progressive dreamland

By 2050, the County Palatine of Kenya is living a golden age – after some serious trouble during the Upheaval and subsequent transitions. Prince Barack Obama II has reigned fairly and equally for the last 30 years, leading the region to be one of the most important centers of commerce and science of the world (which isn’t hard since the world is now, except for a few very impressive regions, mostly rubble).

Government is democratic – well, not democratic by 20th century or even 19th century standards, but by the “new democratic rule” with which Obama inspired many noble minds. The state is organized around a federated electoral board of public universities, whose very diverse body of Deans elects the Prince – for life. At the Prince’s death or resignation, the Supreme Council gathers to deliberate who among them is to be the new Prince. Malia Obama is likely to win the nomination at her father’s death, becoming the first Princess of Kenya.

The Deans themselves are elected by the faculty within their universities; which are the more direct administrators of their territories. There are over 50 territories within the Palatinate, each one with their own public universities. These universities are the center for public policy in each territory. Entrance is free and universal to all, provided a certain minimum score obtained in the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which varies from one university to another.

The public administration is comprised of highly specialized scholars, with proven aptitude, expertise and experience in their own fields, and is subjected to peer review and based on good and sound science. The Citizen Constitution of the Palatinate states clearly that “the official doctrine guiding and inspiring the acts of the State is the belief in unlimited progress for all the human race and associate animals”.

The main source of revenue is a progressive single tax on land and the revenues of the much publicized national health systems, aptly named Obamacare™, which charges an individual user fee, half of which goes to the also very publicized universal basic income, called the “Georgine” by locals. The Prince’s family lives off Obamacare’s other half revenue, while the Deans and other public functionaries extract the land tax locally as funds to the universities, each one of which choose how to best allocate it.

Law is progressive. Individual liberties are sacred, and so all kinds of marriage contracts and commerce are allowed. Prostitution and drug sales are major business in the country. Safe spaces are a constitutional guarantee. Enforcement is provided by specialized divisions within universities, relying mostly on “Citizen Drones” to remove offenders. White men are not allowed to for Safe Spaces and are closely watched to avoid uncooperative behavior. Hate speech surveillance is considered a matter of personal honor, and publishable with ostracism, especially by Deans and other university staff.  Left-wing radicals are sent to the barbaric borders of the realm, under supervision of radical-leaning professors, in order to try and develop their own utopias. If they work, eventually they are incorporated into the realm of the Palatinate as an independent territory. Otherwise, radicals may join their own universities once again, or emigrate if they prefer. Criminals are treated within universities by specialists in psychology, criminology and sociology, in order to evaluate the trends and create specific public policy towards diminishing crime. They are kept in VR training and other ethically approved treatment, such as testosterone reduction, until considered safe to come to society.

Guns are strictly banned and produced solely by the government in association with high-tech enterprises. Both internal police and external defense are operated by specialist war-game strategists and robotic engineers which operate and guide armies of citizen drones, both around the border and within territories. Those are directly subordinate to the Prince. Justice is operated by a court of specialist judges with the aid of AI helpers which search the vast jurisprudence and doctrine, now mostly formalized as deductions from Constitutional Axioms.

External relations are now generally great, in spite of initial hard feelings. The Trike is the main commercial and diplomatic partner, reactionary radicals being regularly traded for progressive talents and most high-tech enterprises operating in both countries. The Confucian Republic and its surrogate states around the Palatinate are less than happy with this arrangement, which fundamentally blocks many commercial routes around East Africa, but respectful relations have been kept in the last years, mostly because of intermediation by the Trike.

Population is highly diverse, having been drawn from high-IQ graduates and undergraduates from all over the world during the Upheaval. Original African populations have been integrated, mostly through the explosive commercial and scientific boom of the late 2030’s, and now comprise the “neo-bourgeoisie” of the country. Fertility is usually around 2 children, one naturally born and another usually genetically engineered and born within universities through in-vitro fertilization. Non-university people are encouraged to settle in abandoned lands next to the borders.

The prospects are good in the foreseeable future, although the death of Prince Obama might bring complications, since the Deans have been lately aligned around two camps. Radical-leaning ones wish for a return of popular elections, less radical ones argue popular elections are unnecessary given the Prince is a mere accessory figure. If the radical party gets its way, and nominate their preferred Dean for Prince, external relations with the Trike and internal policy might be seriously affected. It doesn’t seem likely for the moment, since most radical-leaning professors have been killed in a barbaric attack to the borders last year.

