Quartered Safe in Their Delusions

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/04/07/aint-gonna-study-war-no-more/


Now, whether this Leftist posturing is a net benefit or not may be debated. After all, wheresoever they set foot, they come bearing a stifling burden of ideological commitments, predetermined dogmas, bold lies. Perhaps this field is best left to the amateurs and the military schools.

Expanding the Suffrage...

Opening the Borders:
http://www.xenosystems.net/idiocracy/

Open Treason

It's one thing to question the conduct of operations in Afghanistan; it's quite another to desert a combat unit, then beg for rescue. Bergdahl is a traitor. And this was clear before he was rescued. But, then, it was also clear that Obama was a traitor before we voted him into office. DOD allows itself to be humiliated by the Leftists once again. It has suffered ideological capture at the highest level.


It is interesting, as a matter of PR strategy, that they have not wished to push this incident in our faces. The media ignores it--and we know they do not ignore issues just because they are on the wrong side. They were on the wrong side in Ferguson, yet they continue to push it. But, they submerge the Bergdahl story--maybe because they cannot think of a spin that even the typical Leftist would consider sane.

Jews Subvert the World

http://newobserveronline.com/jews-demand-open-borders-for-usa-but-use-dna-to-keep-israel-racially-pure/
http://newobserveronline.com/racist-jewish-hypocrites-start-shipping-african-refugees-from-israel-to-sweden/


The Jews are unique: the smartest ethnic group in the world, the oldest, the most cohesive--and today the most powerful tribe in the world.


They are the last people to be trusted by any outsider. The principles upon which Israel is governed are eminently defensible, including the discrimination against immigrants based on racial and religious characteristics. However, the Jews in America (it may be doubted whether the phrase "American Jews" is ever apt)--are virtually unanimous in demanding that America refrain from enforcing these same principles that Israel and any other sensible nation enforces. The Jews in America are obviously a fifth column--obvious if one has access to the facts of the situation. But, since they have tremendous influence over the media and education, and their universally enforced speech codes service their convenience, very few know the facts and everything is spun in their favor. Their own holy books demonstrate perpetual war against the rest of the world for 3,000 years. They are a tribe; their religion simply reinforces tribal identity. They have no friends and they know it. They perceive only two categories outside the tribe: enemies or useful idiots at their disposal.


The ancient world knew their nature, before their nature was obscured by the distortions of Christianity (that ingenious Jewish invention): they are the people born for slavery, as Tacitus said. And slaves, being powerless, do not dislike or despise their enemies, they hate and resent and envy: they have no emotional distance, but succumb to these gnawing emotions and brood upon them. This was a major element in the formation of Jewish character: hundreds of years of suffering, slavery, and brooding upon revenge. The vicious character thus evolved led to their diaspora experiences: sooner or later they make themselves so unpleasant to the host nation that they are forcibly evicted or slaughtered. There is no exception to this rule. Dozens of very different nations have expelled them for much the same set of reasons. Perhaps, though, America is someway unique and never will expel them.


America was founded by the Puritans, a cult that pointedly sought to be more Jewish than the Jews, a cult that slowly evolved into Transcendentalists, then Abolitionists, then Progressives, then Socialist Progressives, then Cultural Marxists--each iteration of idealism more insane than its predecessor and the last, the Cultural Marxists, a finale that merges the last-gasp, doom-eager insanity of WASP culture with the shrewd and sharkish, reflexively overreaching, ever-insecure and ever-aggressive culture of the diaspora Jews. So, while we have on the one hand in Israel an ethno-religious capitalistic state with a reasonably healthy culture (meaning a culture that plans to survive, that sees a future for itself)--on the other hand we have the Western nations who are, with Jewish money and propaganda urging them on, destroying their ethnic foundations, surrendering their religions, suffocating their economies. Hypocrite is not a sufficient term for this contrast: I prefer predator. Those who, in the past, called them parasites had a point, but they underestimated the slave-bred malice and the brain-bred power they wield. America, then, has the same sorts of reasons that the expelling nations have always had; but America, when the Jews arrived en masse, had a severely compromised immune system, soft from a century of geopolitical safety and from incubating the idealistic madnesses to which such a strange safety had led. Instead of expelling the intruder, America, the power of the world, transported a still more virulent, but closely related intruder to its susceptible allies in Western Europe, Canada, Australia. The successful Jewish invasion of America foreordained The Fall of the West.



