Monthly Archives: February 2016

Institutional Capture

I’ve mentioned before that the left has, in the long-term, won almost every political battle of the last century. The one big area where the US (and just the US) has not been moving overly left is gun freedom. The main reason for this is the NRA, but the NRA wasn’t always as powerful or hardline as it is now.

In the second half of the 1970s, the NRA faced a crossroads. Would it remain an Establishment institution, partnering with such mainstream entities as the Ford Foundation and focusing on shooting competitions? Or would it roll up its sleeves and fight hammer and tongs against the gun-control advocates? Or flee to the Mountain West? The latter was appealing, and the NRA leadership decided to move the headquarters to Colorado and also spend $30 million to build a recreational facility in New Mexico called the National Outdoor Center.

The moderates felt rejected by both the NRA hard-liners and the Washington elite.

“Because of the political direction the NRA was taking, they weren’t being invited to parties and their wives were not happy,” says Jeff Knox, Neal’s son and director of the Firearms Coalition, which fights for the Second Amendment and against laws restricting guns or ammunition. “Dad was on the phone constantly with various people around the country. He had his copy of the NRA bylaws and Robert’s Rules, highlighted and marked. My father and a lot of local club leaders and state association guys organized their troops.”

Theirs was a grass-roots movement within the NRA. The solution was to use the membership to make changes. The bylaws of the NRA gave members power on the convention floor to vote for changes in the NRA governing structure.

“We were fighting the federal government on one hand and internal NRA on the other hand,” Aquilino says.

In Cincinnati, Knox read the group’s demands, 15 of them, including one that would give the members of the NRA the right to pick the executive vice president, rather than letting the NRA’s board decide. The coup took hours to accomplish. Joe Tartaro, a rebel, remembers the evening as “electric.” The hall’s vending machine ran out of sodas.

By 3:30 in the morning the NRA had a whole new look. Gone were the Old Guard officers, including Maxwell Rich, the ousted executive vice president. The members replaced him with an ideological soul mate of Knox’s named Harlon Carter.

Carter, a longtime NRA board member, had arrived in Washington in 1975 as founding director of a new NRA lobbying unit, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA). His pugnacious approach, which rankled the Old Guard, was captured in a letter he wrote to the entire NRA membership to discuss the fight in Congress over gun control: “We can win it on a simple concept —No compromise. No gun legislation.”

The right is holding its own in this particular battle because hardliners captured the NRA (and then later recaptured it after a moderate pushback). This is how the left has always won, by capturing institutions: the academy, NGO’s, the media, the bureaucracy, etc.

If the right wants to win, it needs to figure out a way to take over pre-existing institutions. Making institutions is also good, but it takes a lot more effort. Conquering pre-existing institutions and their resource base is better.

The Neoreactionary Bargain

I’ve explained the theoretical core of neoreaction and made an introduction to neoreaction. But what it the ultimate goal of neoreaction?

Neoreaction was originally an intellectual exercise, a discussion of ideas. Because of this it had no real goal beyond theorizing. Moldbug wrote a general idea of the final goal of neoreaction in his Open Letter.

The end goal of neoreaction is formalized, privatized government. The Open Letter and Letter to France outline the steps a country’s elites should take to do this.

But how is neoreaction to achieve this?

The current social order is slowly(?) collapsing. The money’s run out, inflation and cheap debt are reaching the limits of their ability to mask insolvency, the natives are growing increasingly restless, low-level guerilla war is rising, and our culture and cohesion are breaking down. What can not last forever, won’t. Eventually this social order will be replaced.

What will it be replaced by?

One option is a slow limping decline/dark age. Another is simple collapse and anarchy, possibly an on-going low-level civil war. Another possibility, particularly in Europe, is Islam. A fourth possibility is a leftist singularity. The most likely possibility is a right-wing surge of the native population and the violent expulsion of the elites and invaders.

