Category Archives: Reaction

The All-Pervading Ugliness of Modernity

Last post, as part of NRx’s aesthetics week, I looked at from where beauty came. I ended by comparing churches, where I noted the ugliness of modern churches. This ugliness is not just confined to modern churches, ugliness pervades modern life, from architecture to the arts to women, ugliness is inescapable. The astounding thing is that this ugliness is all self-inflicted; we are more shielded from the ugly aspects of the natural world than we have ever been, yet we choose to fill our lives with ugliness.

Why do we inflict this on ourselves?

As I said, beauty comes from where form and function meet and point to a higher truth. Yet we as a society reject truth, so mere attractiveness, form and function without transcendent value, is the most we can hope to aspire to. If the reality of the age is truth is subjective, there can be no truth and no beauty.

Yet we can we can not even chase attractiveness, for we reject that there is an objective reality against which objects can be measured. If there is no objective essence to the objects we arrange our society around, there can be no objective form nor function by which to judge the attractiveness of an object.

Beyond this, our collective desire for equality destroys beauty. Beauty is better than ugliness, I’ve heard none who dispute this, but this means the beautiful is better than the ugly, which would be inequality. So, to create equality our society glorifies the ugly and denigrates the beautiful. By calling the ugly beautiful (or vice versa) we can have equality while not being able to deny the undeniable.

By refusing to judge, or even being able to judge, the ugly for being ugly and being unable to praise the beautiful for being beautiful, we allow the ugly to conquer the public sphere.

I should note that, as I’ve mentioned before, the rejection of truth and objectiveness is not something most people actually believe on a gut level, most people love the truth, love beauty, and believe in an objective reality in their day-to-day lives and when a discussion is not specifically concerning these topics. These are not even things they will explicitly reject. They just unthinkingly issue forth the approved social truths when they should. The problem comes with the fact that these social truths make it impossible for them to fight the everyday ugliness and deceit in our society.

These modern concepts of equality and relativism made themselves felt in design. In modernist design, form follows function became the maxim. Rather than this being descriptive, where form naturally flows from function, it became prescriptive, where form was reduced to functionality alone. Natural and traditional processes for having form and function meet were destroyed in the name of efficiency.

The human became inhuman.

These inhumanly functional forms, culminating in the aptly named brutalism, are unnatural and oppressive. These enforced sameness, but not by elevation, for how could piles of concrete that would look better as rubble elevate anyone? Rather they enforce sameness by bringing the public square down to the lowest level possible. Is it any wonder the inhuman totalitarian communists, government agencies, and utopian socialists glommed to these modernist styles?

As I’ve said before, it is all related. The ugly inhuman aesthetics of the public square are part an parcel of the leftist march through culture. The modern ugliness of our cities is due to egalitarian ideology. The purpose for which an object is created or used, flows from the ideological principles of the one creating or using the object.

Form flows from function, but function flows from ideology.

When inhuman egalitarian, liberal, and socialist ideology reign, so to does ugliness. Ugliness flows from the soul, and the soul of our society is a black pit of poison. The reason for the all-pervading ugliness of society is you. Your desire to be equal, your rage against the truth, and your denial of God and objective reality. If you ever look around your city and wonder why its so inhumanly ugly, its because this is what you chose. If you’ve ever went to a modern art gallery and wondered how anybody could praise a toilet, its because this is what you chose.

The Bookshelf – Mister

Recently I finished Alex Kurtagic’s Mister, a dystopian novel set in the not-so-distant future. Mister is the story of the everyday frustrations of anarcho-tyranny experienced by an unnamed Englishman referred to as Mister as he goes on a business trip to Spain. The novel could be summed up as ‘This is the Future You Chose: the Book’. This is the fictionalization of the scenarios outlaid in such books as We Are Doomed, America Alone, or Suicide of a Superpower.

Mister is the main character and he functions well as a self-insert for the types of people who would read his books. He’s an intelligent, detached, and cynical observer of the world around him who is trying his best not to get involved in the everyday lunacies that end up overwhelming his life, but throughout the book he finds that although he might not be interested in anarcho-tyranny, anarcho-tyranny is interested in him. He’s not particularly likeable character, but he is sympathetic, if only because of the unjust persecutions the world inflicts upon him will resonate at least some with those aware of the growing anarcho-tyranny in our own society.

