http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/21st-assailant-sentenced-in-Cleveland-gang-rape-4889262.php#photo-3451930
I wrote about these crimes a few years ago. Note the difference in sentences between those who went to trial and those who pled guilty. Note how brief are the sentences of the pleaders. Note that the "juveniles" were sentenced only to parole. This is the response of the legal system to the repeated gang rape of an 11 year old Mexican girl by over twenty black males--a pack of sub-humans who also threatened the girl's safety if she told anyone about the rapes. Each of these creatures ought to be put down like dangerous dogs, to include the juveniles. The resolution of this story received virtually no national news space in the major media outlets. Lies of omission remain the strongest strategy of the Cathedral.
Showing posts with label the cathedral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the cathedral. Show all posts
Friday, February 27, 2015
Friday, September 19, 2014
Entryism Works
http://i.imgur.com/3gH8hs2.jpg
The above is a post from 4chan, a site mostly populated by teenagers and twenty-somethings. The political discussions there are open to all comers, but usually won by rightist types. What would be paradoxical in a healthy society may be witnessed first-hand: the sanest political websites are those with least oversight, like 4chan.
The Leftists are purging people over on 4chan, formerly a free fire zone for participants, with no PC enforcement. This is their MO: they infiltrate, close the door behind them, then purge their enemies. They've played this entryist game (a page out of communist political strategy) throughout education, the media, Hollywood, non-profits, the civil service, the military. Now they're hitting smaller targets like 4chan, the NFL, Ferguson and assorted random symbolic targets like "racist" NBA owners and "homophobic" business execs. And the whole game is entirely one-sided, its success foregone, because even when an attack fails according to normal standards, the media still counts it as a Leftist win. For example, the Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a black whore were exonerated legally, yet are still considered racist rapists in the media. Same with Zimmerman. But, usually their targets simply capitulate.
The above is a post from 4chan, a site mostly populated by teenagers and twenty-somethings. The political discussions there are open to all comers, but usually won by rightist types. What would be paradoxical in a healthy society may be witnessed first-hand: the sanest political websites are those with least oversight, like 4chan.
The Leftists are purging people over on 4chan, formerly a free fire zone for participants, with no PC enforcement. This is their MO: they infiltrate, close the door behind them, then purge their enemies. They've played this entryist game (a page out of communist political strategy) throughout education, the media, Hollywood, non-profits, the civil service, the military. Now they're hitting smaller targets like 4chan, the NFL, Ferguson and assorted random symbolic targets like "racist" NBA owners and "homophobic" business execs. And the whole game is entirely one-sided, its success foregone, because even when an attack fails according to normal standards, the media still counts it as a Leftist win. For example, the Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a black whore were exonerated legally, yet are still considered racist rapists in the media. Same with Zimmerman. But, usually their targets simply capitulate.
Monday, September 1, 2014
Anarcho-Tyranny Unleashed
This is an especially disgusting type of crime. Its enablers (police, media, politicians, ngo's) will suffer not the slightest punishment. The few perpetrators so far convicted received light sentences.
On the theory and practice of anarcho-tyranny: http://www.vdare.com/articles/anarcho-tyranny-where-multiculturalism-leads
Overview articles on Rotherham:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11066244/Rotherham-is-not-an-isolated-incident.html
http://mangans.blogspot.hk/2014/08/rotherham.html
Top feminist websites' (non)-coverage of Rotherham: http://www.kidstrangelove.com/2014/08/29/the-rotherham-child-sex-abuse-scandal-and-the-american-media-coverage-in-pictures/
Some thoughts on the Rotherham atrocities from Nick Land and commenters (the "Cathedral" is the Leftist media-academic complex, those who lead the Leftist religion):
Nick Land:
The BBC fog-machine at work on the UK child-predation story:
Child sexual exploitation is happening in a “number of towns” in different parts of the country, according to the author of a damning report into abuse in Rotherham. … According to an estimate from the Children’s Commissioner for England three years ago, 2,409 children were identified as victims of exploitation by gangs over a 14-month period from 2010-11 …
I’m going to assume that all the fanatically unspecified “men” (or “males”) involved are Muslims of Pakistani origin (abusing white children), unless presented with definite evidence to the contrary. Any other default would be an act of cognitive collaboration with Britain’s sordid little branch-operation of the Cathedral, and we’ve now seen with stark clarity what that enables.
