Two days late… but not a dollar short!. Sorry about that folks. Things didn’t line up well last weekend for a variety of reasons.
Jonathan Haidt’s big paper on leftist ideological domination of the social sciences is finally out. That link is just the highlights. (The full paper is behind a rather tony paywall.) But the highlights are pretty astounding.
Academic social science today appears to be one of the most diverse places on earth, with one exception: ideological diversity, aka., the only one that would actually count. Very interesting reading Haidt, a liberal, chastizing liberals for not living up to their own liberal standards. “We just need to be fair and open-minded harder guys!” Haidt is hard to excerpt. Thorough, but rarely punchy. RWTW.
One Irradiated Watson drops Part Deaux of his Private Cities series: Decentralization and Economies of Scale. Hard to excerpt and summarize, he looks at the good, the bad, and the woefully undersupplied features of the Indian city Gurgaon, whose (relatively) decentralized development makes for an excellent case study of formalist ideas. Watson’s done an amazing amount of research and analysis here. RTWT! Watson earns yet another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this series.
Jim was hugely busy this past week. A lot of his articles are short. None of these were. And each focused on key concepts of the The Neoreaction. First there is a Review of Left Singularities. A magisterial review and analysis of the phenomenon.
What Happens in a Left Singularity
In the realm of discourse, non-leftist ideas become increasingly unacceptable, with their proponents facing social, professional, and legal consequences. The negative consequences for speaking against leftism quiet down the resistance and thus increase the boldness of the left, which accelerates the process.
Social then professional then legal consequences. A familiar pattern by now. With Graeme Harris’ going to prison for his mild prank we can be certain that we’ve entered the final stage.
Next we have What to do in a restoration, which is really a Chapter Two to the Left Singularieties article.
So here is what is going to take to clean up the Augean stables:
Cannot stop a left singularity. unless you get real serious about stopping it. Hence the end of a left singularity is apt to lead to a restoration – though it may instead merely lead to the execution of a remarkably large number of leftists, suspected leftists, potential leftists, and suspected potential leftists. (Yey Stalin! Go Stalin Go!)
Jim goes on to list a series of critical fixes that are long overdue, but which will take military force to implement. For this pair of superb articles Jim wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀
Finally from Jim another meta political theory article: The Cathedral is Not the Zionist Occupation Government. In which Jim sees progressive Jews as conversos to the state religion. But is it good for the Jews? Tack on an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Jim’s for this one.
There’s bound to be an upside to integrating women into combat roles, right? Other than losing battles and getting a lot of people killed, I mean. Also from Isegoria: Money And School Performance. Hey! Maybe Kansas City just didn’t throw enough money at the “problem”?!
Esoteric trad has given a useful moniker to a strange and growing cadre of persons with The Cult of the Individualist Statist.
Their entire aesthetic is the pillaging of human culture that was once linked to ritual but for them there is no ritual. There lives lack any meaning but the pursuit of new heights of individualism. They profess to be fans of Chomsky, thought Occupy had some valid points, and nowadays are prepping to enthuse themselves for Bernie Sanders. Their speech contains all the latest talking points from the Huffington Post, all the analysis from The Atlantic, and when they really want to look high brow they reference that New Yorker article they just read.
Intellectual Detox drops a nuke on the Mainstream Economist Industrial Complex with GDP and CPI: Broken beyond repair. It’s just fantastic work.
So we have good reasons for excluding imports from the price index, and good reasons for including imports. Which is correct? The economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis tries to patch it up the best they can, and kludge a number together.
The reasonable person must admit: “We do not know.” We cannot reduce a nations output to a single number. Any attempt to do so will simply combine dozens of different assumptions that will react or cancel each other out in weird ways, giving you a resulting number that is completely useless.
Reasonable person? That’s a euphemism for “Unemployed Economist”. Moar:
The point is not that GDP numbers are overstating growth or understating growth. The point is that GDP numbers have no objective meaning whatsoever. The GDP calculation is basically a very fancy and obfuscated way of doing a subjective survey or poll of the BEA statisticians. The numbers are very sensitive to the assumptions you make, and a wide range of plausible assumptions can be used, each producing a very different GDP number. The GDP flunks a sensitivity analysis and is therefore useless. If the number seems close to your intuitive sense of how fast the economy has grown, it is because the calculations were fitted to match your intuitive sense.
