Basic Logic
It looks like Radish was quitting, but it seems they're staying in the end. Quitting is lame, if you can't find the time or inspiration you can always do like Eric Falkenstein and simply slow down a bit.
I, on the other hand have been neglecting the blog lately. I've been busy with work and family, and I must say this Snowden business has disturbed me quite a bit. I've been thinking a lot. I've also been playing Civilization a lot. The new expansion is amazing.
Anyway, I've been visiting family after quite some time, and I've been having some neoreactionary lapses which have proved very interesting.
Most of my family is fairly mainstream conservative, the kind of people that call themselves moderate or centrist. No extremism in them. God forbid that. They know very well who holds the megaphone and how they should never contradict it. But of course old people do have their own issues of concern, and they like to have an opinion in things that aren't contradicted by the megaphone.
A big issue in the family lately is natality. A lot of cousins giving birth lately. Most of them quite old, 30+, and so they can't expect many more babies in the future. That is something they like to complain about. And I like to participate.
Uncle: "Young people these days, you know. Nobody has babies. At this rate we'll have no people left."Me: "Yeah well but what can you do. Women are busy working, and most people don't have enough money to buy a home big enough for a family."Uncle: "Yes. The government should do something."Me: "Like what."Uncle: "Well if people don't have money, well give them money. A subsidy for babies. Babies will pay taxes eventually."Me: "That's all right, but if you set a certain amount of money to give people who have children, the incentive will be stronger to people with lower incomes. Say if you give them 10k a year per child, that's a big incentive for someone who makes 10k a year in some odd job. But for a highly skilled engineer making 100k, it's hardly an incentive at all."Uncle: "Yeah well. So?"Me: "Which means that any subsidy to childbirth will produce a higher birthrate from people with lower incomes compared to people with higher incomes. And you don't want that."Uncle (pauses to think): "Wait a second."Me: "On average people with lower incomes produce lower skilled children."Uncle: "Yes..."Me: "Because intelligence is inheritable."Uncle (shudders, looks away): "Well..."Me: "In the same way as height is."Uncle (suddenly with a very sanctimonious tone): "I'm not sure about that..."Me: "There's tons of studies proving it."Uncle: "You know, studies... you can prove anything these days."
It's funny because my uncle is 10cm taller than my father. And his children are 10cm taller than me! But of course acknowledging that intelligence is inheritable fired up his PC sensor. It wasn't immediate though, I noticed him stopping to think for some seconds. I imagine his thought sequence was:
If intelligence is inheritable -> we should discourage dumb people from having children -> so the government should measure everyone -> and discriminate against dumb people -> did you just say discriminate? -> ALERT ALERT STOP NOW
My uncle is an old, middle level engineer, not highly educated so it's not that he needs to be PC or that he was brainwashed at college. It happened very naturally that once I said "inheritable" a few seconds later he was about to reply "but that's what the Naz..." when Aunt came by and interrupted the conversation.
I could tell hundreds of such anecdotes, when people listen to you in good faith, follow your logic, understand it, but a few seconds later go CRIMESTOP and refuse to go further. That won't change until we grab the megaphone. And we never will.
40 comments
That's why neoreactionaries ought to regard mainstream conservatives with the same benign pity as they regard well-intentioned but misguided lefties with.
Celine said the West died at Stalingrad-that's good enough for me.
Perhaps the pity same snobs reserve for those who end sentences with prepositions. Gnon forbid Tribunes convinced they've found gnostic truths should lead others to clearer skies. Might have to mix with the commons and all that, but don't worry the commons may well fix it. It's quite true conservatism is doomed by serial failure. It's also true it would take courage to be a Tribune, and while our fighting may indeed by done by fools our best thinking [reaction] is done by cowards. I'll take courage and common sense any day. And really what do intellectuals have to be proud of? They're responsible for centuries of horror, in our own time - NOW - they've undermined the foundations of civilization itself namely the family, and the worlds money. They're even responsible in their boundless malice for stopping science in it's tracks, indeed pushing it backwards to pre-Aristotle animist superstition with peer review, settled science, and Gaia worship. I don't know about boundless but malice is dripping from the screens of reaction. If you want it to go anywhere ye had better get courage. Ooodles of it.
I have to confess I don't get what you mean in 95% of your comments.
I'm starting to entertain the proposition (at p = 0.1) that VXXC was written by James G as a reactionary bot.
It would explain the bad writing.
Maybe not - I think a James G bot would have excellent prose.
Admittedly I'm not a native speaker, but I don't see why you can't end a sentence with a preposition. And though it may have come across as snobbery, I didn't mean it like that. There is such a thing as genuine pity, you know.
You can end a sentence with a preposition. You can start one with "because." You can even split infinitives.
