Things I should be blogging

Sorry for the lack of content, but I’m on vacation enjoying the holidays with family. If I weren’t I’d be writing about:

Good quote: "The options for supervillain real estate look shockingly similar to the options for a libertarian state."

Derb interviewing Jared Taylor:

I oppose Noble Lies as a matter of principle—at least for anyone older than age seven or eight. Santa Claus and the baby stork are for unformed minds; adult opinion and government policy require a flinty-eyed view of the facts.

Take race and IQ: We do the country no favors by insisting that blacks are just as smart and hard-working as whites but are held back only by wicked whites. That only encourages blacks to hate whites, and many don’t need encouragement.

Decline and Fall of the American Empire: Gang rape edition.

Laura Wood on what it means to actually be anti-feminist.

Sonic Charmer on small talk and extroversion.

Kalim Kassam links to an interview with Steve Sailer on HBD.

Ferdinand on the death of game – I agree wholeheartedly with this take. I agree less wholeheartedly with him on intelligence, but he’s still worth linking to and reading. He’s panhandling, so you should help out if you can.

Elusive Wapiti on the inevitability of the homosexualizing of the military. I don’t really care about DADT, but it’s pretty hard to deny that your civilization’s warrior spirit is shot when you openly gay people into your military, right?

Paul Cella on imposing morality:

Can we impose morality? Liberals and libertarians often hotly deny that we can. To them the imposition of morality constitutes one of the more egregious abuses of political power. Indeed, their hostile reaction is, not infrequently, the sum of their argument against a given proposal.

To me this has always seems a puzzling reaction. The logic is slipshod. How is it possible to govern at all, having forsworn all imposition of morality? The very interdiction against imposing morality is a moral statement. To say, “you can’t legislate morality” is to make certain (admittedly vague) claims about the kind of being that man is, and the nature of his political society.

In pulverizing fact, all legislation but the most superficial imposes morality.

Ilya Somin supports secession as long as everyone who is in the seceding political entity is seceding for a good reason. Which is to say that Professor Somin does not, in fact, support secession in any realistic circumstances. I guess this lets him maintain some semblance of libertarian bona fides without having to take a meaningful unpopular position.

Steve Sailer pwns the people bitching about US test results on the PISA scores.

TJIC linking to a piece on bureaucracy:

In the long run the rule of aristocracy has been succeeded not by the rule of democracy but by the rule of bureaucracy. Let us examine this pallid aphorism a little more closely. If one does not like aristocracy one is, most probably, a democrat by preference; or the other way around. But one’s exasperation with bureaucracy is a different matter: it is at the same time more superficial and more profound than our dislike for either form of government. The democratic exercise of periodic elections does not compensate people sufficiently against their deep-seated knowledge that they are being ruled by hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, in every level of government, in every institution, on every level of life.

These bureaucrats are not the trainees of a rigid state apparatus, or of capitalist institutions, as their caricatures during the nineteenth century showed them. They are the interchangeable, suburban men and women of the forever present, willing employees of the monster Progress

The GMU guys have been talking about big government and big finance. They are missing the most important fact: you’re incorrect to talk about big government and big finance as separate entities. They are in fact identical entities. Neither could exist without the other. They are one combined entity.

Deogolwulf on libertarians:

It has been said that disgust arises in man from the consciousness of those things which remind him of his beasthood. That must explain my visceral reaction to libertarians.

OneSTDV on Victor Davis Hanson:

Mr. Hanson and other moderates need to understand Barry Goldwater’s timeless aphorism that "extremism in the pursuit of justice is no vice," because if not, if one refuses to stand hidebound in opposition to the left, it will continue its gradual march against every traditional edifice we have left.

TAS on Lincoln:

Next year, with the 150th anniversary of the start of the civil war, we are sure to hear incessant praise of America’s only tyrant, Abraham Lincoln. The fact that so many Americans idolize the proto-fascist is revolting, especially when Americans take a dim view towards foreign leaders who kill thousands of their own people in wars.

For example, Slobodan Milošević killed 130,000 people to preserve the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and he was arrested as a war criminal, dying in jail.

Yet, Abraham Lincoln killed 600,000 people to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States, but a Greek temple was built in his honor and his portrait was placed on America’s most common coin.