Bloody Shovel 3

There's this idea that Cathedralist universalism is a by-product of wealth. Affluent societies lose sight of what made them wealthy, they become complacent, life is easy so the energy they aren't spending in surviving, they spend in zero-sum status whoring to see who is holier than who. Affluent people are also proud, disobedient, hard to employ in hierarchical corporations. That serves to incentivize the import of cheap labor to fill the menial jobs that their parents used to do happily, but the kids can't do without falling into depression. Of course the cheap labor isn't cheap (nor labor) in the end, but by the time you notice it's already an article of faith in the holier-than-thou rat race.

But wait, not all is lost! Universalism of course is toxic to the economy, and if wealth is causing leftism lunacy, the inevitable economic downturn will turn things straight, reminding people of their priorities. Poverty opens your eyes to what is important in life. What works and what doesn't. Europe today is fertile ground for a return to sanity. The economic crisis will strengthen national sentiment, pushing back the leftists and their insanity.

Right? Right??

nope

Italy, of all pla...

I don't remember who said it, that writing isn't something you consciously control; very often you just think of something, start writing, and once you get into it, the story just has a life of its own, and through inertia it goes on evolving in ways you didn't foresee when you started the whole thing. That's what happened with my previous post, I didn't set out to write a thesis on the intersection between Clausewitz and Dunbar. It turned out a pretty good post (the ways of the brain are inscrutable), but I wanted to write about something else at first.

I wanted to write about this guy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AXBX3e1T64]

This old man being interviewed is Price Hans-Adam the Second, the sovereign of Liechtenstein. As most of you will know Liechtenstein is just a mountain valley in the Alps, which was so tiny and inconsequential that nobody ever thought of integrating in any of the empires or nation states that were forming in Europe. Not even Hitler bothered to send some troops to draft some Aryan kids into the Wehrmacht. So this little alpine valley was just left there, the personal fief of the Lord of Liechtenstein, who had actually been living in Vienna for 1000 years, being an absentee landlord as all the cool kids used to be. He actually had way more land than that miserable piece of mountain, but he wasn't so lucky at keeping those from the onslaught of nationalism. Security through obscurity they call it nowadays. Come 1938,...

I have nothing interesting to say about the Paris attacks. Given that they understandably took attention out from my last post, as a blogger my duty is to try to explain the Paris attacks and their likely consequences in terms of Status Point theory. Yes I'm starting to sound like a broken radio, but at least I'm not just rambling about it's all the fault of the Jews. So listen up.

France will do nothing about these attacks. Nothing will change. The Front National won't win the elections. Immigration won't be stopped, nor French Muslims will be incentivized to leave. 120 murdered is a lot of people; but people only care as much as the media reports about it, and the media only reports about it as much as the Cathedral wants to. The Cathedral doesn't want to report about it, so in 2 weeks people will have forgotten the same they did about Charlie Hebdo. They will remember their Facebook filters and Twitter tags much more clearly than the 120 murdered. They didn't actually know any of the killed, but they of course have clear memories of how good it felt to signal virtue on social media.

If anything can happen is that the US uses the chance to bomb some more of Assad, and France joins up to signal toughness against terrorism or something; then some neocon arranges for a Russian convoy to get bombed, and Putin responds in kind. That'd be... interesting.

Why will nothing happen? Why will France not bother to defend its own people? In the capital, under the...

I've been writing for so time now the idea that bad things happen not necessarily because bad people are out there conspiring to do them, but because humans are, well, just a species of highly social monkeys, cooperation is difficult, large scale societies are weird, and sometimes bad things happen even when nobody really wants it that way.

In 1966 probably nobody wanted to end up worshiping mangoes as Mao's holy fruit. And Mao himself didn't want that to happen. But it did, because of bad incentives feeding into human's SP cognitive process. And there are plenty of examples of the same thing happening all over our thousands of years of history. This includes of course the collapse of Western Civilization occurring just as I write this.

But you know the saying. The fact that you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not really out there to get you. Take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqIdghXyOP8

Insane, right? Apparently Merkel has not had enough with the Afghan teenagers ravaging the German countryside. A million Muslims is not enough, she wants more. And she wants to not just open the doors; she wants to go out there to tell them to come! To Africa! To be fair the word "propaganda" means just advertising, it's not necessarily associated with Goebbels alone in German, but still. Look at the faces of her audience. ...

I've been a bit harsh about France. Yes, the French are the kings of bullshit. Yes, their intellectual output over the last two centuries has been a net harm on human civilization. Yes, all things considered, the French might be better off just shutting themselves in madrassa and reciting the Koran, rather than reading Focault and Derrida.

But you can hardly blame them. The French just happened to take intellectual pursuit very seriously, and in a culture where everything is concentrated in the capital, and intellectual pursuits are given high status, market competition is going to reward the most useful and productive pieces of intellectual work. And given that inherent epistemological constraints mean that most people just can't possibly know anything at all except a narrow area of expertise; well any popular intellectual construct must necessarily be complete bullshit. That's what people demand: bullshit to lubricate conversation, to make people talk so that gossip comes out easily, and social alliances can be made. The French were just pioneers in the modern intellectual marketplace. And they paid dearly for it.