Does the progressive media really think it can de-realize this festival of cultural ruin with a standard inattention protocol? If so, it has to count as an extraordinary peak hubris moment. Perhaps the left is structurally incapable of preventing itself from pushing things over the brink of catastrophe. It always has to take that one additional step, and it has no sense at all of how to back down.
There have to be a lot of people in the UK right now who would be delighted to see the media establishment strung up from lamp-posts, with panic and defection rife in journalistic ranks. It’s surely not impossible that the pattern now jutting into hideous visibility in Britain will evoke a disturbing sense of recognition elsewhere, possibly throughout the Anglosphere. As far as core Cathedral operating procedures are concerned, this has to be a period of (possibly unprecedented) vulnerability. As a source of regime threatening irritability, the Rotherham syndrome is the droit du seigneur of the new nobility — even among a pitifully broken people, it pushes some deeply atavistic buttons. Lies, sexual exploitation, and foreign invasion — who’d want to be PR manager for this cocktail of native degradation?
Commenters:
Scientism: I think perhaps we, from what I assume are our fairly “privileged” positions (not having been “vulnerable youth”, but I only speak for myself here), don’t quite grasp how insidious the Cathedral is. This looks to us like the Cathedral coming apart, but consider that what we have here is a system that managed to train a succession of civil servants to overlook abuse. Not just one or two, but seemingly every last person involved with the council, the police force and the charities, was trained to overlook this kind of abuse, for 16 years.
How can such an outcome be anything but the Cathedral firing on all cylinders, doing what it was designed to do? The immediate reality of the Cathedral for most of us is, essentially, having been misled by the media, having woken up and realised we’ve been lied to, perhaps knowing we’ve lost much of our culture. In the future, we expect some kind of collapse, we think things will get worse. But that’s in the future. On the other hand, the reality of the Cathedral for the civil servants, activists, etc, who are part of it is: Pakistani men raping little white girls while everybody looks the other way. The reality for the media: not reporting on these events, because it might make white people angry at a minority group. That’s their main concern, in both cases, not the abuse. That’s their daily lived experience: being complicit in atrocities while simultaneously being enraged by trivialities.
This is what these guys do all day and have been doing for years. A little scandal isn’t going to change the way they do things. The only thing that’s going to end this is economic collapse or war.
Kgaard: I do not see economic collapse, and I don’t see war coming to the UK’s shores anytime soon. So the existing system continues as is, I guess. When you look to the top of the power structure, the logic of it all is crystal clear: Big business wants the bodies to offset all the babies not being created by native Brits. Labour, meanwhile, wants the immigrants because immigrants vote Labour. So it’s a pact made in hell — and the same pact has been made in the US and much of continental Europe. There is no stopping it that I can see. Who stops it? Who can withstand the combined force of the ENTIRE power structure coming down on their head — from the political left to the right?
Scientism: It’s essentially a set of pernicious feedback loops. The civil servants, the media and a large portion of the British public are experiencing a severe belief bias effect where all evidence confirms their Leftist outlook. Every atrocity is cause to double down on their anti-racist efforts. These efforts protect and enable the gangs and cause more atrocities. This serves to confirm the horrors of systemic racism in the mind of the anti-racist. When the natives try to organise against the protected immigrants, they’re merely seen as racism incarnate, again confirming the Leftist outlook. It’s difficult to see any end to it. These aren’t rational people; they’re caught in a system that develops and maintains a kind of delusive belief system. With the media and most university educated members of the public complicit, there’s little hope of exposure. The outrage of the uneducated masses merely confirms their racist nature. Nationalist groups inevitably find solace in anti-system symbolism and end up goose-stepping down the street, again conforming the worldview of the anti-racists. Everybody has a role to play and everything confirms Leftism! How do you escape that?