By the way, America and Europe both give the wrong answer to the question: Israelis or Arabs? The right answer is neither. Let them shift for themselves. The Christian world was denuded of its tribes by the Christian churches a thousand years ago. What have we to do with tribal warfare?

America in the Time of Commissars

Sailer on America as one huge re-education camp (the Dalrymple quote is classic):
http://takimag.com/article/intro_to_megaphonics_steve_sailer/print#axzz3MIprRWB5


The red-tinted afflictions of black America, or how the application of fake (Leftist) solutions to real problems plays out in reality:
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2014/12/09/the-worst-states-for-black-americans/


Leftist infighting, an increasingly frequent and always reliable source of entertainment, Gays vs. Jews edition:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/08/the-rise-and-fall-of-chris-hughes-and-sean-eldridge-america-s-worst-gay-couple.html

The Vanguard of Idiocracy?

 U.S. college majors: Average IQ of students by gender ratio | scatter chart made by Etpinard | plotly

The more women pile into a field, the more the clean mountain air of logical thought becomes a swamp of emotional indulgence. The Femtard Dyke Brigade amasses its lardy, lame-witted zombies to overrun the last remaining bastions of logic and reality. Soon we'll have courses like "Gender Anxiety in Mathematical Structures," "Guilt and Gravity: How Men Use Gravitational Theory to Repress the LGBT Community," "The Oppressive Phallic Symbolism of Microelectronic Design and Praxis," "Inclusive Mechanical Engineering Introduction: A Womyn-Centered Perspective on Engineering Without Mathematics." On the list of Progressive errors, conceding suffrage to the female must rank rather high.

By the way, the IQ estimates in the graph are systematically overestimated for all majors because they're only counting those students who plan to pursue graduate school. I should expect the scores to be about 6-8 points lower in reality.

Progressive Foreign Policy

The Pure Well of Leftism Undefiled

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-peoples-front-of-judea/

On 1984 and Brave New World

 "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one." - Neil Postman

The witch hunters are banning books; a drugged-up, hyper-entertained Idiocracy will render them unwanted.

From the Front

Finding the limits of Leftism:
http://economia.ie/ec/2014/the-oppression-ouroboros-intersectionality-will-eat-itself/0125/

The result is to turn every individual and organization into an infestation of parasitic social resentments. This is contagious and a spur to anarchy.

Will someone on the Left pull a Stalinist retrenchment? A return of Leftist authoritarianism?

Anarchy strikes deep, Ukraine totters, joining the ranks of many other nations the State Department has trashed with Leftist revolutions. Perhaps the time is come for the great infector, America, to eat a life-changing dose of its own medicine? We're seeing a big bull market in partisan division, with both sides struggling to contain and channel the energies of their true believers.

Self-Selection Protocols

As unchallenged one party rule makes the party dumber, their production of new ideas slows. Some day, self-reinforcing Leftist stupidity will implode the movement (cf. Brezhnevism).

Leftism Eats Itself

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/penalty-marriage-obamacare_767194.html
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/01/the-new-federal-wedding-tax-how-obamacare-would-dramatically-penalize-marriage
This is just another transfer, a huge one, from the productive classes of society to the parasitic classes (esp blacks, mestizos). It might discourage gay marriages, though. The Left has gone from a philosophy of softening the blows of being an incapable and of making unproductive personal decisions--to a practice of encouraging willful incapacity and frivolous personal decision-making--not to mention luring them into the temptation of deliberately gaming the system. This both corrupts and infantilizes the population; it empowers the professorial-bureaucratic-media complex, the Cathedral. The Left has reached the point that it is now destroying wealth (not just spending it) faster than the private sector can generate it. This is the crucial inflection point that an unchecked Leftist tendency always reaches. In America, due to our innovation infrastructure and our lucky positioning in human history, and despite the concentrated, energetic, bipartisan Leftism of the last 70 years, it has proven to be an unusually long road.

