(This has been a UF (2.1) theme up to now, but what’s the point of schizophrenia without zig-zags?)
Someone insulted a POC
With Whitey on a comet
They didn't use the pronoun zhe
And Whitey's on a comet
— Surviving Babel (@SurvivingBabel) November 13, 2014
The circular argument to end all circular arguments from John Gray:
Social evolution is just a modern myth. No scientific theory exists about how the process is supposed to work. There’s been much empty chatter about memes — units of information or meaning that supposedly compete with one another in society. But there’s no mechanism for the selection of human concepts similar to that which Darwin believed operated among species and which later scientists showed at work among genes. Bad ideas like racism seem to hang around forever, while the silly idea of social evolution has shown an awesome power to mutate and survive.
(Gnon laughs.)
(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.
Tentacular epic now hyper-epic.
SST re-visits motte-and-bailey doctrines (patching us through to the source).
The Outer-Right, in all its principal strands, has a horrified fascination with decline. Is this basic proposition even slightly controversial? It’s not easy to see how it could be. This is a zone of convergence of such intimidating enormity that even beginning to heap up link support seems futile. Taking the Trichotomy as a rough guide reveals the pattern starkly:
(1) Religious traditionalists see a continuous decline trend from the Reformation to the most recent frenzy of evangelical hyper-secularism.
(2) Ethno-Nationalists see a process of accelerating demographic destruction driven — or at least lucidly articulated — by left-wing race politics.
(3) Techno-Commercialists see the systematic destruction of capital by cancerous Leviathan and macroeconomic high-fraudulence, undermining economic incentives, crushing time-horizons, and garbling price-discovery into fiat noise.
In each case, the online-ecologies (and associated micro-cultures) sharing the respective deep intuitions of progressive ruin are too enormous to conveniently apprehend. What everyone on the Outer-Right shares (and I’m now hardening this up, into a definition) is the adamantine confidence that the basic socio-political process is radically morbid, and is leading inexorably to utter ruin.
No surprise, then, that John Michael Greer finds many attentive readers in our camp. His latest (and still incomplete) series on Dark Age America resonates with particular strength. The most recent installment, which discusses the impending collapse of the market system, through quasi-Marxist crisis, on its way to many centuries of neo-feudalism, is bound to raise some tech-comm eyebrows, but it nevertheless occupies the same broad forecast space. If people are stocking their basements with ammo, silver coins, and dried beans for Greer reasons rather than Stockman ones, they might cut back a little on the coins, but they’re not going to stop stocking the basement. Differences seem to lie in the details.
The formulation of this concept was a building-block moment for NRx, but the trend in its usage has been dismally regressive. Apparently devised as a tool for the analysis of social identities, it is increasingly invoked as a rallying-cry for neo-tribalism. From the perspective of Outside in, it will soon become entirely toxic unless it is dramatically clarified.
Nydwracu initially employs the word ‘thede’ to designate the substance of group identity, “a superindividual grouping that its constituent individuals feel affiliation with and (therefore?) positive estimates of.” Thedes are multiple, overlapping, sometimes concentric, and honed by antagonistic in-group/out-group determinations. They are seen as following from the understanding that “Man is a social animal.” Ideological arguments disguise thede conflicts. At this level of abstraction, there is little to find objectionable.
In his essay on Natural Law, Jim writes:
Man is a rational animal, a social animal, a property owning animal, and a maker of things. He is social in the way that wolves and penguins are social, not social in the way that bees are social. The kind of society that is right for bees, a totalitarian society, is not right for people. In the language of sociobiology, humans are social, but not eusocial. Natural law follows from the nature of men, from the kind of animal that we are. We have the right to life, liberty and property, the right to defend ourselves against those who would rob, enslave, or kill us, because of the kind of animal that we are.
Occupying a band of group integration between ants and tigers, humans have intermediate sociality. Even the tightest mode of human social organization is loose relative to an ant colony, and even the loosest is tight relative to a solitary feline. In human societies, neither collectivity nor individuality is ever absolute, and — even though these ‘poles’ are commonly exaggerated for polemical purposes — they realistically apply only to a range of group integrations (which is both narrow and significantly differentiated). To say that “man is a social animal” does not mean that collectivity is the fundamental human truth, any more than the opposite. It means that man is a creature of the middle (and the middle has a span).
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.)
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.”)
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.
Steve Sailer’s remarks on the twentieth anniversary of The Bell Curve make a strong case for his conclusion:
A decade ago, I was interviewing an expert psychometrician who had been head of testing for one of the major branches of the military. He proudly recounted that he had given Charles Murray access to the Pentagon’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth data that makes up the central spine of The Bell Curve. He had only one objection to Herrnstein and Murray’s interpretation of his numbers: they were too cautious, too nice.
That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.
(Robert VerBruggen’s more cautious commentary is also surprisingly sane for a comparatively mainstream media channel.)
Note: As you can see, the new Archenemied capacities of this blog includes a tidied-up block-quote function — but it strips out the caps (going all hbdchick). Is this a tolerable format? I’d be inclined against it, but I know there’s a passionate block-quote chorus out there …
(Open thread, and stuff.)
Too much Ebola news and commentary to process, from speculative nightmares of various kinds, to historical reminiscences, neo-Puritan panic attacks, border disputes, alarm calls, and conspiracy theory.
Ron Paul, John Glanton, and Keith Preston walk into a bar. The bartender says: “OK, break it up gentlemen.” (Jordan Bloom should get it.) Related.
The game has changed.
An unfortunate invention.
A humorous access-gate into a serious insight at AoS:
This is not a government; this a corporate PR firm. The PR firm has a smaller child corporation that is tangentially in the business of government, and its chief stock in trade is failure.
The PR firm runs the show, and the corporate PR firm is here to tell you two things:
1, everything’s fine, nothing to see here, errors were made but by the way errors weren’t even made,
and,
2, if you don’t agree, there’s something wrong with you. Perhaps racism.
A social machine designed for accelerating system-collapse would be built pretty much exactly like this. (Read the whole post for explanatory context.)