On the theory and practice of anarcho-tyranny: http://www.vdare.com/articles/anarcho-tyranny-where-multiculturalism-leads
Overview articles on Rotherham:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11066244/Rotherham-is-not-an-isolated-incident.html
http://mangans.blogspot.hk/2014/08/rotherham.html
Top feminist websites' (non)-coverage of Rotherham: http://www.kidstrangelove.com/2014/08/29/the-rotherham-child-sex-abuse-scandal-and-the-american-media-coverage-in-pictures/
Some thoughts on the Rotherham atrocities from Nick Land and commenters (the "Cathedral" is the Leftist media-academic complex, those who lead the Leftist religion):
Nick Land:
The BBC fog-machine at work on the UK child-predation story:
Child sexual exploitation is happening in a “number of towns” in different parts of the country, according to the author of a damning report into abuse in Rotherham. … According to an estimate from the Children’s Commissioner for England three years ago, 2,409 children were identified as victims of exploitation by gangs over a 14-month period from 2010-11 …
I’m going to assume that all the fanatically unspecified “men” (or “males”) involved are Muslims of Pakistani origin (abusing white children), unless presented with definite evidence to the contrary. Any other default would be an act of cognitive collaboration with Britain’s sordid little branch-operation of the Cathedral, and we’ve now seen with stark clarity what that enables.
Does the progressive media really think it can de-realize this festival of cultural ruin with a standard inattention protocol? If so, it has to count as an extraordinary peak hubris moment. Perhaps the left is structurally incapable of preventing itself from pushing things over the brink of catastrophe. It always has to take that one additional step, and it has no sense at all of how to back down.
There have to be a lot of people in the UK right now who would be delighted to see the media establishment strung up from lamp-posts, with panic and defection rife in journalistic ranks. It’s surely not impossible that the pattern now jutting into hideous visibility in Britain will evoke a disturbing sense of recognition elsewhere, possibly throughout the Anglosphere. As far as core Cathedral operating procedures are concerned, this has to be a period of (possibly unprecedented) vulnerability. As a source of regime threatening irritability, the Rotherham syndrome is the droit du seigneur of the new nobility — even among a pitifully broken people, it pushes some deeply atavistic buttons. Lies, sexual exploitation, and foreign invasion — who’d want to be PR manager for this cocktail of native degradation?
Commenters:
Scientism: I think perhaps we, from what I assume are our fairly “privileged” positions (not having been “vulnerable youth”, but I only speak for myself here), don’t quite grasp how insidious the Cathedral is. This looks to us like the Cathedral coming apart, but consider that what we have here is a system that managed to train a succession of civil servants to overlook abuse. Not just one or two, but seemingly every last person involved with the council, the police force and the charities, was trained to overlook this kind of abuse, for 16 years.
How can such an outcome be anything but the Cathedral firing on all cylinders, doing what it was designed to do? The immediate reality of the Cathedral for most of us is, essentially, having been misled by the media, having woken up and realised we’ve been lied to, perhaps knowing we’ve lost much of our culture. In the future, we expect some kind of collapse, we think things will get worse. But that’s in the future. On the other hand, the reality of the Cathedral for the civil servants, activists, etc, who are part of it is: Pakistani men raping little white girls while everybody looks the other way. The reality for the media: not reporting on these events, because it might make white people angry at a minority group. That’s their main concern, in both cases, not the abuse. That’s their daily lived experience: being complicit in atrocities while simultaneously being enraged by trivialities.
This is what these guys do all day and have been doing for years. A little scandal isn’t going to change the way they do things. The only thing that’s going to end this is economic collapse or war.
Kgaard: I do not see economic collapse, and I don’t see war coming to the UK’s shores anytime soon. So the existing system continues as is, I guess. When you look to the top of the power structure, the logic of it all is crystal clear: Big business wants the bodies to offset all the babies not being created by native Brits. Labour, meanwhile, wants the immigrants because immigrants vote Labour. So it’s a pact made in hell — and the same pact has been made in the US and much of continental Europe. There is no stopping it that I can see. Who stops it? Who can withstand the combined force of the ENTIRE power structure coming down on their head — from the political left to the right?
