(Weekly open thread.) XS is sticking with the settled schedule, despite the risk of chaos overdose. It’s been that kind of week. Spotty coverage of 4chan craziness and failed secession in the Anglosphere heartland doesn’t begin to exhaust it.

For anybody tugging at the scorched /pol/ thread, this is an interesting — and impressively sophisticated — strand to pull at (+ some Ebola-Chan context). ++ Trolls are Kulaks — Science. Free Northener on #Gamergate (+ NIO anticipates the storm).

The regular Mitrailleuse secession round-up makes serves as a good Scottish re-dependence portal. Some now dated, but stimulating Scotland-related commentary here, here, here, and here. (Also loosely related, and highly-recommended, from Mitrailleuse.) This might also be the place to throw in some Proprietary Cities links (1, 2, 3).

Anything — however embryonic — proposing to synthesize Neoreaction and Accelerationism is bound to get a hearing here. This is the sign. From a left-slanted sensibility, but related.

Dark comedy on the civilization-morbidity front at the MacArthur Genius Grants. (Some residual seriousness still apparent.) Grants and awards are clearly a crucial zone of conflict.

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Richard Fernandez seizes upon Roger Cohen’s recent NYT lamentation (here) to explore the predicament of America’s narcissistic, ruin-mongering elite, as the world they broke collapses about them:

What’s the alternative to stupidity now? Now that they’ve gone so far it’s almost a shame not to see it through to the end. And therein rests the last remaining chance of the liberal establishment, imploring such divinities as they still believe in — luck maybe — that their hero can create a chaos so complete it will embroil the entire Muslim world, Russia and China in a vast conflagration before it consumes them.

Note: Cohen’s inclusion of a citation from Kipling’s The Gods of the Copybook Headings (in the NYT!) is a sure sign of the End Times. It makes me wonder whether the liberal media elite will be desperately chanting Moldbug poetry when Zack finally closes in.

Via Cussans (dark channels), comes this crucial document on the intersection of racial anthropology and international institutional politics. The abstract:

From 1945 and the following 20 years UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – was at the heart of a dispute in international scientific circles over the correct definition of the concept of race. This was essentially a dispute about whether the natural sciences or the social sciences should take precedence in determining the origins of human difference, of social division and of the attribution of value. The article provides an overview of the work on race carried out by UNESCO, examines the measures it took to combat racism, pays special attention to their political and social impact in various member states, and demonstrates how UNESCO played a major part in imposing a new view of man: UNESCO Man.

The only thing that Neoconservatism has to offer a non-psychotic policy analyst is bitching, but sometimes the bitching can be pretty good. Bret Stephens (via Brett Stevens (sorry, I had to do that)):

… None of these fiascos — for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting to one side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset, the mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva conferences on Syria, the catastrophic interim agreement with Iran, the de facto death of the U.S. free-trade agenda, the overhyped opening to Burma, the orphaned victory in Libya, the poisoned relationship with Egypt, and the disastrous cuts to the Defense budget — can be explained away as a matter of tough geopolitical luck. Where, then, does the source of failure lie? […] The myth of Obama’s brilliance paradoxically obscures the fact that he’s no fool. The point is especially important to note because the failure of Obama’s foreign policy is not, ultimately, a reflection of his character or IQ. It is the consequence of an ideology.

The ‘ideology’ at its root, of course, is evangelical egalitarian universalism, and it is one the Neoconservatives entirely share. At the limit, which is now being encountered, what America is makes it impossible for it to succeed at what it wants.

… William S. Lind asks in this recent panel discussion (third speaker, just after 43 minutes in). “The foreign policy establishment, or the country?” The relevant thread of his argument: The aggressive foreign policy posture of the United States is counter-productively promoting global disorder, which eventually threatens domestic calamity. When the US fights a foreign state, Lind argues, it advances the chaotic “forces of the fourth generation” — a more formidable opponent than even the most obdurately non-compliant state is able to be. America’s “offensive grand strategy” — tied to a high-level of concern for the internal political arrangements of foreign countries — is sowing dragon’s teeth.

TNIO has been coaxing NRx onto a path of broadened geopolitical scope. There is an unavoidable irony here. The Old Right tends naturally to a preoccupation with hearth-and-home, so that its preferred policy posture (non-interventionism) is often accompanied by — or even buried within — a retraction of mental energy from distant questions. The Neoconservative synthesis of foreign policy activism and cosmopolitan fascination with foreign affairs is far more psychologically consistent, regardless of its errors. For anti-globalists to sustain a panoramic perspective takes work.

This work is important, if realistic analysis is the goal, because distant eventualities hugely impinge. The existence and fate of Neoreaction depends far more upon the great churning machinery of world history than upon the local decisions of its favored ‘little platoons’. To misquote Lenin: Even if you are not interested in the system of the world, it is interested in you.

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Adam Garfinkle on the profound pointlessness of international ambitions in the Middle East:

Iraq, and Libya have pretty much fallen to pieces, and Lebanon breathes whatever vapors Syria wafts its way. Egypt is an economic corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead and so won’t fall down. (For my ducats there is no better symbol of the Egyptian circumstance than Cairo’s City of the Dead — a vast cemetery full of countless squatters.) Jordan is suffering a multi-sourced nervous breakdown, complete with anti-Hashemite mobs. Algeria and Bahrain are armed camps, albeit for different reasons. Tunisia is a political weathervane that cannot control its borders. Morocco is fragile and faces a rising Berber challenge. Yemen is an armed mess. Sudan is a truncated basket case. Only great gobs of resource rents keep Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar afloat and seemingly quiescent. Oman may be the only Arab country that has managed to keep its balance, and it’s not a real state anyway — just a family with a flag.

This sad state of affairs is not the wayward result of the so-called Arab Spring. Not only does it long predate the Arab Spring, but all that misnamed and wildly misunderstood phenomenon wrought was to accelerate the ongoing decay of the highly unappealing authority relationships in these societies. It has disrupted the ugly and the unacceptable in different ways in different countries, since they’re all different. But with the possible exception of Tunisia (and the jury is still out), the results have not been any improvement on the status quo ante. Some state authorities have their backs up and are trying to be more oppressive than ever, while others are simply flailing.

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A passing comment from Peter Frost, on the changing tides of civilization:

Lab work will probably have to be offshored, not because it’s cheaper to do elsewhere but because the “free world” is no longer the best place for unimpeded scientific inquiry. A Hong Kong team is conducting a large-scale investigation into the genetics of intelligence, and nothing comparable is being done in either North America or Western Europe. Cost isn’t the reason.

This will be needed when we get back to the topic (eventually):

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Couldn’t resist sharing this:

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Having seen this a few times now (most recently here, where it’s described as a “five-year plan”), I decided I just had to have it.

FWIW I don’t expect Vienna to have been absorbed into the renascent Caliphate by 2019.
(I don’t expect things to have calmed down, either.)

The Islamic Vortex series was not completed, so it needs re-visiting, but I think it’s holding up quite well (parts 1, 2, 3, 3a, 3b, 4, 5).