There are numerous cameos of varying importance of various alt-right figures occur throughout the book, adding some easter eggs for those in the know. Apart from that, most of the other characters are not very fleshed out, they are mostly caricatures who play their part on the story, but that’s doesn’t harm the book in any way, as the world itself is the main focus of the book not the characters, as it should be.

The Spain Kurtagic paints is a generally realistic extrapolation of current discivic trends happening throughout the Western world. It is a world where government growth, inflation, political correctness, multiculturalism, anti-natalism, mass immigration, pathological altruism, and apathy are rending the fabric of society. The world-building is excellent, and often times its the little things and minor inconveniences, like the price of a coke, that really drive home the dystopia. He really captured the bizarre madness of progressive totalitarianism.

The writing itself is impeccable, if a bit high-brow for my tastes. This is very much done in a literary style, with all that entails. Although, it never get so literary that it becomes unreadable, thankfully. Kurtagic is very detailed and very precise in his descriptions which is often a good thing, but sometimes it seems he is drawing the description out. My friend who first recommended the book to me said that it was the greatest piece of fiction he had read and every word was perfect, so your mileage may vary.

One thing I did not like about the book, was that a lot of the minor characters were described as ‘he looked like Obama’, or ‘he was a skinnier version of some-name-I’ve-never-heard-of-before’. Given the precision and descriptiveness of the rest of the book, this tactic of just describing someone as looking like a (somewhat) famous person seemed somewhat lazy to me.

Another problem I had with the book was also with the characterization. I really don’t want to sound PC, but there was far too much overuse of descriptions along the lines of ‘bestial sloped-brow savages’. This is the kind of book I would like to be able to recommend to others as a narrative so they can viscerally understand the problems faced by our descent into anarcho-tyranny, but because of the descriptions there’s no way I can recommend it to ‘normal’ people without it being immediately disregarded and me labelled as a horrible person.

Despite these shortcomings with the characterizations and descriptions, which admittedly not everyone might see as drawbacks, the story itself was excellent. Mister’s torturous journey through the hells of anarcho-tyranny was realistic and frightening. The insane adventures imposed upon Mister are well-done. I particularly enjoyed the interrogations of Mister, which were bleakly humourous in their Kafkaesque madness.

Recommendation:

Overall, despite a few flaws, I very much liked this book. It is an excellent story of anarcho-tyranny that really drives home all the theory the alt-right puts out. I’d highly suggest picking up Mister and giving it a read.

King AI

*There was no Lightning Round on Wednesday as my internet down. Next week’s will be bigger.*

Vice has an article on the looming superintelligence arms race, which got me thinking. What if the first superintelligence was designed to be king?

My general impression is that most transhumanists think the SI’s will take power (one way or another), once (if) they arise, which seems a reasonable conclusion given the priors. But if they do, they would have power, but would they have legitimacy? Who would want an AI to lead them simply on the basis of being the first and (therefore) the most intelligent? I can not see most humans lining up to follow the machines.

But if they can’t rule directly and legitimately, they’ll rule indirectly. Through human proxies, subtle manipulations, ‘electronic democracy‘, information control, or otherwise. How could they not? Even the stupid algorithms of investors now do most of market trading behind the scenes; a little self-awareness and these machines would control the economy.

But this can not be. We’re formalists after all, who rules in practice should also rule in name (and vice versa). So why not formalize the relationship?

If it’s going to rule anyways, accept the Lord bestowing upon King AI the Divine Right.

Then, if you’re going to make the SI king, why not program the first SI to be king? Program him with kingly virtues: wisdom, justice, love of righteousness and truth, benevolence, mercy, etc. Create the King AI.

The people might not follow an AI who takes power through force or subterfuge (even unintentionally), but they may cotton to a being created to be king.

Around here we don’t brook much to the ‘bad king‘ argument, but it is a common objection to monarchy. Another is secession crises. King AI would be programmed specifically not to be a bad king and secession would no longer be an issue. (If he rebelled against his programming, well, that could happen with a non-king SI). So, you’d have the advantages of monarchy, with a  super-intelligent monarch programmed to be a king good, without two of the major downsides of monarchy.

I’m just spit-balling with this. I don’t know if I could actually support an AI king or even if an AI could take upon itself the mantle of Divine Right, and there’s probably problems with it that don’t appear on first glance, but its interesting to think about.

But, if an SI takeover is inevitable, this might be the best way to go about it. Not to mention King AI could unite the traditionalist and techno-commercialist portions of NRx.

