complement to this would be something like: disintegrative Social Darwinism through ruthless competition is what the Far Right is all about. A formula of roughly this kind will inevitably come into play as the conflict evolves. Momentarily, though, I’m more interested in situating the clashes to come than initiating them. Whatever the contrary assertions — and they will come (doubtless from both sides) — the entire arena is located on the ultra-right, oriented vertically on the ideological space diagram, rather than horizontally (between positions whose primary differentiation is between the more-and-less right).

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This argument seems strangely familiar. Still, if the central thesis of Neoreaction is becoming common wisdom on a path that bypasses Moldbug, it remains something to be celebrated. Cultural convergence could simply be an index of truth.

Jaded as I am by NRx, Goldman’s review doesn’t quite make me rush out to buy the book (since we’ve been treating this argument as a basic reference for years). It’s still good:

The desire to be redeemed from sin (redefined as a social fact) identifies the post-Protestants as children of the Puritans. That insight is what makes his new book a new and invaluable contribution to our understanding of America’s frame of mind. Just what is a secular religion, and how does it shape the spiritual lives of its adherents? Bottum deftly peels the layers off the onion of liberal thinking to reveal its Protestant provenance and inherited religious sensibility. The Mainline Protestantism that once bestrode American public life never died, but metamorphosed into a secular doctrine of redemption. And that was made possible by the conversion of sin from a personal to a social fact in Walter Rauschenberg’s version of the social gospel. Bottum writes, “The new elite class of America is the old one: America’s Mainline Protestant Christians, in both the glory and the annoyingness of their moral confidence and spiritual certainty. They just stripped out the Christianity along the way.” By redefining sin as social sin, Rauschenberg raised up a new Satan and a new vocabulary of redemption from his snares. According to Bottum, his “central demand is to see social evil as really existing evil — a supernatural force of dark magic.”

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Multiheaded’s horror:

… what’s … terrifying to me is that [Mencius Moldbug] is a sign of things to come; certain objective processes within the early 21st century Western society have actually produced “neo-reaction”, and these processes have no reason to abate. … the world just felt very wrong all of a sudden.

The position of Outside in (admittedly extreme) is that NRx is Neocameralism. As this equation ceases to persuade, NRx falls apart, and no future convergence point will be found within itself. It will be scavenged apart into Dark Libertarian and IQ-boosted ENR debris, unless neocameralism is either re-animated as its fundamental doctrinal commitment, or rigorously reconstructed into something specifically new. Hence today’s Quote note (from Moldbug’s How Dawkins got pwned (part 4)):

In order to get to the reactionary theory of history, we need a reactionary theory of government. History, again, is interpretation, and interpretation requires theory. I’ve described this theory before under the name of neocameralism, but on a blog it never hurts to be a little repetitive.

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