The take away:
The GDP and CPI numbers are foundational to a vast number of academic papers. The numbers are woven into discussions and assumptions of economics. Thus to denounce the numbers as useless is to put myself in opposition to nearly all of academic economics.
But I believe such a view is justified, as noted for all the reasons above. Academia is not disciplined by external forces that make it truthful. Nobody gets fired for producing papers that are so obscurant that they can never be disproven. In any such situation, we should expect that falsehood will accumulate over time.
Excellent work as always.
Nick Land notices David Frum noticing what hitherto only hatful white supreme-acists were noticing. And here is Land’s fully articulated response NIOs articles last week on the shortcomings of protocol and the warping of truthfulness. To be entirely honest, this discussion has gotten a bit above my pay grade. But I’m glad they’re hashing it out like civilized men!
Also from Land, major Cathedral organs beginning to notice natural symmetries between progressivism and affective domain religion. Of course, they say it like it’s a good thing. He’s also glad that Wikipedia exists. Some of it is even good.
Nydwracu has been reading CIA documents. Hey, they’re free. It’s not surprising to us what they said about The New York Times. I wonder if it was surprising to the CIA. Related?
By way of the New Yorker, here is a note on The geopolitical uses of abstraction in “art”. Also: Everybody was on the same page. Remind me: Who were the “bad guys” again back in the Cold War?
Reactionary Ferrett posts a nice video on The Blue Challenge.
You know how everybody finds Scott Alexander annoying but unusually perceptive? Well, Alrenous does a great public service by catching him in the act of baldfaced obfuscation on aggravated assault rates. The bigger picture?
The longest-term trends, going back before the French Terror, are if anything further evidence to the contrary. It merely shows that progressivism is failing to maintain a long-term trend that pre-existed it.
P.S. On gun control: the Swiss murder rate, where basically every household has a working automatic weapon by law, is 0.6.
Sydney Trads rip a young putative conservative essayist to shreds. “Islamophobia” indeed.
Slumlord plots a non-retarded, if not entirely non-inflammatory, path between genetic determinism and genetic denialism, Brown noses and Brownshirts.
Last week, Free Northerner showed how the political center keeps swimming left. This week he has a theory why, in spite of these obvious facts, leftists keep saying that things are Swimming Right, with a straight, albeit doughy, face. Evolutionist X commentates.
Free Northerner then pulls a formalist coup by suggesting A Compromise on Refugees. It only sounds Swiftian. But the “Sponsorship Program” is not merely an excellent compromise, but pretty much the only way the world worked until lying about the nature of social relationships became de rigueur. Northerner wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Honorable Mention☀ for his succinct and effective exposition of formalist principles.
Cambria Will Not Yield’s weekly epistle: Blessed Provincialism.
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week asking Where Does #BlackLivesMatter Go?
Take #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) to its logical conclusion. They do not want police in their neighborhoods. The supposed system oppresses blacks, not the actual, progressive-controlled system that needs blacks for justification of their rule and therefore gives them benefits and perks in the legal code. These invisible grievances from a long gone system build up, forcing blacks to commit crime.
If they’re really asking for their own Black Nation… well, that isn’t a bad idea at all. But, they don’t want one without whitey to blame.
The real problem is political. The Left has no figure to stop this madness. Presidential candidates are apologizing for saying “White lives matter” and even “All lives matter”. Senator Bernie Sanders cowers and shrinks from BLM protesters at his own presidential campaign stops, even though he was an old Civil Rights veteran. Any type of leadership on the Left could snuff this out, and stop the lunacy while still keeping blacks engaged at the ballot box for the Left’s benefit. The problem is the broad Left is like a blob, in that is has no shape, no head, and no directive, except to consume and spread for more control.
David Grant continues the history lesson and commentary on Monday with The Fall Of Sparta. Looking forward to next week’s installment in which he promises general lessons from Sparta’s history.