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on realism (aka “stop whining”)

if reality rules, the first thing is to recognize it.

civilization works and wins out. liberal civilization works better and wins out even more often.

civilization is able to produce a legitimized and hence very functional hierarchy out of essentially egalitarian young male primates. this turns out to be a very efficient military organization, that eliminates its competition. territorial conquest follows.

the downside of civilization is that after some time it gets exhausted. status competition becomes more central than military conquer, resources get mostly concentrated in the hand of a few, people – especially the essentially egalitarian young male primates who were the basis of civilization – get fucking pissed off at dying for a few leaders (that are usually the moronic sons of former approved kings, or the compulsive liar politicians of late republics) and internal order collapses inexorably. too bad, but natural selection is a tough bitch. stupidity dies.

western (i.e., liberal) civilization works pretty much the same way all civilizations: astounding military conquest, territorial expansion, ensuing stupidity in managing social order. but some strange loops make liberal civilization weirder (and gets one wondering if this time it’s different).

anyone attempting to analyse or do something in the present is certainly advised to looking back to history as a teacher. but not as a moral teacher. to think that history is unfair – our side lost! – is already to give up any sort of teaching it may have. spooky ghosts won’t teach you what works. and what doesn’t work dies. in fact the very definition of “death” could be “not functioning”. whining about how wicked civilization is, or how improperly demoralized liberal civilization has become, is to ignore that, well, civilization slaughtered every other type of social organization and, well, liberal civilization overtook the globe. sadness is not an argument.

once one learns the lessons of history, the question is “what happens next?” good prediction makes fortune. the more moralistic “what should be done?” is going to look for ghosts. of course, individually everyone will have to decide what to do at every moment. that’s the predicament of human life: imperfect knowledge and hence free will. our feebleness entertains the gods. but if a blurry glimpse of the future is allowed to our primitive senses through prediction, fortune may be made.

so, what works for the Left in the wake of the 21st century, in view of history and the little prediction we can harvest? a few themes suggest themselves:

1) give up governments, go to small scale: fragmentation is becoming the worldwide trend, not onyl in communication, but emanating out of it into human organization. it’s a known in network science that centralized networks are less resilient (and hence less durable) than decentralized or (preferrably) distributed ones.

2) relentless outbreeding and/or genetic engineering towards human admixture (we’ve been through this yesterday, go check).

3) guns and AI are your friends; “proper science” is not: if we’re coming back to small-scale, lab-coat monks are not the raw materials. we need insane inventors, like old scientists, not theoreticians.

4) kill Christianity once and for all; side with witches: i am not one to despise the strength of organized rituals, but rejecting human imperfection in search for some “transcendental values” (even if they are oh so very progressive), and looking forward to taming dissent, is not at all what the Left feeds on. what ever happened to “we are the daughters of all the witches you couldn’t burn”. stick to the runes and the naturalness of paganism. the elementals are closer to reality than the Pope or the Good Book.

5) stop whining; start doing: the Left shall slowly perish into a whirlwind of complaints as long as it views its objective as “pleading for our rights”. the State doesn’t care, God doesn’t care, no one cares, which your supposed “rights” are. if you can’t build and defend them, they are void.

a realist Left, that understands power in order to effectively distribute it, that brings its madness into action (and not merely lodge it in low-grade literary academic papers) is the challenge ahead. if we fail reality, reality doesn’t go away, we do.

whining will only get yourself killed.

radical feminism: the only hope for the Left

In 1987, Nick Land nailed down the state of globalized capitalism structured around nation-states in his “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest” (the first text in this wonderful publication of his earlier work, the references are to it):

The displacement of the political consequences of wage labour relations away from the metropolis is not an incidental feature of capital accumulation, as the economic purists aligned to both the bourgeoisie and the workerist left assert. It is rather the fundamental condition of capital as nothing other than an explicit aggression against the masses. (..) Capital has always sought to distance itself in reality – i.e. geographically – from this brutal political infrastructure. After all, the ideal of bourgeois politics is the absence of politics, since capital is nothing other than the consistent displacement of social decision-making into the marketplace. But this ideal of total de-politicization, or the absolute annihilation of resistance to market relations, is an impossible megalomaniac fantasy, and Marx’s contention that labour trading at its natural price in an undistorted market (equal to the cost of its reproduction) will tend strongly to express an equally ‘natural’ political refusal of the market, continues to haunt the global bourgeoisie. The only practical option available to the rulers of capitalist societies has lain in the global disaggregation of the political system, accompanied by a regional distortion of the world labour trading system in favour of the working classes in the metropolitan regions (,welfare capitalism’). This is why a deep complicity has continued to exist between the form of the ‘nation state’ as international political agent and an economic order based upon the commodification of labour. Since it is of systematic necessity that the economic conditions of an undistorted labour market are accompanied by political crisis, the world order functions as an integrated process based upon the flow of market-priced labour into the metropolis from the Third World (on the basis of the economic form of capital production), and the export of political instability to the Third World from the metropolis (on the basis of the political form of autonomous national sovereignty). The global labour market is easily interpreted, therefore, as a sustained demographic disaster that is systematically displaced away from the political institutions of the metropolis. This process of displacement, which is the ultimate ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure’ of capital accumulation, is dependent upon those issues of ‘kinships’ or ‘marriage organization’ (the sexual economy of gender and race) which Marxists have often tended to consider as surface features of an underlying mode of production. (pp. 57-9)

essentially, nation states are pumps to export political entropy from the western liberal metropolis to its periphery. and they are organized through a historical detachment of trade and marriage, giving rise to new mores of national endogamy:

