In which we celebrate the first year of Radish — and perhaps of something greater.

Table of Contents

The Flammarion engraving (image)

The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent to all the Future… Thomas Carlyle

As we near the end of this (not unusually) foul year of our Lord, 2013, which is also the first year of Radish, the Carlyle Club is pleased — no, compelled, I should say (no doubt by eldritch rites conducted ’neath solstitial alignment of the ’spheres), to attempt to sum up certain recent doings, which may be of interest to the reactionary — “neo-” if you prefer; in any case, he who, in these latter days, this wind-and-wolf age or Kali Yuga, still swears allegiance to Order; Cosmos; the Right Absolute.

Call it an Anti-Progress Report — wherein we identify three major trends: (1) dramatic expansion of neoreaction, both in the number of writers and in the depth and breadth of debate and discourse; (2) large numbers of pre-reactionaries discovering the Cathedral; and (3) the Cathedral discovering us reactionaries.

We also identify two minor and closely related trends: (4) broader recognition that “conservatism” is nothing more than neutered false opposition to progressivism; and (5) increased aggression by the ruling class against right-wingers, real and suspected.

So do keep an eye out as we go month by month through the year that was.

“Formal Fridays” for “productivity, team spirit” and “general morale” (image)

The Cathedral discovers the Manosphere, just as Roosh Vörek predicted. The Independent warns us that Roosh himself is an official “hate group.” Daily Kos makes a slight miscalculation: “The best we have [sic] to confront these kinds of attitudes is to make them known to the public.” And Australia’s Daily Life cites Mill, Bentham and Rawls on “rights,” though somehow I doubt the author of OMG! That’s Not My Husband has actually read them. Martel (Alpha Is Assumed) wonders if this particular ’sphere is really ready for prime time:

For now, we’re only objects of dismissive mockery and scorn, mere annoyances. They hope to keep us on the fringes as long as possible, but they know they won’t be able to keep us hidden forever. Otherwise, they’d be happy to ignore us entirely. Once the “tipping point” is reached and we have to be addressed, we will be vilified and slandered.

Nathan Wyatt (TakiMag) provides a working definition of what it means to take the red pill: “identifying and studying kernels of politically incorrect realism.”

Robert Merry, editor of The National Interest and author of Taking on the World and Sands of Empire, praises Oswald Spengler for his “uncanny foresight.”

In assessing our own time through the Spenglerian prism, a number of perceptions emerge. First, Spengler predicted with uncanny foresight a number of Western developments of the past century, including the rise of world-cities and the money culture, the emergence of a powerful feminism focused on the yearnings of the Ibsen woman, the force of money in politics, declining birthrates and the popular embrace of avant-garde cultural sensibilities, awash in cynicism and cosmopolitanism and bent on destroying the cultural verities of old. Second, Spengler makes a powerful point when he says these are not characteristics and developments found in ascendant civilizations. On the contrary, many are signs of cultural and societal decadence and decline. Although the hallowed Idea of Progress has shrouded this truth from Western society, the reality is clear: the Western cultural decline, as understood and predicted by Spengler, is now complete.

Aaron Clarey (Captain Capitalism) publishes Enjoy the Decline and makes The Washington Times.

John Dickerson, political director for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate, says “Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” (Dickerson is by no means unusual in that respect.)

Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.

The Journal News in Rockland County is forced to hire armed guards after printing the name and home address of every licensed local gun owner. Gawker pulls the same stunt in New York City.

Neo-Rousseauvian pop-science writer Jared Diamond professes his firm belief that “the few remaining tribes and nomad groups left on the planet,” particularly the ones in New Guinea, “have a great deal to teach us,” including “care and compassion, particularly for the elderly, and a concern for the environment that shames the west.”

On the other hand, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that “witch burning, torture and sorcery are still frighteningly common in Papua New Guinea.” Indeed, the country is “rife with violence, in part due to its tribal culture,” and will soon reinstate the death penalty after “a spate of horrific crimes against women,” including an American bird researcher raped by nine armed men, two elderly women tortured for three days and beheaded on suspicion of sorcery, and “a young mother stripped naked, doused with petrol and burned alive” for a like reason.

The Huffington Post characterizes the existence of racial differences in crime rates as “a jawdropping claim.”

A “reluctant racist” admits that “mass immigration” (i.e., Third World colonization) has destroyed Britain.

Ireland sentences a Zimbabwean rapist to a few years in prison.

A Central Criminal Court hearing in Cork heard that the 25-year-old had laughed in the woman’s face as he pinned her to a bed and raped her. The Irish Times reports that the court heard he then told her that he was HIV positive and had hepatitis C. […] Justice Paul Carney told Dube that he had abused the woman’s hospitality by returning to rape her when she was alone in the house less than an hour after she and her fiancé had invited him in for coffee as it was raining. […] Justice Carney said the woman was entitled to ‘safety and sanctuary’ in her own home. […] “I used to be a happy, carefree, trusting person before the rape. I don’t know if I will ever be that person again.”

THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR IMMIGRATION. DID YOU GET — okay I think you got it.

Egypt’s new and improved and much more democratic post-Arab Spring government loses control of Port Said.

Democracy is in a crisis, according to political “scientist” Ivan Krastev (TED):

Paradoxically, part of the problems of democracy is that today almost everybody claims his sympathy for the principle of self-government. Elections are the only source of legitimate government. Even religious fundamentalists who still insist that power derives from God tend to agree that the best way to interpret God’s will is to count the ballots on election day. In short, democracy is the only game in town but many people start asking themselves: is it a game worth playing? Do the voters have the power to bring meaningful change? Could they change, for example, economic policies or could they only change governments who at the end of the day implement the same economic policy?

Victor Davis Hanson (PJ Media) talks hypocrisy and hipness; in other words, high status.

In a shallow and superficial America you can make all the money you like without being dubbed selfish or greedy, frequent all the most exclusive resorts without being a one-percenter, and commit all the politically incorrect sins you wish without being tagged a reactionary — but you better try to be hip first.

Al Gore sells his TV station to Qatar for 500 million dollars.

Environmentalist Mark Lynas changes his mind about genetically modified food.

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag — this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends.

“Climate science” continues not to be science.

Matt Forney, formerly known as Ferdinand Bardamu, publishes Three Years of Hate.

Scientists feel the need to check if men prefer to have sex with slender women (they do), and social pseudoscientists are horrified to discover that some women still want to raise families.

Michael Shermer, editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, is surprised, like Lavoisier and Condorcet before him, to find his own head upon the chopping block of progress. No real lessons are learned, of course:

It involves a McCarthy-like witch hunt within secular communities to root out the last vestiges of sexism, racism, and bigotry of any kind, real or imagined. Although this unfortunate trend has produced a backlash against itself by purging from its ranks the likes of such prominent advocates as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I contend that this is in fact a sign of moral progress. […] Perhaps I should have spoken out, because now the inquisition has been turned on me. […] I shall close with a warning about the propensity for social movements to turn on themselves in purges that distract from the original goals [my emphasis] and destroy the movement from within.

“That isn’t purging,” cackles semi-professional witch-hunter Ophelia Benson: not being “the KGB nor even the Stasi,” feminists just “don’t have the power to ‘purge’ people.” Foul-mouthed Christian-hating court biologist P.Z. Myers, Benson’s partner in doxing, howls right along with her in true Krokodil fashion:

Astonishing. Apparently, criticizing anything Mr Michael Shermer says is now a “McCarthy-like witch hunt,” an “inquisition” with the goal of “purging” Shermer from the ranks of…what? He’s a publisher and author. Is there a threat to take his word processor away?

Matt Forney’s anti-feminist satire provokes an attack by Anonymous cyberterrorists.

Top feminist researchers discover a new, more deliciously public way of humiliating “nice guys.” ESPN is forced to apologize for calling a model “beautiful.”

Nick Cohen (The Observer) shows us the underbelly of the far left in Britain.

Only when it’s too late do women learn that the alternative disciplinary system of Marxist-Leninists exists to control them and let the leaders do as they please. […] Anna Chen saw the misogyny up close. She stopped working as a comic and poet in the early 2000s to devote every waking hour slaving for the Socialist Alliance, Stop the War and other SWP front organisations. “Because the revolution comes first, human beings are just disposable,” she told me. “I was struck by how sexless and ugly the leading men in the SWP were. But they always had women. If you slept with one of them, they promoted you. It was as basic as that.” Before the Socialist Workers party, there was the Workers Revolutionary party. Thousands went to its rallies in the 70s, drawn by the presence of Vanessa Redgrave and her late brother, Corin. The party was nothing more than a vehicle that promoted the regimes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi — for money — and supplied a stream of women for its supreme leader, Gerry Healy, to enjoy. It fell apart in 1986 when 26 women came forward to describe the “gross sexual abuse” they had suffered at his hands. In a poignant account that has stayed with me, one exhausted party worker described how she realised that she had wasted her life the moment Healy loomed over her.

(See also: Bill Ayers; Occupy Wall Street.)

The sexual-revolutionary left continues to devour its own as feminist Julie Burchill (The Observer) wages a vicious battle of identity politics with “the trannies.”

Educated beyond all common sense and honesty, it was a hoot to see the screaming mimis accuse Suze of white feminist privilege.

British “Liberal Democrat” MP and former “Equalities Minister” Lynne Featherstone demands that Burchill be sacked.

