Bloody Shovel 4

So the news from last week were how China changed the constitution and abolished term limits in the only thing that had term limits; the presidency. This was followed by the USG propaganda apparatus (AKA the press) going into fits of panic. “We got China wrong”, they say. It took China changing its constitution without American permission for Americans to notice that they got China wrong.

What did they get wrong? China was dirt-poor in 1980. Really, really poor. It would have likely remained ...

Myanmar opened up to the West, agreed to "democratize", and release Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2011. I blogged about it back then. The rationale between the military junta dissolving itself was that China was eating up the whole economy. 100,000 Chinese have basically colonized downtown Mandalay, so the idea was to play USG against China. Which is a pretty good idea. Kim Jong Un is playing the very same game right now. Duterte in the Philippines kinda is too. This will be basically geopolitics 101 in ...

https://twitter.com/ForeignPolicy/status/883152369948688386

It's been a while since I last wrote about Singapore. Now that the old man is gone it's seldom on anybody's radar anymore. But that has changed recently. Singapore is in the news. First there's this article by Nick Land on Jacobite, where he quotes my coinage of Singapore Singapore as an IQ Shredder, and notes how we don't yet have a fix to perhaps the biggest problem we have.

But there's a pretty big piece of news going on in Singapore. Big enough that the Prime Minister, Harry Lee's son Lee Hs...

DCaSWEIVYAEFR1O

https://twitter.com/Outsideness/status/875728073538232320

I did write a post on being cautious about extrapolating trends, but you never know.

Look at this page: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-austria-election-idUSKCN11I0NA

Two important pieces of news here.

One is that the Austrian presidential elections have been postponed. These elections are the repetition of the elections done in May. Why are they repeating them? Because of massive electoral fraud. Electoral fraud done to give the election to a leftist candidate, against an anti-immigrant rightist one.

This sounds trivial but it's the first time in... a 100 years? That fraud is a...

Speaking of Tibet, the Dalai Lama just gave a long interview to the BBC. He went out of his way to make it easy for reactionaries to have an opinion on his country.

For some reason, the interview isn't published in the English website, which shows only a small lame news article.

The BBC Chinese version though has a long and juicy account. Dalailama.com also has a longer account.

What did the Dalai Lama say? He said he is in favor of abolishing all traditional Tibetan culture and formally become yet...

Yes, Trump is lots of fun. Having Mexico build a wall makes me giggle too. Shitting on Saudi princes on Twitter is priceless. But, but, Trump may not be all that cracked up when he gets the presidency. He's doing lots of stupid stuff too. Bombing ISIS? Come on. Pandering to conservakin voters has its backside too.

Take this:

Fuck yeah. That's exactly that they should be doing. That's perhaps the best, the most important single policy that any country on earth can be pursuing. Go promote abortion i...

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

In 1966 probably nobody wanted to end up worshiping mangoes as Mao's holy fruit. And Mao himself didn't want that to happen. But it did, because of bad incent...

There are many theories of what drives elite madness. Peter Turchin thinks it's about elite overproduction, we have too many educated people with ambitions of high status, so they fight each other to see who's holier-than-thou and gain status for themselves. Moldbug thinks it's Puritanism evolved, getting ever more virulent. There also other theories: bureaucratic religion, mass-media induced cognitive failure. Choose your favorite one.

Whatever the cause, the disease is increasing and getting wo...

Isegoria has been running a series of posts quoting John Glubb's [The Fate of Empires](http://www.rexresearch.com/glubb/glubb-empire.pdf). It's a great book, short and to the point. Not exactly erudite and full of data, but the patterns he points out are very interesting, even though his analysis is not quite consistent.

I also found interesting his chapter on religion, which agrees on some old idea of mine:

I'd say we need renewal, and not yet another revival, but the train of thought is similar...

T. Greer linked to this (long) article by Adam Elkus about the relation between academia and politics. Academia and politics are quite different institutions, made up by very different people with often antagonistic tempers. But they also have a lot in common, both claiming to have authority, and in most states they have tend to be integrated into the power structure. They make two of the three big pillars of the Cathedral.

Or so we tend to think of them, as a common tenet of neoreaction takes e...

WRM cheers on the newly found intimacy between USG and Japan. Kerry and Hagel, State and the Pentagon are both now in Japan, where they have signed... something. WRM sees this as proof that USG is putting its weight behind Japan, joining forces against China. And that's a good thing. Say what you will about WRM, he knows what he likes, he makes it clear, and he says it all over again as many times as he can find excuses for. Pension reform, automation, fuck China, defend Israel, he's not a singl...

It seems the US is immersed in yet another witch hunt against a heretic troublemaker who dares contradict the foundational dogma of the Cathedral. I'm more surprised by the balls of the man who made a dissertation on Mexican IQ on freaking Harvard, than in the totally predictable crackdown when his views came out in the news. Of all the stupid, irrational, me-too denunciations that have denounced Richwine all around the media, the one that caught my eye the most was the one from Will Wilkinson i...

Says Thrasymachos that he's fascinated with Walter Russel Mead. I must admit to share some of the fascination. It's like watching a train wreck. I can't help admiring the mess, and wondering how each piece of broken steel is entwined to the other. Thinking how on hell did the toilet end up between rows 11 and 12, surprisingly keeping its shape intact.

A good source of reactionary recruits is a sober analysis of recent foreign policy. Of Moldbug's Cathedral, perhaps the most conspicuous part is th...

What pushes Globalisation? Michael Pettis says that Globalisation is caused by inflation. Which is an interesting theory. But I'm not here to talk about economic theory. Let us say in more general terms that Globalisation has two vectors. One is economic; globalisation is pushed by money in search for yield. The other is ideological; globalisation is pushed by a faith in search for converts. Both can work together and add impulse to the process, but they don't always do, and sometimes they work ...

I blogged some time ago how The Economist wouldn't shut up about Myanmar, who recently turned into the Cathedral's best friend. The China-backed military junta suddenly decided that the Chinese were too big to be trusted, and they decided to make peace with USG. So they dismantled the junta, had an election, freed Aung San's daughter, and let George Soros' establish an office in Yangon.

It was a big victory for Hillary Clinton and the recent State Department policy of shifting focus from the Pers...

Liberals have been in power for over 100 years already, and we are more than used to their insanity. We dissenters have spent a long time thinking about their positions, have written long texts analyzing their creed, and since Tocqueville at least, have concluded that liberalism is a suicide cult, and that it cannot last. Equality as Paradise and Man as God is simply too detached from reality. Liberalism eventually must perish.

And so we still believe, but it's been some time already, and Liberal...

Charles Murray has been going around saying that the elite is smarter than ever before. That the difference between the top and the bottom is getting bigger and bigger. I myself wrote I saw nothing wrong with that development. Societies are supposed to sort out the best and give them advantages so as to disseminate those traits. Evolution accelerated by human agency. I'm all for it.

But that was assuming the premise. I am guilty of wishful thinking, perhaps. Jim A Donald thinks the premise is fal

  You are a bad person

Huh? What have I done.

 You don't let me buy up your country's assets.

 wtf  

Advisor: Mr Soros stay to the script please.

 Y...