You’ll notice that all of these are bloody. Neoreaction wants to avoid this. To do so, we are building an ideological and, eventually, structural basis for a leader* to arise and implement the neoreactionary agenda by making a bargain with the elites.

The neoreactionary bargain to the elites will essentially be this:

Your regime will fall. It can fall to the leftist chaos, Islamic invaders, or right-wing populists, but it will fall. Any of those three groups will happily and ruthlessly exterminate you and your families, probably after torture, reeducation, work camps, rape, and/or enslavement. The leader knows that violent revolutions of any type tends to end poorly for the country and he also would like to avoid death camps and mass executions if possible. So he will make a deal.

If you willingly divest power to the leader, he will restore orderly government. He will expel the Islamic invaders, halt the leftist singularity, and placate the right-wing populists. Current higher elites will be allowed to keep some of your wealth (and your lives) as long as you obey the new order; lower elites and officials hostile to the new order will be retired on a modest, livable stipend and not be further harassed as long as you remain private. Some of the most criminal of the elites will have to meet final justice but it will be served cleanly and measuredly, there will be no torture, no camps, and families will be spared and treated well.

You can give power to the leader, who will formalize and privatize government, or you can try your odds with chekists, Islamic militants, and right-wing death squads?

This is the neoreactionary bargain to the elites: surrender power to a leader to formalize government and be treated well, or be exterminated by one of the populist groups.

****

Honestly, as one of the most prol of the neoreactionaries, the less charitable parts of me wouldn’t mind seeing our criminal elites meet right-wing death squads. I’d probably feel some primal satisfaction upon hearing of the fire-bombing of Yale and Harvard, the torching of the Federal Reserve with everyone in it, the decimation of Washington, and the staff of NYT and Gawker going for helicopter rides.

But Christian charity compels me towards mercy, so I hope they take the bargain.

Lightning Round – 2016/02/23

Pax Dickinson outs himself as the Duck.
Related: Why Twitter’s politics ultimately don’t matter.
Related: Twitter takes out Stacy McCain.
Related: Why no conservative alternatives?
Related: Twitter shadowbans.
Related: Twitter shadowban FAQ.

NBS has moved his This Week in Reaction to SM.

The maelstrom of modern magic.

The biological case against democracy.

Americanism and puritanism.

Tribes, parties, and fashion.

Hollow states and hollow people.

The cowardice of nihilism.

The need for a corporate state.

Donald Trump: democratic socialist.
Related: Trump and the pope.

Why turn your back on conservatives?
Related: Conservatism is dead.

Against sustainable development.

Reality doesn’t care.

Matthew Crawford.

Leftism in one picture.

The white knight and the cool girl.

Big budget American Rape.
Related: The majority of rapists in America are Democrats.

Modernity destroys Middle East mosaic.
Related: On Turkish people.

Corporate leaders and loyalty.

Poland goes alt-right.

IQ and GDP by state.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the NSA.

Milt Felsen, life-long communist.

Sexy socialist singles.

The opposite of faith is bureaucracy.

Fathers had problems of the past.

Piper’s debilitating fear of saying ‘no’ to women.
Related: Cartoon chivalry.

Feminism is the glorification of rebellion.

Why are white death rates rising?

Hypocrites in high places.

Canada court voids will for whites-only scholarship.

RL trolling with transgender laws.

Some non-fiction writing tips.

H/T: NBS,

Sparing the Rod

Recently the Liberal Party of Canada have floated the idea of banning spanking, so I’m going to write a bit on spanking.

The anti-spanking crowd is superficially right in that most studies of spanking find that spanking correlates with a number of negative traits, particularly increased aggression.

I’ve read many of these studies over time, and the primary problem with these studies is that they are always observational. Nobody sets up controlled, randomized studies of spanking (getting parental consent and cooperation would likely be prohibitively difficult). A superficial examination of the problem, ignores other more likely factors for increased aggression among those children who are spanked.

