(Open thread, plus links.)

Yuray the task-master. A sustained meditation on capital teleology. Another argument for teleology. Multicultural madness. Who the hell are these people? Brett Stevens lays it all out. Meta-round-up.

Elections can be confusing: “In Georgia, retiree Joyce Burns said Obama was risking a biblical apocalypse by criticizing Israel. The life-long Democrat said she voted Republican this time. ‘I believe we’re in the Latter Times,’ said Burns, 61. ‘When everyone goes against Israel, that’s when I believe Jesus will come back.'” Not that it matters: “… both Republicans and Democrats should face up to a much bigger truth: Neither party as currently constituted has a real future.” Dampier has a plan. Racing it up. Some additional sound coverage.

Best of the Schadenfreude (that last one is from Morford, the gift who keeps on giving). … and one more. There’s a superficial win, and a deep win.

A few Ebola science links.

Tentacular epic now hyper-epic.

SST re-visits motte-and-bailey doctrines (patching us through to the source).

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Mark Yuray has made me a believer. From nominal head-nodding towards the Moldbug model of caste identities, I’ve been dragged into utter compliance (with an even simpler variant), in awe-struck wonder at its explanatory power.

@AimlessGromar @Outsideness @ClarkHat The difference between #Rx and #NRx IMO is only caste.

— Mark Yuray (@MarkYuray) November 4, 2014

@Outsideness @AimlessGromar @ClarkHat The disagreement seems to be whether theorizing is necessary or not i.e. a caste difference.

— Mark Yuray (@MarkYuray) November 4, 2014

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(Open thread, links, stuff …)

The better half has been in NY for a few days, so I’ve been juggling some unusually intense kid-management with getting my (short) time-travel book up on Kindle, and all kinds of threads have been dropped. Kindle throws me into a greater state of ambivalence than anything else I know. It’s at once a delight — raw disintermediation euphoria — and an absolute nightmare due to the obstruction the interface puts in the way of editorial control. Would it really be impossible to allow an editorial function at the MOBI end? It seems obvious that Amazon has put almost the whole of its attention into the reader-experience end, but it’s getting content-providers fused with the process that will lock-in the future. The present set-up can only be considered a flaky intermediate stage.

While I’ve been distracted, NRx seems to have been in exceptionally productive mode. Among the best things I’ve picked up on have been an epic overview of far-right practicality by Yuray, Nydwracu on the slow collapse, Anomaly revisiting the Trichotomy, Poseidon Awoke on Left-Liberal difference, and Dampier prodding traditionalists, and tech-comms (but this might have been my favorite recent Dampier piece). Feminist outreach from Jim: “A woman is like a badly behaved dog …” Machine Lords. Cathedral Cultural Studies. He‘s baaaaack.

Gamergate remains a popcorn machine. Some outer-edge of lunacy exploration here (sample: “… if South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can do it, I don’t think I’m asking so much. … America is Gamergate”). ClarkHat chats to AoS. Tactical stuff. Christian-shaming. Alexa-analytics on the great migration. The Grays. Hitler.

Ebola science. (This story is losing its grip on my mind — strange that something continuing up an exponential curve can do that.)

Clausewitz and nonlinearity (superbly done).

Games Theory simulation for Eth-Nats.

Free Northerner completes his To Be A Christian series (with internal links to the rest). And, from Matt Walsh: “We are, without a doubt, the most marriage-averse group in human history.”

A conversation with Nicholas Wade.

“I don’t care.”

ADDED: The Dampier Trichotomy-tour is completed (with a penetrating look at nationalism).

Another blog comment reproduction, this one from More Right, where Nyan Sandwich lays out the basic stress-lines of a potential tech-comm schism (of a kind initially — and cryptically — proposed in a tweet):

There are definitely two opposing theories of a fast high-tech future. I call them “Accelerationism” and “Futurism”

I’m a futurist Techcom, Land is an accelerationist Techcom.

FWIW I think this is nicely done, but the complexities will explode when we get into the details. Fortunately, distinctions closely paralleling Nyan’s enhancement / artifice option have been quite carefully honed within certain parts of the Singularity literature. Hugo de Garis, in particular, does a lot with it — through the discrimination between ‘Cosmists’ (artificers) and ‘Cyborgists’ (enhancers) — although he thinks it is ultimately unstable, and a more sharply polarized species-conservative / techno-futurist conflict is bound to eventually absorb it.

It’s also interesting to see Nyan describe himself as a “futurist Techcom”. That’s new, isn’t it?

Even in the absence of its energetic Catholic constituency, it could be tempting to identify NRx as an anti-Calvinist ideology, given the centrality of the occulted Calvinist inheritance to Moldbug’s critique of modernity. As Foseti remarks (in what remains a high-water mark of Neoreactionary exegesis):

Believe it or not, even though Moldbug’s definition of the Left is basically the first thing he wrote about, there is a fair amount of debate about this topic in “reactionary” circles. This debate is sometimes referred to as The Puritan Question. (In addition to Puritan, Moldbug also uses the terms: Progressive idealism, ultra-Calvinism, crypto-Christian, Unitarian universalists, etc.)