Thursday, Mark Citadel talks about European Council President Jean-Claude Juncker’s High Time-Preference Gambit—which amounts to flooding Europe with pro-EU immigrants, and implicitly future leftist voters, to overwhelm the natural national feelings that are stoked by the lunk-headed internationalism of the bureaucratic caste.
And on Friday, Jimmy A. Rustler makes another guest appearance to discuss What’s To Be Done About The Reproducibility Crisis In The Social Sciences? He recommends an engineering model for the social sciences. I think that’s fair, but perhaps a medical model is an even better fit.
This Week in Henry Dampier
Leading off the week over at Henry’s place: Why They Sent Ahmed To Juvie. Basically because normal psychology is normal. And also pathologized by our chattering elites.
Ahmed might be a good boy, but not of such enormous value that we need to alter the rest of society and condemn the inclinations of the majority in order to accommodate the Ahmeds while enduring the occasional Tsarnaev bombing. Multiculturalism eliminates any shared sense of rules beyond an ever increasing tangle of bureaucratic doctrines. The administrators who sent him to a detention center were almost certainly following strict rules about how to respond to students bringing unidentifiable electronic devices into school.
Here he shows Drones Are Weapons for Individualists.
Comparing the Predator drone to the B-17, the B-17 was designed to destroy the enemy population, with the enemy population itself defined as a strategic target. It says “the individual is irrelevant, what matters is the destruction of the mass to break the general will.”
The drone denies the existence of a culture beyond the individual — it says “there are no bad groups, there are only bad individuals.” While the B-17 had only a primitive sight for targeting and rarely was capable of precision targeting, the drone has a high resolution camera, and advanced communication makes it possible for pilots to make highly considered decisions about whom to kill and at what time.
Which, Henry notes, is a great way to kill people, but a very bad way to win the war that ostensibly justifies their deaths. This one earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
On Financial Friday, Henry infers the Fed’s continuing hesitancy to raise interest rates means ZIRP Forever. This is something I’ve long expected, but I wish it would manifest itself in gold prices.
Borrowers (whether direct or indirect) benefit at the expense of creditors, who become expropriated. In the case of the ZIRP scheme enacted to bail out financial institutions, governments, and corporations, the system has expropriated some creditors to benefit some borrowers and other connected parties. When these schemes fail as they always do, the former heroes of the ‘new economy’ (really the beneficiaries of the bubble credit expansion) become villains virtually overnight.
Not a moment too soon, in my opinion.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Son of Brock Landers takes a look at Angry Black Women: Jem Edition.
Black women sad over some not super black actress being cast as the third level side kick in a terrible ’80s cartoon adaptation is hysterical. It is a crappy movie. Apply your Af-Am studies degree language elsewhere. Clean up your community. Are there bigger concerns for blacks right now? Are there no socioeconomic issues to address that your wisdom could help?
> Implying actually black black women have agency.
The harsh bigotry of high expectations, Sherman!
You’d think that puritanical skirt clutching wouldn’t touch the WWE, but you’d be wrong. SoBL has the scoop: Brown Scare Comes To The WWE .
Wednesday we look at Haiti vs. Dominican Republic… Is it Just White Dads? Umm… yeah. Pretty much.
The European DNA had to get there somehow, and this [52%] is an average Dominican and not the very euro appearing Dominicans like Oscar de la Renta. The population genetics for Haiti are not as European in mixture. Haiti did not enjoy the white dad effect. Haiti did a pretty good job of killing all of the white dads.
“Same island. Two outcomes.” As Michael Savage constantly reminds us, it’s Border, Language, and Cutlure™. (And genes.)
Good news! Richard Spencer put up SoBL’s Obran article from a couple weeks ago on Radix.
And observance of the Centennial of WW1 continues with The Cost of Victory .
This Week in World Crass
With an eye on the news, Crassus says “Overall, Muslim influx into Europe will hurt European culture, but it could bring a few improvements”. Indeed, Middle Easterners are a lot of fun to talk to, and just imagine the delicious new cuisines you’ll be able to sample!
What do you do if you’re a midwit who wants to be a well-respected pundit but can’t quite hack it in the ivory tower of academe? Unless you’re Ta-Nehisi Coates, you get a job that matches your actual qualifications.