Another problem with most of these studies is that they look at physical punishment, and do not distinguish between spanking and abuse. Most “spanking” studies would lump together breaking your kids nose in a fit of rage and smacking our child’s bottom with your hand in a controlled manner after a ‘this hurts me more than this hurts you’ talk as both being corporal punishment. The studies would then find out that, very obviously, there were negative effects from “physical punishment” (ie. beating the shit out of your kid) which was then translated as spanking harms children. When the form of physical punishment is controlled for, controlled spanking ranges from harmless to beneficial.

Back to the primary problem, the correlational approach misses two related explanatory factors that I think would be more likely explanations than ‘lovingly-enacted disciplinary swats on the bottom permanently scar children’.

The first is that aggressive and impulsive kids get spanked more often and more harshly. Lots of these studies find that those children who are spanked more are more aggressive (and maybe even less cognitively able) and assume that they are aggressive because they are spanked. But wouldn’t the reverse causation be more likely. Wouldn’t you be more likely to physically discipline a more aggressive child? One study on the causation question found that it was both, aggressive kids were physically disciplined more and physically disciplined kids were more aggressive. They say early childhood spanking starts the cycle, but I can not access the study to check. (Note, the data for this study do not distinguish between forms of spanking).

The second is that those parents who engage in physical correction, particularly the more violent forms thereof, are likely those parents who are less self-controlled and more aggressive themselves. Aggression and self-control are largely heritable. It stands to reason that the kind of parents who physically discipline children are the kind of parents who would have more aggressive and more impulsive children.

I find it doubtful that moderate spanking is in itself harmful. I think it likely that aggressive children were born that way due to naturally aggressive parents who use aggressive parenting to control them. (Note: I am using aggressive as a continuum here, not a dichotomy).

Like many things though, the people controlling the discussion are liberal elites. The children of self-controlled puritans and Jews at Harvard and Yale likely don’t need physical discipline. These children are likely naturally non-aggressive, self-controlled, and intelligent, and need only minimal discipline. So banning spanking will work fine for them, it is a luxury they can indulge in.

On the other hand, when upper class sentiments meet the lower classes of naturally aggressive and impulsive Scots-Irish and blacks, a ban on spanking probably will not work out as planned. Time-outs and lectures probably won’t work as well at controlling, directing, and teaching morality to the aggressive, impulsive children of aggressive, high-time preference people.

I would hypothesize that applying cultural elite values on spanking to lower classes will be harmful to the lower classes. The parents probably know their children and their temperments better than disconnected elites and will be more apt to properly punishment their children. Forcing an unnatural ban on spanking on populations where spanking may be necessary could be counter-productive.

Of course, to say for certain some proper studies would need to be conducted and that is unlikely to happen.

Until then though, instead of assuming lower-class parents are abusive for their, to-us, violent methods of parenting, maybe we should consider that they know how to properly raise their own children. Maybe for those children with less natural self-controlled, the application of violence is necessary to teach lessons that more naturally self-controlled children would learn after a firm lecture.

****

One side note: I find it somewhat amusing that the sorts of people who are strongest against spanking are also the sorts of people that are happy to put their children on mind-altering drugs. I would think that latter would be more abusive than the former, n’est-ce pas?

Sperm is Cheap

In my last post, I wrote that women are too valuable to waste on military activity. Achtung Liebe disagreed, linking me to Roosh and Rollo.

Women are, civilizationally and socially, more valuable than men. One of the two problems with the Roosh piece (and the main problem with the Rollo quote) is that he mixes the personal and the impersonal. While in general a woman is more valuable than a man, that does not apply in every case. The value of particular individuals depends on the particular individuals. Thinking that this means that you are worth less than all women, is just as silly as the person who gets personally offended when told whites in generally have higher IQ and then tries to disprove you by pointing to (insert high achieving black here). saying women are more valuable does not imply that the childless, post-menopausal cat lady is more valuable than a father of eight. Applying systems-level thought inappropriately to the individual level is just stupid.

If the thought that women are more valuable than men makes you feel hopeless or forms pussy pedestalization in you, that is more an indictment of your psychological state than of my assertion.

