Bloody Shovel 3

I first became acquainted with the name of Christopher Beckwith when I borrowed this book on the origins of old Japanese from my college library. It's a groundbreaking book on a very interesting topic that nonetheless has received little scientific scrutiny. Most Japanese themselves don't know much, nor seem to care about where their language, and hence their people come from. The book was interesting in part, but also full of wild speculations and non-sequiturs that left on me the impression that Mr. Beckwith is quite the nutter. It's one thing that Japanese has relatives in old Manchurian Kingdoms. It's a different one altogether to posit that Burmese and Japanese share common ancestry because they both have a pronoun which starts in /wa/ and have a lot of monosyllabic words.

To be honest I never cared much about the topic, or the man. Until last week Razib at GNXP declared himself a fan of a recent book of his on Central Asia. I recall the guy was an expert on Tibet, so he must know more about Central Asia than Japan. And Central Asia is also a poorly understood region, so there must be lots of low-hanging fruit for the committed scholar to gather. On the same post, Razib li...

So the slowest year on record for this blog is over. If you think this is just the beginning of the decline, you might be right. I'm not blogging as frequently as I used to, and there are good reasons for that. One being my recently started family. Another being that my comment threads aren't as rewarding as they used to. Another that I'm going through a reverse Dunning-Kruger effect: the more I know the less I think I know. It's starting to get harder to write a post that I can be proud of, and I just don't have the time or energy to do the necessary research to write really good posts.

This may just be me being too hard to myself; substandard content doesn't seem to bother a lot of bloggers out there, even fairly famous ones with academic careers. I should probably just loosen up and just go on writing, maybe on a fixed schedule. Thing is I'm very bad at fixed schedules; my brain just doesn't do self-discipline. My ego always pairs up with my id. Or I'm just very bad at fooling myself, which might not be a bad thing.

I can do monthly though, if only to avoid gaps in the archive list in the right sidebar. So here goes a light post for December 2014.

A lot gets written around about religion, the importance of tradition, rituals, all that. There's the old debate on whether religion is either something you believe in, or something you do. These are likely to be different things. Religion is often treated as a gestalt, but that is fallacious. Religion is ...

The great man is dead. I had my issues with the man, and I believe that history will not be kind to him. His great work in Singapore will soon be undone. His successors will not have his genius or drive; and soon a targeted Progressive onslaught will bring leftist agitation, an untethered press, and electoral change.

I think it's wrong to see him as a reactionary politician. He completely lacked any appreciation for traditional culture; in fact much of his work was about breaking the spine of the local Chinese associations, forbidden their dialects, their economic bases, and subsuming all ethnic and racial communities into his vision of a modern, English speaking nation.

He is more rightly viewed as the ultimate Legalist scholar, in the Chinese tradition of government. Unlike Shang Yang, who was ignominiously killed after finishing his work, or Han Fei, who was murdered before he could realize his vision; Lee Kuan Yew had absolute power in his person, and held power until his death. And he achieved the great legalist vision of achieving a wealthy and ordered society through skillful government, unapologetic about his ultimate authority and recourse to violence.

What really marked his name among this circles is not his success at government. Singapore is far away, has a very peculiar set of circumstances, so LKY's model most likely isn't applicable to other locations or scales...

WSJ protests that China bans egg-freezing for single women.

Note the big frontal picture of the beautiful but barren Xu Jinglei. While she wasted her fertile years into fornicating her way into the top of Chinese showbusiness, apparently he got 9 eggs frozen in the US, for... you know, for when Mr. Right appeared. Well she's 41 now.

Under Chinese law she could only have 1 child anyway. Which she could have dumped on her parents like everybody else does in China. But no, she was... busy. With her... career. Of course.

Well the Communist rulers of China have enough sense to discourage this sort of harmful feminism. Egg freezing is only available for cases of womb disease. You are not to play with your reproductive system. If you must, if you insist in being irresponsible and rubbing your irresponsiblity on everybody else, well, go to the US. And get reported on US newspapers, they trade on everything bad. Sure, you'll have your pretty face on the front page. But you will still be a barren, leftover woman.

WAR IS PEACE

SLAVERY IS FREEDOM

IGNORANCE IS KNOWLEDGE

DIVERSITY IS...

Inquisition, for the most part. The corporate PR racket sells that diversity is a strength because having different people in your organization gets you different points of view, and that results in better input for discussions and thus better decision-taking. Which is exactly how it doesn't work in practice. Racial diversity is welcome so long as everyone is strictly progressive, and USG has been busy promoting ideological uniformity across its whole empire. In recent years who basically can't get a job if you are caught dissenting with the most trivial progressive dogma. As Trotsky had it, in capitalism those who don't work shan't eat; under communism those who don't obey shan't eat.

