– Finally, some reasonable thoughts on the IRS case. This is also almost certainly true. Here’s yet another example.
– I’m tired of writing about immigration, but if you want more: see hbdchick’s explanation of why Richwine was right, the comparative advantage of Puerto Rico, some thoughts on IQ and race, some real-world experience with multiculturalism, a theory on the fall of Rome, a piece on the new oligarchy, and Richwine not being a pussy.
– More reactionary consensus.
– Beginning of some essays on moral progress.
– Walter Russell Meade on the jobs crisis.
Foseti 
Wish Heritage had not been a pussy too, and turned it around on Harvard…
Couldn’t agree more. Pretty lame that Harvard has more anti-PC balls than Heritage.
Harvard’s PC position is incomparably more secure. It can afford to sail over an occasional blooper (especially when cutting off that PhD thesis would mean impugning all the professors who signed off on it), but not Heritage.
Possible reason why conservatives (and most other people in prominent positions) are pussies: a soft life.
Never been in a real fight. Never feared real economic hardship. Never struggled. Never lifted anything heavy. Never been afraid.
(A real fight is one in which there are no authority figures like bouncers to step in and break it up.)
Well you nailed it but how and why is this possible?
Because that’s their goal. For generations.
Our elites came into being during the New Deal, but only achieved Empire with World War II – and here is the key – the cognitive elite came into being to avoid conscription. They were dodging the great 1940-1973 American Draft. It’s not just danger they shirked, it’s the toil of soldiering and of course the degradation of labor. People do love their HBD and all this talk of selection, perhaps they should consider how they were selected, their choices.
They’ve literally bred cowardice and shirking into our elites, here is the power of evolution amongst creatures of free will!!! It happened in a century. Free Will and strong motivation.
Now they don’t just want to avoid danger and toil, our PC codes are there to also eliminate risk, unpleasantness, and government/academic service eliminates consequences as long as you fling the monkey poo.
Now have a care PA, you must consider your audience.
I think the elite has been selected for its religious fanaticism more than its cowardice. The more purely Puritan, the more elite.
The model for manipulation is Quaker “friendly persuasion,” which is actually a delightful combination of religious fanaticism and cowardice.
So, talked to a gal I know who has some insight into Heritage, though not so recent as the DeMint era. Her short answer for what happened was “Rove & Co.” I guess he’s still got some significant pull over there. Her longer answer was something like this:
1. Many inner-circle strategists in the Republican Party machine basically believe the game is over demographics wise. They’ve believed this for a long time. Call them the “We Are Doomed” Machiavellians, trying to make a barely-palatable lemonade out of some very nasty lemons.
2. Privately, personally, they probably agree with everything Richwine and all the rest have ever said. But it doesn’t matter, because, on the strategic time scale, we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.
3. Tactically, short-to-medium term, you could follow the Sailer Strategy and, maybe, squeeze out a few Revanchist wins for Republicans, but it would be counterproductive. The Cathedral (they don’t call it that, of course) would make easy hay of “the hateful white party” in due time, and it would go the way of the Know-Nothings in Boston – permanent obsolescence.
4. So, the best you can do, if you care at all about the long-term survival of anything like even a fake opposition party in out decadent democracy, is to embrace the Latin American / Texan model, an increasingly Brazil-esque society, but one in which, in some places, at some times, you can still get some Hispanics to feel fondly about and vote for the Republicans.
5. To do this, you must absolutely, positively, and, most importantly, preemptively cave to everything you think the Democrats could possibly leverage against you. Which, in practice, means being the volunteer auxiliary PC-enforcer on your own side. It also helps when you’ve got big business on your side.
I suppose I could be charitable and, for the sake of argument, assume that Rove is completely right about all this. But I can’t stomach his strategy. I’d rather go down telling the truth.
Do you really think the Texas model will survive another couple generations?
I guess that strategy really hinges on that question. How stable is Texas? My guess is that it’s not very stable at all.
I don’t think so either. I think this is all folly. It demonstrates desperation and weakness which in turn only provokes one’s opponents like blood in the water.