It is no part of this blog’s brief to facilitate the more somnolent — and at times simply derisive — positionings which Moldbug’s diagnosis can appear to open. While our Catholic friends may consider themselves to be securely located outside the syndrome under consideration, this attitude corresponds, structurally, or systematically, to a minority position (irrespective of the numbers involved). As a dissident schismatic sect, the NRx main-current is cladistically enveloped by the object of its critique. ‘Calvinism’ — in its historical and theoretical extension — is a problematic horizon, within which NRx is embedded, before it can conceivably be construed as a despised object for dismissal.

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(Open thread and links (this week, a lot of links (if not quite at Free Northener dimensions))

ClarkHat took the #Gamergate discussion to the next level (to massive and sustained applause). If we’re framing this as the long war, argues Ben Southwood, then there’s only one way to bet: “Like it has won almost every major political battle since the Glorious Revolution ([if slowly, sometimes]) the left is going to win this one because it controls the commanding heights of the media, allowing it to bring the mass public on side, and because its adherents follow their faith with a religious zeal. … Gamergate is one of the most interesting things to happen in years, but I don’t think it will win.” In any case, we shouldn’t get too excited about the players here, or believe much that is attributed to them. Best to focus on Gawker losing it completely. On the creation of nerds. Dissymmetry.

On the Ebola-Channel, it was New York, Mali, and bio-warfare rumor week. The highlight article was Richard Preston’s New Yorker piece, but there was plenty of additional quality commentary. Also, a variety of political responses, and policy review pieces. (other diseases are falling through the cracks.)

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If NRx is spiraling back into a second phase of entryism paranoia, it looks as if it might be a lot more reflexively intense — and therefore more creative — than the last one. It’s still too early to get a firm grip at this point, and it is quite possible that the very nature of the threat makes confident apprehension an unrealistic expectation. Subversion is an abstract horror, or integral obscurity, presumed to be actively restraining itself from emergence as a phenomenon. However, some stimulating indicators:

I could become a leftist tommorow, I'd just have to choose. And how would you guys notice if I didn't want you to?

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) October 25, 2014

The self-exemplification (by Konkvistador) here has surely to be taken as the provocation to a more abstract suggestion. If ‘I’ could do it, then others could too. The generalization is strongly encouraged:

#AIACC And everyone is a radical leftist hiding. Maybe I'm a leftist who forgot he was one.

— Konkvistador (@asilentsky) October 24, 2014

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Via Nydrwracu comes this:

There’s a remarkably bad-tempered argument taking place among racial identitarians at the moment (some links here), which makes the civility and intelligence of these remarks all the more notable. (For this blog, the Social Matter discussion was a reminder of the — similarly civilized — exchange with Matt Parrott that took place in the comment thread here.)

In case anyone is somehow unclear about the quality of the neighborhood White Nationalism finds itself in, or adjacent to, it’s worth a brief composite citation from the Andrew Anglin post cited above:

You [Colin Liddell] agree with Jewish agendas, which is why you would wish to obfuscate the fact that Jews are responsible for everything by claiming we shouldn’t blame the Jews for our problems. … The reason these two [CL plus Greg Johnson] are on the same side against me is that they share the quality that they have no interest in a popular movement, and despise anyone who would attempt to take that route. … I am, unashamedly, a populist. Every successful revolutionary movement in history has been populist in nature … Hitler was a populist.

While I have to confess to finding Anglin entertaining, I hope it goes without saying that this kind of thinking has nothing at all to do with NRx. In fact, revolutionary populism almost perfectly captures what Neoreaction is not. NRx is notoriously fissiparous, but on the gulf dividing all its variants from racial Jacobinism there can surely be no controversy. So the barking you can hear in the background serves as necessary context. (This does not count as an objection to the Neo-Nazis acquiring their own state, since that would make it even easier not to live among them than it is already. Unfortunately, it is not easy to imagine the separatist negotiations going smoothly.)

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It’s going to be a challenge cranking-up the chaos level this week, but away you go. First, in accordance with the emerging ritual, a few miscellaneous links.

Moldbug mainstreaming watch. Also (quickly) from in and around the reactosphere: Triune critique. This post captures the quintessence of Anissimovite new reaction. An almost-equally characteristic overview from Nydwracu. Another IQ shredder? An 8chan podcast on NRx. “They woke up confused from fractured dreams, then groggily dug through memories to remember only a strange hooded figure, a brief pinch near the neck and then blackness …”

Over in the more traditional New Right, there’s some spectacular internecine conflict taking place. This is the best guide. Sample commentary from Counter-Currents and Alternative Right, who are both fully pitched in (on approximately the same side — here‘s the other). It seems to have been ignited by this preposterously entertaining series of events, embarrassments, apologies, and discombobulations. Simply noticing this has your brain curving back towards /pol/. … then there was the whole Budapest brouhaha, which seems to have driven the usually level-headed Jared Taylor into WN Utopian race nuttiness. (If you managed to save a little of that popcorn, you’ll be glad you did.)

As Ebola gets increasingly terrifying (*ahem*), it has begun to provoke an ever wider range of political commentary. (I like Gary North’s prediction: “An Ebola pandemic will create a ‘distrust in government’ pandemic.”)

Brevity.

On Jaynes and ancient mythology (from 2010)

IQ and autism (some facts).

Boltzmann Brains.

Galton’s awkward legacy. Also, Byron Roth on Immigration and Dysgenics.

Some critical guidance for qabbalists on the mind-traps of small numbers.