Science fiction/fantasy writer Theodore Beale, also known as “Vox Day,” announces his candidacy for president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

Suspense/horror writer Edward Trimnell assures Beale that “real conservatism,” the one true false opposition, is neither “sexist” nor “racist” — and accidentally makes a good point in the process:

We conservatives don’t help our cause by embracing the crude collectivist tactics of the Left.

The newly launched Veritas Lounge points out that Trimnell’s “conservatism” is “essentially a waste of time as a distinct political philosophy from the reigning spirit of liberalism.”

If one is really interested in countering the juggernaut of leftist thought, one must go outside the Enlightenment tradition, because leftist thought is simply the purer, faster, less compromising manifestation of that tradition. It isn’t the left, or the democrats or labour that is wrong — it’s the underlying philosophy, and it’s a philosophy that the republicans and the tories share almost completely.

Economist Jerry Bowyer (Forbes) dubs the false opposition “kept conservatives.”

The kept conservative’s announced job is to represent the conservative point of view, but their real job is to give the illusion of balance without really challenging any of the core tenets of liberalism. They spend lots of time “reinventing” the Republican Party, and the new invention is always the same: more liberal. […] They are the loyal opposition: loyal, that is, to the regime, not to the people. They are not the solution. In fact they are more of a problem than the liberals. […] True resistance to socialism will not come from such an opposition force as our current conservative ruling elite. Better no opposition than faux opposition.

A West Point (the U.S. Military Academy) think tank warns America about the danger posed by “far right” groups such as the “anti-federalist” movement:

They support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government.

Hipsters institute “Formal Fridays.” (Can the 20th century please be over?)

Noam Chomsky kills Aaron Swartz.

Nick Land explains the “left singularity,” a concept introduced by James Donald.

Alfred W. Clark, Galton, and Vinteuil launch Occam’s Razor. Bryce Laliberté launches his own blog with an ‘Anarcho-Papist Manifesto.’ Wesley Morganston (Nydwracu) floats the idea of a “reactionary web magazine,” which will later be realized as Theden. The Carlyle Club publishes the first issue of Radish.

Oh, and the fairly epic Ann Barnhardt begins blogging.

“Europe in the trap” — better manufacture some more consent (image)

Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Charles Stross discovers the Cathedral.

Something has gone wrong with our political processes, on a global scale. But what? It’s obviously subtle — we haven’t been on the receiving end of a bunch of jack-booted fascists or their communist equivalents organizing putsches. […] Here’s a hypothesis: Representative democracy is what’s happening. Unfortunately, democracy is broken. There’s a hidden failure mode, we’ve landed in it, and we probably won’t be able to vote ourselves out of it.

“Please, man,” Moldbug demurs. “Don’t complain about the dish you ordered.”

What happened? Um, the revolution happened. Slowly, it’s true.

Angelo Codevilla (Forbes), author of America’s Ruling Class, sees the Republican base abandoned.

Representation can be perverted. Some regimes (formerly the Communists, and currently the Islamists) allow dissent from the ruling class to be represented only by parties approved by the ruling class. […] The Republican leadership’s preference for acting as part of the ruling class rather than as representatives of voters who feel set upon has begun to produce the sort of soft pre-emption of opposition and bitterness between rulers and ruled that occurs necessarily wherever representation is mocked. […] Some Democrats seem to believe that taking these Republicans unto themselves while deeming the remainder “unworthy,” withdrawing “tolerance toward [their] regressive opinions,” will crush serious opposition. Maybe. Surely however, incorporating the Republican Establishment into the ruling class leaves the dissidents free coherently to pursue their own vision, and with a monopoly of opposition. […] This representation is happening by default. It is aided by the internet, which makes it possible to spread ideas to which the educational Establishment gives short shrift and which the ruling class media shun. In short, the internet helps undermine the ruling class’ near-homogenization of American intellectual life, its closing of the American mind. Not by reason but by bureaucratic force majeure had America’s educational Establishment isolated persons who deviate from it, cutting access to a sustaining flow of ideas that legitimize their way of life. But the internet allows marginalized dissenters to reason with audiences of millions. Ideas have consequences.

Megan McArdle (The Daily Beast) muses on the ignorance of journalists and America’s mandarin class.

All elites are good at rationalizing their eliteness, whether it’s meritocracy or “the divine right of kings.” The problem is the mandarin elite has some good arguments. They really are very bright and hardworking. It’s just that they’re also prone to be conformist, risk averse, obedient, and good at echoing the opinions of authority, because that is what this sort of examination system selects for. […] And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even [my emphasis] many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there’s anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

Marxist political sociologist Claus Offe (Eurozine) is a firm believer in European “democracy,” with an emphasis on mind control and class warfare; and a fierce opponent of “populism,” meaning actual democracy:

The crisis is so serious because of the seemingly insoluble contradiction it presents. In simple terms: the course of action so urgently needed is extremely unpopular and thus cannot be implemented by democratic means. […] Before the preferences of voters can be evaluated, they must be formed [my emphasis] in the light of the normative principles of social justice just as much as that of a sober understanding of the situation we find ourselves in, as well as of feasible courses of action and their consequences. […] Referenda and plebiscites in the member states are unlikely to be the best way of democratically securing the massive solidarity measures we need at the European level. […] In order to really shape voter choices via argument and persuasion, the parties must be ready and willing to tackle all kinds of fears, distrust, short-sightedness and suspicion. […] It would take two changes to do away with these received opinions and knee-jerk responses. In the first place, the state-versus-state mindset of “methodical nationalism” in most debates about Europe must at the very least be supplemented by a view in which Europeans see one another not primarily through the prism of nationality but rather as individuals and members of particular social classes. In the second place, European law must allow member states to implement social redistribution measures internally without being penalized in the current competition between EU member states over fiscal and social policy.

Victor Davis Hanson (PJ Media) brings up some revolutions we missed — like this one:

About four years ago, the media just dissipated. Gone, buried. Did we notice our newsreaders are virtual government employees?

Mark Steyn (The Daily Caller) is similarly hard on the official press:

Essentially, Obama has achieved the same relationship with the press and the media and public information that the Soviet Communist Party had to jam radio transmissions and smash printing presses to achieve.

Jezebel, appropriately enough, writes ‘An Idiot’s Guide to Free Speech,’ in which we learn that the formal freedom of speech will not “protect you” from “the Right to Anonymity” (sic):

People are allowed to try and figure out who you are and post your information on the internet. No one is entitled to anonymity. It’s up to you whether to make it easy for people to find you. […] If you publicly express yourself in a manner that is offensive, hurtful, or just plain dumb, strangers might contact your friends/family/school/employer and tell them what you did.

As first-world birth rates decline, feminist Amanda Marcotte argues that in order to save “middle-class white women” from “a life as our husbands’ support staff” — save them from having children, that is, so they can enjoy life as a corporation’s support staff instead — we should implement bold new economic policies that will somehow compensate for extinction.

If women don’t want to have more children, then instead of abandoning women’s equality as a goal, we should rework our economic system so it doesn’t rely on a steadily growing population to function.

Feminists celebrate fifty years of Betty Friedan destroying families and generally ruining women in every possible way.

I think, though, that I didn’t read The Feminine Mystique precisely because it had seeped so deeply into American culture [my emphasis] that I figured I had already digested its message.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese researchers are looking for “the roots of intelligence in our DNA.”

But critics worry that genetic data related to IQ could easily be misconstrued — or misused. Research into the science of intelligence has been used in the past “to target particular racial groups or individuals and delegitimize them,” said Jeremy Gruber, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a watchdog group based in Cambridge, Mass. “I’d be very concerned that the reductionist and deterministic trends that still are very much present in the world of genetics would come to the fore in a project like this.”

Semi-literate, professionally swarthy Maxine Waters (D-California) attempts to explain sequestration.

Subsidized electric cars, meant “to cut fossil fuel use and address global warming,” continue not to work. On the plus side, global warming continues not to be a real thing.

Christopher Dorner kills himself (and several others).

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry says Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad must go. USG (America’s beloved sovereign) starts supplying Syrian rebels with “non-lethal aid.”

Nick Land, author of the seminal series The Dark Enlightenment, moves to Outside in; it will soon become the premier neoreactionary discussion forum. Avenging Red Hand launches his own blog; he will later establish the Golden Circle reactionary email list. Sunshine Mary takes up arms at The Woman and the Dragon, though she will soon move to new digs. Peter Taylor offers a gentle introduction to Moldbug’s own Gentle Introduction.

Jordan guards the Syrian border (image)

Multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur Sam Altman worries that the magic of democracy is fading, and letting large numbers of narcissistic idiots vote for other narcissistic idiots is somehow no longer making the world better in every conceivable way.

Everyone feels screwed, and almost no one feels like the government is doing a great job. We can’t agree on anything, and anyone that proposes doing something radically different doesn’t get elected. But democracy […] worked in the US for a long time — we were able to make real progress, pass budgets, be the world superpower, evolve as a country, etc. Something has changed. […] All of that said, in absolute sense I’d much rather live in the world of today than 1950 — it’s tough for me to imagine living in a world without the Internet. However, in the same way that one can feel acceleration but not velocity, people seem more sensitive to the annual rate of improvement than the absolute quality of life. So even though people should be happier in an absolutely better world, no one wants to stand still on the hedonic treadmill.