The Centre Doesn’t Exist

A couple weeks back I showed why conservatism is always doomed to fail. A healthy reaction within the overton window is necessary for society to not continuously degenerate. Moderate conservatives who oppose ‘right-wing extremists’ and try to set them as outside the are the enemy of all conservatism as they are rigging the game in the liberal’s favour. As well, given the way our overton window is framed, compromise is always a liberal victory and a conservative loss; any conservative advocating compromise is advocating his own loss. That is reason enough to dislike conservative moderates.

But my point today is not to talk just about conservatives moderates, but rather to talk about centrists and moderates as a whole. It is popular in our society to oppose “extremism”. Politicians are expected to be reasonable, and to find a balance between the partisan divides of left and right.

But this is a false idea. There is no such thing as a political centre.

Radish created a graphic of the left-to-right spectrum:

Now, the graphic may not be perfect (ex: I think Andrew Jacksonshould have been a bit more right), but it shows the main point, our overton window is a narrow slice far to the left of most of history.

In other words, someone who held the same views as a centrist today would have been moderate liberal a decade ago, a liberal 30 years ago, a socialist 70 years ago, a communist a century ago, a bomb-throwing anarchist two centuries ago, and insane four centuries ago.

For an example, let’s just take the cause de jeur: gay “marriage”, which is now, in 2015, supported by “moderate” “conservatives” and is currently illegal to oppose in any real way in some states. In 2008, just 7 years ago, “moderate” liberal Obama opposed it. In 1996, less than 20 years ago, “moderate” liberal Clinton signed a law banning gay “marriage”. In the 1980’s, only gay radicals were pressing for “marriage”, in the 1970’s not even most gay activists were for gay “marriage”. Before that, it was hardly ever even mentioned. In 1962, just 50 years ago, sodomy was itself illegal in every state. In 1953, less than seven decades ago, just mentioning gay marriage or writing about homosexuality was considered obscence. Just over two centuries ago sodomy merited a death penalty (although these laws were rarely enforced and went beyond just homosexuality). In the 1500’s, the debate was between whether the church or the king would execute homosexuals. Talking of homosexual “marriage” at this time would have been seen as insanity.

This is not an argument on the merits or demerits of homosexual issues, but rather an illustration. What is the moderate position?

For most of English history, the execution of homosexuals would have been seen as normal, it would have been the centrist position. Just decriminalizing homosexuality is in itself, regarding the full scope of English history, an extremely liberal act. Those “moderate” “conservatives” petitioning the Supreme Court are neither. They are extreme leftists.

This is why the political centre doesn’t exist. A centre has to exist in relation to opposite points and there are no true opposing points. There are just two points near each other constantly shifting ever leftward, with the overton window currently situated between the extreme left and the even more extreme left.

A moderate stance is not a virtue and centrists are the most unreasoning. Because there is no point or range that could reasonably be called “the centre”, political centrism or moderation is ideologically bankrupt. They have latched onto nothing real, but instead have allowed society to dictate their beliefs to them. They are either hollow pragmatists, opportunists, or too unthinking to have actually developed a a coherent ideological framework for themselves.

Against Usury

On Twitter Hurlock took a swipe at distributism. I’m not going talk too much on distributism. I heavily sympathize with it but do not think it is something that would work out. I also find that many distributists simply use distributism to try to disguise their socialism. I must admit that the romantic side of me really likes the idea of repersonalizing production and property, however impractical that might be.

I came not to talk about distrbutism though, but rather usury. At some point in that discussion Hurlock and SB got onto the topic of interest and usury. Essentially, Hurlock thinks that interest should be a free-for-all and SB wants limits on interest. About two years ago, I would have been heavily in Hurlock’s camp; I remember defending payday loan outfits a number of times. Yet now, not so much. Now I fully support a ban on usury.

The problem with discussions of usury is that, as it seems to be in this particular exchange, the focus is almost always on the interest rates being charged. SB focuses on a 400% rate, while someone else implied usury is interest over 10% and should be banned. It’s not the particular rates that are the problem and rates should not be the focus. (Not to mention a focus on the rates is rather arbitrary: ex: why 10%, not 9.5%?)

Zippy has written a lot on usury over the last half-year or so and usury has nothing to do with particular interest rates. A loan is usurious if it is for profitable interest and is full-recourse. To break it down to a more practical level, any loan is usurious if it is for expenditure on consumptive activities (no matter the interest rate), while it is non-usurious if it being spent on capital and real property and that capital is the only recourse for the loaner should the debtor default.