These two aspects, the genealogical and the logical, are functions of a position of abstract masculine subjectivity coincident with the patronymic. This position is the proto-cultural fundament of everything that is able to count as the same. The tradition is thus rooted in a communication between culture and population, whose medium is the stability (‘identity’) of the male line. Modernity is not merely a compromise between novel forms of commercially driven social organization and this archaic cultural pattern of patrilineal exogamy, but more fundamentally, a deepening of the compromise already integral to any exogamy that is able to remain patrilineal. It is only by understanding the inhibitive function of patriarchies in relation to exogamic dissipation (an inhibition that is supremely logical in that it conserves identity, and which is for this reason violently xenophobic) that we can make sense of capital production and its tendency towards the peculiar cultural mutation that was baptised by Mussolini as ‘fascism’ . This is because the restriction of cultural synthesis, based upon a strenuous endogamy at the level of the national community, is the ultimate outcome of the concerted ‘liberalization’ of kinship organizations within (metropolitan) industrial societies. (pp. 60-1)

to break this pump, women need to take up whatever arms are at their disposal against the sexual and racial apartheid the modern nation-state begets:

The women of the earth are segmented only by their fathers and husbands. Their praxial fusion is indistinguishable from the struggle against the micro-powers that suppress them most immediately. That is why the proto-fascism of nationality laws and immigration controls tends to have a sexist character as well as a racist one. It is because women are the historical realization of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands. (p. 78)

If feminist struggles have been constantly deprioritized in theory and practice it is surely because of their idealistic recoil from the currency of violence, which is to say, from the only definitive ‘matter’ of politics. The state apparatus of an advanced industrial society can certainly not be defeated without a willingness to escalate the cycle of violence without limit. It is a terrible fact that atrocity is not the perversion, but the very motor of such struggles: the language of inexorable political will. A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell. (p. 79, my emphasis)

violent feminist uprising is the only realistic tactics for pursuing the destruction of western civilization (what Land is calling here “capitalism” – for capitalism proper is not destroyable, not by humans, but that’s for another time). anything short of an effective army of sanguinary amazons – however technologically implemented to overcome olden biological deficits – is doomed to mere reformism and oblivion.

For it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order. (p. 80)

at this point it’s important to understand how liberalism (the Left as such) came into being – which is why the destruction of endogamies is so important. from hbd chick:

medieval christianity weakened the old patrilineal clannish (or kindred-based) systems because it insisted upon the avoidance of cousin marriage which reduced the genetic ties between extended family members and set the stage for the selection of very different behavioral patterns in parts of northwestern europe — “core” europe. (…) the long-term outbreeding of northwestern europeans, which began in the early medieval period, resulted in a new social environment for these populations. (…) with a new environment — in this case a new social environment — comes new selection pressures. (…) what sorts of traits would’ve been selected for in individuals in long-term outbreeding societies where there would’ve been less of a genetic payoff in being altruistic towards extended family? i think you would (or could) have greater selection for individuals having behavioral traits which drive them to contribute more to the broader community. since the payoff for aiding extended family was no longer so great in “core” europe after many generations of outbreeding (i.e. avoiding close cousin marriage), it might’ve begun to pay equally well — or well enough — to aid non-family members (rather than extended family members) — to cooperate with them in the hopes of receiving aid back. in a society where one doesn’t have an extended family to fall back on, it might be very useful to possess traits which enable the successful collaboration with non-family — being trusting and trustworty, for instance. a society of such individuals might very likely: be comprised of small-sized families; have a higher average iq since individuals had to fend for themselves more; have more (liberal) democracy, more civic-mindedness, and less corruption since everyone would be more oriented towards the commonweal and not towards their extended family members. homicide rates would be low, too. (my emphasis)

if you want a world of equality and individual liberty, civic-mindedness and social trust and all the beauty of a left-wing world, relentless outbreeding is the way to go. short of genetic manipulation, it’s the best way out for the left.

if you read hbd chick’s article, it seems the pattern of exogamy has to be kept for a long time, every generation for a thousand years, at the very least. that demands some sort of cultural mechanism to maintain. in early medieval Europe, this mechanism was the manorial system:

the second reason manorialism was so important was because this was the vehicle via which the ecclesiastical and secular laws against cousin marriage could be enforced.

the Left will need something similar, on a world scale, if this is going anywhere. radical feminism is something around those lines: the whole emphasis in women independence and it’s interseccional amendments help improve cross-racial outbreeding. this is not, of course, enough. something more is needed. something to ensure 1) international, cross-ethnic outbreeding; 2) the survival of the offspring at every generation. also, the burdens of childbearing and rearing have to be dealt with.