But I can imagine being stuck in a frame and pattern of thinking that cannot escape taking status-quo democracy for granted, and believing, “it’s a long shot, but it’s the only hope we’ve got left.”
The easiest answer is they are careerist looking out for themselves and don’t care about the long term. After all, that answers how we crossed the Rubicon in the first place.
Sadly, that rings true.
So can anyone suggest for a moment why any American Patriot – which we can define narrowly as someone who loves his country – should ever care again about the Republicans or support them? The Left is rabid, but at least they fight.
Do they fight or do they triumph over a beaten foe? Look at the coverage of this incident:
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/patrick-reevell/femen-topless-paris-protest_b_3262960.html
You’ve got this teenage temper tantrum thrown because French people are celebrating Joan of Arc, and who does the article repeated call “extremists” and the “far” right? These women aren’t fighting because there is no risk involved, they have already won.
That’s what I thought. They aren’t a real opposition, they are just cutting a deal for themselves using the rubes as leverage.
Exactly
This raises an interesting question. Let’s jump way ahead of ourselves for a moment and imagine there is some day a real reactionary movement that is actually trying to win power via democratic coup. Could this movement win without any significant NAM votes? If not, would this movement have to purge itself of openly HBD writers? Or could the movement find some tricky balance, where it still accepted HDB, but simultaneously cleansed itself of any personal animosity towards existing NAM citizens of America, and gave enough direct gifts (shares in the new American Sovcorp) to win votes? The latter strategy might have a chance of working. After all, I think black people are actually much more HBD than white liberals (I still remember a discussion about racial stereotypes in my high school class, where a black classmate said, “White people got it in the head, black people got it in the bed”). And any sort of democratic coup would need to involve giving free shit to people to have any sort of chance of winning. So maybe there could be some sort of grand compromise that minorities would buy into: “School is sham to get your tax money to pay for cushy jobs for white liberals. Vote for the reactionary program where we’ll have national profit sharing – 20% of all tax revenues dedicated to the workers, thus guaranteeing a minimum wage of $12 an hour for everyone.”
The problem with promising to give things away via redistribution is that you already have a party with a proven track record of giving things away via redistribution. Not only that, the progressives are perceived as the party that wants to do this for you, whereas reactionaries would be seen (rightfully) as doing it only begrudgingly.
And I think it also comes down to the allocation of future risk. People think they want to win the lottery – which is what getting a windfall of a certain number of dividend-paying shares in USG would be. But I think in the back of many people’s heads, especially the kind that are spendthrift and have trouble managing their money, there is a realization that they would “blow it in no time.”
What people really want is something like a paternalistic, rock-solid, inflation-adjusted annuity – which is what they think they have with Social Security and Medicare.
If that’s what you’re going to have to promise to dole out (which is, by the way, what the Republicans have been forced to promise to dole out), then the reactionary government looks an awful lot like the current government – at least budget wise – with some significant improvement in policy and administration, but still, a giant pension fund or charity.
Maybe I’ve strayed off the reactionary reservation on this one, but I am actually ok with a government that permanently has progressive taxation that gets distributed as an annuity, pension or wage subsidy to citizens. I imagine the concept less of government as charity, more of government as a giant labor union (a nationwide labor union where a share of profits of all capital go to all the workers). I think there is a need for such a union, because the bargaining power of ordinary workers has eroded, and this problem is only getting worse as automation technology improves. (I write more about the problem on my blog).
The key is how to provide the more utilitarian wealth distribution, while avoiding nasty democratic politics. I think maybe some sort of dual class stock could do the trick (90% of the shares permanently attached to citizens for their lifetime, 10% of the shares floating and have 10X the voting power).
You’re not off the reservation unless you’re proposing the Detroit-solution, which is a payment contingent on not working. I think payments for work, even completely wasteful/made up work, are firmly within wider reactionary framework.
Payments for nothing have been tried and have failed.
It depends on what you mean by “recognize” HBD. Singapore implements policies in a way that recognizes HBD without offending minorities, whereas the old South Africa recognized it in a way that offended minorities (South Africa went beyond recognized statistical differences and applied some blanket prohibitions based on race, which arguably goes beyond recognizing HBD). I think Rhodesia also recognized it in a way that wasn’t offensive (although it created an opportunity for certain people to profit from creating offense).
