– An 18 minute talk from Moldbug
– Jim Kalb on the ’60s:
The ‘60s claimed to be about liberation. In fact, they were much more about the rise of a new ruling class of experts, managers, and media people. That class, which is still with us, has some unusual qualities. The most notable is that it denies that it is a ruling class, and claims instead to be a neutral means through which expertise, rational administration, and the machinery of publicity help people attain their goals. Our rulers today tell us they are here to help us: to educate us, free us from the prejudices of the past, let us know what we really want, and make sure we all get it. They claim their power is liberating, and back up the claim by pointing to their suppression of authorities that compete with them, such as family, custom, religion, and traditional hierarchies. If we can go shopping, play video games, surf the Internet, and sleep around, and we don’t have to listen to Mom, Dad, or the Pope, we must be free. Aren’t suppression of incorrect thoughts and safeguards like the Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) mandate worth having to protect that?
A class that rules by claiming not to rule needs to hide what it is. Our new rulers deny their identity as a class while denouncing the influence of classes that remain identifiable as such. If the Supreme Court is all white or male, that’s domination by a particular class and something must be done about it. If it’s all graduates of Yale and Harvard Law School, and recent presidential elections have all been contests between various Yale and Harvard graduates, that’s not domination by a particular class, it’s just proof that Yale and Harvard are superior and the more power we give the Supreme Court and president the better.
(HT: Paleo Retiree)
– Chuck is still basically the only source for decent information on the Trayvon Martin case.
Foseti 
No, GLP is not the only source or even the best.
I think it’s fairly obvious at this point, and has been from nearly the beginning for all who wanted to take even a cursory glance at the facts, that Zimmerman can’t be convicted at trial. But that’s not the point of any of this at all.
Only a few people in American even care about the trial anymore – the whole race-baiting politico-media Gleichschaltung has served both it’s frenzy-of-the-week and intimidation-reinforcement purposes. Anyone who’s experienced the criminal justice systems knows the process itself is half the punishment.
What the Zimmerman case does help show, just like the endless catalog of recent “hate-crime” hoaxes that Sailer occasionally mentions, (Here’s only the most recent, notable only for the fact the young woman actually set herself on fire), is that there is literally NO story involving a spinnably “White” offender and a Black victim, no matter how facially preposterous and clearly fabricated, that the entire media machine will not immediately buy into, warp and distort even further, and amplify in a feedback-loop frenzied orgy.
A carnival of lies, and a modern-day “Passion of the Christ” popular entertainment incitement to lynch-mob, but of course, with an altogether different Christ, and different “Jews”. A Strange Messiah indeed.
The “Christs” might be different, but I think that an ancient Pharisee would quickly recognize the facial features and surnames of the people who own/run the media outlets that fuel the mob as those of his kinsmen.
By which I mean that the Jews are the same.
The phenomenon Kalb mentions might just be lefties coping with victory. Lefties always want to be portrayed as underdogs fighting the establishment, so when they become the establishment there is some cognitive dissonance that must be worked through. It is achieved by portraying all the old winners as somehow nefariously scheming to achieve their ill-gotten positions, while todays winners just won fair and square through their own merit. You see echoes of this in the ‘reality-based community’ and ‘reality has a liberal bias’ slogans.
It’s good though, because it reveals that the ruling class today has become just as decadent as the one it replaced. I don’t even think lefties know how to argue for their own positions anymore, instead resorting to assuming that they are obviously right and hurling abuse at anyone who dissents.
Is Moldbug deliberately trying to hide his greatness?
Not nearly enough time.
Moldbug is trying to reach a new audience. His prose is indecipherable for all but a few of us, and it’s not the sort of thing “normals” seek out, anyway.
He got in front of a hundred or so nerds with money, and he made his case, albeit with awkward verbal tics. It was a good day for Moldbuggery.
His prose is decipherable for normals. I’m a normal. It is in sore need of an editor, but I do that myself when I read him. What this does not translate to–at all– is speaking. We all read and comprehend many times faster through reading when compared to speaking and listening. The speaker absolutely has to change his approach to reach even an audience of nerds. Since Moldbug’s theme was RAPE, he could have illuminated the concept of how to successfully eliminate government beginning with three words: Sandy Springs, Georgia.
Decipherable for normals, yes, but appealing to them? That’s what I doubt. All sorts of people slog through prose that’s as dense as Yarvin’s, but usually it’s because doing so is part of their job.
To read it on the weekends, though? That’s something that this conferences attenders would probably have never done.
I would have liked to see Moldbug develop a single idea thoroughly to completion. What was presented had the feel of a sampler plate of “here are a variety of things that I like to write about” which would have taken a lot more time to tie together in a way comprehensible to an audience that isn’t already familiar with Moldbug’s writing.
Some people just don’t do well speaking in public. Moldbug is, apparently, one of those people. My esteem for him is diminished not in the least, but I sincerely hope he doesn’t make a habit of this.