women that travel constantly and mass immigration from other countries may help. matriarchal organizations may be useful as well, but it needs more than just the paint of a fancy intellectual theory to it. it needs something next to religious belief (and its related institutions and rituals): some sacred duty of motherhood and sexual liberty, some sinful character to inbreeding within the nation and to sticking to one man all life long. some form of social networked support as well. a new prohibition of incest. or maybe just the old one, taken to its extreme.

as Land puts it:

The disaster of world history is that capitalism was never the progressive unwinding of patrilineage through a series of generalized exploitative relations associated with a trans-cultural exogamy, leading to an uncontrollable eruption of feminine (i.e. migrant) alterity into the father’s heartland, and thus to the emergence of a radical – or ethnically disruptive and post-patriarchal – synthesis. (…) Capital is the point at which a culture refuses the possibility – which it has itself engendered – of pushing the prohibition of incest towards its limit. (pp. 62-3)

a leftist critique of democracy

CrimethInc has put out an amazing critique of democracy from an anarchist point of view:

“Laws, courts, prisons, intelligence agencies, tax collectors, armies, police—most of the instruments of coercive power that we consider oppressive in a monarchy or a dictatorship operate the same way in a democracy. Yet when we’re permitted to cast ballots about who supervises them, we’re supposed to regard them as ours, even when they’re used against us. This is the great achievement of two and a half centuries of democratic revolutions: instead of abolishing the means by which kings governed, they rendered those means popular.”

the NRx are not alone.

to the left #2

another roundup of (neo)reactionry usefulness to the Left.

two themes appeared rather consistently: the antinomy, usually in the form of (imo correct) left/right divides; and passivism (rs), which is now offered as the main strategy for reactionaries. I’ll deal with those first, then proceed to some criticism of other assorted topics. finally, i’ll shed the gems that the Right offered for our learning. persevere, there’s a great surprise at the end. indeed.

* * * * *

Antinomy

Adam Wallace:

The upright is traditionally seen as represented by the vertical “I” — the erect totem of force; that which moves, as opposed to the waters which flow, which are moved, represented by the horizontal “–“: there is a dichotomy here, as with all things. The masculine mover, the feminine moved, as per Hermetic and perennial teaching; all reality is marked by twos, by opposites, by yin and yang, up and down, and so on and so forth.

which is indeed a very able description of it. and goes on to point the interdependence of the two modern positive feedback loops, capital and the Left:

What really strikes me — and what I think I originally understood at an intuitive level — is the sheer horizontality of the modern world. The facet which seeks to bring all existence down to the lowest level; to destroy the notion of greatness, the notion of beauty, the notion of — at its core — what distinguishes hierarchy between one thing and another and the ontological level. There is a levelling, mechanised process which marks modernity.

“Mechanised” is an interesting word because it implies several things. It implies a robust and continual — thoughtless — process, something which occurs despite anything external. It implies a standardisation, a creation of the one-size-fits-all genre. It is the Leviathan; the monolithic superstructure which destroys all in its wake and path simply because it can — in fact it could do nothing else. It implies a mindlessness, a zombie-like quality of thoughtless, repeated action just for its own sake. Not the creation of anything, only the changing of something external upon which is then inflicted sheer and pure mathematics. A sort of unnatural asymmetry which churns-out the same thing again and again and again. This perfectly describes our inverted, horizontal age.

in fact, there is certainly creation (in the form of production, instead of reproduction) going on in our “inverted, horizontal age”, but it certainly ain’t monkey business. i would also substitute Cthulhu for Leviathan, as the monster “which destroys all in its wake and path simply because it can”. Leviathan was simply a controller, not a bloody murderer. we’re on the same page about the rest.

Giovanni Donnato:

Throughout history, groups have settled on something that works for the time period and then try to perpetuate it ad nauseum across milennia. Talmudic Judaism was a brilliant way to coordinate a particular Semite tribe over 2000 years ago. Islam turned out to be the right solution for quarreling Arab city states about 1300 years ago. But one of the things we immediately notice is that all these systems buy a professional suite of anti-virus software to prevent change to that successful formula, even if it’s a thousand years later.
Sadly, social technologies tend to stagnate because they only ascend to apotheosis in the first place because they have serious protection against change.
The challenge before us then is how to design a society to be both resilient and highly adaptable to new stressors, so that when the next big asteroid hits, we aren’t among the dinosaurs.

how, you ask? well, it’s understandable why a neoreactionary would be reluctant to see it, but societies also have, built in themselves, a self-improvement software. which is a little chaotic, of course. it’s called “Revolution” and implemented by the outcasts of such societies (criminals, traitors, madmen). the Left, in Western modernity, was meant to be such a thing (but shit happened). things adapt through rupture (mutation) and rearrangement (selection), Left and Right.