I think it’s impossible to create a stable US without recognizing HBD. Every non-discriminatory policy will have a disparate impact on a diverse population, for example. Our legal system can’t handle this basic fact. Without some recognition, the whole system is too inherently contradictory to function. Singapore went further and eliminated trial by jury to avoid OJ Simpson like “juries.” After failing to disperse racial groups evenly throughout areas, they allowed racially segregated areas to exist (people generally want them anyway) – such a policy in lots of cities would currently help alleviate some of the tension created by gentrification, for example.
a) “Payments for nothing” have succeeded wildly at empowering the people who control the payments.
2) Payments are *never* for nothing.
The “One Big Union” idea has to allocate political power and so has to deal with the above. In fact, the One Big Union idea is how we got here. To be more precise it was the Wobblies One Big Union and the “efficiency movement”‘s One Big Trust, synthesized perfectly in Bellamy and later Croly and Lippman. Do I really need to explain that the problem of tying political power to One Big Anything is that it becomes *The Party*.
We have One Big Union and One Big Trust and all of the sudden the meaning of life is to be producer and a consumer. Even just about all of the PC bullshit boils down to totalitarian economism. Black people and women were denied their right to be treated as identical producer and consumers with all the other cogs. How dare anyone recognize anything other than an individuals capacity as producer/consumer! Actually, there is obviously quite a bit more to it, but still, Fuck communism.
@josh the issue is that the “one big thing” is a fact of life. Let’s say you don’t go with the “one big union” idea, government totally abdicates it’s any role in acting on behalf of consumers and employees, and stops enforcing any antitrust laws, workplace laws, etc. It cuts all taxes and cuts away social security and medicare. What happens? I think most of the major industries consolidate into giant trusts, so that they can use their bargaining power to raise prices and drive down wages. Simply put – there is too much to be gained by combination for any greedy person or institution to resist. So given this state of affairs, the only thing to do is to combine first, and have the biggest combination be a union working for your interest that can keep the monopolists and trusts in line.
One of the most extreme examples of the above was in 17th century India. Before the arrival of the British East India company, Bengal was one of the richest areas in the world due to its cloth industry. At first there were many foreign traders, all competing against each other, so prices for cloth were high. The British East India Company came in, and by hook and by crook, managed to form a monopoly. One thing that aided it’s monopoly formation was that the government of Bengal was weak, divided, and unstable. The government did not have the power to set favorable terms of trade. So the East India got the monopoly, and now could set the prices, and it drove wages way down, and the region became quite destitute (later on the rise of the cloth industry in England made the Bengalis even worse off, but the impact of that was later).
It’s not the way I would design the world if I was God, but in the world we actually live in, bargaining power and organization matter a heck of a lot. If you are not organized, if you do not have some organization doing at least something to protect your interests, you’ll probably end up screwed.
The problem with communism was not the “one big union” idea, but the idea of total top down, collectivization and control of the economy.
The “one big union” I’m proposing is closer to a European social democracy model, which has some very good things to be said for it. The problem with the European model is the “modern structure” – the government that is half-hyper-partisan electoral democracy, and half unaccountable bureaucracy controlled by the cathedral. A “one big union” type of government with a better management structure might be quite good. (A while ago I wrote an essay on how such a government might be structured, if you are interested).
Devin,
I’m pretty sure the age of massive trusts is long since over. Those trusts also suckled on the government as much as they did anything else.
The real problem is keeping people doing something so they don’t start figuring it out for themselves. I agree that paying them might be the cheapest and most effective alternative. The key is what you get in return for your payment.
@Foseti that the age of trusts is mostly over is in part due to anti-trust laws. And of course, in a world of anti-trust laws, those monopolies that do exist will exist with the help of government. And yes, government has often been corrupt and worked on behalf of the trust rather than on behalf of the consumer or employee.