Moldbug insists that Sam Altman is not, in fact, a blithering idiot.

What I find exceptionally terrifying is that Altman’s blithering idiocy looks and sounds exactly like sober good sense. Read it. You’ll agree. The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.

In an interview with Joshua Kurlantzick, author of Democracy in Retreat, the Los Angeles Times announces that democracy has been “on the wane” — the whole world “losing faith in” it — for ten years now, and wonders:

How do effective leaders battle the “nostalgia” factor, when people who have suffered under authoritarian rule lose enthusiasm for their new-found rights and freedoms because their day-to-day needs become a struggle? [My emphasis.]

Hey, at least now they get to cast worthless ballots for idiot narcissists.

Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) puts ‘Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell,’ which, apart from a “trigger warning” for “racism” and the usual silliness about King Leopold II, is not bad at all.

Western society has been moving gradually further to the left for the past several hundred years at least. It went from divine right of kings to constitutional monarchy to libertarian democracy to federal democracy to New Deal democracy through the civil rights movement to social democracy to ???. If you catch up to society as it’s pushing leftward and say “Hey guys, I think we should go leftward even faster! Two times faster! No, fifty times faster!”, society will call you a bold revolutionary iconoclast and give you a professorship. If you start suggesting maybe it should switch directions and move the direction opposite the one the engine is pointed, then you might have a bad time.

Stupidity is on the rise in Western society, and Orthosphere writer James Kalb (Crisis), author of The Tyranny of Liberalism and Against Inclusiveness, chalks it up to our “rejection of transcendent standards,” enforcement of the “ideals of diversity and inclusiveness, which draw their institutional strength from the technocratic desire to turn people into interchangeable components,” “consumerism, comfort, and lifestyle libertarianism,” “consumer goods, social programs, and industrially-produced pop culture,” “electronic diversions,” and “the distance between cause and effect in a complex globalized society,” among other things. Paging Tyler Durden…

James E. Miller (Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada) writes an excellent, straightforward defense of monarchy, citing Rothbard, Hoppe and Nock.

If the choice is between monarchy and democracy, I say give me a king. I have enough respect for myself to wish to live under the truth rather than fiction.

Steve Sailer uncovers “micro-aggressions.” (This is not satire. This is real stupid.)

Submission: Hey! White girl! I love you! You are beautiful! Shouted to me on the street 15+ times a day during my study abroad experience in Nicaragua. I never truly understood what it meant to feel objectified until this experience. Comment: This submission is very, VERY problematic…as much as I sympathize with her plight I’m calling BULLS*** on this woman ~never TRULY feeling objectified~ until some random brown guys in a foreign country hollered at her…subconscious racism/xenophobia much? Comment: This complaint of a microaggression is a microagression in and of itself. It is perpetuating the idea that “white beauty” is ideal and that Latinos are machismo & objectify women.

Charlotte and Harriet Childress (The Washington Post), authors of Clueless at the Top, invite us to “imagine if [sic] African American men and boys were committing mass shootings month after month, year after year.” (Again: not satire.)

Aleks Eror (Vice) interviews evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller on China’s “creepy-ass” new biotech project.

[Eror:] It’s not exactly news that China is setting itself up as a new global superpower, is it? While Western civilization chokes on its own gluttony like a latter-day Marlon Brando, China continues to buy up American debt and lock away the world’s natural resources. But now, not content to simply laugh and make jerk-off signs as they pass us on the geopolitical highway, they’ve also developed a state-endorsed genetic-engineering project. […] How does Western research in genetics compare to China’s? [Miller:] We’re pretty far behind. We have the same technical capabilities, the same statistical capabilities to analyze the data, but they’re collecting the data on a much larger scale and seem to be capable of transforming the scientific findings into government policy and consumer genetic testing much more easily than we are. Technically and scientifically we could be doing this, but we’re not. Why not? We have ideological biases that say, “Well, this could be troubling, we shouldn’t be meddling with nature, we shouldn’t be meddling with God.” I just attended a debate in New York a few weeks ago about whether or not we should outlaw genetic engineering in babies and the audience was pretty split. In China, 95 percent of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference.

Obama tells the prime minister of Israel that “Assad must go.” USG trains Syrian rebels in neighboring Jordan.

Jared Taylor (American Renaissance) questions the possibility of democracy in America.

The Last Psychiatrist tells us more than we ever wanted to know about Cosmo.

The single greatest obstacle to turning women into fully productive members of the workforce, i.e. batteries, is not men obstructing them but their persistent belief in metaphysics. If the thing that is keeping women out of the underpaid labor force is “family,” then family must go, and if what pulls them towards family is love then love has to be a fantasy. I know what you’re thinking. You’re worldly, you’re cynical, your skeptical. You don’t go for all this love crap…. You’ve figured out that love was a construct pushed by the patriarchy to keep women tied to the home, to deny them orgasms with multiple penises and vaginas; to prevent them from getting jobs, money, power. Am I right? Ok, then let’s play by your rules, let’s say you’re right that love was used to keep women down — then what does today’s suppression of love signify? Could it be that the abandonment of love doesn’t also serve the system’s purpose? Or is only the former the trick, the latter a discovery made by your genius + sophistication + expert reading of human emotions? You think you’ve figured out that true love doesn’t exist, that it’s all been a kind of romantic lie sold by TV and the media, that real life isn’t like that; but what I am telling you is that you didn’t figure this out, you were TOLD this. Now, constantly, by every modern TV show, by Lori Gottlieb and the zombies at The Atlantic, by your friends, by your parents — the trick was to get you to think you figured it out on your own.

Donal Graeme begins blogging. Larry Auster dies.

Thank you, vibrant diversity, for enriching us so (image)

Neoreaction experiences what Nick Land will later dub a “Cambrian Explosion.”

Veteran right-winger Anomaly UK writes a concise introduction to neoreaction.

James Donald defines Dark Enlightenment and contemplates a restoration.

Spandrell divides the new reaction into three branches: traditionalist, nationalist, and capitalist.

Meanwhile, Scipio Germanicus launches The Reactionary Thinker, and Calculated Bravery enters the fray.

Nick Land relabels the trichotomy: theonomist, ethno-nationalist, and techno-commercialist.

Frost comes up with three red sub-pills of his own: Christian, secular, and nihilistic.

Anomaly UK contemplates reactionary unity in light of Spandrell’s trichotomy.

Scharlach, blasting off to Habitable Worlds, reports that neoreaction “has begun to go ‘meta’ on itself.”

Scholars of the Dark Enlightenment are beginning to ask self-reflexive questions about who they are, where divisions lie, and what it all means.

He offers his own, visual classification scheme:

That same day, Amos & Gromar opens its doors.

Which brings us to the end of April. The explosion will carry on until the end of May.

In the meantime, Donald Kagan (The Wall Street Journal), “Yale’s great classicist,” admits that “democracy may have had its day.” He lays much of the blame on the so-called higher education system.

Universities, he proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are “individualized, unfocused and scattered.” On campus, he said, “I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness.” Rare are “faculty with atypical views,” he charged. “Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of our Western civilization and of our country and an appreciation of their special qualities and values.”

“The world is marching toward anarchy,” according to geopolitical analyst Robert Kaplan (Real Clear Politics).

Everyone loves equality: equality of races, of ethnic groups, of sexual orientations, and so on. The problem is, however, that in geopolitics equality usually does not work very well. […] The fact is that domination of one sort or another, tyrannical or not, has a better chance of preventing the outbreak of war than a system in which no one is really in charge; where no one is the top dog, so to speak. That is why Columbia University’s Kenneth Waltz, arguably America’s pre-eminent realist, says that the opposite of “anarchy” is not stability, but “hierarchy.” Hierarchy eviscerates equality; hierarchy implies that some are frankly “more equal” than others, and it is this formal inequality — where someone, or some state or group, has more authority and power than others — that prevents chaos. For it is inequality itself that often creates the conditions for peace. […] Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy — be it an American hegemon acting globally, or an international organization acting regionally or, say, an Egyptian military acting internally — we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing, because civilization abjures anarchy. In his novel Billy Budd (1924), Herman Melville deeply laments the fact that even beauty itself must be sacrificed for the maintenance of order. Without order — without hierarchy — there is nothing.

Robert Samuelson (The Washington Post) heralds “the twilight of entitlement”: the demise of a post-1960s mind-set based on “optimistic and, ultimately, unrealistic assumptions,” e.g.,

that lifestyle choices — to marry, have children or divorce — would expand individual freedom without inflicting adverse social consequences. Wrong.

Ron Unz identifies America’s Pravda.

We always ridicule the 98 percent voter support that dictatorships frequently achieve in their elections and plebiscites, yet perhaps those secret-ballot results may sometimes be approximately correct, produced by the sort of overwhelming media control that leads voters to assume there is no possible alternative to the existing regime. Is such an undemocratic situation really so different from that found in our own country, in which our two major parties agree on such a broad range of controversial issues and, being backed by total media dominance, routinely split 98 percent of the vote? A democracy may provide voters with a choice, but that choice is largely determined by the information citizens receive from their media.