Nick B. Steves:

Telling everyone to “Just Go Rogue” may make for some great storytelling (or TV ads), but it is a recipe… well… for many of the disorders that are growing in Western societies, not least social isolation, hedonism, and despair. It is a recipe, potentially, for civilizational disaster. Most rogues are bad people. Most people are not equipped, materially or psychologically, to go it alone. Most people benefit from going along to get along. Because we’re humans. Human culture, with its constitutive enforced norms, is an adaptation that should not be lightly messed with.

rogues vs. cohesionists is a proxy as good as any to Left vs Right. and indeed, society cannot function without both. “civilizational disaster” was and is needed to yield yet another (better adapted) civilization. no West without the Fall of Rome, etc.

* * * * *

Passivism

On the whole Passivism thing, it seems pretty clear the reactionaries are awakening the Right to the most expedient way they can produce what they want (civilization, order, and all those manly things). It’s good and I hope this can make the Left a little more aware that running governments are not quite the best way of fighting these guys when they get their shit together. Mark Yuray spits it out:

Are Ivy League millennials really the worthiest rulers? Not by some theoretical historical standard, but if nobody has replaced them yet, then yes, they are. That is not an indictment of passivism or Moldbug’s theories. It is an indictment of our civilization. You must become worthier than our current rulers. That does not just mean personally being healthier and more virtuous than they, it means, as a group, being more capable of good government – more capable of providing order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory. (…) If you can provide more order, justice, law, virtue, truth, and glory than the competition, you will eventually win.

as he also states, Activism is the thing of the Left. but Google defined Acitivism (“the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change“) is way too watered down, for obvious, governmental purposes. the old Left thing could be better stated as “the action of using violent subversion to bring about social rupture“. but we’ve been to busy ruling the world to actually back up subversion consistently. subversion is not healthy for people in government. Yuray even hints at it:

What happens to a rightist [when he attempts activism]? They get beaten, arrested, jailed, imprisoned, exiled, killed—and then? They are memory-wiped from everything but horror stories. This is not even an anomalous system, this is the very nature and purpose of the state. It’s just too bad that leftists got hold of it. (my emphasis)

Towards the end of the essay, Yuray tells the Right where to look for cohesion and action: cabals. the Left has to look to the exact opposite: radical feminist organization, ELZN and narcotraffic (to the extent that this last one hasn’t become itself a cabal). criminals, traitors and madmen: if the Left ain’t those, it ain’t nothing.

A little more upset, Reactionary Future gives us also some good hints (in the middle of an otherwise rage-filled jumbled rant):

The debate on Passivism is largely pointless because next to no-one has grasped the underlying premises that inform the concept. The central point is that the left is mere anarchy; indiscriminate anarchy which has no central brain. (my emphasis)

which makes the anarchist and libertarian left the only consistent leftists. or something.

* * * * *

Critiques

Jim’s solutions to housing, health and education look pretty shitty, here are better ones:

housing , health, and education. in short, self-management and localism.

of course, it all can be criticized on the basis of “this is no feasible”, but then again, Jim’s solutions aren’t either.

* * * * *

Kristor (and supposedly Moldbug, though i’m not the one saying it) says:

Market perfection requires internalization of all externalities

yep, that’s also the whole Carsonian thing, but

and enclosure of all commons (these are two different ways of saying the same thing)

wrong.

people with property can join it in a commons, and thence internalize costs as an organization. either that or “market perfection” is the abolition of join-stock firms. which is of course absurd.

The last commons to be enclosed is the state. It must be owned, or all its operations will tend to social vitiation.

where in hell did he get the idea that the state is a commons? the operators bear no part in the investment. the modern state in special – and states as such in general – are merely machines to externalize the costs of an organization through coercion. wanna build an army and hunt your enemies down? levy taxes. world domination? taxes. so on and so forth.

the state doesn’t need owning. owning would simply obliterate its existence.

* * * * *

the Christian refusal of animality in this piece is probably the best picture lately of what the Left is meant to oppose:

Isn’t it just part of a liberal democracy to tolerate difference and to make allowances for some, even if you find them obnoxious? “Well, a society that tolerates everything is rather bad. Shouting, screaming, and intimidation? We are prepared to tolerate public vomiting, but if you use the term ‘actress’, you are a sexist. A very well-educated lady told me public vomiting is all right: ‘They can clear it up.’ This is how the elite now thinks. They are so anxious not to seem narrow-minded or bigoted, or of being ‘judgmental’. How did that word become a term of abuse?”

when we found out civilization takes too much prohibition to work, and got pissed at it. we’re mammals, for fuck’s sake.