Leviathan Their Puppet

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-american-pravda/
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/09/is-journalism-official.html

Like the authors of these two articles, I too believed, and for a long time, that I was savvy enough to "interpret" the press--that I could discount the known prejudices of press institutions and writers. But, in the course of a few years in my early thirties, the truth came to me. It is a thing impossible to accomplish. And the most insidious category of lies of which the press stands guilty--a category fully functional only in an atmosphere in which no effective opposition exists--are the lies of omission.

I ought to note that I have not read all the material on the anthrax, POW, and nuclear espionage stories in the first article. The other matters mentioned there are well-known.

Of the second article, may I submit that I do not frequently happen upon a writer possessed of an almost egregiously superlative talent--but, when he turns his talents to the provisioning of my entertainment and edification by means of firing a forest of dead lies and clearing the land for new growth, and prophecies rebirth in allusive, many-tentacled, metaphor strewn prose, I count myself blessed. Consider his comparison of official journalism to its predecessor, an implicit admission that no simple solution to the problem of accurate information exists. Yet, as a de facto branch of the civil service, the pseudo-apolitical caretakers of the people, see how we find ourselves closely mewed up in a statist circle of thought. State education and the state-adjunct press determine (with condolences to Emerson) the horizon beyond which almost no one can think. From within that horizon an occasional chink of light only may sparkle from the great beyond, to be interpreted by most inmates as a random reflection of the real world within the horizon, since either they do not realize an horizon exists or they believe what lies beyond it is mere madness; but in fact the potentially saving light emanates either from the internet or an old book.


Examples of journalistic fraud and negligence:

No press outlet thought through the meaning of the real estate bubble before it burst, though some saw the bubble (eg The Economist).

"Paleo" nutrition was excluded from the press, though convincing scientific literature extends back 100 years, and the world grows obese.

The press carefully excludes the real effects of immigration policy in the white world, though America is threatened with socialism economically and a recapitulation of Brazil's social experience--while Europe faces submission to the Caliphate.

Reporting on trade policy ignores the collapse of strategic industries in the US and Europe, in process of being systematically overrun by state-financed corporations of the Far East.

Crime reporting ignores the black on white race war in America: blacks commit 83% of violent inter-racial crimes between blacks and whites, and 20,000 black-on-white rapes occur per year compared to less than 10 white-on-black rapes per year.

Reporting of racial inequalities ignores the IQ differences, the cultural differences, the different criminal propensities, different levels of accomplishment--or ascribes black/mestizo deficits in each area to racism, thereby inciting racial animosity among both the superior and the inferior.

War reporting tilts against the US at every opportunity, while giving the enemy the benefit of the doubt. Also, war reporters rarely explain that a "humanitarian" counter-insurgency is just another way of saying "guaranteed failure with profoundly anti-humanitarian consequences."

The list of mindlessly idealistic official wisdom and state-sanctioned-and-sanctioning bullshit never ends--is there a field of thought or action in which the official press is actually right?



The unexampled power of the press in pseudo-demotic society is similar to that which Hobbes ascribed to state officials who "resembleth the Nerves, and Tendons that move the severall limbs of a body natural," one of whose responsibilities it is "to teach the people their duty to the Sovereign Power." Hobbes also remarks on the ultimate spiritual guides directing the goals of his Leviathan, men such as Jesus and Paul, and those with authority to expound upon these men. Our ultimate guides today, though, our cultural Marxists, deem themselves holier than these, present themselves as supra-Christians and Platonic philosopher-kings, presume themselves, in short, more idealistic than their forerunners and more consciously divorced from (transcending?) reality. Oh, and godless as well, since their ascetic stance and posture would be incomplete if they were to nestle themselves under the warm, comforting promise of divine succor.

Leftism is Inversion

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-gay-guide-to-wedded-bliss/309317/