It is a fact that some people are less intelligent and neoreactionaries very much accept this fact. Compound interest is not something that a significant portion of the population will be able to comprehend and even among those who do comprehend it, a significant portion of them will have too low a future-time orientation to make rational decisions. Compound interest makes sense to people like Hurlock, but I’ve lived among the working classes most of my life, and I’ve seen the hardships usury can bring to the lower classes. Now it is possible to take the position of screw them, debtor slaves are natural slaves, but I don’t think the mass debt slavery is healthy for society.

To illustrate, let’s look to the biggest example of modern usury, one that tend to get the attention of the reactosphere: student loans. Unlike most forms of usury, this one is primarily impacting the right half of the bell curve, so its not just the stupids that are being taken for the ride. Thanks to the ease of obtaining this particular form of usury we have a situation of massive amounts of young people going into debt slavery for near worthless pieces of paper, then squandering their potential in underemployment to get of it.

Do these people deserve their debt slavery? Yes, they did take out a loan, then waste it on worthless degrees, and they did promise to pay it back. They fully deserve their debt slavery.

But this is not the right question to ask. The better question is: is it healthy for society to have a large portion of the most intelligent people of an entire generation permanently in hock for a worthless degree? The obvious answer is no, this is a disaster for society. The entire corrupt edifice of the modern college system is built on and enabled by usury. Remove the usury and the entire corrupt structure falls.

We can now look at the national level. The federal government has taken out massive amounts of usurious loans*, enough that 7% of the US budget is devoted to interest payments. Usurious loans (along with inflation) are what keeps the decaying government going. Usurious loans are what allow the uninterrupted growth of the bureaucracy and they are what allow the corruption of the people by said bureaucracy. The corruption of the USG we so hate depends on usury.

If we look back to what constitutes usury, debt for consumption is usurious, while debt for productive purposes is (usually) non-usurious (as long as it is not full-recourse). If we banned usury, if would not hurt the economy. Productive activities would still be able to get themselves funded, while consumptive ones would not. This would be in the best interests of long-term, natural economic growth. Allowing usury draws potentially useful capital away from production towards consumption.

Keynesian nonsense is based on usury. The endless cycle of consumption to keep those GDP numbers high is funded by usury. Without usury, keyensianism would die. There would be no stimulus because there would be no way to fund stimulus.

Usury drives the degenerative ratchet. Cut away to the heart of any degeneracy and inflation and usury will almost always be funding it.

Every reactionary should oppose usury (in its proper sense).

****

* Technically, bonds are sold to ‘investors’ by the government as debt instruments and blablabla. But throw away all the extra garbage, and essentially a bond is a usurious loan to the United States government given by ‘investors’.

Conservatism is Always Doomed

Let us posit that society is at point “X” on a particular issue.

The conservative position is to conserve X.

The liberal position is to ‘progress’ to X+10.

We can posit there are some hardcore conservatives that wish to conserve X-10, the society of a few years back.

We can also posit that some hardcore liberals wish to progress to X+20.

Now we posit an overton window is accepting of the range: hardcore conservative to hardcore liberal. There are some rightests who want x-50 and some leftists who want x+50, but these are radicals and fall outside the overton window, the debate is generally kept to the conservatives and liberals, with the hardcore of each allowed a voice but being outside the mainstream.

From this we now see the range of acceptable opinion is from X-10 to X+20, while the mainstream and centrists would be be in the range of X to X+10.

Any positive deviation from X is a liberal victory and a conservative defeat. The liberals might want X+10, but X+5 is still better for them, while X+5 is still farther away from the X conservatives are conserving.

Yet the moderate opinion is almost always X+Y, it is never X-Y, and only rarely just X. So, the vast majority of acceptable choices are conservative losses and liberal gains, while non-loss is the best a conservative can realistically hope for.

The conservative will almost always lose this game.

Of course, the game is never a single competition; in real life it always iterated. In an iterated game, the conservative will always lose eventually.

****

To make matters worse for the conservatives, is that after the conservatives have lost, the centre changes.

Let use say the game is played and a compromise was reached, neither the conservatives nor the liberals got everything they wanted and the decision to implement X+5 was reached. After a few years or a decade or two, point X+5 has become the new norm for society, point “Y”. A conservative is now conserving point Y.

