– Steve Sailer reviews the reviews of Charles Murray’s book.
– Wilhelm Durand doesn’t like "neoreactionary." Instead, he likes "autocratist." I’ve always like Moldbug’s suggestion of "royalist" – it’s quite effective at evoking an awkward silence. (Read the whole post for more on whether people believe in HBD). He also nicely sums up something I’ve said before:
If any given area of technology has advanced in the past 50 years, it’s because it’s become highly computerized, not because of breakthroughs in hardly any other area.
I’d go a bit further and say that declines in many other areas have been covered up by advances in computing power.
– Tweets from Park Slope (HT: Rod Dreher)
– John Derbyshire on Dharun Ravi.
– Clio and Vladimir on Monarchy (HT: Anomaly UK). Devin added some thoughts.
– Smart Flight:
The point is that people out there are working their asses off, getting stressed out, having diseases and even dying because of the stress. And all for the only purpose of avoiding proles. Which means you need a house in a nice neighbourhood. And if you have kids, you will want to take them to a school without proles. And oh God that’s worth a fucking fortune. So the cycle of stress, and women in the workforce, and broken marriages, and just general shit goes on. All to avoid proles.
– Whites (like me) that live around a significant number of blacks from Hail:
The integrity, dynamism, and viability of our Multicultacracy itself is dependent upon, heavily dependent upon, enough of the native population not experiencing it.
– Where the white man went wrong.
– The Confederacy was roundly defeated, and is therefore still a favorite target of ridicule for leftists, like this libertarian. Let’s go with this dude’s argument that the was was fought over slavery. What then, does it say about the war that it didn’t end slavery? And that Southerners correctly predicted that outcome? Nothing good for the North, I suspect.
– nydwrace on Christopher Lasch.
– This pretty much settles it for me.
– Progress
– It’s getting too hard to parody liberalism and academia (but I repeat myself). Here’s a professor supporting "after-birth" abortion. Apparently she doesn’t watch South Park.
– It still always sort of surprises me that when people see that government employees are rich and powerful, their first reaction is to get pissed. Why not just become a government employee?
– Unamusement has some good posters about race. It’d be fun to start some about democracy. How about this picture?
– Bring back colonialism one and two.
– Chicks like dudes that beat them up, Grammy edition (HT: Whiskey). Also, one in four British women are dating three dudes at the same time (HT: Ferd).
– Tips on being a good reactionary.
Foseti 
I’m curious Foseti, do you mean declines in general efficiency being covered up by electronics, or do you mean technological regress being covered up by electronics? The former I think most of your readers would agree on, while the latter is a bit of a scarier thought.
I mean the former. Not only for efficiency though. Think about governance or policing, etc. Your latter idea is interesting to consider though.
You can be certain a priori that technology is regressing, because wherever software is cheaper than hardware, hardware innovations will be replaced and fall into disuse.
This makes it difficult to safely determine whether hardware use and techniques are independently in decline.
Absolutist?
The correct answer must be whatever gets the most accurate google hits.
>“Anybody who’s spent any time in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Flint, can see what the market has done to those neighborhoods. It’s destroyed them.”
Oh, snap, son. The market has also been hard at work in Lagos, Haiti and Zimbabwe, but for some reason hasn’t touched Singapore. The market racis’!
Why not become a government employee
Hmm… I wonder… not M/F/D/V/B perhaps
Its not that hard to become a government employee, most are begging people to come work for them. For anyone of decent ability it pays less then private.
Decent ability? You mean decent credentials…
No, I mean decent ability. Public sector hate comes mainly from people that never worked in both.
‘Its not that hard to become a government employee, most are begging people to come work for them. For anyone of decent ability it pays less then private.’
Not necessarily.
For computer programming, for example, private-sector programmers are often given a lot of freedom but lousy pay and job security. Government programmers have to suck up to the bosses a whole lot but don’t have to write much code.
Basically, a lot of bureaucratic jobs, whether private-sector or public-sector, involve more sucking up than actual work. Productive organizations have tighter margins and less waste.
‘It still always sort of surprises me that when people see that government employees are rich and powerful, their first reaction is to get pissed. Why not just become a government employee?’
Because they have some self-respect.
There are many military veterans who take their personal oath to the Constitution more gravely than they take every assertion of the US government. These vets refuse to accept government jobs because they are not willing to compromise the Constitution.
With all due respect, the military isn’t entirely outside of government is it?
‘the military isn’t entirely outside of government ‘
I’m referring to men who started out as naive kids in the military, then got wise as to the nature of the corruption after they had sworn their oaths.
They can’t change the past, but they refuse to be of further service.
Smedley Butler was one articulate example of this kind of man.
Nowadays, “Iraq Veterans Against the War” and related protest groups have many men who are still pro-Constitution, but vehemently anti-government.
I should have expressed myself a bit more plainly, but I hope my meaning is now clear.
The problem with working outside of government in the modern US is that there aren’t very many jobs that are really outside government. Smedley Butler doesn’t seemto have found one.
I’d also add that most government employees are anti-government. The government isn’t one entity after all. I have a few friends that work at DoD and they don’t think highly of State. The people I know at State have similar feelings in reverse.
>Here’s a professor supporting “after-birth” abortion.
…of Down’s Syndrome children. Although the slippery-slope problem in a number of senses is a serious one, any honest person must concede that a Down’s Syndrome child’s life may not be worth living. A responsible mother might be unaware that her child suffers from this condition until it is born; amniocentesis introduces a small risk of its own, and screening isn’t 100% accurate either.