Joel Kotkin (Orange County Register), author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 and The Rise of Postfamilialism, insists on personifying every single thing that’s wrong with “conservatism.” In this case:

There’s nothing fundamentally unRepublican about class warfare. After all, the party — led by what was then called Radical Republicans – waged a very successful war against the old slave-holding aristocracy; there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that conquest.

22 leaders of national atheist organizations “pledge to make our best efforts toward improving the tone and substance of online discussions” and “to promote productive debate and discussion.” The ever-so-rational and skeptical freethinkers at Secular Woman reject it outright for giving “equal voice” to “sexist ideas and beliefs.”

As a secular feminist organization committed to understanding and exposing societal constructs that contribute to the inequality of women and other oppressed groups, we have no desire to listen to [my emphasis], respect, or continuously debunk overtly sexist viewpoints. Just as most scientists are not interested in debating the beliefs of creationists, we are not interested in debating gender-biased, racist, homophobic, or trans*phobic beliefs. […] Those of us working to challenge systemic sexism should be under no obligation to listen to or be more charitable to our opponents.

These “overtly sexist viewpoints” and “gender-biased beliefs” include evolutionary psychology; see, e.g., Rebecca Watson, Amanda Marcotte, Lindy West, and Sharon Begley. I refer you as well to evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell in Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists:

For many feminists in the social sciences, evolutionary psychologists are still seen as the enemy. The disagreement is not about the desirability of social change, but about where the causes of gender differences can be found. Unlike social constructionists, evolutionary psychologists accept that beliefs reside in the mind and not just in discourse and language. Traditional empirical method may not be perfect but it has the advantage of being a self-correcting system. Liberal feminists identify causes that are proximate and external but ultimately incompatible with a mass of empirical research. To acknowledge the impact of culture is not the same as saying that gender has no biological basis and that the nature of men and women is wholly constructed by society.

Meanwhile, novelist Sarah Hoyt watches the long march of the cultural Marxists:

It’s become impolite to say in public you’re a Tea Partier, for instance. The slur of sexual innuendo, followed by never substantiated rumors of violence, have stained the name, though there is no truth at all in it. At the same time, unless you are with friends and know them well enough, it is against politeness to refer to Occupiers as “Louse infested would be communists” — though it is true of the vast majority of them. Because that’s not how the stories present those groups. And people want to belong to the majority — to the “normal.”

Mark Steyn (National Review) heralds the end of tolerance.

The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent; the diversity celebrators demand a ruthless homogeneity. Much of the progressive agenda — on marriage, immigration, and much else — involves not winning the argument but ruling any debate out of bounds.

Malcolm Pollack reinvents the left singularity.

Theodore Beale takes a break from his SFWA election campaign to diagnose the “conservative” blogosphere’s terminal illness:

An even more important factor is the sapping of right-wing energy by thirteen straight years of relentless betrayal of conservative principles by the Republican Party. Libertarian realists like me are still going strong, since we never expected any better, but how much enthusiasm can conservatives expect to muster in support of nominal leaders like George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? The political enthusiasm simply isn’t there anymore. It’s not so much the right-wing blogosphere that is dying as the Republican one.

Progressive novelist and literature professor Adam Roberts (The Guardian), while acknowledging the existence of “perfectly decent, book-loving rightwing people,” worries about their continued participation in science fiction, alluding to a “war” for the genre’s “political soul.”

Alterity is fundamental to SF: it is a poetics of otherness and diversity. Now, it so happens that the encounter with “otherness” — racially, ethnically, in terms of gender, sexual orientation, disability and trans identity — has been the main driver of social debate for the last half‑century or more. […] On the other hand, many fans define SF as the literature of scientific extrapolation. There are those who think of “science” as ideologically neutral, simply the most authoritative picture of the universe available to humanity. The problem is that “authoritative” has a nasty habit of eliding with “authoritarian” when transferred into human social relations. Rightwing political affiliation comes in many forms, but for many rightwingers, respect for authority is a central aspect of their worldview. […] Conservatism is defined by its respect for the past. The left has always been more interested in the future — specifically, in a better future. Myriad militaristic SF books and films suggest the most interesting thing to do with the alien is style it as an invading monster and empty thousands of rounds of ammunition into it. But the best SF understands that there are more interesting things to do with the alien than that.

Harold Meyerson (The Washington Post), lacking any formal Buddhist training, manages nevertheless to attain a perfect lack of self-awareness:

As the New York Times reported Sunday, the Koch brothers told a group of like-minded money men at a closed-door conclave in Aspen three years ago that the right needed to invest more in grass-roots activism, politics and media. Given the nature of the Kochs’ investment in grass-roots activism and politics, that doesn’t bode well for the kind of fact-based journalism that most American newspapers strive to practice.

Joan Walsh, author of What’s the Matter with White People?, teaches us “how to talk about white people.”

As whites become just one of several American minorities in the near future — brown babies already outnumber white babies in the nation’s nurseries — I’ve been thinking more about the ways language can ease our transition to a multiracial America. […] Let’s start with one term used occasionally for the Obama alliance: the “coalition of the ascendant,” as the National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein calls it. That’s fine for a journalist, but when used by Democrats it sounds like a snub to white voters: “We’re the future and you’re not.”

Awkward! We’ll also have to tone down on the racial hatred — eventually:

Just as social justice-minded people have learned not to generalize about African-Americans, Latinos and Asians, we’ll have to learn the same thing about whites. In my work over the years, I’ve heard “white” used, without a modifier, as a synonym for clueless, out of touch, even racist.

But we mustn’t forget about all that “privilege” white people apparently have.

Whites no longer have the highest family incomes of all racial groups; that distinction belongs to Asian-Americans, who also lead whites in college attendance and completion today. That’s due to hard work [my emphasis], not any kind of artificial advantage. […] None of this is to deny white privilege. Not enough white people recognize the colorless, odorless oxygen of advantage [my emphasis] they enjoy due to this country’s grim history of slavery and persistent discrimination.

John Derbyshire (TakiMag) would like to know why racism isn’t cool.

Time was, protest meant brave dissenters standing in proud defiance against the massed forces of Establishment power. Nowadays those massed forces believe exactly what the protesters outside our hotel believe, and they propagate it with unflagging zeal through the institutions they control: the media, business, labor, the big political parties, all branches of all federal, state, and municipal government (including the military), and all universities, colleges, schools, kindergartens, and playgroups.

Richard Hernandez (PJ Media) wants to use diversity to maximize freedom — but in a good way!

The process which has dumbed down the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and blinded the FBI is essentially the same: that of removing information from the system in order to make it predictable, manageable, and nonthreatening. To make it consistent with the internal ideology of the human institution. Institutions do not always seek to find the truth. More often than not they seek to find the approved solution. But to really learn you have to be prepared to listen to what you don’t want to hear. The future only contains new information if it tells you something you don’t know. But bureaucracies want to make all new knowledge predictable, consistent with the existing narrative. And homogenization destroys information.

Thirteen female prison guards turn over control of a Baltimore jail to gang leaders.

Chechnya’s wretched refuse blows up the Boston Marathon.

The American Interest explains the ludicrous restrictions imposed on USG by stupid old classical international law (until Woodrow Wilson murdered it).

There was lots of talk back in the heady days of Orange and Rose revolutions that American NGOs would fund, train, energize and equip Russian society for color revolution of its own. This all sounded to the Kremlin very much like a planned and orchestrated use of diplomatic personnel as subversives to overthrow the regime; that’s a big no-no in traditional diplomacy.

USG doubles “non-lethal aid” to Syrian rebels, expanding the definition of that term to include “battlefield support equipment such as body armor and night-vision goggles.”

Libertarian writer Richard Maybury casually mentions that America backed the wrong side in World War II.

Let me point out that the largest ally President Roosevelt had during the war was Stalin’s Soviet Socialists. Except for Obama, Franklin Roosevelt was America’s most socialist president. Instead of staying out of the war and letting the German and Soviet barbarians pound each other to dust on the plains of central Europe, Franklin Roosevelt abandoned neutrality and in June 1941 — five months before Pearl Harbor — announced he would back the socialist Stalin. Stalin was the worst known evil in history. In his book about the true nature of old world governments, called Death by Government, historian R.J. Rummel reports the most accurate estimate of Hitler’s murders is 20.9 million, and Stalin’s death toll was 42.7 million. Franklin Roosevelt backed Stalin, so the worst evil in history won the war, Stalin.

Applied evolutionary psychology can be “morally tricky” (image)

The Cambrian Explosion continues, as More Right kicks off with essays by Michael Anissimov and Samo Burja (also known as “Konkvistador”), and Raptros fires up his own blog.

Nick Land and Occam’s Razor publish a visual trichotomy by one Nick Steves.

Nick Steves, still crafting “reactionary consensus,” promptly creates The Reactivity Place.

Ash begins blogging (under his real name, even).

Notable commenter Handle discovers Darkest Enlightenment over at Foseti’s place.

James Donald talks God and game.

Scharlach introduces myth and rhetoric.

Handle drifts over to Wesley Morganston’s place to distill the essence of the new reaction:

To favor the Truth, no matter how ugly or dark that truth or its implications.

Michael Anissimov reconciles reactionism with transhumanism.

Spandrell puts the “neo” in neoreaction.

The Carlyle Club releases ‘Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment,’ immortalizing several authors of interest (to the Darkly Enlightened) in a satirical fantasy role-playing game.