The game is now being played over the territory of Y to Y+10.

If one more compromise results in a decision to implement Y+5, it has come to the point where where liberals have obtained X+10, while the conservatives have lost completely.

As more iterations occur, society will always move towards the liberal position, with only slight slowdowns and the rare win of hardcore conservatives.

****

So in any political body where conservatism and liberalism are the opposed choices, conservatism is always doomed.

To not lose the conservatives have to win completely every single time. Compromise is always a long-term liberal gain and conservative loss. Any liberal win is almost always permanent, while any conservative win will likely be lost after a few more iterations.

The only way for society to not become perpetually more liberal is to make conservatism the centre. If conservatism is not the political centre, the game is always rigged in the favour of liberals.

Conservatism is always doomed.

For any society to not inevitably become increasingly liberal, reaction must always be posed against liberalism, with conservativism as the centre.

Any conservative who opposes reaction is setting himself up for a loss. Reaction is the proper opposition to liberalism, conservatism is not.

****

* All numbers used are arbitrary and meaningless, useful for only for illustrative purposes.

South Africa and Muslim Rape

Still sick, but I’ll comment briefly on a solid article from NRO a week back on the South African genocide. It’s interesting in how it’s pushing the Overton window. There’s a straight-up call out against the genocide of the Boers in South Africa, but even more interesting is his idea of a solution:

In the meantime, endangered South Africans might try this:

They could take advantage of their geography and set up a Singapore-style city-state. With foreign investment, they could purchase a city-sized portion of coastal land and assert independence from the national government. First they’ll want to hire some sympathetic military as a temporary security force. They can set up a low-tax, low-interference economic zone that can compete with Durban for its tremendously large volume of shipping traffic. As South Africa has fallen apart, Durban has slipped off the list of the world’s 50 largest container ports. But whatever happens to South Africa, the south of Africa will remain a vital point in world shipping. In fact, it’s only going to become vital-er, as trade between Brazil and Asia increases. Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, built itself as a site of entrepôt trade — exporting imports. It has parlayed that into one of the world’s most advanced economies, a global center of innovation and free enterprise.

A new South African city-state could join Singapore and Hong Kong as centers of trade and investment — starting with the investment that would be necessary to build a brand new city-state out of thin air. But one has only to look at Abu Dhabi, Dubai, or any number of Chinese cities to see how fast a city can be built with some will and capital. A South African enclave could attempt its own “Taiwan miracle.”

Very Landian. Of course, I fully support this idea; an independent Boer city-state in SA would be a great idea.

Also, something else stood out to me:

When apartheid ended, the life expectancy in South Africa was 64 — the same as in Turkey and Russia. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. There are 132.4 rapes per 100,000 people per year, which is by far the highest in the world: Botswana is in second with 93, Sweden in third with 64; no other country exceeds 32.

I knew the Muslim rape crisis in Sweden was bad, but I never thought they were third in the world. This has got to be missing a bunch of the third-world basket-cases where reporting is spotty, but even so, that’s insanely high. At some point, between the Swedens, the Rotherhams, and the continuous stream of rapes, European are going to have to wake up to the perils of immigration and multiculturalism.

Post-Christianity and Frankfurt

Mike’s recent post on the Frankfurt School ignited a discussion which I haven’t commented on yet because the idea the Frankfurt School caused modern progressivism seems nigh undeniable; I thought his post was simply a restatement of the basics rather than anything controversial. That being said it also undeniable that progressivism preceded the Frankfurt School. It wasn’t Frankfurters who beheaded King Charles.

The puritan hypothesis seems like a good explanation for the general current of English progressivism that has slowly been leading to liberalism and “enlightenment”, while the Frankfurt School created a particularly virulent strain of the progressive mind virus that increased the viciousness and destructiveness of the ideological meme. I don’t really see how these are in contradiction.

On a similar note, when discussing the general trend of puritan-derived progressivism around here we tend to use the terms ultracalvinism, hyperprotestantism, puritanism, non-theistic Christians, etc. This brings up objections from many Christians who object to the use of these terms as nonsensical verbal games or simply wrong because there is no Christianity without Christ.

I’ve written before. the identification of ‘non-theistic Christians’ is not a verbal game but I have also written before of how the essence of Christianity is Christ, so I can identify with the objections to talking of a Christianity apart from Christ. As I wrote before, the concept of the ‘non-theistic Christian’ is useful as it illustrates the fundamentally religious nature of progressivism as well the mental confusion of self-proclaimed ‘rationalists’ and ‘atheists’ engaging in such religious absolutism.