Furthermore, let us acknowledge that whether a sentient creature is located in a womb or in the outside air is of no relevance whatsoever to its status as a sentient, pain-experiencing being – although for the purposes of slippery-slope arguments regarding the effects of this policy on the behaviour of other humans, the difference between prenatal and postnatal is indeed important.
In addition, consider that to prevent parents from terminating their Down’s Syndrome newborn is likely to create a situation in which the disabled child isn’t properly cared for or is handed over to the state for care – the parents are likely to lack the disposition or means to care for the child, otherwise they would not have sought the termination.
This is a complex issue and not one to be treated with contemptuous brevity. I can’t say that I’m impressed by the kind of commentary allowed to pass without criticism on the housewife site either: “At 22 and pregnant, I’m so horrified by this I haven’t much in the way of rational thought to offer, aside from the obvious statements of utter outrage.”
This is the kind of “thinking” criticised by Fabian Tassano here and here.
That said this kind of behaviour is somewhat to be expected of women whether under “mediocracy” or not, since their biological inheritance endows them with greater powers of empathy than of critical thought.
>Apparently she doesn’t watch South Park.
Philip K Dick’s short story “The Pre-Persons” came to my mind. But one can’t substitute fiction for sound reasoning.
Agreed that the most off-putting thing about Catholics is that worship of sheer numbers. They would be happy if all Catholics were NAMs and disabled. More souls to save!
Infanticide is a pretty common custom in most of the world during most of history. Saying that abortion is the same thing is true; but hardly an argument to oppose it. \
Btw Phlebas my blog gets quite a lot of visits of people searching your name. You should get a blog, there sure is demand for one.
Indeed, if the Spartans did it then I’m disinclined to view such a thing as the ideological fruit of self-parodying liberalism. In addition, Razib of GNXP has suggested that Down’s Syndrome abortions are a proof of principle for neo-eugenics, rebranded euphemistically under the label of “personal genomics” and set to become increasingly important as the relevant technology improves.
Therefore whatever the motives and ideological background of the academic that Foseti criticised, it seems as though support for such a thing as postnatal abortion is something quite memetically positive for, um, royalists like us aside from one’s views on the morality of postnatal abortion itself.
But Spartans didn’t say ‘all life is sacred.’ Nor, ‘everyone is equal.’ Liberals do.
It may be practical, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also self-parody.
I would like to say that this was not a thought experiment. The Journal of Medical Ethics like all academic journals is actually attempting to influence policy. In other words, the authors, at least one of whom describes their specialty as “practical ethics” are actively engaged in the cartoonishly evil task of trying to *kill babies*. That’s worse than puppies.
A mental stop sign is perfectly justified in some cases. The authors were not trying to “make us think”. They were trying to *kill babies*. It’s okay to have a heuristic sometimes.
People will do what they want to do, religion and ethics be damned. The only way to stop women from forsaking upwardly mobility by aborting or killing babies, is to cut the correlation between childlessness and upward mobility. If you make it so the only way women can raise their status is by having children by high status men, and erase any alternatives (forbid them from entering the workforce), well they’ll get on with having children.
Which was they did during all of civilization. Upward mobility is a stronger motive for women than the biological drive to reproduce. That’s a fact. Women are cruel and vicious with their own children when they blame them for downward mobility.
Whachoo talkin bout, Willis? Of course people will not “do what they want to do, religion and ethics be damned.” The human sacrifice pyramids of Mexico City, for instance, have not been open for business in half a millenium, nor have the Weejuns been doing their blood eagle thing for quite some time. The descendants of the Phonecians have not burned their kids for Moloch or buried their firstborn for a cornerstone in something like 2000 years. You’d have a hard time convincing me that these are all coincidences caused by sunspots and not their forced civilizational software upgrades. As for women choosing social mobility over their own children-some women, sometimes, maybe. But not the women of America’s settler generations, nor the women of Eastern European Jews post-Khmelnitsky (or the Orthodox of today.) Of course, if you incentivize a behavior, you get more of it, but this is not infinitely elastic.
spandrell:
Japan had a pretty strong policy of firing unmarried women after a certain age. It didn’t change much. The problem is post scarcity + birth control. Only fear, fear of deprivation and poverty, scare women into marrying beta males and having their children. What we call poverty today is a joke, its biggest health concern is obesity.
any honest person must concede that a Down’s Syndrome child’s life may not be worth living.
You’ve already lost.
I usually say “monarchist”. However, a crown princess was recently born in the once and, God willing, future monarchy where I live, whereupon I discovered that “royalist” was the preferred term among my aggressively republican Facebook friends. It’s always surprising how strongly people feel about their principled resistance to ancient seats of power that were stripped of any relevancy centuries ago.
“All to avoid proles.”
Nah. Blacksn
There’s a world outside the US.
>>asdf,
That’s a very good point.
Although I must note that the Japanese government view on the subject is that the problem is not fertility, it’s the marriage rate. Married couples do tend to have 2 children each (negligible out of wedlock births there). The problem is that ever increasing amounts of people are never getting married.
The cause of the low marriage rate being… well, unreasonable expectations. Roissyan sexual dynamics. Of course you might argue that women always had unreasonable expectations, they just didn’t act on them because of fear of deprivation.