Filed under This One Not Ripped from the Headlines, Crassus wonders: Will The Decline and Fall of America and Europe feature a chapter entitled “2015”?
Here is a Riddle: When does a suitcase bomb that lacks explosives explode all over America? Answer: When it’s Ahmed Muhamed’s “clock”. World Crass has the full run-down. If only it were that easy for me to not live down to stereotype.
This Week in The Kakistocracy
Porter has odds-n-ends for Manic Monday—a This Week in… Race Replacement of sorts. This line was particularly funny:
Nazi: it’s the Shamwow of leftist rhetoric. As an aside if you’re looking to invest in European real estate, I would go very long Budapest.
And also true. Things are funnier when they’re true.
Filed under A Bit of Good News, here’s a bit of facebook moaning from a disillusioned antifa.
We were outnumbered and outgunned by the Fascists, who were up for a fight from moment one, and had the sufficient mix of booze and steroids to be essentially unstoppable.
Poor dear!
Filed under Maybe America Could Just Learn To Avoid Eye Contact… Paying for a Rainy Day. Global Climate Change™ is apparently the new international equivalent to “My car broke down on my way to a job interview”. A taste:
We had previously been assured that by now hurricanes would be landing like Africans in Italy. And while nature’s plodding has trailed the left’s plotting, we can take some solace in an impending flurry of cashnados. Someone’s got to pay for all these gibsmecanes.
On Wednesday, Porter has Running the Circle. As always, perceptive. On British and American party politcs he notes:
[W]e do not hold elections for the purpose of deciding national trajectory, which has been taken almost wholly from the public’s means to peacefully alter. Instead our range of choice is limited to which apparatchik will head the politburo. That it will continue, and on a linear course is not subject to our discretion. And so it’s not that elections don’t matter, as tyrants in power have long proven. It is that they matter for different reasons than most believe.
Meanwhile the unfashionable giggle about The Emperor’s tiny reproductive organs, and become increasingly ungovernable, left and right. Not really a problem… if you’re not The Emperor.
Here he is live(ish)blogging Debate II. “Trump has certainly made the right enemies.”
Also at The Kakistocracy, the case of the not particularly bad-boy Graeme Harris in The Gulag Delta. “Equal protection” is found difficult and left untried.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dante has Zero Sympy for (Nick, no relation) “Sarah” Nyberg. Not, apparently, (((((Nyberg))))), but the shoe fits. Perhaps a little less than zero, which he admits in Anger, Decorum, and the Pursuit of Truth.
Filed under This Week in… Drama, Dante has: RICK WILSON THROWS A MASSIVE TEMPER-TANTRUM IN HIS QUEST TO STUMP THE TRUMP. Which had the unfortunate side effect of alerting me to the existence of Rick Wilson. But, hey, Dante’s a pro. He does what must be done. All’s well. I am relatively undamaged.
Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Alfred Miller has page two of his Woodworking Journal. Also, filed under politics: the Uncharted Waters of Europe’s Refugee Crisis®. And here’s further thoughts on the topic:
Where will England be in a century? What will the country be like? Going by present trends, we’re likely to become an Islamic republic with a dwindling native population. Obviously this won’t happen – Europeans; the British; will kick back before such a thing occurs – but this the future the liberal establishment is aiming to bring about based upon present trends. All forces which previously existed to maintain the existence of English society have been destroyed, or are presently undergoing vicious, unceasing attack. The family unit, authority, respect for the elderly, patriotism, faith in one’s leadership, loyalty to one’s family and community, et cetera, are all either deteriorated or deteriorating ideals within the native population of this island.
Obviously? One could wish it a little more obvious.
Also at WCRx, Adam Wallace has undertaken a huge task in transcribing Julius Evola’s 1971 “Unpublished” interview: this is part 3. A little over thirteen minutes less of it now remain unpublished.
Dr. Briggs goes on The Stream with So-Called Homophobia Now Being Labeled a ‘Mental Disease’. I suppose it would be if anyone was actually irrationally frightened of homosexuals. Here Briggs posts the complete preface to his, still looking for a publisher The Philosophy Of Uncertainty: An Introduction. It sure sounds like something I’d like to read.