But if you removed anti-trust laws altogether, I think the trusts would come back with a vengeance. For one example of many, without anti-trust laws, I do not think Firefox or Chrome would exist (Microsoft would have simply had no shame in completely breaking those programs, rather than only secretly being somewhat obstructive). I think the mobile companies would all try to combine (just as T-Mobile and ATT tried a couple years ago). Even worse for the consumer would be if the owners of vital goods – such as agricultural companies or oil companies combined and started openly abusing their power. It’s not hard to imagine a lot of really bad outcomes, and even a cursory reading of history shows those bad outcomes have actually happened in the past.
The trusts that were broken up by anti-trust laws were: 1) government created (e.g. Railroads); 2) already breaking themselves up (e.g standard oil and Microsoft); or 3) simple bribery.
Governments generally try to create monopoles, not destroy them. See, for example, all of our banking laws.
Ant-trust laws have always been about protecting one trust against others. Teddy Roosevelt was a Morgan guy who went after the Rockefeller/Kuhn Loeb/ Harriman coalition.
The early 20th C the battle was over *how* business would be cartelized, by finance (Morgans), or by (self) regulated Industrial Organizations culminating in the Rockefeller-sponsored, early New Deal NRA.
The Morgans made a bit of a comeback and rejoined the coalition (coincidentally right after the Business Plot), but as a Jr. partner in the One Big Trust. Today businesses are cartelized through a combination of regulation and finance. It’s Bipartisan!
The Cathedral is one. A Cathedral divided against itself can not stand. When Bill Gates agreed to put his billions in the hands of the Cathedral’s tax exempt PR wing, suddenly his problems disappeared.
The One Big Trust:
http://www.designingeconomiccultures.net/the-top-50-of-the-147-superconnected-companies/
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be including the foundation-media-educational-bureaucratic complex when they do these sorts of analyses, but this is the ruling blob.
Not that the right lobe of the blob necessarily knows what the left lobe is doing, but these things still follow their evolutionary paths. Cancer doesn’t grow by eating itself; it eats the host.
I didn’t think I’d say this as soon as 2Q 2013, but, good grief, I can’t keep up with all the new neoreactionary output these days. Being an early adopter means being used to a quantity of product that I could absorb casually and with very little free time.
You know it’s gotten bad when you can imagine looking back and saying something like. “I liked that band before it was cool.”
Yeah, I get the same feeling. The new guys are still of surprisingly good quality as well.
You know it’s gotten bad when you can imagine looking back and saying something like. “I liked that band before it was cool.”
We’re all going to be in that position. It’s an anguish I can live with.
I can’t even read Moldbug’s comments anymore; kids and aspies.
Of course, the other possibility is that the USA starts a slow process of disintegration – not secession like some are saying.
A “soft partitioning” is almost certainly coming, with the southwest becoming a Hispanic-dominated region, the Pacific Northwest a SWPL republic, and so on. Eventually I suspect the country will break up into several smaller nation-states, each more or less culturally, linguistically, and ethnically homogenous. Canada may split up too, which would introduce an interesting twist to all of this.
And how could liberals opppose that? It’s self-determination after all, isn’t it? They’re the ones who pushed the whole multi-you-name-it paradigm to begin with, and what I’ve described would simply be the logical conclusion to it. Unless they intend to prevent that from happening by using force…nah, couldn’t happen.
“It also helps when you’ve got big business on your side.”
Except the GOP doesn’t. Big business is just as comfortable with the Democrats, if not more so. Big business understands that contributing money to either party is basically a protection racket, and if the Democrats are in charge of everything, why bother giving money to the GOP?
You hear a lot about the Wall Street vs. Main Street divide. When Main Street figures out that the GOP is not their friend, game over. A UKIP-like party will take root, and the Republicans will go the way of the Whigs.
Golden Dawn USA, coming soon. See you at the soup kitchen.
More UKIP in the USA I think. The Greeks seem to be creatures of extremes. Their Great Grandfathers marched into and took Constantinople back – briefly – and they could have made a much better showing against Hitler if they hadn’t left 25 Veteran Mountain Infantry Divisions in Albania to be flanked and cut off.
We don’t need Golden Dawn. We do need USIP.
As fascinating as that would be, I just can’t see it happening.
America now: IS IT DONE YET?
No. Nor is it likely to be, it has too many advantages. Matchless geography – which is destiny – tremendous natural mineral resources and arable land, and finally a still quite vigorous population.