It's true that people believe what they believe for emotional reasons, and then they look for evidence or arguments that justify that belief. I guess that means that our appeal to people is going to have to be an emotional appeal, backed up with enough evidence and moral justification to make people feel OK about switching to our side. Something like showing a video of a white woman being beaten by a black man, and then saying "we have a right to want to be safe, don't we?" One really, really big thing we have going for us is that the great majority of the "others" who are causing white civilization trouble are blacks and Latinos who are essentially retards. The ONLY power they have is what we let them have. The day that a critical mass of white men no longer will tolerate the situation, the NAMs are up shit creek.
I used to think like that. But the danger is not that the NAMs take over. They will never rule whites as a whole. But including retards in your polity means your polity becomes retarded. And you can't exclude them. Ever.
You think white proles would revolt against a revolutionary era-style voting rule (property owning males) ? I highly doubt it, without the Cathedralist ideology.
There is a possibility that this will not happen in the U.S. Blacks and Muslims are annoying enough and assertive enough that it is impossible to entirely suppress people's innate desire to stay well away from them. Folk HBD understanding of cognitive differences between blacks and whites cannot be suppressed in people who routinely encounter the Rachel Jeantels of the world. The situation is less clear cut with Hispanics. They're not nearly as annoying or as assertive (on average). A significant percentage of them are willing to get jobs (jobs that don't really do much for the economy, but jobs none the less). A significant percentage of them are willing to interact with white people in a polite and friendly manner. And intermarriage with them does not cause the same deep repulsion that intermarriage with blacks does. People avoid recognizing black dysfunction by focusing on the "few good ones" that they know and trying to ignore the many bad ones that they encounter. But if they live around enough black people they can't entirely fool themselves. It will be a lot easier for people to fool themselves about Hispanics. There will be more good ones to focus on and it will be easier to ignore the bad ones, because they'll be much less likely to randomly beat you to death for no reason. They're not savages, they just have bad genes, so they drag a country down in a way that is much harder to notice, they just make it a little poorer, a little dumber, a little less safe every year. They won't create Detroit, they'll just make the U.S. more like Mexico. And higher rates of intermarriage will give people an investment in fooling themselves. Nobody wants to think that their mestizo nephew has bad genes that will drag down our civilization. Unless there is some shock that makes secession possible, I'd look for America to gradually decline into a Latin American country, without a reaction ever occurring. Boiled frog style. I think Europe offers the real hope for reaction, because Muslims are annoying enough that people won't put up with them forever, not once they get real political power and start using it.
I know what you mean. Try talking to my friends and relatives about this and instinctively, they wanted to shut down the conversation. People have been programmed to stay away from this area.
Hell I remember myself doing it as a teenager but to be fair the interlocutor wasn't this straightforward. He just threw a casual remark about Africa being never developed and would likely never develop because 'look at the people.' Set off all my PC sensors.
It's interesting that "the Snowden business" is making you think. I have always been a bit skeptical of neoreaction as ideology, rather than just as a source of fresh perspectives, but the revelation of the cyber-Leviathan's existence especially makes me think that we've been living in a world order where political ideas, old, new, and old-new, are all out of touch with important parts of reality. Regardless of what you think of their agenda, the "Assangians" may be more attuned than any other political faction, to the realities of this hidden power.
Well I don't think Assange or Snowden really know what they're doing. Hell, look at them, both prisoners in some small room. Doesn't look like they're shrewd political operators. I think it's obvious that the political framework of a nation depends in a large part on the military technology it is sustained on. Cyber-Leviathan changes, or rather strengthens the power of the bureaucracy against anybody else. That's very disturbing.
People just do it wrong. If you try and directly contest information with the power structure then you lose - because they have all the power. However that power isn't just the size of their megaphone it's the size of megaphone *multiplied* by the faith people have in the veracity of the people holding it, p = f*m. If you reduce faith in the holders of the megaphone to zero then the power of the megaphone to create voluntary submission drops to zero also. For example, the Soviet Union had a megaphone and crimethink but it didn't create voluntary submission because people had no *faith* in the Communist priesthood. So the first step is not to debate information with people but to undermine their *faith* in the multicult priesthood. Once you've weakened their faith you can contest information easily. For example on crime stats, instead of arguing data focus first on the media's lies, bias and distortions when race is involved then once they've lost faith in the media you can feed them whatever data you want.
Soviet citizens had no faith in Soviet megaphones because they believed the even bigger and cooler Western megaphones. Same thing happens in China today. Faith is trivially easy to induce.
Step 1: undermine faith. Step 2: contest information.
How's that been working for you? Honestly curious.
It works. It's just slow. The principle is the same as cult de-programming.
Basically you can't work on one individual for hours or anything like that. Instead you have a group of people you know who you regularly hit with drive-by examples of say media double standards. You know when they've turned when they start repeating stuff back to you. That's the point when you can tell them anything you want and they'll believe you. Given the very long-term nature of the process it's best used with family or work colleagues.