Our leftists are not stupid. Banal, yes, but not stupid. This gay train started quietly down the tracks several decades ago, mostly traveling nights, colors subdued. Gradually all were exposed to the sight of the ugly thing and, despite a particularly dark and dangerous run of track encountered soon after it left the station, its course thereafter became ever more promiscuous and visible, with a visibility perhaps slightly enhanced by some friendly cosmeticians, stylists, tailors, and most of all strategic concealments--what scoffers may have misapprehended as propaganda. Observing this generation of dark passages, the Obama team, with exquisite acumen in temporal judgment, then announced to the expectant gathered gay world that the time is come, a glittering runway to the future awaits--the Big Apple, Showtime, Broadway! Free at last, free at last, great Obama almighty, free at last! And the train bears down on us brilliant, garish, violet, pink, mauve, lavender most of all--yes, all the hues so much beloved of the heavy-boned-and-browed, bristle-faced unimpregnable female, this enduring, ever-renewed insult to Darwinian fitness. And a huge phalanx of cheerleaders lines the track, Harvard, the USG, the NYT, The Atlantic, the American Federation of Teachers, Hollywood, the Donkeys leading the Elephants and their "churchly" friends as always to the mire. And the people, well, the people somehow no longer think what they used to think of this train, their aversion somehow (who knows how?) turned to welcome, to "tolerance," or, at least, to submission. How gay is that?

Some Holdouts Speak

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/stupidity-a-malady-of-the-cultural-elite

 

This is a Catholic take on the course of Western decadence. I have noticed that intelligence and erudition are not often lacking in the Catholic intellecto-sphere. Even the comments maintain a standard.

 

I might riposte with the sense that a true tracing of our moral decline rounds right back to Christianity itself, especially the Puritan branch which eventually produced that fleur du mal, New England's Christian Socialism. It is this Christian Socialism that infected our elite more than 100 years ago, claiming the title of "Progressivism," and which morphed and melded, under increasing Jewish-cosmopolitan influence, into a mode of Europeanized thought better termed cultural Marxism. What we now have, then, is a hyper-egalitarian form of Christianity minus God. And this set of values not only determines the political and social trends of America, but is exported aggressively to the world. Our first target, Western Europe, is notable for being even more thoroughly dominated by cultural Marxism than we are--not surprising if one considers that we played Dr. Frankenstein to their corpse-monster after the War. They are our creatures; our elite made them what they are, without any interference from elements like the masses--nor even from powerful residual institutions (like the Catholic Church), such as slow down leftist reforms in America. Our elites availed themselves of the tabula rasa they'd created--one reason FDR determined upon unconditional surrender at war's end.

 

In considering of this article, I reflected further upon the value system in which our elite places its faith and for which it exercises its power. One of the handful of pivots is the spiritual and material benefits of diversity upon which they presume.

 

Supporters of diversity presuppose uniformity of human talents across groups, at the genetic level at least, and consider that all signs of non-uniformity of talent indicate different cultural and other environmental conditions. They do not believe in meaningful genetic diversity across groups. They therefore deem cases in which a group is underrepresented to be proof that there is prejudice against that group in the particular field. They seek, then, to achieve cultural/racial/sexual diversity in each field, at whatever cost to other factors, such as competence. The problem arises from the initial presupposition of equal human talents across groups: this is quite clearly not the case. There is in the world both genetic and cultural diversity across groups, to different degrees and variously intermixed. In other words, to achieve "diversity" these diversocrats ignore real genetic diversity and seek to include diverse cultures in every field at equal levels of representation, which has the effect of reducing real cultural diversity. The attempt to equalize the interests and achievements of every culture guts the particularity of each culture, its essential character. So they seek to ignore one form of natural diversity (the genetic) and reduce the other (the cultural). It's a nice Orwellian game for the religiously earnest devotees of diversity to deny one major form of human diversity and suppress the other.

 

"Diversity," as used by these people, our elite, actually means uniformity. They want uniformity, at least in the masses. They believe this will render the world more politically stable and also make people easier for them to mold because more interchangeable. They fear that the scientifically confirmed genetic differences between human groups, races especially, will exacerbate the usual tensions caused by cultural contrasts. Of course, they have a point here. But, one may well question both the means and the ends of their workings. Is uniformity really a superior human future to one featuring conflict and competition? Have they failed to notice that China, like all healthy nations, seeks primacy, and not merely of the primus inter pares sort? And this egalitarian fantasy combines with the infatuation with pity-motivated and -justified government social supports to create a society which inflicts equality by leveling down. After all, the standard may always be lowered, but the more it is raised the more exclusionary it necessarily becomes. The decline of standards throughout society follows ineluctably. Anyone who disagrees with this interpretation of the meaning and priority of diversity is rigorously excluded from the elite. Intellectual diversity is proscribed.  