Americas problems are its’ elites. The New Deal Administrative State and the Rule of the Cathedral require men of virtue, patriotism, courage – for their own virtues are the only check.
These wretches couldn’t be farther from any of those qualities. The solution is simple, direct, and obvious.
The death of New Deal Government and the death of our elites are in no way THE END OF AMERICA.
As I often scold a close friend, do not conflate the wretches around you with the entire country. He works in DC. Hates it.
Other than having to suddenly live by wits and to work or not eat – will any of you really miss it?
Demography is destiny
No, whoever settled here was going to be important.
Geography remains destiny.
I’m hoping though all things considered all of you in DC are quite ready to give up so easily.
You’re all quite vested in surrendering the country to all takers, would you mind surrendering it to the Americans?
I wouldn’t mind surrendering to the “Americans.” However, I think the category as you would define it increasingly no longer exists. You can’t surrender to nobody and there’s no reason to surrender to a dying entity.
The Americans exist, but the young ones are all fat or on meth.
It’s quite nonsense that there are no Americans to surrender to…certainly the Progs seem to fear them, given that they sicced the IRS on at least 500 of their groups. And those are just the Moms [that’s the Tea Party profile – stay at home mom]. Mom by definition means – kids. Where does our Military come from, for instance? The moon?
And what gives Reaction the right to look down their noses at them? Reaction has been losing for centuries. Upon what meat doth reaction eat that it grows so great in it’s own mind?
Wait I forget – most of you work in government and academe. I guess that’s the meat.
Frankly this is beginning to look like a case of wanting to dominate your office co-workers. Too bad, this is the only original political thinking around. Not going anywhere but historical curio without troops. For that you need a demos.
No Americans? Who the Hell was this? This is just NY State in 2010..
Of course there are some. However, their numbers dwindle as the smart ones are assimilated into the elite and the rest continue their transformation into an underclass. Instead of rising up, they’re dying out.
There’s the Marines, I suppose. I’d surrender to the Marines.
Have you been to Latin America? It’s incredibly beautiful and rich in natural resources, and warm year round. It should be one of the wealthiest places on earth, and populated by the Swiss it would be. So what’s the problem? The problem is it’s the Spanish, a borderline insane and ultraviolent (in a good way) people trying to control the American Indians, an insane and ultraviolent (in a bad way) people. It works a little but it’s mostly poor and dangerous.
There is a mechanism by which the elite maintains a semblance of control in Latin America, which Sailer has talked about a little with reference to Mexico. I don’t fully understand it but it amounts to that, when the chips are down, they go medieval on their asses. Rather than being a quip from a Tarantino movie, it’s pretty much literally medieval. I’m not sure how Puritans trying to control American Indians is going to look, but it’s going to be ugly.
Best case outcome is Chile, but for the US it’s more likely to be a cross between Venezuela and Argentina.
WRM is right that there was net progress from 1890 but he discounts the deprivation and chaos that occurred in between. The worst part of that time was 1890 to 1930- an openly hostile progressive elite presiding over increasing chaos and decreasing living standards. I think that’s what we’re in for in the next few decades.
Here’s what I think is most important about the IRS case.
If the IRS is on your side, then your organization can submit a highly fabricated return, with the foreknowledge that they will look the other way. The taxes you save (which, usually for these groups, is the amount they pay themselves in salaries and to politicians as bribes), are basically a purely corrupt gift from the public fisc.
If you are basically an entirely political organization but you throw in a nominal amount of purported “public education” in there, a favorable interpretation by a single sympathetic bureaucrat is all you need to come out hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead.
Who gets the discretion to decide whether the education (or ‘religious’ or ‘charitable’ activity) is ‘real’ or ‘substantial’ enough? An ally or enemy? Who can possible review such a decision for corruption? It’s inherently unreviewable unless you get someone to be a whistleblower and openly testify as to motive.
As a private citizen, if you suspect this is going on, what exactly are you able to do about it? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. You don’t have a private claim, and private claims aren’t allowed without prime-facie evidence, and you can’t subpoena any yet.