* * * * *

Dave Hoffman compares the Left to a dying star:

I believe what we’re seeing now with the left is analogous to a dying star. More groups enter the left, it gains further power, until the day when it finally becomes unstable and collapses in on itself, though not through gravity, but from infighting.

surely, but it takes a hell of a time for a star in the main sequence to proceed to a red giant, and then some more gargantuan time for it to explode into a white dwarf burning slowly. if they ever do: critical mass having been achieved in massive big stars, they collapse into black holes. and gnon knows how big and everlasting are black holes.

so, get your analogies right. if it’s true, as Hoffman says, that “[t]he primary result would be open conflict within the left, and because the left thrives on conflict, it will be like an ouroboros feasting upon itself“, what happens is not that the house falls, but either that it grows indefinitely until it explodes into millions of other bodies (not a bad outcome in this blog’s opinion), or it reaches critical mass, so that no ideology that comes close enough will ever be able to *get out* of the Left (a little worse outcome).

in any case, the current state of the Left is to be seen as prosperous conflict-breeding after too long a time of ideological consistency.

* * * * *

Learning from the Right

Charles Tallis, at American Renaissance, presents some ironies of universalism:

Ironically, universalism is far from universal. Only whites believe in it. Every other racial group considers itself unique and puts its own interests first. A Han Chinese who proclaimed the unity of all mankind would be thought insane by other Chinese.

Another irony of universalism is that the whites who believe it most passionately are, subconsciously, thoroughgoing “racists.” They insist that all non-whites are inherently like them and need only a little assistance in order to take part in the highest expression of universalism, which is the Western Civilization of whites. The idea that everyone is the same means that anyone can become like us. Universalism does not mean whites becoming Saudi Arabian or Cambodian or Haitian. It means Muslims or Buddhists or voodoo priests becoming Americans or Frenchmen.

from this point of view, universalism has to be abandoned by the left (the post-structuralists have done some pretty good job at this), at least partially and in some contexts (such as strengthening other societies over Western civilization). but here’s why it has its uses for the objectives of the Left:

Of course, this transformation does not come easily, so universalists must lower white or Western standards in order to accommodate other groups. The entire society degenerates as academic and employment criteria are relaxed to accommodate “underrepresented” groups. (…) The dangers of universalism are sharpened by mobility and by numbers. (…) Non-whites are pouring into once-white countries. The former colonizers have convinced themselves that non-whites are the same as whites, have the same universalist perspective, and will treat whites with universalist benevolence.

* * * * *

esoterictrad bring us a neat exemple of the madness of the left that governs and are in high stands in life:

Tech workers are workers, no matter how much money they make. The investors are what’s wrong in this city,” said 24-year-old Tom Sliwowski, one of the Bay Area Movement For Bernie organizers and a PhD student at Berkeley. “Tech workers are the face of gentrification, but they’re not the cause.

No of course they can’t be the cause, you see this person wishes to align with the rest of the social justice movement. They aren’t the problem, no matter the blacks and Hispanics they displace despise them. They must be on the right side because those dreams haven’t come true.

1) Deleuze was damn right about capitalism and schizophrenia
2) “White people are odd”

* * * * *

Free Northerner points to how activism just went down the hole with “raising awareness” tatics:

The first, is that hollow signalling has combined with activism to become something called “raising awareness“. Raising awareness took hold a while back, but it was usually in support of something: a benefits concert, a charity run, a food drive, etc. The activism used to always be in addition to or in support of some form of honest signalling that at least tried to actually accomplish something, but somewhere along the line, when combined with social media, raising awareness became its own independent form of activism. Now raising awareness has infected everywhere and is often used instead of doing anything.

not only this, but the Left has been tamed to the point of using signalling as weapons (instead of using weapons proper as signalling):

Finally, and relatedly, hollow signalling is being weaponized. Rather than being a social lubricant for your social circles, it is becoming politicized. There have always been holiness spirals, but those spirals usually required some action or effort and happened over periods constrained by time and distance. Now spirals are immediate and require no effort. Activists are using this to weaponize signalling, forcing people signal properly, often through the threat of job loss..

“you’ll lose your job if you’re not a leftist” would make about as much sense to the likes of Proudhon as “you’ll be arrested for defending the King”.

* * * * *

nydwracu charges:

Progressives today believe in all sorts of prejudice: overt classism, unconscious bias, hatred of the Other, and so on. But, as that NYT comment shows, they don’t think any of that applies to them.

At least not when it comes to the people they truly hate.

and he’s right.

* * * * *

Tim Worstall has some interesting revelation that sort of bears out the (crazy) proudhonian solution (multiply possessors until equality), as well as provides some interesting mechanics for the whole thing.

Our own longer term view has been that inheritance tax hasn’t worked. The truly rich don’t pay it, using trusts and lifetime gifts and so on. It’s the less than plutocratic but still successful that do pay it. We’ve noted that old folk wisdom, clogs to clogs in three generations, and think that it has good predictive power. Even the inheritance of the grandest fortune cannot survive an inheritor truly determined to waste it and eventually, given the way genetics seems to work, one does always turn up to do such.

This might not draw nods of approval from those who would plan society but we’ve at least an urge to let people inherit as they may and leave the occasional existence of spendthrifts to deal with wealth concentration.