The argument itself is true, though. Actual diversity does bring different points of view, which can often be interesting. But that requires actual ideological independence. The ideological landscape in the West is completely owned by USG, and one can hardly found any original ideas that differ even slightly from the progressive platform. But far away in East Asia, people can afford to think for themselves. And they do, for the most part, producing actually interesting ideas. If there's an argument for learning exotic languages, this is it. This blog is proof of that.

The talk of the street these weeks in Japan is a proposal for reforming pre-primary school, and making not only kinde...

Sailer quoted Disraeli  (d'Israeli, originally) saying "all is race". I got curious and Googled the guy, and damn.

I don't know if England has lost 15 IQ point on average since that time, as Charlton says. But Parliament speeches have lost even more than that.

Some samples from en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

The noble lord in this case, as in so many others, first destroys his opponent, and then destroys his own position afterwards. The noble lord is the Prince Rupert of parliamentary discussion: his charge is resistless, but when he returns from the pursuit he always finds his camp in the possession of the enemy.

Speech in the House of Commons (24 April 1844), referring to Lord Stanley; compare: "The brilliant chief, irregularly great, / Frank, haughty, rash,—the Rupert of debate!", Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The New Timon (1846), Part i.

Heh. Prince Rupert being famous for being the best general to lose the English Civil War.

London owes everything to its press: it owes as much to its press as it does to its being the seat of government and the law.

Probably true. Not a good thing though.

Sir, it is very easy to complain of party Government, and there may be persons capable of forming an opinion on this subject who may entertain a deep objection to that Government, and know to what that objection leads. But there are others who shrug their shoulders...

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Congratulations to the English. Well done.

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

Watch how Mr. Farage didn't even know the final result of the referendum; but he was already calling not only to leave the EU, but for dismantling the EU and meddling with continental politics. Oh, Englishmen. Will you ever mind your own business.

But anyway, well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvJtNhadzH8

Is a lost art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzNj-hH8LkY

It shouldn't be though. In the age of Youtube, good speeches are more relevant then they used to be. Such a complete punch in the face to the liberal order as Brexit only happened because a big chunk of the British elite was able to make its case with this kind of eloquence.

We got much to learn.

So some people are saying I'm just some rootless cosmopolitan who speaks Chinese. How can I be alt-right?

此言差矣. It doesn't work like that. I have insight precisely because I've been around, and I've read around. Let me prove my alt-right bona-fides by quoting Zhu Yuanzhang, the great founder of the Ming Dynasty, the Empire of Brightness.

Zhu Yuanzhang is the greatest rags-to-riches story in the history of mankind. He was some minor son of a landless peasant, born during the period of Mongol rule in China. Mongol government in China was quite horrible; infrastructure decayed, bandits were everywhere, and all manner of natural disasters happened all the time. One of those disasters killed our hero's whole family. Starvation. Every single one of them. Our hero had to go to the closest Buddhist temple to beg for some food; and all he got was an old wooden pan, and an order to beat the crap out of the temple and beg some food outside. Which he did for years. Beg for food. Around the country. For years. Until he met some band of bandits. Heaven had it so that his best childhood friend was a bandit chief; so he soon joined them. Our hero then slowly but steadily climbed the bandit meritocracy ladder; next thing you know he is leading the best rebel army in China, expels the Mongols to the steppe and reunifies All Under Heaven.

There's something to say for the tradition, the slow accumulation of knowledge in society. But some things just don't require an educa...

So this article is doing the rounds. Chinese netizens have synthetized a very powerful compound which has the Cathedral in complete terror. What is it? The word 白左, the White Left. This means that some people in China understand that progressivism is a foreign conspiracy against the Chinese nation. And they see this is in overt racial terms. It's not "Western left". It's the "White left".

Now, don't get too excited. Nick Land is excited.  But he lives in Shanghai. And he just found out about this. Which means it's not anything mainstream going on in China. I found the word in my Twitter feed about the time of Merkel's boner, when she decided to bring 1 million hostile men into Europe.

The Chinese in Europe were livid. And for good reason. The Chinese went through a lot of hoops to get legal residence in Europe. The Muslims just got in for free. The Chinese are law-abiding and industrious. The Muslims are lazy and prone to crime. The Chinese live in low-rent areas where the Muslims flock to, and they assault the local Chinese all the time, while the police do nothing.

Now the Chinese have long had their problems with western style progressivism. There's lots of Chinese living in the West, many go ba...

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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