Scientism: It’s essentially a set of pernicious feedback loops. The civil servants, the media and a large portion of the British public are experiencing a severe belief bias effect where all evidence confirms their Leftist outlook. Every atrocity is cause to double down on their anti-racist efforts. These efforts protect and enable the gangs and cause more atrocities. This serves to confirm the horrors of systemic racism in the mind of the anti-racist. When the natives try to organise against the protected immigrants, they’re merely seen as racism incarnate, again confirming the Leftist outlook. It’s difficult to see any end to it. These aren’t rational people; they’re caught in a system that develops and maintains a kind of delusive belief system. With the media and most university educated members of the public complicit, there’s little hope of exposure. The outrage of the uneducated masses merely confirms their racist nature. Nationalist groups inevitably find solace in anti-system symbolism and end up goose-stepping down the street, again conforming the worldview of the anti-racists. Everybody has a role to play and everything confirms Leftism! How do you escape that?
Friday, February 28, 2014
Anatomization of Progressive Adaptability and Cyclicality
The comment's author is the proprietor of another neo-reactionary blog: http://handleshaus.com/
Handle shows how progressivism has religious characteristics, but is a religion without a central authoritative text or a single locus of human authority. Consequently, it is maximally adaptable, manipulable, survivable, keeping in power those ruthless enough to ride its snaky path--but its perfunctory logic and its unprincipled basis in rhetoric leave it with minimal social, economic, military, or any other sort of optimality. Note, by the by, that the best of the neo-reactionary blogs attract comments of a higher quality than most articles in standard publications--and, as mostly pseudonymous writers, they even find the freedom to trample presently protected political fetishes--when such impede the search for truth or amusement.
Handle's Comment:
The strongest belief systems is one that can change opportunistically without admitting its changing, pretend it is part of a continuous tradition without resembling even its recent forbears, and become absolutely impervious to criticism or falsification. Like a religion.
I think the ACA-hours thing is a good example of what you see a lot of progressive writers do, and what Yglesias is particularly skilled at doing first.
The pattern of any particular debate is:
1. Progressives develop policy goal A, and implementation B.
2. Opposition says that B will cause negative trade-off or unintended consequence C – that Progressives themselves currently accept as negative, or at least something that is seen by most of the public as negative.
3. Sometimes the argument goes further and deeper with the Opposition saying anyB that is trying to accomplish A leads to C, there’s just no way around it.
4. At first Progressives deny B->C. But that is sometimes falsifiable, or just a total howler.
5. Then Progressives say, well, ok C, which is bad, but A is worth it. This is a matter of subjective valuation, which is why is it a dead-end for discourse, spinning around the same cul-de-sac forever.
6. And if that’s not satisfactory, then someone like Yglesias notices the obvious solution to the problem which is just to come along and say, “Actually, C is a good thing, or at least it has a bright side which we’re ignoring and which can trump the negative side. Only stupid people caught in dead-ends don’t see this. We should have more C! The burden of proof should now shift to people who are opposed to C!” This is the ultimate in ‘spin’ – and ‘flipping the script’ is why we call it spin.
7. And then everybody else suddenly realizes the immense power for winning the debate behind adopting a new set of beliefs where C is a good thing, and a day after Yglesias does it, I see a dozen other high-Alexa county writers repeat it. All of a sudden, the frame of debate shifts and the desirability of C is new dead-end, and the ratchet proceeds one notch at the expense of replacing a former progressive belief with a more useful new one – an adaptive mutation.
An example is the recent minimum wage stuff: The CBO came out and said it would mean less jobs in the midst of a weak labor market for the low-skilled. Since the CBO is progressive gospel – they can’t afford to criticize the number and ruin the credibility of a source they constantly use as a weapon. And all sides agree fewer jobs in this situation is bad, right?
And then, suddenly:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/18/cbo_minimum_wage_hike_would_cost_jobs.html
The outcome that the CBO is forecasting—an outcome where you get a small amount of disemployment that’s vastly outweighed by the increase in income among low-wage families writ large—is the outcome that you want.
A minimum wage hike with a small but real disemployment impact is the minimum wage hike you want.