All neoreactionary blogs everywhere are immediately swamped by swarms of hipster nerds ironically touting hereditary monarchy. Experts agree: all is lost, everything is ruined forever, and it’s all my fault.

Discussion erupts at Foseti, with further commentary at Jim’s Blog and The Reactivity Place.

Francis St. Pol hoists the Banner of Cosmos.

Spandrell and Nick Land can’t tell left from right sometimes.

Anomaly UK wages a war of ideas.

Frost talks specialization in this, “the opening salvo in the Cambrian explosion of crimethink.”

Heartiste takes aim at the “lords of lies”: the Cathedral and the Hivemind.

James Goulding helpfully puts everything in the form of a comet:

In the end, we don’t need to beat the left. We only need to beat the right — a much easier goal. The only thing that can save The Cathedral is conservatism. We can stop it.

Foseti exposes progressives among us! (Gasps all round.)

Which brings us to the end of May.

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller returns, talking game in Wired.

The seduction community has become a vanguard of applied Darwinism.

Jason Richwine is persecuted by the ruling class to distract us from the colonization of the United States by the dregs of Central America. The “conservative” Heritage Foundation promptly fires him, leading to a harsh appraisal by Jared Taylor (American Renaissance):

I have a simple question for people who call themselves “conservative”: When are you going to stop letting the Left tell you what you cannot think? In other words, when are you going to be men instead of lapdogs?

Mexican supremacist Janet Murguía (The Huffington Post), president of the National Council of “the Race,” thirsts for blood.

Jason Richwine’s resignation is welcome news, but we expect more.

She is horrified to learn that some of Darwin’s work survived the Boasian revolution in the social pseudosciences.

It turns out he is a champion of an antiquated theory we thought has gone the way of the early 20th century — that somehow there is a link between race or ethnicity and IQ.

Mestizos continue to be genetically less intelligent than whites.

Professionally swarthy “race expert” Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic), apparently terrified to the brink of madness by the specter of “miscegenation bans,” takes this as an opportunity to introduce his readers to Harvard historian Lothrop Stoddard’s excellent book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920).

There can be no doubt that at present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white. […] On the other hand, none of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining birth-rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence. Such checks as now limit the increase of colored populations are wholly external, like famine, disease, and tribal warfare. But by a curious irony of fate, the white man has long been busy removing these checks to colored multiplication. […] Now what must be the inevitable result of all this? It can mean only one thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. […] These mighty racial tides flow from the most elemental of vital urges: self-expansion and self-preservation. Both outward thrust of expanding life and counter-thrust of threatened life are equally normal phenomena. To condemn the former as “criminal” and the latter as “selfish” is either silly or hypocritical and tends to envenom with unnecessary rancor what objective fairness might keep a candid struggle, inevitable yet alleviated by mutual comprehension and respect. This is no mere plea for “sportsmanship”; it is a very practical matter. There are critical times ahead; times in which intense race-pressures will engender high tensions and perhaps wars. If men will keep open minds and will eschew the temptation to regard those opposing their desires to defend or possess respectively as impious fiends, the struggles will lose half their bitterness, and the wars (if wars there must be) will be shorn of half their ferocity.

In Scientific American’s worst-ever article, “science journalist” John Horgan demands that the government ban politically inconvenient science.

Institutional review boards (IRBs), which must approve research involving human subjects carried out by universities and other organizations, should reject proposed research that will promote racial theories of intelligence, because the harm of such research — which fosters racism even if not motivated by racism — far outweighs any alleged benefits. […] Some clever critics of my post might accuse me of hypocrisy, because these articles present esearch [sic] on race and and [sic] should be subject to my proposed ban. Obviously I’m trying to eliminate research that reinforces rather than counteracting [sic] racism. I mean, Duh.

Actual scientist Gregory Cochran, co-author of The 10,000 Year Explosion, replies:

There are problems with this idea. Not just that freedom of enquiry is a thing of value, and that John, if given the chance, would exchange his soul for a pile of dung — and be right to do so. No, enforcement of this policy entails technical difficulties. For one thing, essentially all IRBs already try to ban such research, but they don’t do a very good job, because they don’t know enough about the subject. Probably nobody does. For example, not so long ago people felt free to speculate that modern humans might have picked a few useful alleles from Neanderthals — including ones that increased intelligence. That was before it was found that there is substantial Neanderthal admixture only in non-Africans. […] I can see two possible ways of addressing the problem. One is to end all science. Horgan might like that: he thinks that there isn’t much more to find out anyhow. The other solution is to find out exactly what it is that we don’t want anyone to know: find the true causes of ethnic differences in cognition and personality. […] We don’t have to worry about the minefield being empty: people like Horgan know damn well what they expect research to find — if they thought there was nothing there, they wouldn’t worry about it!

A Cheerios commercial featuring a multiracial family (black male/white female, obviously) provokes a backlash.

Camille Gibson, vice president of marketing for Cheerios, said it’s the first time the ad campaign that focuses on family moments has featured an interracial couple, with General Mills Inc. casting the actors to reflect the changing U.S. population. “We felt like we were reflecting an American family,” Gibson said.

Northwestern University rejects a qualified nominee for “associate vice president of diversity and inclusion” because he belongs to the wrong race (white), sex (male), and sexual orientation (normal).

Ian Coley, a student on the Associate Student Government Diversity and Inclusion Committee, later said white heterosexual males are not qualified to hold the position of associate vice president of diversity and inclusion.

California targets the Boy Scouts for punitive taxation with its “Youth Equality Act.”

Paleo Retiree identifies “our state religion”:

A too-big-to-fail bank has just ordered me, a random ATM user, to “unite behind diversity.”

Stockholm burns; police issue parking tickets.

Imported black Muslims decapitate a British soldier on a London street in broad daylight.

French nationalist Marine Le Pen is stripped of immunity from prosecution for “racism” in a secret vote by a European parliamentary committee.

Jamie Malanowski (The New York Times) presents: the official history of the Civil War. (May contain traces of historical authenticity.)

Equivalence of experience was stretched to impute an equivalence of legitimacy. The idea that “now, we are all Americans” served to whitewash the actions of the rebels. The most egregious example of this was the naming of United States Army bases after Confederate generals. […] But that was a time when the Army was segregated and our views about race more ignorant [my emphasis]. Now African-Americans make up about a fifth of the military. The idea that today we ask any of these soldiers to serve at a place named for a defender of a racist slavocracy is deplorable; the thought that today we ask any American soldier to serve at a base named for someone who killed United States Army troops is beyond absurd. […] Changing the names of these bases would not mean that we can’t still respect the service of those Confederate leaders; nor would it mean that we are imposing our notions of morality [my emphasis] on people of a long-distant era.

I refer you to Union Army General Charles Francis Adams II (1913):

That it had its good and even its elevating side, so far at least as the African is concerned, I am not here to deny. On the contrary, I see and recognize those features of the institution far more clearly now than I should have said would have been possible in 1853. […] The noticeable feature, however, so far as I individually am concerned, has been the entire change of view as respects certain of the fundamental propositions at the base of our whole American political and social edifice brought about by a more careful and intelligent ethnological study. I refer to the political equality of man. […] In this all-important respect I do not hesitate to say we theorists and abstractionists of the North, throughout that long anti-slavery discussion which ended with the 1861 clash of arms, were thoroughly wrong. In utter disregard of fundamental, scientific facts, we theoretically believed that all men — no matter what might be the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair — were, if placed under exactly similar conditions, in essentials the same. In other words, we indulged in the curious and, as is now admitted, utterly erroneous theory that the African was, so to speak, an Anglo-Saxon, or, if you will, a Yankee “who had never had a chance,” — a fellow-man who was guilty, as we chose to express it, of a skin not colored like our own. In other words, though carved in ebony, he also was in the image of God. Following out this theory, under the lead of men to whom scientific analysis and observation were anathema if opposed to accepted cardinal political theories as enunciated in the Declaration as read by them, the African was not only emancipated, but so far as the letter of the law, as expressed in an amended Constitution, would establish the fact, the quondam slave was in all respects placed on an equality, political, legal and moral, with those of the more advanced race. I do not hesitate here, — as one who largely entertained the theoretical views I have expressed, — I do not hesitate here to say, as the result of sixty years of more careful study and scientific observation, the theories then entertained by us were not only fundamentally wrong, but they further involved a problem in the presence of which I confess to-day I stand appalled.

Lawyer and philosopher Ronald Lindsay, president of the Center for Inquiry and author of Future Bioethics: Overcoming Taboos, Myths, and Dogmas, makes a few good points about “privilege” in his opening remarks at the second annual Women In Secularism conference.

Let me emphasize at the outset that I think it’s a concept that has some validity and utility; it’s also a concept that can be misused, misused as a way to try to silence critics. […] That said, I am concerned the concept of privilege may be misapplied in some instances. First, some people think it has dispositive explanatory power in all situations, so, if for example, in a particular situation there are fewer women than men in a given managerial position, and intentional discrimination is ruled out, well, then privilege must be at work. But that’s not true; there may be other explanations. […] But it’s the second misapplication of the concept of privilege that troubles me most. I’m talking about the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, “shut up and listen.” […] This approach doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work for me. It’s the approach that the dogmatist who wants to silence critics has always taken because it beats having to engage someone in a reasoned argument. It’s the approach that’s been taken by many religions. It’s the approach taken by ideologies such as Marxism.