The second thing Roosh gets wrong is his universalism. The darwinian struggle is largely relative. Sure, there are 7 billion people, but there are only 200 million white Americans or 7 million Swedes or 15 million Southern Baptists. If you start parsing down to smaller thedes the numbers get smaller. If you want your thede(s) to survive and thrive you need to have the numbers to hold your own in the struggle. So yes, reproduction is still important, unless you’re a rootless cosmopolitan lacking any thedish loyalties.

Sperm is cheap, eggs are valuable. A woman can reliably birth about one healthy child a year over a lifetime window of about 20 years. So at maximum output with no problems, she can’t make much more than 20 children.* A man can produce a healthy child a day over a 40 year window without much difficulty.

From a darwinian standpoint, men can risked, but women can not be. This is why we send men to war, to exploration, to business, to dangerous jobs, etc. Many will die, but the most fit will survive to create the new generation.

But this is also where masculine achievement comes from: great risks entail great rewards. This is why war heroes, leaders, explorers, great businessnessmen, inventors, culture creators, etc. are almost entirely men. Men risk death, dismemberment, poverty, wasted time, etc. to achieve. Those who fail suffer and/or die, those who succeed reap rewards and glory.

Men’s expandability is their civilizational strength. It’s in taking on risk that men achieve. By throwing expendable men at problems, the great ones can do great things for civilization and the less great can form bands to achieve great things.

****

* There are some recorded women with much higher numbers than this, but they mostly depend on an exceedingly rare number of multiple child births, but even those extremes pale in comparison to the male extremes.

Lightning Round – 2016/02/17

On order.

The radioactivity of atomic individualism.

Leftism, suicide, autogenocide, and cosmocide.

Mark gets it right on the JQ.
Related: Judaism as a memetic model.

Making the obvious a mystery.

On become who you are.

The creation of rigid economic borders.

Wesearchr, a Pax Dickinson and Chuck Johnson project, is starting.

On Scalia’s death.
Related: Another requiem.
Related: The practicals of his death.

Defining the dissident right.
Related: Alt-right in the ADL.

The white guilt industrial complex.

We are the borg.

In the long run, we lose, so why continue anyway.

Genetic map of Europe.
Related: Does race exist?

Intra- and inter-ethnic violence.

Austrian police cover up immigrant rape of 10-year-old boy.

The institution of marriage.
Related: Your hi-tech sex goo future.

The heart of atheism.

Avoid the look.
Related: They can’t hear you.

The cult of women’s self-esteem.

Ghomeshi: a taste of things to come. Related.
Related: Media cosbys James Deen.
Related: The future of porn.

The good-humour rapist.

Women, science, and sex.

The coming death of Github.

The g-factor for dogs.

When liberals attack social science.

A breakdown on the social justice “conspiracy”.
Related: On the Github gender bias study.
Related: Sex and the brain.

Psychologist, heal thyself.

Press literally takes orders from Hillary.

Socialized health care in action.

A future letter to Trump from a socialist.
Related: The ultimate minority right.

A Turkish-Saudi invasion of Syria.

Satanic daycares. Part 2.

SF book banned for mild abortion reference.
Related: A brief lesson in mainstream publishing.

37 body-building tips.

H/T: SDA

Drafting Women

It seems that drafting women has come up among the GOP candidates for some reason. So, I’ll give my take on it.

First, women are far too valuable to waste on military activity, with the possible exception of a truly existential threat (such as both the Russians and Germans each faced from the other in WW2). Doug Wilson gets the right of it:

Once you have signed off on the nation/state conscripting your daughters to go serve in combat roles, whatever it was you thought you were conserving — thus allowing you to call yourself a conservative — has had a fork stuck in it and is done. Nothing really to conserve any more.

A nation that conscripts its daughters for its defense is a nation that no longer deserves a defense. We may have to fight later as a practical matter, but this is a matter of rudimentary allegiance.