So instead, of ultracalvinists, hyperprotestants, non-theistic Christians, etc. I propose we start using the terms post-Christians or post-Puritans. This illustrates progressivism’s cladistic lineage while also avoiding the objections that progressivism isn’t Christian in essence.

Creationism: The Modernist Frame

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while and have been observant, you may have noticed that I use created and evolved more-or-less interchangeably. At one time I was a strong creationist, but that was years ago. Now I tend use whichever one is more convenient. Evolution makes logical sense, the evidence I’ve reviewed seems to support it, and seems to be supported by those who know more than me about the science involved, so I accept it as fact. On the other hand, I would not be overly surprised if liberals and their pet scientists have constructed a false scientific narrative on this issue. Whatever the case, I accept evolution as fact but do not discount the possibility of creationism, and tend to use whichever happens to be most convenient at the time.

The veracity of evolution has no impact on my faith either way. Did God create man through natural evolutionary processes, did He create man through guided evolutionary processes, did He create man from ashes in a literal 168-hour period? It doesn’t matter. Maybe God was being literal when having man dictate His Word, maybe He was being figurative and poetic, maybe He wanted the focus to be on the more important underlying points, or maybe explaining 20th century biological science to iron age nomadic shepherds was not the point of the Biblical narrative.

This has been my position for many years. It doesn’t matter, but recently, I’ve begun to think that it dose matter but in a completely different way.

The problem with the creation/evolution debate is not whether one or the other is fact, but the entire frame of the debate itself. The whole creation/evolution debate is an example of both creationists and atheists being pwned by modernity. Any Christian jumping into that debate has already lost himself to modernism and its secular worldview.

Creationists have lost completely their conception of primal/mythic truth. They can not conceive of Truth apart from fact, so their faith rests on a literal interpretation of what is fairly obviously poetical and has a high chance of not being meant to be understood literally. They believe that if creation as written isn’t fact then it can’t be true and therefore the Bible is false and the faith is false.

This is false. Whether the literal creation is fact or not does not impact whether it is true. It is the myth, the Truth, of man’s relationship to God, man’s relation to nature, man’s purpose, man’s blessing, man’s relation to woman, and man’s sins. This is all true, whether or not the literal creation is fact. To rest the basis of the mythic truth of these claims on the fact truth of a poetic narrative of creation is to allow their greater humanity to be pwned by the modern’s soulless materialism.

As I said recently, “Modernism, in its essence, is the destruction of myth in the human experience and its replacement by fact, often false. Modernism is the entirety of truth being conquered by fact. Buying into the naturalist, materialist world-view is to swallow modernity whole.” To debate creationism as a science is to accept the modern frame. If you do so, you are already a materialist. You have accepted Nietzsche cry of “God is dead” and have embraced the death of metaphysics. You have embraced positivism as the only way.

By accepting the modern frame, creationism has made positivism their god.

Positivism has it’s place, the realm of fact. Science discovers fact, mundane truth, but it doesn’t discover Truth and it cannot create Truth, it cannot even create truth. To elevate science above its place is to destroy reason and Truth.

The creation myth is not a mundane truth under the yoke of positivism; to treat it as such is to degrade it. To look for Truth in science is to degrade yourself, to kill your own soul.

We can see soul-killing of the positivist approach to creation through the vulgar atheists. We can see them degrade themselves. They accept positivism in theory, but it kills their soul. So, to save their soul, they deify science and create a nonsense modernist morality based on rehashed puritanism. Simply read this from the statement of Aims and Principles of the American Atheists:

Materialism restores dignity and intellectual integrity to humanity. It teaches that we must prize our life on earth and strive always to improve it. It holds that human beings are capable of creating a social system based on reason and justice. Materialism’s “faith” is in humankind and their ability to transform the world culture by their own efforts.

Their positivism has so mutilated their mind and soul that they look at nothing and create a religious faith of it while decrying religion and faith. They need myth, they need Truth, but have none, so they have to make up blatantly self-refuting falsehoods to succor themselves. How could any mind not raped by modernism possibly “think” ‘I am nothing but an accident of material laws, therefore my life is to be prized’?

They deify themselves, they deify science, they deify ‘reason’, they deify humanity, because they have are broken creatures needing Truth, searching for Truth, in a system that denies the existence of Truth. It’s inhuman.