 

This is the wrong way. The incapables ought to be discouraged from breeding, and if an entire group manifests disproportionate incapacity, then that group ought to move to a nation dominated by its type--or submit to its fate, as determined by talent and effort, among superior people.

"The Latitude is Complete"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnLo2XJY2qU

 

If justices were appointed by merit, judge Posner would be on the Supreme Court. This is an excellent summary of how Constitutional law actually works and why it ought really to be called "Supreme Court law" instead.

 

I quote below the crucial lines:

"Almost the entire body of constitutional law was created by the Supreme Court justices by free interpretation or no interpretation of the Constitution, just using the Constitution as a jumping off point...The text doesn't impose a limit; precedent doesn't impose a limit. There's obviously something circular. Supreme Court justices make up some principle.[which becomes a precedent] If judges follow that [precedent], they're just following the law, they're not making anything up. But, they're applying something which was itself made up by judges. And the Supreme Court's not bound by its precedents. It can always overrule them or distinguish them to death or distort what they say. So they have a complete free game, except for public opinion."

 

How the Constitution is overridden, based just on examples given in the interview (many others could be provided):

invert meaning (searching with a warrant)

ignore ($20 amount in dispute or creation of air force or right to bear arms)

change meaning of terms (cruel and unusual punishment, right to counsel, self-incrimination clause)

 

Most of these are crucial provisions of the Constitution. They are emptied of their meaning at the will of the Court. This is why the Court is the unassailable pinnacle of our permanent government. And almost everyone in the government is permanent--the Presidency is the only remaining position with any power that is non-permanent. Congress is de facto permanent, the Court de jure permanent. The professoriate is permanent. They tell the government and the media what to think. The media is permanent. Government and the media together manufacture consent among hoi polloi. And big business plays nice with the government because, when the government is permanent and powerful, this is simply good business.

 

All this amounts to a vast web of interrelations that was produced, per Moldbug, by adaptive evolution--not, for the most part, conscious planning. (Admittedly, there are periods when adaptation occurs more quickly, like the American Colonial Revolt against the King, the shredding of the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution, the War of Northern Aggression, the FDR leftist coup, the LBJ-Nixonian conspiracy to explode welfare spending, open the borders to elect a new people, and regulate everything still standing). Of course, conscious planning on such a large scale has historically produced mostly bad results--the Soviet Union being the largest example (though the French Revolution remains the archetype of this fallacy and Burke's book the archetypal critique). Nevertheless, it's worth asking: for whom is this system of ours adaptive? Cui bono? The intellectuals determine the permissible range of thought, the mind space within which the functional rulers operate and to which they confine their subjects. The bureaucrats and plutocrats play the practitioners to the professors' theoreticians. And the (state-sponsored) media and state-run schools convey the parameters of existence to hoi polloi. Our Dear Leader Obama would inform us that all well-intentioned people, not just Americans, benefit from this system. Our Dear Leader might then compare our system to the ideal republic of Plato, led by the philosopher-king, a disinterested genius who would ensure the (perhaps Procrusteanized?) equality of his subjects and peace (submission?) among them all. How could anyone doubt the beneficence of Our Dear Leader, or question the feasibility or desirability of his particular Utopian vision?

  

But, still, really, Our Dear Leader aside, cui bono? It's generally a useful principle to assume that whoever end up with the most power in a given social configuration are the ones with the most bono. And this would be, to varying degrees, the elements of the Polygon (or the Cathedral), as summarized by Moldbug:

The Polygon might be defined as the "extended civil service." It consists not [only] of those who hold actual formal GS rank, but those whose position demands a sense of civic responsibility - real or fake. The major vertices of the Polygon, by my count, are the press, the universities, the judiciary, the Fed and the banks, the "Hill" (congressional staff), the civil service proper, the NGOs and transnationals, the military, the Beltway bandits (defense and other contractors), and corporate holders of official monopolies (such as "intellectual property").

To which I would only add Congressmen, since they're virtually guaranteed reelection and may therefore be deemed part of the permanent government and not mere democratic contingencies. Note that the Presidency is excluded for being a dependency of the electorate, a relic of democracy, an amateur and a temp, and too minutely constrained by public opinion and overexposure in the media to have significant power.