The offensively, almost surreally stupid Amanda Marcotte (joined by Rebecca Watson) does the two things she does best: bitch, and in so bitching, prove every one of her opponent’s points a thousand times over.

Instead of acting in his role as a leader — to welcome the participants and offer a quick introduction of the speakers — he used his time to issue a condescending, unnecessary lecture to the women present about their supposedly naughty behavior when dealing with those who oppose the existence of feminism. […] Needless to say, preening about how men are “silenced” when asked to shut up and listen to women’s experiences before rendering judgment on the validity of them is offensive enough. Under the circumstances, where he is a speaker and the audience present is required to shut up and listen out of politeness, the arrogance of this complaint was particularly grotesque. We are to shut up and listen to him, but men are entitled at all points in time, it appears, to yap over any woman whose complaints about sexism they find beneath their attention.

In the words of Queen Victoria (1870):

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of “Women’s Rights,” with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to “unsex” themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.

Meanwhile, psychologists manage to detect the obvious superiority of the Victorian era and its people.

New research in the journal Intelligence suggests the Victorians were naturally cleverer than we are, and draws the startling conclusion that “the Victorian era was marked by an explosion of innovation and genius, per capita rates of which appear to have declined subsequently.”

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) points out that start-ups have dried up:

I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural. Since 2008, this country hasn’t celebrated achievement or entrepreneurialism. Instead, we’ve heard talk about the evils of the “1%”, about the rapaciousness of capitalism, and the importance of spreading the wealth around. We’ve even heard that work in the public sector is somehow nobler than work in the private sector.

Google CEO Larry Page wants to set aside part of the world for experimentation.

I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world.

Ellis Washington (WorldNetDaily) links IRS persecution of the Tea Party to cultural Marxism.

Since the 1848 publication of Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” history has repeatedly demonstrated that the Lenin-Gramsci “Long March through the Institutions” is an established Marxist/Socialist tactic and proven philosophical strategy to indoctrinate a comprehensive socialist hegemony throughout society (years before the Dutschke moniker was coined) by systematically deconstructing bourgeoisie capitalist culture and society rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions and by co-opting, taking over and eventually controlling all major societal institutions — not from without via violence and revolution as in Marxist/Socialist revolutions of the past, but within via Fabian Socialism — steadily, quietly, imperceptibly and with Nazi-like efficiency over a long period of time.

Jeff Goldstein (Protein Wisdom) finally breaks from the ruling class over the IRS scandal. Robert Belvedere (TheCampOfTheSaints.org) says the cancer has metastasized, and the patient cannot be saved.

Jewish communist Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), still frothing from her intensely gratifying Two Minutes Hate of Jason Richwine, is kind enough to introduce an audience of millions to Richard Spencer’s unusually presentable brand of European ethno-nationalism.

Jewish communist Arthur Goldwag (The Washington Spectator) joins in with her horrified shrieking:

Perhaps the theme I have written about most is how the extreme right is infiltrating mainstream political discourse. As disastrous as last week was for Jason Richwine and the Heritage Foundation, it was a pretty good one for Richard Spencer.

Joe Biden answers the Jewish question:

“I believe what affects the movements in America, what affects our attitudes in America are as much the culture and the arts as anything else,” he explained, “… Think behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it’s in Hollywood or social media are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry.” Biden also cited one of his favorite explanations for the success of gay marriage — “it wasn’t anything we legislatively did. It was Will and Grace, it was the social media. Literally. That’s what changed peoples’ attitudes. That’s why I was so certain that the vast majority of people would embrace and rapidly embrace” the measure. In those developments, Biden explained, “the influence [of Jewish people] is immense. The influence is immense.”

The SFWA elects Steven Gould, author of Jumper, as its president. Theodore Beale receives 9 percent of the vote.

Jim Goad is a rape skeptic.

Obama reiterates: Assad must go.

Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) looks high and low for a real right wing:

All parties in American politics are devoted to Progression. It’s simply a matter of whether you are a “conservative” progressive, a progressive progressive, or a radical progressive.

It’s all relative, writes Paul Gottfried (TakiMag):

The “conservative movement” and the GOP operate from a false pretense that they are straining to dismantle our vast bureaucratic state. Both our national parties are social democratic clubs that accept and implement in varying degrees the PC teachings that flow from our educational and cultural institutions.

A survey of registered voters shows that 29 percent of Americans believe that “an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years.” Another 5 percent are “unsure.”

A writer out of time (image)

Robert Merry reviews John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths.

“The overthrow of the ancien régime in France, the Tsars in Russia, the Shah of Iran, Saddam in Iraq and Mubarak in Egypt may have produced benefits for many people,” writes Gray, “but increased freedom was not among them. Mass killing, attacks on minorities, torture on a larger scale, another kind of tyranny, often more cruel than the one that was overthrown — these have been the results. To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.” Such thinking puts Gray severely at odds with the predominant sentiment of modern Western man — indeed, essentially with the foundation of Western thought since at least the French Encyclopedists of the mid-eighteenth century, who paved the way for the transformation of France between 1715 and 1789. These romantics — Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Helvétius and Voltaire, among others — harbored ultimate confidence that reason would triumph over prejudice, that knowledge would prevail over ignorance, that “progress” would lift mankind to ever-higher levels of consciousness and purity. In short, they foresaw an ongoing transformation of human nature for the good. The noted British historian J. B. Bury (1861–1927) captured the power of this intellectual development when he wrote, “This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions… laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.” We must pause here over this doctrine of progress. It may be the most powerful idea ever conceived in Western thought — emphasizing Western thought because the idea has had little resonance in other cultures or civilizations. It is the thesis that mankind has advanced slowly but inexorably over the centuries from a state of cultural backwardness, blindness and folly to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and civilization — and that this human progression will continue indefinitely into the future. […] Gray rejects it utterly. In doing so, he rejects all of modern liberal humanism.

Economist Richard Ebeling (The Daily Bell) of the Foundation for Economic Education finds himself “thinking an unthinkable: no voting right for those living at the taxpayer’s expense.”

Our dilemma, today, is that, to use John Stuart Mill’s phrase, we have a political system in which many who have the right to vote use it “to put their hands into other people’s pockets for any purpose which they think fit to call a public one.” Unless some way is found to escape from our current political situation, to use Frederic Bastiat’s words, in which the State has become the “great fiction” through which everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense, we are facing a fiscal and general social crisis that may truly be destructive of society in the coming years.

Law professor Jonathan Turley (The Washington Post) witnesses the rise of a “fourth branch of government.”

For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies. This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined. The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations. This rulemaking comes with little accountability. It’s often impossible to know, absent a major scandal, whom to blame for rules that are abusive or nonsensical. Of course, agencies owe their creation and underlying legal authority to Congress, and Congress holds the purse strings. But Capitol Hill’s relatively small staff is incapable of exerting oversight on more than a small percentage of agency actions.

Charles Blow (The New York Times) tracks the death of white America, the destruction of the family, the decline of faith, and other forms of moral-political progress in an idiotic but revealing op-ed:

This means that on the moral front, more liberal views — like support for same-sex marriage — are allowed to quickly spread [my emphasis] and have gone from being seen as radical to mainstream. […] These new realities have changed the conversation about the role and size of government, about the line between individual liberty and the collective good, about the meaning of personal responsibility and societal responsibility. They have also signaled that conservative arguments on many of these issues are losing their resonance nationally, and that the Republican pool of potential voters is shrinking while the Democratic pool expands. So, to defend themselves, their ways of thinking (and, to their minds, their way of life), Republicans are pulling every lever to slow the change on the state level — gerrymandering, limiting voter access, passing anti-immigrant laws, cutting assistance to the poor.

Cultural “critic” (i.e., Marxist) James Wolcott pronounces the death of the “right-wing blogosphere” in Vanity Fair. Unfortunately, he’s looking in the wrong place.

For the Breitbartians, it isn’t about winning anymore. It’s about fouling up the works — poking a stick between the spokes. Sentient Republicans (those non-fanatics who can read election results and recognize demographic shifts) understand that a corner has been turned and they have to turn with it or be left behind as fossil remains. When Rush Limbaugh accepts reality and admits that gay marriage is “inevitable,” when the Republican Party’s own task force produces an autopsy report on the 2012 defeats that advises muffling the anti-gay, anti-immigrant, old-fart rhetoric, the “war” that Breitbart lip-smackingly wanted to wage has already been lost.

A Colorado bakery faces a charge of “discrimination” for not baking a cake for a homosexual wedding. Obama fancies a Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage a “victory for American democracy.”

Artist Mike Krahulik of the gamer webcomic Penny Arcade comes under ferocious attack from the usual social-justice suspects for “a series of increasingly transphobic tweets” (Wired), “blatantly anti-transgender comments” (Financial Post), and “some transphobic garbage” (Storify); specifically:

I don’t think it makes me a monster to think boys have a penis and girls have a vagina though. I guess I could be wrong. It happens.

GayGamer gets right to the point (after a couple quick “trigger warnings” for “rape and transphobia”):

His statements are his personal opinion — but that opinion has been formed, directly or indirectly, because of centuries of uncritical, unreasoned and unexamined opinions that suggest that our biology is the ultimate deciding factor in whether we are “men” or “women,” which is not only presumptuous and simplistic, but also unscientific and inaccurate!