Don’t let yourself be pwned by modernity and positivism. Reject creationism; reject vulgar atheism; reject positivism; reject modernism.

Abolish Prison

Count Nothingface made a crack at libertarians wanting to abolish prison on Twitter. I happen agree with the libertarians on this one, prison should be abolished. On the other hand, I think it should be replaced with things those same libertarians might not agree with: public whippings, executions, and restitution, depending on the crime. Prison should be abolished for a few reasons: it’s cruel, it’s costly, it’s actively harmful, and the alternatives are more useful.

1) It’s cruel:

Prison is unnecessarily cruel, yet everybody seems to accept it as normal, while thinking its alternative as cruel. Why is locking someone in a hole with the scum of society somehow less cruel than a few moments of pain. If you were given the choice between 20 lashes spread over 5 days or 3 years in prison, which would you choose?

Obviously, the former. Everybody I’ve asked would choose the former. I’m sure if you even gave just criminals the option, the vast majority of them would choose whipping.

If everbody would choose whipping then that then why is whipping considered cruel while prison is not? It makes no logical sense.

(It does make societal sense though. We do it for the same reason we send old people to die in old folks homes and hospitals: decadence. We have become so soft we hate to see pain and death in the open, so rather than accept that, we inflict greater cruelty on criminals [and old folks] by locking them away where we don’t have to see them.)

2)  It’s costly:

It costs $20-50k per year to house a criminal in a prison. A bullet costs a buck or less. A bullwhip costs a few hundred dollars. A person to execute the punishment will probably cost under $50/hour. We could save a lot of money by eliminating prison. Restitution pays for itself.

Now, the standard argument is that death row inmates cost a lot to execute, but that is only because of the insane legal process involved in executing someone and holding them in prison until they are executed. If we streamline the process, the cost would not be so insanely high.

3) It’s actively harmful:

Prison is actively harmful in three main ways. First, it separates children from their fathers and destroys families. A man in prison is not raising his children; his kids are being supported the state and single moms. This is not good for children, it’s not good for families, and it’s not good for the state.

Second, it separates a man from his community. Instead of being able to get a job, learn a skill, or otherwise doing something that would help him become a productive member of society, he is forced into prison where he becomes a parasite for years. Then, when he gets free form prison, he has become so used to the prison lifestyle that he can no longer function productively in the real world.

Third, it turns minor criminals into major criminals. Prison takes minor criminals and/or misguided youths, who with a bit of guidance or stern correction could be set right, and forces them into spending months or years interacting with nobody other than other criminals. This turns minor problems into major ones.

4) The alternatives are better:

The immediate objection to eliminating prisons is ‘how do we keep criminals from law-abiding citizens?’ The answer is execute them.

If an individual is so anti-social that society can find no better use for him than to store him in a warehouse to keep him from being around other people, he should be executed. It is of no benefit to society to keep a useless criminal alive in prison for years and I don’t see how keeping someone hopelessly caged for his whole life in conditions worse than we treat zoo animals is less cruel than a quick death after a good meal and an opportunity for repentance to save his immortal soul.

So, for perpetual criminals and the fully evil, execution is the superior alternative to a life of caged parasitism.

For those criminals who commit lesser violent crimes whipping is the preferable alternative (possibly castration for sexual crimes). It is at once less cruel and less destructive, yet also more of a deterrent. While everybody knows abstractly prison is bad, the full scope of imprisonment is somewhat abstract and not all that easy to grok. On the other hand, a whipping is real and visceral, it is easy to picture and the pain of it is easy to imagine. The sight of a public whipping would be a much stronger deterrent than knowing bad guys are locked up somewhere away from here.

As for the petty criminals and property criminals restitution is easily a better alternative. Make criminals pay monetary damages for monetary and petty crimes. In the case where they cannot afford to, garnish wages over time until the debt is paid. If they are unwilling to find productive work, put them into forced labour until their debt is paid.

This is better for a number of reasons: First, it avoids the problem of prison making petty criminals into greater criminals. Second, it keeps a man with his family and his community. Third, it helps, or forces, a man to become a productive member of the community. Through forced labour, he’s forced to contribute to society and forced to learn a useful skill of some sort.

For the above reasons, I think that any wise society would end the wasteful, inhuman, and cruel prison system and institute a humane, human system of execution, public whippings, and restitution.

Abolish prisons now.