Then it tweets and tumbls and reblogs all over the place. Now the question shifts to ‘what’s the ‘optimal’ number of job losses for a minimum wage hike to maximize ‘prosperity’, which, yeah, is kind of a fuzzy, manipulable notion, but what we were really always shooting for.
Tyler Cowen pushes back against the avalanche here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/the-cbo-report-on-the-minimum-wage.html
This is a perverse kind of Bayesianism where the policy cart is driving the ideology horse. One begins with subjective ideology and an empirical theory of policy implementation. When the data proves your theory produces results that are ideological negatives, then you just switch the valence to positive in your belief system. The means become the ends. Raising the minimum wage isn’t good because it redistributes more wealth from capital to labor without causing unemployment or inflation, raising the minimum wage is good in itself, and if disemployment and inflation are the results then they are also now positives we should have slightly more of.
Once you witness these progressivism adaptive mutation-cycles occur a few dozens of times a year (at least), you realize that change is the only constant
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
America in Afghanistan
I recently watched some Obama officials testifying before Congress on the Afghan situation. These men work for an ideology dying from a million lies eating its insides like worms, an ideology whose immune system has been hijacked by these parasites and now selectively rejects truth. How could they cough up the accursed truth? How could they even digest it in order that it might then be coughed up? They speak truth only accidentally or, upon encounter, angrily reject the alien substance. Look how General McChrystal was vomited out. Among the insane ruling class, the truth is an alien pathology.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Does Krauthammer Know He's a Leftist?
http://charlierose.com/watch/60306163
A smart guy, but his political positions resemble those of Democrats from the 60s through the 80s, depending on the particular issue. Can there be any serious doubt that the next generation of "conservative" columnists and opinionators will more closely resemble more recent generations of Democrats? I'd like to hear his response to these Moldbuggian tropes:
A smart guy, but his political positions resemble those of Democrats from the 60s through the 80s, depending on the particular issue. Can there be any serious doubt that the next generation of "conservative" columnists and opinionators will more closely resemble more recent generations of Democrats? I'd like to hear his response to these Moldbuggian tropes:
The great power center of 2008 is the Cathedral. The Cathedral has two parts: the accredited universities and the established press. The universities formulate public policy. The press guides public opinion. In other words, the universities make decisions, for which the press manufactures consent. It's as simple as a punch in the mouth.
The Cathedral operates as the brain of a broader power structure, the Polygon or Apparat - the permanent civil service. The Apparat is the civil service proper (all nonmilitary officials whose positions are immune to partisan politics, also known as "democracy"), plus all those formally outside government whose goal is to influence or implement public policy - ie, NGOs.
(There's a reason NGOs have to remind themselves that they're "non-governmental.")
....
For a hardened denialist such as myself, who has completely lost his faith in all these institutions, attempting to understand the world through the reports and analysis produced by the Cathedral is like trying to watch a circus through the camera on a cell phone duct-taped to the elephant's trunk. It can be done, but it helps to have plenty of external perspective.
And for anyone starting from a position of absolute faith in the Cathedral, there is simply no other source of information against which to test it. You are certainly not going to discredit the Times or Stanford by reading the Times or going to Stanford, any more than you will learn about the historical Jesus by attending a Latin Mass.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Kerry on Egypt from Pakistan
John Kerry, Obama's traveling jester, exercising his Bushian semantic acuity on Egyptian developments:
“The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people, all of whom were afraid of descendance into chaos, into violence,” Kerry was quoted as having told Geo. “And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment – so far. To run the country, there’s a civilian government. In effect, they were restoring democracy,” he added.