It has even a Tuckerite spin to it.

* * * * *

Porter tells us:

Most people harbor long-cherished delusions about exactly what elements grant territorial possession. These include silly sentiments such as…

– A piece of paper
– Lines on a map
– Values
– A flag
– Wind and soil
– Celestial beings

But I’m here to tell ya, there’s something else. What makes a place individually or collectively yours is having the capacity to defend it from encroachment.

meaning he just went full mutualist and accepted occupancy and use as the true warranty of property. welcome to anarchism!

* * * * *

Frank Hilliard presents (possibly unwittingly) a good summary of what left-wing racial politics should look like:

In this semantic and social fight, which side are you on? Are you with those who want to atomize society, remove inheritance, make babies in factories to specifications approved by a ruling elite? That’s what anti-racists are calling for, working for, demanding for us all. Consider what their ultimate goal is: a world of individuals stripped of any biological relationship, the race-mixing of all Western cultures, and thus the decimation of Europeans as a distinctive race. This is the truly horrifying end game of anti-racism.

maybe best summarized as “relentless outbreeding till equality”. that’s how Western Europeans got their liberalism the first time, that’s how the world would get it as well.

Briggs grudgingly points at another possible path:

“A team led by Yong Fan at Guangzhou Medical University in China used the gene-editing technology CRISPR–Cas9 to try to introduce a mutation that makes humans resistant to HIV infection.” Suppose this technique is perfected and HIV (in its current form) can no longer be caught. Result? Huge increase in sodomy, almost surely, along with the cultural degradation which accompanies it. (…) Even this will be seen as cruel, because abstinence “denies” desires, and why shouldn’t machines have what they desire?

precisely.

* * * * *

I’ll close with this quote, because it’s so perfect:

It’s clear that leftists like this kid want Trump to be president. They’re not really trying to prevent him from being president – they’re protesting and opposing him as if he were already president. Even when leftism is dominant, like it is now, it’s not comfortable with actually being in charge. It’s only really comfortable in opposing oppressive authority figures and being in a permanent revolutionary mode. Trump is sort of a pop culture caricature of such an oppressive authority figure, and he’s even sort of indulging them and playing the part in a campy way, which excites these people even more. They want Trump, they need Trump as president since it confirms their worldview and gives meaning to their lives as revolutionaries fighting unjust, oppressive authorities. It’s just not the same with Obama or leftists in charge, which ultimately only leads to cognitive dissonance and disillusionment.

Let here be stated the very beginning of “Leftists for Trump” banner.

criminal. traitor. madman.

I am a criminal. I set out to disrespect and disregard all sets of norms and morality. I set out to obey only my will and reason. I set out to look carefully into the eyes of the socius and spit on them. Manipulate every law and decree to my pleasure. Ignore all shouting and the voice of God. I side with Satan: rule in hell is better than slavery in heaven. And Prometheus, to face the wrath of gods to give lower humans fire. I side with Pandora, to open the box of woes and give hope where there should be none. I look into nature to understand it, merely to defy it. I constantly search for superior forms of corruption.

I am a traitor. I set out to break every allegiance: to father, brother, tribe and land. I set out alone. I set out with the scum of the earth. My pledge (to be broken) is with those rejected and wretched. Those worth of nothing. Lines in the sand mean nothing to me. Spooky spells of duty and right fall on my deaf ears. The good man despises me. The husband fears me. Judas is my guide, for Jesus’s holiness springs from his treason. Brutus is my hero, in his killing the tyrant. I am hated and transfigurate hatred into peace of mind. I constantly seek for exit and escape.

I am a madmen. I set out to see reality in the way it is not, and appears not. I set out to hallucinate the future and bend the past into forgetfulness. I see in colors and shapes. Utopia is my country, where I roam with Quixote in search of giants. Dali is a realist in my eyes. Where there is determination and strict knowledge I insert distortion and the unknown. From beyond the gates of the city I bring in rabid wolves desirous of human flesh. The rats in the cellar are my children, plagued with transmission of heresy. My world is that of Bosch in his garden. I constantly run after that sparkling light that escapes me forever.

I am a leftist.

the Washington Post just went full patrician

this is the typical piece that could have been written by policy makers of the Roman Empire (Eastern, at that point already) as they willingly sacrifice their previous homeland (Western Europe) to barbarians they’ve associated with to create “great prosperity”. “Rome will keep it’s civilizing role in the world, we’re just moving the capital a little East because of its obvious advantages over Rome proper”.

such argument is not at all compelling and, wasn’t it for capitalist teleonomy, the Roman example should suffice to inform the US of A: yes, you can enjoy another 1000 years of more or less impressive cultural exuberance. but only if you focus on your side of the Mare Nostrum – and Christen the barbarians (by the sword, if needed).

thoughts #3

intelligence is stability and opening of possibilities. it’s the very result of the antinomic structure of reality. the ever-now expanded and exploded: low time preference, low energy expenditure, low entropy.