In my experience, men I get along with will follow, men I don't get along too well or who are just the annoying competitive type will just contest anything I say with fallacies just to show they don't accept my intellectual authority. I mostly can't be bothered.
> Soviet citizens had no faith in Soviet megaphones because they believed the even bigger and cooler Western megaphones. No, no. 1) Most soviet citizens had quite enough faith in Soviet megaphones. They honestly believed (and still believe) things told on TV and printed in newspapers more than their own lying eyes. Besides the intellectual effort required, it was easier psychologically to delude yourself than to face reality. Also there were always excuses available (and regularly supplied by the media) for problems. Here is Solzhenitsyn making Stalin express this mindset:
Only a minority of the citizens ever listened to the 'voices'. Mostly these were intelligentsia. And even they were shocked, when the Communist party rule ended, to discover just how much lies there really was in circulation (basically everything). 3) The best minds of the dissident movement started with believing their own senses, not with listening to the 'voices'. You did not exactly need BBC to notice that people did not sing any more in the villages, or to listen to your grandparents' tales from before revolution, or to divide food production figures from Pravda by the population, and to reach your own un-PC conclusions.
I had occasion today to interview my parents about the role of the 'voices'. Apparently, it was quite significant in two related ways: they provided a sense that you weren't alone or out of your mind thinking dissident thoughts, and they publicized analysis and probably some commentary by the leading dissidents. Since communication deviating too far from the party line was difficult and dangerous, and publishing your own dissident thoughts in the Soviet media impossible, both were important. However, listening to the 'voices' was also difficult and even somewhat dangerous; one didn't come to listen to them spontaneously. People had to lose faith in the Soviet media first, or at least entertain grave doubts, and be already on their way down the rabbit hole.
Someone should push a pro-family/fertilty tax cut: a 5-10% cut for each child that one has. This way the non-taxpayers don't get a subsidy and those with higher incomes get a greater discount in absolute terms. Of course it doesn't take a genius to figure out the real purpose of such a policy, but at least it seems more palatable. It doesn't discriminate by race per se and it's doesn't mention the heritability of intelligence. Maybe something like that could slip by the PC-radar, probably not though. It's soft eugenics.
> It doesn’t discriminate by race per se This old standard doesn't cut it since quite awhile back. Disparate impact is the watchword now.
To the bureaucracy yes, but most people haven't assimilated that. Most laymen agree that discrimination is bad but they do not think disparate impact is unjust.
> most people haven’t assimilated that. Most laymen agree that discrimination is bad but they do not think disparate impact is unjust. You're probably right, but so what? I do not doubt that The New York Times has assimilated it very thoroughly.
Well if you push the meme hard enough, many people will agree with it, and the Cathedral will have a hard time arguing against it. Which might wake up someone.
The Cathedral does not usually argue with people apt to think disparate impact is unjust. Such people are most often found on the lower tiers of the status pyramid, no?
Do this next: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGsnm2nOnso
Persuade me.
I don't think I can do it more justice than the trailer. It's a very well done puzzle and exploration game. Beyond that, the game has a lot of fresh ideas in its presentation and game mechanics. This review says it better than I can.
Candide, I was pretty sure I knew what you meant by 'voices', but wanted to confirm. In doing so I happened upon information that may save American civilization in the nick of time: Under § 501 of the Smith–Mundt Act of 1948, the Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens until July 2013.\[35\] The intent of the legislation was to protect the American public from propaganda actions by its own government.\[36\] Unless § 501 of Smith–Mundt is renewed ASAP, Americans could face a dark future of government propaganda and social engineering. Neoreactionaries who are US citizens should email their congresswomen and congressmen and senators in support of a renewal of § 501.
> Candide, I was pretty sure I knew what you meant by ‘voices’, but wanted to confirm. Yup, VOA, BBC, Deutche Welle, Radio Liberty et al. > In doing so I happened upon information that may save American civilization in the nick of time: >> The intent of the legislation was to protect the American public from propaganda actions by its own government. Pfui. The Cathedral does not need the Congress' permission to broadcast propaganda to US citizens. Broadcasting propaganda to US citizens has always been one of its primary functions. The quantity and volume of Cathedral propaganda is so enormous that VOA would be a drop in an ocean. > Unless § 501 of Smith–Mundt is renewed ASAP, Americans could face a dark future of government propaganda and social engineering. A good example of sardonic humor.
@Spandrell From earlier discussion. "I mostly can’t be bothered." I think that's a reasonable as de-programming people is slow and tedious. The main exception i'd suggest is family, particularly younger ones who might be tempted to risky behavior because of the media's fantasy version of reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprogramming
[…] A comment in my last post was a good example of non-aggressive incremental policy proposal: […]
Basic logic is falsified. Anyway, who cares, this band rules: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeohN5JMeYY