Daniel Bergner publishes What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire.

We embraced science that soothed us, the science we wanted to hear. The presumption that while male lust belongs to the animal realm, female sexuality tends naturally toward the civilized; the belief that in women’s brains the more advanced regions, the domains of forethought and self-control, are built by heredity to ably quiet the libido; the premise that emotional bonding is, for women, a potent and ancestrally prepared aphrodisiac; the idea that female eros makes women the preordained if imperfect guardians of monogamy — what nascent truths will come into view, floating forward if these faiths continue to be cut apart?

The volunteer thought police target Geoffrey Miller for “shaming” lazy fatties (redundant, I know).

His since-deleted tweet read: “Dear obese PhD applicants: If you don’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation. #truth.” […] Before the account was locked, his comments quickly drew the ire of the Twitter world, with NYU colleague Jay Rosen referencing the “fat-shaming tweet” as “mind boggling.” Wired writer Steve Silberman compared the sentiments to eugenics: “More from @matingmind’s passion for eugenics. It sounded better in the original German.”

The EEOC pledges to fight a non-existent “wage gap.”

The enemies of Western civilization turn their slitted yellow eyes on Edith Jones:

A complaint filed today by several civil rights groups, including one funded entirely by the government of Mexico, alleges that federal Judge Edith Jones has violated her duty to be impartial and damaged the public’s confidence in the judiciary, in statements she made in a public lecture — including that blacks and Hispanics are more violent.

Judge Jones is, of course, obviously, indisputably right. So too is Michael Bloomberg in his comments on New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy:

“One newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be. But it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murders,” Bloomberg said. “In that case, incidentally, I think, we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little,” the mayor said. “It’s exactly the reverse of what they’re saying. I don’t know where they went to school, but they certainly didn’t take a math course, or a logic course.”

The EEOC sues BMW for not hiring criminals (because so many blacks are criminals).

Cathedral forces humiliate and destroy Paula Deen after she admits to having used the word “nigger” — used it appropriately, as a matter of fact — some thirty years ago:

Deen recalled the time she worked as a bank teller in southwest Georgia in the 1980s and was held at gunpoint by a robber. The gunman was a black man, Deen told the attorney, and she thought she used the slur when talking about him after the holdup. “Probably in telling my husband,” she said.

23-year-old 911 operator April Sims loses her job and is publicly disgraced after “a Facebook friend forwarded screenshots of her offensive posts to local media.”

“Black people are outrageous!” she wrote on one post. “They are more like animals, they never know how to act, just loud [expletive]. Always causing problems. I can count on one hand the black people I know who don’t have [expletive] for brains.”

Here are some things black people said on Twitter circa New Year’s Eve, 2013:

@JazmyneJ_: “I swear black people dont know how to act”

@immal0ner: “Black people dont know how to act, shooting guns an shit”

@KtrinaG: “@SforSuccess_ lol , really cause y’all black people dont know how to act .”

@barbie4eva10: “Damnq , CARRY TOWN CANCELLED ! Because of the past events ! Lord ! Black people dont know HOW TO FUCKIN ACT”

@RipTinyy: “Ion [I don’t] go out on NYE . Black people in Lauderdale dont know how to act . I know because 99% of them is my family .”

@Desire_Nae: “A lot of black people just dont know how to act when they go places … Somebody always gotta fight or shoot or stab someone smh [shaking my head]” (2 retweets)

@yonnacarter12: “Black people dont know how to act when it comed to events” (6 retweets, 2 favorites)

@_aRawww: “why all these black folks having hotel kbs, yall know yall dont know how to act.” (7 retweets, 1 favorite)

@LickMy_Sexyness: “Cant Never Go No Where ’ Black People Dont Know How To Fucking Act 😫👐 ❗️❗️” (8 retweets, 2 favorites)

@jarelld92: “I’m hanging with the white folks tonight black ppl dont know how to act on nights like tonight” (2 favorites)

Journalist and writer David Barnett (The Guardian) tries to push H.P. Lovecraft down the memory hole.

The American writer, who died in 1937, is also widely considered today to have had unacceptable racist views. And yet, despite his prejudices and stylistic shortcomings, his work remains insanely popular. […] So why do we continue to fete Lovecraft instead of burying him quietly away?

Nick Land remarks: “That ‘we’ is more terrifying that anything H.P. Lovecraft ever put to paper.” Even the giant penguins?

Professionally swarthy N.K. Jemisin sounds the alarm over Theodore Beale’s candidacy for president of the SFWA in her paranoid, narcissistic, white-hating Guest of Honour speech at a fan convention in Melbourne.

There were two candidates — one of whom was a self-described misogynist, racist, anti-Semite, and a few other flavors of asshole. In this election he lost by a landslide… but he still earned ten percent of the vote.

Beale replies:

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males. […] Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance.

This does not go over well. Heads can fairly be said to have exploded. The SFWA removes Beale from its Twitter aggregator and its forum. “Lots of people,” president-elect Steven Gould notes, “calling for the expulsion of this guy. With reason.” The phrase “tarred by association” is discovered to be racist. No one tries to engage with Beale’s ideas about history, anthropology, or governance.

Here I must digress into the words of Lovecraft himself (1919).

The genius of a few individuals is never an index of collective racial capacity. In spite of all the Booker Washingtons & Dunbars we can see that the negro as a whole has never made any progress or founded any culture. We cannot judge a man sociologically by his own individual qualities; we have the future to think of. Two persons of different races, though equal mentally & physically, may have a vitally different sociological value, because one will certainly produce an incalculably better type of descendants than the other. We must see that the best retain social & political supremacy, in order that our best traditions may be preserved. Therefore, to me, racial prejudice is not irrational or unexplainable; nor in any way unjustifiable. It has awkward phases, but its benefits immeasurably outweigh its disadvantages.

Or, if you prefer, these, from The Call of Cthulhu (1926):

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

In Britain, seven Muslims receive hilariously light sentences for raping, torturing and trafficking, with “extreme depravity,” white girls as young as 11. Britain kinda, sorta notices how insane and evil anti-racism is.

The high-profile trial was the latest in a rapidly growing list of grooming cases that are forcing politically correct Britons to confront the previously taboo subject of endemic sexual abuse of children by predatory Muslim paedophile gangs. The 18-week trial drew unwelcome attention to the sordid reality that police, social workers, teachers, neighbors, politicians and the media have for decades downplayed the severity of the crimes perpetrated against British children because they were afraid of being accused of “Islamophobia” or racism. […] The trial — details of which were so disturbing that jury members were excused from ever having to sit on a jury again — exposed years of failings by Thames Valley police and Oxford social services. The court heard that the girls were abused between 2004 and 2012 and that police were told about the crimes as early as 2006, that they were contacted at least six times by victims, but failed to act. […] Despite irrefutable evidence that the girls were being sexually abused, no one — according to a report published by the House of Commons on June 5 — acted to draw all the facts together, apparently due to fears by police and social workers that they would be accused of racism against Muslims.

Towson University professor Ben Warner meets Matthew Heimbach, a real live white nationalist! Why, he seems almost… human.

If I was once ashamed of my excitement at having him in class, that shame didn’t keep me from talking about him. Though it made me uncomfortable, he’d become the most interesting part of my teaching. I was primed for something to boil over, but I also found myself liking him. He arrived to class on time; he was prepared; he was respectful. He had a way of calling me professor in the middle of sentences that appealed to my ego. “You know, Professor, what Kafka might be saying here…”

The Golden Dawn takes out Clément Méric.

A security guard who was present… has pointed the finger at the four anti-fascist militants, one of them in particular. According his testimony, the young man, very agitated, had boxing gloves in his bag and egged on the others to fight the skinheads who, according to the guard, sought rather to avoid a confrontation and leave quietly. The witness added that Clément Méric had said about the skinheads: “These are people who should not even be alive.”

Edward Snowden leaks NSA secrets. Moldbug does not care — oh, and by the way, the ACLU was a communist front, so take your “freedom” and the rest of your stale mythology and shove it.

Vladimir Putin is much subtler than Joe Biden:

“I thought about something just now: The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose composition was 80–85 percent Jewish,” Putin said June 13 during a visit to Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. […] According to the official transcription of Putin’s speech at the museum, he went on to say that the politicians on the predominantly Jewish Soviet government “were guided by false ideological considerations and supported the arrest and repression of Jews, Russian Orthodox Christians, Muslims and members of other faiths. They grouped everyone into the same category. “Thankfully, those ideological goggles and faulty ideological perceptions collapsed. And today, we are essentially returning these books to the Jewish community with a happy smile.”

In Indiana, four Democrats are sentenced for ballot fraud in the 2008 Obama-Clinton primary. In Miami, a Democratic congressman’s chief of staff is “implicated in an elaborate and massive voter fraud scheme that reportedly occurred during the 2012 primary election.” He will later serve 90 days in jail.

The U.S. Supreme Court bars Arizona from checking to see if its voters are actually U.S. citizens.

The ruling was the second in two terms to reject Arizona laws that the state’s officials justified as responses to illegal immigration. In both cases, the court insisted that the federal government has the dominant role when it comes to national issues like controlling the borders and how federal elections are conducted.

In this case, the “dominant role” is to do absolutely nothing.