But they were only first, not the only ones. Any culture where people read the press, and most social conversation is based on the content on mass media is going to inevitably fall down the French path. See the mighty English. If you have a Twitter account you can do worse than follow this account: https://twitter.com/SoMuchGuardian

Some sa...

Donald Trump has swept the American political establishment by promising to kick out 10 million immigrants and forbidding Muslims from entering the US. The refugee crisis in Europe has turned awry so fast and so dramatically (assaulting young women in New Years has to be the worst PR ever in leftist history), that nativists all over the West are ecstatic and full of energy. The time has come, it almost appears. Everybody is running to Twitter and making small scale demonstrations all over the West, to take advantage of the momentum.

Some of this outburst of energy has reach this blog. Now I've been critical of white nationalism for quite some time. I just don't see it working out, and I have good reasons for it. I know my history, I know what nationalism is, how it was born, how it died, and what would it take to bring it back to life. And I just don't see it working out. Some people accuse me of being a bourgeois snob looking down at working class whites. Others have called me a rootless cosmopolitan who just doesn't have skin in the game.

Well, guilty as charged. But that's putting the cart before the horses. I took my skin out of the game because I didn't see how we're going to win this game. So I bailed. It happened that I had a good way out. And yes, I think working class whites are retarded. But I think that of high class whites too. I'm not into sports, which makes it hard to build rapport with working class people. But I'm not into charity, or homos,...

A modest proposal. Don't take it too seriously.

Western elites are hell-bent in allowing unrestricted immigration into Europe and America. Even if they're all ISIS operatives. Muslims are not deemed to be a threat to the progressive establishment the same way that white-nationalism is, and they're mostly right about that.

Given present demographic trends, at this rate large swathes of the West will be Muslim in 20 years time; and again the progressive establishment will do nothing about that; because doing something about that would strengthen the hand of white-nationalists, and that directly threatens the power of the progressive establishment. So odds are for a Brazil - Mexico style situation, where a white-ish progressive elite rules over a mixed demographic of various shades of brown. Living standards plummet on average, but the elites still do great, and a white middle class which keeps the lights on still manages to make a tolerable living. But note that progressivism is still the state religion, and that means a large proportion of white people will still buy the whole package, i.e. hedonism, low fertility, feminism, the whole thing. That means dysgenic fertility goes on forever; the end of that road is South Africa.

The only way out is for whites to stop being progressive. And that means whites to stop being white. This means whites must stop being distinctly white, i.e. they must join non-whites at something so that the state can't just point ...

Data from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261133206_Fertility_Patterns_of_Native_and_Migrant_Muslims_in_Europe

Don't know if "Total Population" here includes Muslims too or not. If it does, we're busted.

Note how all those "success stories" about fertility rates, France and Scandinavia, all are under replacement, except Muslims.

All those Patriotic European Warriors (PEW): Surely you've been doing your patriotic duty and producing lots of white babies. Have you?

I wonder what Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) are going to say when 100 million Christian Nigerians come to Europe saying that they need refuge from the evil Boko Haram Muslims from the North.

The Nigerians probably go to Church more than we do.

(Stop your Ghostery or other extensions to see Twitter links)

https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews/status/698244314858713089

One of the weirdest things in history was Byzantine iconoclasm in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Byzantine imperial house decreed that all pictures and portraits in Orthodox churches were to be destroyed. Not that I'm a fan of the art style of Eastern icons (I find it kinda gloomy and too flat), but that was a waste of perfectly fine artwork. The usual explanation is that the Emperor thought that Islam was strong due to its ascetic religion, and that Byzantines were losing the war because the wasted too much time and effort into drawing lame portraits. Whatever the reason, the Byzantines had adopted an important trait of Islamic culture without surrendering. "Aerial influence", as linguists call it, made the trick.

Another example is the Taoist and Shinto religions. People talk of Taoism in China and Shinto in Japan as if they were ancient religions, with temples, and priests, and the whole package. But that's bunk. When Buddhism came into East Asia, it brought temples, monks, books, influence peddling with rich and powerful, a very strong institutional package. Taoists and Shintoists just copied the whole thing, including the architecture of the temples, and much of its vocabulary. It's like if some neopagans built Gothic Churches, and run weekly rituals where people were fed bread by a professional priest, after giving a homily on...

Dozens of killed in multiple terrorist bombings in Brussels. Under the very nose of the EU headquarters.

The common response of European politicians has been that they are "united", in "solidarity" with Belgium, and "defending the values of democracy and freedom".

Think about it. What does "united" mean here? Who is united, and for what purpose? What about this solidarity? And what does democracy and freedom have to do with Muslim terrorism?