Now, lets say, on the other hand, that you are put on the enemy’s list and
targetedinvestigated / audited. You suspect you’re being singled out because of your beliefs, but the IRS, naturally, claims it’s all random. Red flags, computers, all that.What are you supposed to do? What can you do? How can you prove your case without subpoenaing the entire IRS case file? And maybe not even then. You don’t have a burden-shifting mechanism that forces the IRS to ‘prove’ pure motive. And even if you did, the IRS could just produce the source code to its random-audit generator and say, “It came out of there, we promise.” Try to prove that wrong.
And this goes for any government agency that does discretionary, “random” investigations.
The point is – it’s an inherent feature of the system that this kind of abuse of discretion is unactionable without an insider mole or whistleblower who 1. Was present at a conversation where someone was stupid and insouciant enough to openly admit what was happening and why – something very easy to avoid through proper use of language by any competent bureaucrat, and 2. is so disgusted that they are willing to take substantial personal risk and come forward to testify.
These people are extremely rare and, my impression is, they are getting ever rarer. I suspect they will face retaliation, one way or another, officially or unofficially.
If you leave the system the way it is, you are relying on these exceptionally rare events to be the only real safeguard you have to police the bureaucracy. In any sane person on the non-left willing to trust that?
And yet, listen to what the Republicans are saying. Only “outrage” and “investigations” and “bring the culpable to justice”, but missing the larger point entirely. No one is attacking the civil service design or process itself, or suggesting fundamental reorganization of the way we accomplish the revenue collection function.
If you’re going to leave the IRS (or, again, any investigative / regulatory agency with power to make major discretionary decisions or grant waivers) basically intact – then the only way to “reform” it reliably is to set it up as a fundamentally adversarial system – like the courts.
We already do this for voting with polling place monitors / hand recount monitors. Each party gets to deploy thousands of volunteers and lawyers and review each other’s monitoring and counting. Kind of a “I cut you choose” solution to a game theory problem. We also insist on near-parity party representation (regardless of how the last vote came out) on a variety of boards and commissions, precisely to serve the same adversarial oversight purpose.
But, again, NO ONE is suggesting this or anything effectively like it for the IRS, or EPA, or DHS, … etc.
How can you ever take discretion out of a bureaucracy.
The IRS is staffed by people. That people get an obviously fabricated tax file from an organization called Fuck Whitey.
Well someone in that organization is going to have to take a decision about that file. What can you do about that? Try to have different kind of people in the IRS? Hah. It doesn’t work that way does it.
You don’t have to take away “decisions” – you have to take away as much “potential for abuse of discretion”. Here’s a real world example.
So, different parts of the government, such as the Patent Office, and parts of the Judiciary (especially when they perform under certain common private mediation or arbitration rules), have long recognized the potential for similar dangers and have actually implemented structural mechanisms to try and reduce that danger. Not perfect or foolproof, but great leaps forward.
The most significant tactic is through minimization or sanitization of information considering the identity of the applicant from the reviewer. If I’m reviewing a piece of software, do I need to know whether it’s Microsoft, Amazon, or some tiny start-up or even individual who has made the application? No. It should make no difference – it actually must make no difference according to law, so it should be redacted away from me. It’s hard to play favorites under such circumstances. Not impossible, of course, but hard and risky. It’s a big improvement.
Another case in point, when some individual or organization puts in a FOIA request to EPA, they can waive the substantial fees. Right now, they do so routinely for groups they like, and refuse to do so for groups they don’t. Because they don’t have a reviewer-sanitization system in place, so they get to know the identities of the requestors and do their bullsh*t. Congress could take that away tomorrow.
Another system is consistency auditing. Reviewing bureaucrats in many areas often see a lot of very similar applications. Throw in a test one, and then throw it in again six months later. Are the results consistent? Consistency is rewarded and inconsistency is disciplined … however gently that usually happens to be in the bureaucracy.
You know where you find these things the most? The one large Department where the left doesn’t immediately assume that the workforce is almost entirely composed of volunteers for the Cathedral – the military. Surprise, surprise.
Someone should check success rates of FOIA requests from conservative versus liberal organizations. I bet there’s a huge disparity.
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