“the old winners as somehow nefariously scheming to achieve their ill-gotten positions”
Trust me, we are. We will, too. Reaction is great, and will prevail…
Fourth doorman is right. Thanks for the plug Foseti but others have uncovered a lot more than I have. Wagist has done a lot. The only thing about Conservative Treehouse is that for all of their good reporting they’ve also thrown out some painful duds. They were wrong on Martin’s phone records timestamp and I think they’re wrong on DeeDee’s identity. They sometimes seem too convinced of what they’ve determined through their reporting.
The best stuff I’ve seen from them is their connecting the dots between Benjamin Crump, some PR guys, and the media. Either way, it’s clear that this was a sham from Day 1 and everyone who has addressed this case from a skeptic’s angle has played an important part.
I’ll check out wagist, but I agree that there have been some issues with the reporting from other places.
If I understand correctly, Moldbug believes in HBD, and yet there he was, speaking at some conference or other. Not once did some leftist attempt to shout him down with accusations of racism, and he even appeared to be received enthusiastically by the audience, none of whom looked like the sort of people who go to American Renaissance gatherings. How on Earth did he manage such a feat?
How did he manage such feat: only Nixon can open China. Only Clinton can cut welfare.
The left doesn’t really understand Moldbug yet. They haven’t encountered his ideas before, so he doesn’t trigger the mental immune response. Give it time: if Moldbuggery becomes a phenomenon, expect purges, denunciations, and blacklists.
When UR got posted to Metafilter, it wasn’t until a fair way down the comments that someone pointed out he was an ungood crimethinker, and that was only because he had a link to Sailer in his blogroll.
That sounds about right, although it occurs to me that Razib Khan, another believer in HBD, also has a blog hosted by the very mainstream Discover magazine, an association that seems to have attracted no significant criticism from the Left. I wonder if at last we might be seeing the faint beginnings of an attitudinal shift toward such matters as race and heredity.
Well, Pinker’s at Harvard. Has been awhile. And I seem to recall some talk about him being pretty matter of fact in the Harvard classroom, though that could be wrong. Before that he was of course at MIT. There was also Hamilton who talked a lot about dysgenesis and was a critic of Jewry, though not a voluminous one.
There’s Peter Thiel. Not sure of his exact views but he is certainly a prominent freethinker and nose-tweaker.
But really I don’t think intellectual HBD has got much more currency than it had when Bell Curve came out, 50 psychology professors backed it in a letter to WSJ, etc.
The real change I think is the morale reversal in Europe, with anti-nativist stridency withering… nativism has grown immensely as seen with the True Finns, Front Nationale, etc, and nativists now preponderating in the comments section even at the Guardian. I’m not an eyewitness but I was credibly informed that that was a total change from the past situation. Most of this energy is not very preoccupied with scientific HBD though one of the key figures, Sarrazin, does have this interest. Nothing similar seems to be happening in the US, so far.
It’s getting rather hard to live, though, at shit wage rates. We talk a lot about the stagnation of the median wage, but the shit wage has really got markedly worse after inflation IMO.
“Now he is speechless. He can’t think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn’t understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.”
As someone who see a future breakup as a 7-1 Vegas odds chance, the good thing about Moldbug getting out there is that his proposed reboot is so different from lefty alternatives. If a break up happens, a blame game would ensue, and it would be important to have alternatives out there amongst the thinking class.
I’d rather see the thinking classes, tried and hung for their crimes against their own peoples, but then again I’m a sheep dog and I don’t care for traitors.
Cosigned.
whole classes? millions?
I wonder if at last we might be seeing the faint beginnings of an attitudinal shift toward such matters as race and heredity.
It will be non-racial and along the lines of cognitive elitism. Since a certain special people occupy the top of the IQ totem pole, an HBD limited by discussions of IQ (and only IQ) and its implications will edge its way into the mainstream.
Indeed. Let’s all try to remember what the great driver of the last several decades where. Average IQ whites had accumulated lots of capital due to the prosperity of the post war era and its egalitarian policies. High IQ people wanted to take that capital. Race was simply a club by which that was done. A way for the right half of the bell curve to beat up on the left while using AA crumbs and feel good tolerance to give it cover.
Now that average whites are devastated and have no capital left to steal its important to explain how it was all their fault for being stupid anyway, and how the current class deserves to rule for its own interest via divine right (oops, the right of high IQ, same difference I guess to them).
Apropos of nothing, some old highly emotionalMarx, 1842:
Also apropos of nothing:
By now, everyone’s heard of Lena Dunham, attention whore du jour.
And there are, naturally, a dozen popular, and well-deserved, parodies of that video all over the web.
But who else wants to see the sexual innuendo, (Scared at first but tried it and liked it and now I do it every time) “First Time Not Voting” Video?
Average IQ whites had accumulated lots of capital due to the prosperity of the post war era and its egalitarian policies. High IQ peAverage IQ whites had accumulated lots of capital due to the prosperity of the post war era and its egalitarian policies. High IQ people wanted to take that capital. Race was simply a club by which that was done.ople wanted to take that capital. Race was simply a club by which that was done.
A related point for the Cheap Chalupas crowd, from a reader at Auster’s commenting on the nanny who killed two NYC children:
There is no such thing as cheap labor.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on Air Conditioner.
Regards