 

I rather like this clip too,  in which Posner explains that Leftism is a non-theistic religious movement, which is to say, it is driven by irrational and moralistic passions:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYa5y8IkUMk This is why Moldbug denominated our ruling class "the Cathedral." It is the secular church of Leftism, which happens now to rule us. The problem is that all moral thought is irrational, a function of the passions and tastes (including the taste for religion), not of logic. Therefore argumentation does not work in this realm. Propaganda works. Appeals to emotion work. And, as always, the display of power is an excellent form of emotive propaganda. The Left has the power. Moreover, only those whose moral tastes appear sufficiently Leftist are permitted to form the next generation of the power elite, the priests of the Cathedral. Since the Reformation, at the latest, the Left always has outrun the right in mastery of propaganda--hardly surprising given that the essence of propaganda is mendacity and the very foundation of leftism (human equality) is a lie. When you're naturally predisposed to idealism (what I call lies), when your thought process is inherently delusional, when you instinctively retreat from the "is" and desperately embrace the "ought," when you are your first and most fanatical convert---with such a psychological character you are a natural, even an involuntary, propagandist. Socialism: the party of involuntary propaganda. Of the right, though, it may be said that "its nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer's hand." And what it works in is reality, not the seductive fantasia of ideal forms. But, the communication of reality is generally perceived as quite crude and rebarbative propaganda--keen apprehension is required to notice that it's not propaganda at all, since it's the awful truth (without the saving grace of Cary Grant & co).

 

How can the right attain power in such a system as ours? It cannot. Only the ideas most attractive to intellectuals (which are mainly a matter of social status games) win the competition for preeminence, and thence that for political application, in our system. Not the most truthful ideas, not the most useful in any utilitarian sense, but those ideas most attractive to this audience prevail. These ideas define the Overton window. The intellectuals then repackage their favored notions in a form that will appeal to hoi polloi (the manufacture of consent). Big business and permanent government then determine how to action the ideas. Where, you may wonder, is the "Right" in this process? Watching. Sometimes complaining. Then submitting. Finally, forgetting that the given idea--first theoretical, then novel, now simply reality--was Leftist in the first place. Its reality inclines the Right even to defend it against any new changes. The "Right" exists for two reasons: to legitimize the claim that we live in a two party democracy, and to provide political entertainment and distraction from reality.

 

The only avenue for the Right to attain power is a military coup. The only chance of this happening involves some decidedly unattractive preconditions, like Brezhnevite stagnation for at least a generation or some form of extreme crisis, like nuclear war. The former option, though it looks increasingly likely, may yet be evaded by major technological advances. But, does the Right nevertheless have some use today? Well, it might slow the Leftist advance. Another possibility: sustain a level of dissident intellectual discourse that is high enough to tempt the ruling Leftists occasionally to purloin a useful idea (eg, Carter's administration did considerable deregulation based on intelligent Rightist analysis). Such discourse might benefit those nations that attempt to buck the American example (like Singapore or potentially China or Russia). Highly successful Rightist regimes overseas may provide a counterexample to our Leftist morass just as we formed a counterexample to the Soviet morass and catalyzed its transition to "an improved infancy." A third use might be to prepare for a Leftist collapse, perhaps already an inevitable fate for the West--to have ready to hand an intelligent, considered, current plan to form a Rightist regime on the mouldering ruins of yet another Leftist failure.

Die Uber-Chinese

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838

 

Leftism is the flight from reality.

Reality may take many forms.

 

China has undertaken to provide us with our mandatory reality dose in this century.

Imagine if Nazi Germany had been run by Heydrich (relatively sane and smart) instead of Hitler (who squandered his potential) and its natural ethnic territory had been the size of America. This approximates the threat China will pose within a generation.

 

Leftism only knows one direction and ever intensified leftism either collapses in on itself--or those powers still in possession of their will to power crush its hollowed-out carcass and institute a new dispensation.