Hey, maybe its time for the Pentagon to restore democracy in America, to prevent further "descendance" into violence and disaster. I think this might mean the Cathedral is more enamored of democracy in theory than in practice. Which isn't to say that they're about to drop the pro-democracy propaganda shtick. Rather, it means that democracy will mean whatever they say it means. They are fairly fond of this trick, commandeering the language and reforming it for the purpose of moral betterment and good-thinking. What they call "amnesty" these days actually means get-out-of-jail-free for millions, and get-into-America-free for millions more. In the case of Egypt, since the army proved more friendly to good Egyptian friends of the Cathedral than the Muslim Brotherhood was, democracy means that the army resumes power. Now, do you think his Pakistani hosts quite follow these sophisticated involutions of intent and flights of interpretation? Who knows when the State Department's priests of permanent revolution may alight upon Islamabad as a promising new proving ground for their religion? When you consider that FDR inaugurated permanent revolution in America, could it be any way surprising that State translates this foundational stance into foreign policy? State's long struggle against colonialism, a struggle that catastrophized much of the third world, was certainly revolutionary and certainly stopped at nothing: they undermined the French in Algeria and the Pentagon in Vietnam, amongst many other glorious achievements against non-Marxists everywhere. Still, Kerry's bold turn of phrase shows the way for any adept dictatorship to keep State off its back. At least, that is, until State goes even further Left, as inevitably it must.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/170519#.UfyHDCIo6Rt
http://www.xenosystems.net/the-islamic-vortex-part-3a/
“The military was asked to intervene by millions and millions of people, all of whom were afraid of descendance into chaos, into violence,” Kerry was quoted as having told Geo. “And the military did not take over, to the best of our judgment – so far. To run the country, there’s a civilian government. In effect, they were restoring democracy,” he added.
Hey, maybe its time for the Pentagon to restore democracy in America, to prevent further "descendance" into violence and disaster. I think this might mean the Cathedral is more enamored of democracy in theory than in practice. Which isn't to say that they're about to drop the pro-democracy propaganda shtick. Rather, it means that democracy will mean whatever they say it means. They are fairly fond of this trick, commandeering the language and reforming it for the purpose of moral betterment and good-thinking. What they call "amnesty" these days actually means get-out-of-jail-free for millions, and get-into-America-free for millions more. In the case of Egypt, since the army proved more friendly to good Egyptian friends of the Cathedral than the Muslim Brotherhood was, democracy means that the army resumes power. Now, do you think his Pakistani hosts quite follow these sophisticated involutions of intent and flights of interpretation? Who knows when the State Department's priests of permanent revolution may alight upon Islamabad as a promising new proving ground for their religion? When you consider that FDR inaugurated permanent revolution in America, could it be any way surprising that State translates this foundational stance into foreign policy? State's long struggle against colonialism, a struggle that catastrophized much of the third world, was certainly revolutionary and certainly stopped at nothing: they undermined the French in Algeria and the Pentagon in Vietnam, amongst many other glorious achievements against non-Marxists everywhere. Still, Kerry's bold turn of phrase shows the way for any adept dictatorship to keep State off its back. At least, that is, until State goes even further Left, as inevitably it must.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/170519#.UfyHDCIo6Rt
http://www.xenosystems.net/the-islamic-vortex-part-3a/
Thursday, March 7, 2013
"The Latitude is Complete"
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.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
America and Its Fate
The most successful world leader of the last 50 years informs the Obamite degenerates that their two great dream-delusions, "multiculturalism" and socialism, will destroy America. He is precisely correct. But, I wonder if he understands the underlying power dynamic which has produced this hegemony of "Progressive" ideology in America. I judge that it is undergirded by a prevailing moral philosophy of cultural Marxism actioned by the Polygon or, as the great Mencius Moldbug has renominated it, the "Cathedral." This is Moldbug's concise demarcation of the Cathedral:
The Polygon might be defined as the "extended civil service." It consists not 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").
These are the people who "manufacture consent" in America, and they are the people who write the rules by which all elements of society are to abide, and the people who dispose of the sums annually redistributed by the government. And they believe or pretend to believe in political correctness, which is a kind of pacifist-Marxist version of Christianity minus God.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
How to End-Run the Ripoff Machine
In time, this may produce the tragic consequence of fewer communists--I mean professors--lounging away on tenure and spouting PC garbage. A few of their fellow fifth column buddies in the sprawling higher-ed bureaucracy might also find the end of the road. It may even come to pass in a generation or two that the only remaining campuses in America will be those focused on science and engineering, which require physical labs, or the truly elite schools, which can afford the outrageous expense.
Monday, December 31, 2012
The Left Unleashed--Moldbug Seeks Redress
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...
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)