USG begins arming Syrian rebels. Syrian jihadists behead a Catholic priest. The two-year Syrian civil war death toll creeps closer to 100,000. As a bonus, violence bleeds into neighboring Lebanon.

Sectarian violence erupts in Egypt.

The beheading of witches continues in Jared Diamond’s Papua New Guinea.

Wesley Morganston talks strategy, and settles on reactionary media:

Passivism is no longer a viable strategy; attempting merely to get the word out that Universalism is harmful and philosophically bankrupt may have been defensible thirty years ago, but the situation now is dire. The consensus is that something must be done; but what? […] Make dissent respectable. Many already disagree; let them voice it. Handle notes that “the pre-reactionary numbers are swelling beyond almost anyone’s awareness.”

Michael Anissimov lists twelve points of neoreaction, and conceives of it as a return to natural order. Occam’s Razor brings us the Laws of the Cathedral. Nick Steves talks God. Foseti sees the Cathedral going viral. Francis St. Pol designs an Antiversity. Anomaly UK wants to start a lot of fun clubs. Matt Forney disposes of Lindy West. Marcus Otte sketches late modernity. James Donald gears up for Civil War, Round Two.

An elite neoreactionary secret elder council convenes in the heart of darkness.

The Reaction® has been fully planned. Implementation has already begun. Please stay tuned to the usual channels for the signal when to carry out your encrypted, prearranged and detailed instructions. Remember, The Reaction® is counting on YOU!!

The crow flies at midnight. The ferret is wriggly. Over and out.

Your masters despise you (image)

Matthew Feeney (Reason) enumerates the benefits of monarchy.

In the last hundred years many European nations have experienced fascism, communism, and military dictatorships. However, countries with constitutional monarchies have managed for the most part to avoid extreme politics in part because monarchies provide a check on the wills of populist politicians. European monarchies — such as the Danish, Belgian, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian, and British — have ruled over countries that are among the most stable, prosperous, and free in the world.

Damien Ma (The Atlantic) can’t understand why the Chinese refuse to accept the one true faith.

A new study shows that the country’s youth have an increasingly lukewarm attitude about democratic political systems. […] Many will likely dismiss these findings as simply a study meant to provide some intellectual heft for perpetuating the current status quo. Or perhaps the official narrative and media are simply driving these attitudes.

Unlike in the free world, where there are no official narratives or official media and no one ever uses studies to provide intellectual heft for perpetuating the status quo. Because votes for idiots! Because democracy.

Meanwhile, an independent report shows a “deep liberal bias” towards “immigration” (that is, Third World colonization) in the BBC, Britain’s official media.

Germany is forced to concede certain drawbacks to “mass immigration.”

Germany faces a wave of crime and disorder because of large-scale immigration from Romania and Bulgaria, according to a leaked government document. In what could serve as a warning to Britain, the report describes overcrowded slum conditions, public health threats and disruption on the streets as a result of the influx from the two countries.

Detroit files for bankruptcy.

The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible.

Film critic Andrew O’Hehir (Salon) thinks he knows the real reason Detroit failed:

Is it pure coincidence that these two landmark cities [Detroit and New Orleans], known around the world as fountainheads of the most vibrant and creative aspects of American culture, have become our two direst examples of urban failure and collapse? If so, it’s an awfully strange one. I’m tempted to propose a conspiracy theory: As centers of African-American cultural and political power and engines of a worldwide multiracial pop culture that was egalitarian, hedonistic and anti-authoritarian, these cities posed a psychic threat to the most reactionary and racist strains in American life. […] As payback for the worldwide revolution symbolized by hot jazz, Smokey Robinson dancin’ to keep from cryin’ and Eminem trading verses with Rihanna, New Orleans and Detroit had to be punished. Specifically, they had to be isolated, impoverished and almost literally destroyed, so they could be held up as examples of what happens when black people are allowed to govern themselves [my emphasis].

National Review accidentally prints a good idea: bring back colonialism.

Why not turn abandoned Detroit into New Detroit, a business-friendly charter city where taxes are low and regulation light? Governance could be guaranteed by some outside entity.

“Independent” Zimbabwe can’t afford to run its own rigged elections.

Mercifully it was peaceful. Memories of the 2008 election — burnt and lacerated bodies, weeping girls and women who had been raped, swollen, bleeding feet and dead bodies — were fresh in the minds of many.

Thomas Sowell identifies the central delusion of the left:

Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

Biologist Lewis Spurgin (Aeon) talks kin selection:

So why hadn’t Haldane — a brilliant and inventive biologist­ — taken the idea of kin selection to its natural conclusion? In a startlingly honest interview for the Web of Stories website in 1997, the eminent evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, a former student of Haldane’s, said that this failure was partly political: I have to put it down, to some extent, to political and ideological commitment… We were, I think, very reluctant, as Marxists would be, to admit that anything genetic might influence human behaviour. And I think that we didn’t say consciously to ourselves that this would be un-Marxist so we won’t do it, that’s not the way that the mind works; but it was a path that our minds were not, so to speak, prepared to go down, in quite an unconscious sense, whereas Bill [Hamilton] was very prepared to go down it… to make big breaks in science, which Hamilton did, it’s not enough to have the technical understanding of some technical point, it’s got to fit in with your world view that you should pursue this road.

Biologist John Bohannon (Wired) talks genetic intelligence:

This is an idea that makes us incredibly uncomfortable. “People don’t like to talk about IQ, because it undermines their notion of equality,” Detterman says. “We think every person is equal to every other, and we like to take credit for our own accomplishments. You are where you are because you worked hard.” The very idea of the American dream is undermined by the notion that some people might be born more likely to succeed. Even if we accept that intelligence is heritable, any effort to improve or even understand the inheritance process strikes us as distasteful, even ghoulish, suggesting the rise of designer superbabies. And given the fallout that sometimes results when academics talk about intelligence as a quantifiable concept — such as the case of Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who in 2006 resigned after suggesting that science is male-dominated due not to discrimination but to a shortage of high-IQ women — it’s no surprise that IQ research is not a popular subject these days at Western universities. But in his lab at BGI [China’s top biotech institute], 21-year-old Zhao has no such squeamishness.

Meanwhile, in still-dreaming America, dry asparagus provokes yet another “debate” on “racial discrimination.”

Violent mobs sweep through southern California.

Speeding through a stop sign with his headlights off, Abdirahman Abdi Ali kills 24-year-old Jessica Hanson.

Police said Abdirahman Ali is the older brother of Ahmed Shire Ali, who is serving an 18-year prison sentence for pleading guilty to his role in the January 2010 slayings of three people at Seward Market & Halal Meats on East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis.

Yes, that is supposed to read Minneapolis. Not Mogadishu.

The Economist fantasizes that First World cities “have become vastly safer” in recent years; furthermore, since “most of what remains of the crime problem is really a recidivism issue,” meaning repeat offenders, we should scrap “harsh punishments, and in particular long mandatory sentences,” to get them back on the street as quickly as possible. Then we can retrain police to “focus on new crimes,” like “tax evasion.” You see, in this “era of austerity,” the middle class might be refusing to pay its fair share of criminal “rehabilitation.” Paging Sam Francis…

George Zimmerman is finally cleared of all charges. Violence erupts among “mostly peaceful protesters.” Gary Younge (The Guardian) calls it “open season on black boys.”

Dim-witted “social justice” grad student Jessie-Lane Metz (The Toast), in true “anti-racist” fashion, screams her hatred of white collaborators in one of the stupidest, ugliest articles of the year:

I remember my rage in my first year of my BSW studies, reading Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in which she casually appropriated the collective pain of Black [sic] people, and rolled out excruciating examples of our experiences in an itemized list. Her article, largely in bullet-point form, highlights a number of ways in which Black people are treated differently from white [sic] people on a daily basis. The beneficiaries of this article are largely white. Peggy herself benefitted from becoming a central voice in anti-racist activism, and still charges $10 for a copy of her article, after doing nothing more than stealing our pain, putting it in her words, and becoming an expert in a struggle that is not her own.

Katy Waldman (Slate), apparently white, understands all of this — and agrees.

If I understand Metz correctly, white people can help by ceding the floor to those whose testimonies about racism deserve more attention than theirs. These stories deserve more attention both as a kind of recompense for what the victims of racism have suffered and because they are more illuminating. I accept both premises: Black voices have earned — and continue to earn — the right to dominate our dialogue about racism, and what they have to say is more valuable than what white voices have to say.

Because equality!

Bob Parks (Black & Right) reprints the classic American Renaissance essay ‘A White Teacher Speaks Out.’

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in America.

Ron Unz, publisher of The American Conservative, writes a straightforward, factual piece on the realities of race and crime in America, for which he will be purged.

SFWA president Steven Gould bans Theodore Beale from the SFWA forum. Sarah Hoyt anticipates the organization’s death by political correctness.

Sean McElwee (AlterNet) makes the progressive case for censoring “hate speech.”

The negative impacts of hate speech do not lie in the responses of third-party observers, as hate speech aims at two goals. First, it is an attempt to tell bigots that they are not alone. […] Jeffrey Rosen argues that norms of civility should be open to discussion, but, in today’s reality, this issue has already been decided; impugning someone because of their race, gender or orientation is not acceptable in a civil society. Banning hate speech is not a mechanism to further this debate because the debate is over.

F