Briggs poops all over Haidt’s Paper on the lack of ideological diversity in social science. I think he’s wrong about that, at least in parts. Haidt may not actually be on “our side”, but he’s certainly sand in the gears of the Academic Industrial Complex.
This was new low: Failed Climate Scientists Call For RICO Investigation To Stop Criticisms, And Non-Scientist Claims Scientists Will Cause Next Genocide. And… not to be missed This Week in Doom Rejecting Sex With HIV+ Is Now Discrimination-Edition.
This was pretty interesting over at HBD Chick’s: the genetics of the american nations. Dig them graphics. And moar of ’em with spain’s north-south divide?
Dang this Eva Brann chick over at Imaginative Conservative is amazing. Here she is with The Ecstasy of Love. Also over there: Joseph Pearce says Things are Getting Worse and There’s Nothing to Worry About.
Last week it was the Poles, this week Real Gary has the Slovaks getting fed up as well as the Finns. He also takes some heart from Germany’s quick about face on the Refuge Crisis®: The Lessons of 1989.
Dalrock has a corollary to “Democrats are the Real Racists”: Republicans are the Real Feminists. It sucks just as bad.
With all the problems of repeatability and ideological group think in the social sciences, you’d think that folks would be tepid about implementing its so-called “findings”. But not Barak Obama. He’s bravely making the findings of “behavioral studies” the Executive Order of the Land.
Reaction’s own (living) favorite Spaniard has Una estrategia para Hungría (y mucho más). And it’s a good one… if the Google Chrome translation may be believed. Hungary’s Victor Orban is “the Hitler of the month”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Welp! Rod Dreher read Camp of the Saints. His pathetic skirt-clutching became annoying long ago. Alfred W. Clark takes Dreher to school. Hopefully it will do some good, but I doubt it.
Next in his LXXV Book Series, Cheshire Ocelot reads The Plantagenets.
Peppermint puts together All the Pieces on the Board.
Hot off the bit presses! A brand spanking new blog: Dividuals. No idea who is (or are) behind it, but some pretty impressive stuff for a first week: From Moldbug to Donovan and back, The Suppression Feedback Loop, and Towards A More Mature Atheism. From that first article:
[T]he million dollar question is: why is it so that whatever threats, real or imaginary, scare modern elites, they don’t scare the plebs, and what scares the plebs, does not scare the elites? Do they have no existential interests in common?
Umm… pretty much no. The priestly caste by which western liberal democracies are an entirely different tribe from the sort of people who staff their military and police forces.
And ANOTHER new blog: The Migration Period. It appears to be outreach for Not Quite Ready for Shitlord Players. So keep it classy folks. Post Numero Eins: The Human Barnyard, in which the conservative whining about progressives not living up to their own principles by rallying about Clock Boy is taken to woodshed. Not because conservatives are not right (of course they are), but because it is counterproductive to assume principles matter. Don’t play by rules your enemy wrote for you (and you alone) to play by. Also On Taxes and a Proposal for Fair Taxation. And Dividuals begs to differ.
Well that’s all I had time fer… Til next week, Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!
Just a “head’s up”: I’m not sure if this was implied in the piece above – and apologies if it wasn’t – but Further Pondering upon the Migrant Crisis in Europe was not done by Alfred; it was done by me. Further, it’s not aimed at those already “in the know”; it’s partly rhetorical, partly for those who need convincing: it was an angry rant, if anything. Regardless, thanks for the mention Nick.
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I should probably clarify this on my blog, as well. That Blue Challenge video comes courtesy of my local Jailor; a friend and former employer of mine. I merely posted it up.
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Better late than never. Glad you’re okay.
I hope you are still enjoying my posts; I thought you might like the ones about SA: https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/south-africa-democracy-and-the-dangers-of-demographics/
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Thanks man: Washington does double down and project a lot, does it not?
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Thanks for the link. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should take a look. An extremely in-depth and impassioned defense of monarchy by Ryan Hunter.
https://ryanphunter.wordpress.com/2015/06/05/in-this-great-service-a-theological-and-political-defense-of-monarchy/
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