The Left Unleashed--Moldbug Seeks Redress

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/opinion/lets-give-up-on-the-constitution.html

The mad genius of the alt-right thinkers (Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations) nominates the American ruling class "The Cathedral." It comprises, by order of rank, the professoriate of the elite universities, the civil service (including our life-tenured Congress and Supreme Court), the media, the entertainment industry, and public school teachers. The op-ed linked above, by a law professor at an elite law school, is convoluted almost to the point of contradiction and stands as an absolute paean to the current Cathedral--truly one of the dumbest articles, substantively, I've seen at the NY Times. Also, not coincidentally, one of purest ideologically, that is, one of the most brilliant in terms of form and structure--which is impressive, since editorial writers, especially on the left, are primarily engaged in a status game in which the purest theologically, I mean, ideologically wins the prize. This game can be rather creative given that there are no rules proscribing flights of fantasy or violations of the reality principle. The overarching stupidity here, of course, is that he advocates freedom from the constitution in the same article in which he (accurately) boasts that we have frequently, and by implication ever more frequently, violated its provisions throughout our history. I also like the strategic omission of any mention of the provision made for amending the Constitution, a provision many times put to use. It might be interesting, though, to attempt an aesthetic appreciation of this piece, exemplary decadent art object that it is. 

 

As a counterstrike to this Leftist insanity, here's a good intro to Moldbuggian thought: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html  And here are my selections from the highly interesting Moldbug on the nature of the Cathedral and his mission to proselytize the shepherds (the boldface is mine):

 

 

 One way to elect a new people is to import them, of course. For example, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party has captured California, once a Republican stronghold, by importing arbitrary numbers of Mexicans. Indeed the Third World is stocked with literally billions of potential Democrats, just waiting to come to America so that Washington can buy their votes. Inner Party functionaries cackle gleefully over this achievement. (BTW, isn't that photo of Frank Rich amazing? Doesn't it just radiate pure power and contempt? Henry VIII would probably have asked the painter to make him look less like Xerxes, King of Kings.)

But this act of brutal Machiavellian thug politics, larded as usual with the most gushing of sentimental platitudes, is picayune next to the ordinary practice of democratic governments: to elect a new people by re-educating the children of the old. In the long run, power in a democracy belongs to its information organs: the press, the schools, and most of all the universities, who mint the thoughts that the others plant. For simplicity, we have dubbed this complex the Cathedral.
The Cathedral is a feedback loop. It has no center, no master planners. Everyone, even the Sulzbergers, is replaceable. In a democracy, mass opinion creates power. Power diverts funds to the manufacturers of opinion, who manufacture more, etc. Not a terribly complicated cycle.

This feedback loop generates a playing field on which the most competitive ideas are not those which best correspond to reality, but those which produce the strongest feedback. The Cathedral is constantly electing a new people who (a) support the Cathedral more and more, and (b) support a political system which makes the Cathedral stronger and stronger.
For example, libertarian policies are not competitive in the Cathedral, because libertarianism minimizes employment for public-policy experts. Thus we would expect libertarians to come in two flavors: the intellectually marginalized, and the intellectually compromised...

 

What we need is a sort of counter-Cathedral: an institution which is actually more trustworthy than the university system. The universities are the brain of USG, and the best way to kill anything is to shoot it in the head.

To be right when the Cathedral is wrong is to demonstrate that we live under a system of government which is bound together by the same glue that held up Communism: lies. You do not need a triple-digit IQ to know that a regime held up by lies is doomed. You also do not need a triple-digit IQ to help bring down a doomed regime. Everyone will volunteer for that job. It's as much fun as anything in the world.

 

Solely for the purpose of discussion, let's call this counter-Cathedral Resartus - from Carlyle's great novel, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Reclothed).

The thesis of Resartus is that the marketplace of ideas, free and blossoming as it may seem, is or at least may be infected with lies. These lies all have one thing in common: they are related to the policies of modern democratic governments. Misinformation justifies misgovernment; misgovernment subsidizes misinformation. This is our feedback loop.

On the other hand, it's clear that modern democratic governments are doing many things right. Perhaps in all circumstances they are doing the best they can. Perhaps there is no misinformation at all. The hypothesis that such feedback loops can form is not a demonstration that they exist.

Therefore, the mission of Resartus is to establish, using that crowdsourced wiki-power we are all familiar with, the truth on every dubious subject. Perhaps the truth will turn out to be the official story, in which case we can be happy.

The two sites today which are most like Resartus are Climate Audit and Gene Expression. Both of these are, in my humble opinion, scientific milestones. CA's subject is climatology; GNXP's subject is human biodiversity.