Was there a danger of European nations not being united and in solidarity with each other? How would it look like if they weren't? Could, Italy, say, or Poland, claim solidarity with the terrorists and say Belgium deserve it? That they're happy Brussels got bombed? That's absurd. It's just not in the realm of possibility. European nations of course dislike Muslim terrorism and everybody feels sympathy with Belgians.

The only way that those statements by European politicians is to understand them in political partisan terms. European politicians aren't speaking for their countries. They are speaking for themselves, and their parties. "United" means that they, as politicians, stay united with their friends in Brussels, their fellow politicians and bureaucrats. They stand united with their friends against their enemies, the far-right. "Solidarity" means they feel bad about their fellow Belgian politicians, and will keep on fighting the far-right so that the far-right can't take advantage of their reasonable prop...

One big idea out there is that what we need is Exit. We need to allow secession, for different people to go their own way. We obviously can't get along. Some people want homosexuals teaching sex education in kindergarten. Others want to put statues to Hitler and Genghis Khan. Others want the liberty to do drugs, own guns, preferably at the same time. Others want soda taxes enforced by a mercenary army. Many want sharia law.

That's what other countries are for! Give us borders. A patchwork, a polyhedron of independent countries free to develop their own culture. That's a fine idea. Autonomy is a fine thing. Surely better than having faceless bureaucrats ruling from thousands of miles away.

Well ok, let's say we all get secession. What happens then? Fortunately Europe is experimenting with the idea. Plenty of secessionist movements going on in Europe. Scotland is one of the most advanced. Soon Scotland may be able to become free, and the Scots can do their own thing. So what are the Scots up to?

They are arresting people for making videos of dogs doing the nazi salute.

They are arresting people for complaining about "syrian refugees" on Facebook.

They are basically running the mother of all censorship campaigns by...

Or, making virtue out of lack of lack of other paths for upward mobility.

The most important topic in social science, the humanities or however you want to call it, is what drives cultural change. Things change, that is obvious enough, and humans have been discussing it since they ever started doing abstract thinking. We understand a lot of change now. Physics tell us why the physical world changes: by obeying the laws of physics. Biology tells us why living things change: through evolution. What we still haven't figured out is why societies change. Cultural change. You can define culture as behaviors inherited through non-genetic means. We still haven't quite figured out the laws of cultural change. It happens they're immensely complicated. We know it has a lot to do with politics. And it happens that the very act of trying to figure culture out is a political statement, so it's hard to get honest inquiry running. The stakes are too high.

But still, I've always been fascinated (I'd say obsessed, but the word is quite abused these days by all sorts of posers) by why different societies do different things; and how people do different things across history. Even the same persons end up having different opinions over time. Of course you could buy the Christian-Enlightenment paradigm and think that they've just earned new information over time. You see, they suddenly realized that gaymarriage is a human right. Or you may take my Darkly Enlightened behaviorist i...

Cool title, huh? It always feels good to type this kind of stuff. "Empire". Pronounced with a 1900s British accent. Feels good man. Insert happy frog pic.

Anyway. The most interesting, shall I say "official" theory of historical geopolitics of the reaction must surely be Peter Turchin's theory of meta-ethnic frontier armies pumping up their asabiya and conquering the civilizational center.

The theory basically says that to run a civilization you need a strong army. To run a strong army you need cohesion, discipline, i.e. asabiya. To produce this cohesion and discipline you need your soldiers to feel its need. Discipline isn't nice. You'd rather slack off and drink beer and be merry. The kind of discipline an army runs off is produced by massive amounts of violence and unreasonable demands. You can only get people to do so if they feel is absolutely necessary. And they will only feel it's necessary if they get to the realization that either they behave like good soldiers, or they're dead, and they will lose everything they hold dear.

The way you get your soldiers to feel that is to stack them against a different civilization. People so alien to you that they you have nothing in common. If they win, everything you are accustomed to, all your life, all those little habits of behavior that form your identity: all that will be destroyed. And you don't like that. It's taken a while for you to adapt to that culture. Starting at birth. Your brain unconsciously...

A while ago I said that France deserves to die, if only to atone for the dozens of evil intellectuals that she has inflicted on the world, from Rousseau to Derrida. That's a bit harsh. France after all has given us Michel Houellebecq, and while he will never have 1/1000 of the influence of a crazy sodomite on drugs like Foucault, he is still the best writer in the whole world of the last 50 years, and that counts for a lot.

Apparently Monsieur Houellebecq went to Argentina to give some talks, and here's one which got uploaded to Youtube. The talk is in French, with Spanish subtitles, both of which are quite tractable on Google translate. He talks about the current intellectual landscape of France, where everyone even half interesting is a reactionary, haunted by the left, but they don't mind it, hold it as a badge of honor. Let me highlight the last 15 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffd5wWuewIM

Let me quote Tocqueville:

I want to imagine under what new features despotism could present itself to the world; I see an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men who spin around restlessly, in order to gain small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others; his children and his particular friends form for him the entire human species;g as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he is next to them, but he does not see them; he tou...

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