(Open thread + linkiness.) Still in catch-up mode here at XS, so raggedness still reigns.

NRx under thoughtful investigation at the Catalyst Club. Re-visiting the Trichotomy. Christianity and degeneration. Notes on religion. Gnonological meditations (1, 2). Bryce’s new blog. The original mitrailleuse. “Yes, they are offering pig blood to a statue of Mao.” A new NRx aggregrator (and blog).

Jihad in Paris dominates the news-cycle. Some NRx-ish commentary from the Legionnaire, NIO, Laurel, Milton, Yuray, and Steves. In any case, this isn’t working. Liberal anguish (with an unexpectedly hard edge). Additional diverse commentary from Peter Frost, Gregory Hood, Sean Gabb, Ed West, Juan Cole, Slavoj Žižek. The Houellebecq connection. John Robb on the 4GW urban combat space (from 2007), with a Dampier update. Meanwhile, in Nigeria. Religious rifting in the CAR and Pakistan.

Consciousness sweeps. The Deep City. Golden ages. Blogs as the new letters (but why not pamphlets?). Richard Fernandez ponders the Great Filter. Templex thoughts from Charlton. Geno-politics.

SpaceX on the crunchy frontier.

Reforming Austrian economics.

An HBD research prospectus.

To add to the ledger of Singapore as a redoubt (no doubt beleaguered) of Neoreactionary insight, an opinion piece in the most recent Straits Times begins:

China’s rise has been psychologically disquieting to many in America and the West generally, because in China, capitalism flourishes without liberal democracy. This is regarded as somehow unnatural and illegitimate because it punctures the Western myth of the universality of certain political values and of the inevitability of the development of certain political forms. And unlike, say, Japan or India, China only wants to be China and not an honorary member of the West.

It is ahistorical because it ignores the inconvenient fact that every Western country was capitalist long before it was either liberal or democratic as those terms are today understood …

… much sanity follows.

Racial healing from the Duck:

in revenge for #BlackBrunchNYC some uncool white people just flash mobbed a black barbecue joint and forcibly pulled up everyone's pants

— Duck Enlightenment (@jokeocracy) January 5, 2015

(Best way to keep up with the Sith these days is to read the Washington Post.)

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.)

@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.

Horroristic practice: to seize the collapse of the world as the opportunity for an encounter with the Outside. Is this NRx? In all probability, no more than symbiotically. The occasion for tactical alignment, however, is considerable.

There are twin tracks into the gathering darkness, but horrorism is by far the more capable of feeding itself. (The chronic NRx call for ‘action’ is a symptom of malnourishment.)

Singapore Airlines is awesome to a preposterous degree — a fact that might feed into the recent outburst of reactionary curmudgeonry about mass air travel (which I need to track down). It was an opportunity to catch up on some movies I’d missed. The most notable of these was Snowpiercer (highly recommended).

It’s one of those movies you have to stick with — give up before you’re halfway through and you’ll have no idea what all the fuss was about, but make it to the end and you’ll know you’ve seen something memorable. The genre is becoming huge. It could probably be described uncontroversially as apocalyptic neoreactionary speculative drama. Gibson’s The Peripheral is self-consciously there. One obvious (and striking) movie comparison is Elysium. In its purest form, the genre goes to rightist places nothing else quite reaches.

It begins with a revolutionary-leftist frame, which is eventually broken on the wheel of irony (more or less occult). The more subterranean the ironization, the more comical the result. In this respect, Snowpiercer is more Animal Farm than Elysium — which is to say, a far more overtly reactionary work. “Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. … All things flow from the sacred engine.”

Continue Reading

(Open thread, stuff, links …)

The Operation is being relocated to New Zealand for a couple of weeks, beginning tomorrow, so there is almost certain to be some disruption in the days ahead. I’m definitely aiming to keep some flow going, with year round-up posts a feature, but chaotic meandering is likely to reach unprecedented levels.

As for the week behind us, NBS’s esential reacto-round-up now has a This Week in Dampier sub-section. Among those highlights, hard and soft money posts, some Gruber contrarianism, and a valuable note on the Bezos effect. Anarcho-papist is another production maelstrom, who requires statistical sampling, in this case substantial input into the left (or ‘demotist‘) singularity and deep state discussions. Scharlach reflects on the state’s monopoly of violence. Nyan recommends escape from local noise. Ash Milton provides a useful introduction to the ENR. Anti-Dem discusses tolerance. SoBL suggests a deal (background). Some posts stretch glib summarization. “Everything is broken” (back-story). Was enlightened.

There’s clearly a stimulating engagement with propertarianism to be had (and this post is especially helpful for orientation). NIO recommendations on game theory and spontaneous order (1, 2). Soapjackal wants us all to spend more time here.

Gallic ‘neo-reactionnaires’ (who aren’t, of course, us) have also been making waves. Has Putin failed? (Venezuela certainly has.) Sony hack weirdness. Deep State ‘action’.

Troll hunters.

Hanson on the deep ideo-politics of plasticity. Defending Leo Strauss (in the lamest possible way). In praise of monarchy. Rage (and hate). TAC on neoconservative and bleeding-heart liberal suckage.

Gates and Shockley (Dampier comments). “Mr. Gates may see Shockley’s experience as a warning: If he cares about his reputation he better keep his mouth shut.” White worries. Eco-miscegeny. Anatoly Karlin reminds us of his fascinating Indian IQ posts (1, 2, 3).

Tech-Comm NRx approves of this message:

(To replace ‘arrest’ with ‘instant execution by our private security drones’ would be a tweak worth considering. The ‘change’ sign in the background is a nice touch.)

The term is introduced — within a highly critical frame — here. The almost perfect coincidence with techno-commercial NRx (or proto-Patchwork tendencies) is so striking that the adoption of ‘extrastatecraft’ as a positive program falls into place automatically.

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines a new global network woven by money and technology that functions almost like a world shadow government. Though it’s hard to grasp the full extent of this invisible network, Easterling argues that it’s not too late for us to change it.

If it’s not too late to ‘change’ it, it’s not too late to intensify and consolidate it. Tech-comm NRx is obviously doing OK, if it already looks this scary.

Populo: Attack! Attack! The time for action has come. Resistance! Struggle! We have to do something, and do it now. Enough with these endless streams of words!
Crypton: Still shouting in the name of silence, Populo?
Populo: Hardly silence, Crypton. Not at all. Even the contrary. In the name, rather, of the voice of true men, rediscovering their pride and fortitude, and joining together to make a stand against intolerable abuse.
Crypton: Ah yes, that.
Populo: So what brings you here Crypton?
Crypton: I was rather hoping we might continue our little chat about the Deep State.
Populo: Terrific! That’s a topic close to my heart, as you know. Those slithering parasites hidden beneath the rotten log of the Cathedral. It’s time to expose them, denounce them, burn them out!
Crypton: They’re the enemy then?
Populo: Of course they’re the enemy! They run the Cathedral, don’t they? Try not to sophisticate matters beyond all common sense.
Crypton: Did you find time to take a look at that little Daniel Krawisz article I mentioned?
Populo: Yes, it was vaguely interesting, I suppose.
Crypton: So you didn’t like it much?
Populo: Frankly Crypton, it reminded me of the side of you I like least, and having downed a few horns of ale, I’ll be double frank — it had a whiff of … well … treachery about it. To spend so much attention upon the subtleties of potential defections, it’s unmanly, somehow.
Crypton: That’s excellent Populo, because I was going to suggest that gaming-out Deep State defections is the only practical strategic topic worthy of NRx consideration. It seems that we have our conversation plotted for us.

Continue Reading