In a civilized society, anybody proposing sending women to war would be sent to a penal battalion himself to die honourably for the motherland.

On the other hand though, Wilson is right. Our society is no longer civilized and no longer worth defending or supporting. There is nothing to conserve and we should stop acting like there’s anything left.

Most “military age” women voluntarily render themselves infertile, so it’s not like we’re taking them away child creation and rearing. They’ve willingly and enthusiastically removed their own civilizational value and made themselves as expendable as men. There’s no civilizational reason to protect expendable self-sterilized young women.

Rationally we should be drafting women. Women claim to be men’s equals, and equals don’t get defended. Equals have to carry their own weight, and in this case carrying their own weight means being drafted and sent to die in case of war. If we’re going to do this liberalism, we should do it right. Allowing women into the military but not drafting them is one of those unprincipled exceptions that Zippy likes to talk about. If women are allowed in the military like men, then they should drafted like men.

(And no, to unseeing tradcons, this is not men cowering behind women, women enthusiastically pursue equality).

On Wilson’s biblical argument, the case Wilson makes does not support the idea that women at war is objectively sinful, just imprudent. So, I will talk in practical terms, not moral ones.

As for the combat effectiveness, it is obvious to anybody who’s not ideologically blinded that women will lower the military’s combat effectiveness and that’s a positive thing (I hesitate to use the word good). America’s hard military effectiveness doesn’t matter. America has had few just wars, hasn’t had a truly defensive war in a long time, possibly ever (the Pacific front of WW2 and the confederate defence in the War of the States may have been defensive, although, the US did provoke Japan and the CSA was not the USA) and has never fought a necessary war at all as far as I can recall at the moment. There’s certainly not going to be a defensive foreign war any time soon, and definitely not an existential one.

As for foreign conquests, America also has the gear and numbers to utterly destroy any possible foreign enemy that it gets serious on. The only reason America loses wars is because America (purposely?) tries to fail. A loss of combat effectiveness simply doesn’t matter against foreign enemies.

On the other hand, the happening could occur in the next couple of decades, and where the military falls during this times will matter a lot. The red tribe (ie. the tribe I support and the one not wholly given to degeneracy) has the absolute advantage when it comes to capacity for violence, but if the military falls on the side of the blue tribe, things could get rough. So, a less effective military helps neutralize a potential threat to the red tribe.

As for the purpose of women in the military being to destroy masculine virtue and manly pride, that’s also a positive. The military is the enemy. It is a part of USG and is controlled at the top by the same people destroying the rest of our civilization. Even worse, it is an enemy filled with good people who should be the allies of us and civilization. Because of its association with masculine virtue and red tribe values, the red tribe disproportionately volunteers to support the institution controlled by those who hate them. As well, it is the most trusted institution in the US, acting as a bulwark of trust for the otherwise (rightfully) mistrusted fedgov.

We need to disillusion young white men of their allegiance to the military. White men shouldn’t be fighting the wars of those who hate them. The more we can destroy the (undeserved) trust the military has among young white men and the less we white men think they can get manly pride from joining up, the fewer white men will volunteer to die in a on the other side of the world while forcing liberalism, sodomy, corporate rape, and democracy upon foreigners.

The same argument holds for lowering military standards. It is a foregone conclusion that military standards will be lowered so that women look equal on paper. This is not something to fear, it is a positive as it will further lower combat effectiveness and eat at trust in the military.

Finally, and more morbidly, having CNN and the NYT showing hundreds of body bags from whatever foreign sandpit we’ll lodge ourselves in next beside the pictures of formerly cute (now dead) young women may end up being a wake-up call for the country (or not, it’s hard to tell where our depravity ends). A little bit of accelerationism in this area could lead to awakening.

So, it’s horrific (but not objectively sinful) that we’re wasting valuable women in the military, but those women were wasting their value themselves, so corporately and civilizationally we’re not really losing anything. If we’re going to let them into the military, we should follow through on the base principles and draft them. The practical effects of this will be positive for those concerned with eventual restoration.