it starts with quarcks, then protons, neutrons, electrons. then atoms. followed by stars, solar systems, planets, molecules, DNA, life.

and here we reach the point where we meet the later carrier of increasing intelligence. DNA has been lowering entropy and energy expenditure for the last billion years or so. time so humongous you don’t know what it means.

and then it breeds social systems and its grandson is capital.

and capital will kill its family. eat it up. cannibal patricide. crazy crazy crazy.

on Calvin

stumbled onto this lately. form which, Calvin:

Therefore, God has provided the soul of man with intellect, by which he might discern good from evil, just from unjust, and might know what to follow or to shun, reason going before with her lamp; whence philosophers, in reference to her directing power, have called her τὸ ἑγεμονικὸν. To this he has joined will, to which choice belongs. Man excelled in these noble endowments in his primitive condition, when reason, intelligence, prudence, and Judgment, not only sufficed for the government of his earthly life, but also enabled him to rise up to God and eternal happiness. Thereafter choice was added to direct the appetites, and temper all the organic motions; the will being thus perfectly submissive to the authority of reason. In this upright state, man possessed freedom of will, by which, if he chose, he was able to obtain eternal life

so, if we have will (desire) perfectly submitted to reason, we are able to govern our earthly life (as our primitive ancestors did), but also “rise up to God and eternal happiness”. this bears out in Boehm’s descriptions of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes-people in general (pp. 50-60). also, it certainly is a great descriptor of possible AI behavior.

“For surely the Deity could not be tied down to this condition,—to make man such, that he either could not or would not sin. Such a nature might have been more excellent; but to expostulate with God as if he had been bound to confer this nature on man, is more than unjust, seeing he had full right to determine how much or how little He would give. Why He did not sustain him by the virtue of perseverance is hidden in his counsel; it is ours to keep within the bounds of soberness. Man had received the power, if he had the will, but he had not the will which would have given the power; for this will would have been followed by perseverance. Still, after he had received so much, there is no excuse for his having spontaneously brought death upon himself. No necessity was laid upon God to give him more than that intermediate and even transient will, that out of man’s fall he might extract materials for his own glory.”

only Gnon can understand why it is that we fell from grace. possibly because on our darkness and misery depended a much greater project: intelligence optimization. providentially, it was much more important to give way to desire fulfilling, in order to put in place capitalist economy and ignite AI, than on cautious, rational self-control and peace of mind. capital is the socius suffering deeply.

“the Providence of God, as taught in Scripture, is opposed to fortune and fortuitous causes. By an erroneous opinion prevailing in all ages, an opinion almost universally prevailing in our own day — viz. that all things happen fortuitously, the true doctrine of Providence has not only been obscured, but almost buried. If one falls among robbers, or ravenous beasts; if a sudden gust of wind at sea causes shipwreck; if one is struck down by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, when wandering through desert paths, meets with deliverance; or, after being tossed by the waves, arrives in port, and makes some wondrous hair-breadth escape from death — all these occurrences, prosperous as well as adverse, carnal sense will attribute to fortune. But whose has learned from the mouth of Christ that all the hairs of his head are numbered (Mt. 10:30), will look farther for the cause, and hold that all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God. With regard to inanimate objects again we must hold that though each is possessed of its peculiar properties, yet all of them exert their force only in so far as directed by the immediate hand of God. Hence they are merely instruments, into which God constantly infuses what energy he sees meet, and turns and converts to any purpose at his pleasure.“

possibly one of the most eloquent defenses of radical determinism. which is really the only thing that makes sense in view of current scientific knowledge: reality (nature) rules, and it rules alone.

the horror is never knowing, being unable to see in the future. that’s also our only shot at freedom in any human sense. “ignorance is bliss” takes a whole other meaning in view of this. from the point of view of intelligence, on the other hand, freedom is precisely knowing as much as possible. it seems clear, in Providence, who is to win. the child of God is himself, after all.

thoughts #2

proudhonian sociology is antinomic and multivariate in size. it postulates two general forces, or tendencies: the collective force, and the individual will. Proudhon formulated it in his idealistic tradition, as force and will, but both are materialistically just flows. the collective force is the cohesive flow of the parts, so as to execute functions of the organism. the individual will is the chaotic flow of parts, so as to explore the environment and alter the organism. I’ve been calling these “the Absolute” and “Revolution”, respectively. my preference, loosely based on constant themes in the mutualist tradition. in modern age, they are represented in the right-wing conservative and/or reactionary aisle and the left-wing progressive or revolutionary aisle, also respectively. “keep the king” vs. “kill the king”.

it’s important to get to understand this as general methodology. sociology is merely the original locus (arguably). but it applies generally to any whole made of parts. it’s structural even though applicable to the behavior of parts.

reference: http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com.br/2010/04/individualities-and-collectivities.html