(HT: EducationRealist)
ER’s got some interesting thoughts on ‘school choice’, charters, vouchers, ‘accountability’, teachers unions, pensions, etc. with the bottom line that what is going left unsaid and unargued (because taboo) is what’s really driving this train.
Charles Murray has a little post, “A case study in the government as the enemy” which, in a way, gives the flip-side of the argument, but I think the particular charter school he’s talking about, and the motivations of those involved with it, present a kind of ideal and outlier case (and even then the County is ‘openly hostile’).
But most of the time the facts and motivations are not that pretty. ER points us to some comments from a previous post which I believe should be reproduced in full:
“ME”:
The reason 48% of whites (who send their children to school elsewhere) supported the teachers was because they need the “bad” kids babysat most of the day. From early morning (free breakfast) to early evening (after school care) the “bad” kids are cajoled into wreaking havoc and violence only on each other, in one building, away from productive citizens – kind of like preschool for juvenile detention centers or daycare until they are eligible for actual prison.
The strike meant the libraries, parks, etc. were unusable for any non-gang members because the CPS kids were flooding them. Sit and sip a coffee as a Chicago public school lets out one weekday – for example a much lauded charter school in Bucktwon [sic] (a nice area so of course some fun and excitement had to be imported). Watch the entire surrounding area batten down the hatches before the kids are pardoned for the evening. It looks just like an old western where the Moms rush children inside, windows close, people pull their cars into the garage, wagons, strollers, and bikes get locked to porch rails…and then all hell breaks loose for about a half hour while the parents blast crude music and scream profanity at each other, clog the small residential streets with maniacal driving, and the kids stream out damaging parkway gardens, throwing junk food wrappers all over the place and “play” fighting. Anything not secured is stolen, anything that can be quickly and needlessly vandalized is just for giggles.
That is why Rham [sic] lost his power play. No one really thinks their tax dollars are spent on education – the bar has been lowered so low that taxpayers are THRILLED when someone just keeps the chaos controlled long enough to enjoy a tiny sliver of a decent life in Chicago. The raccoon eyed moron tasked with stealing everything Jr. left is either frighteningly out of touch with the city (almost definitely) or so dangerously stupid it is high comedy (also likely). The crazy fat far left of center lady who kicked his ass without breaking a sweat is not dangerously out of touch or (as) stupid.
ER:
Conservatives often talk about how schools are too lenient, that education should be a privilege that can be taken away. If bad kids were expelled, schools could focus on the kids who want to be there.
I tell them great. Have they consulted the cops on this plan? Because the cops know better than anyone that much of school in certain areas is little more than babysitting potential delinquents. Are they prepared for the increased costs of jail?
You’ve given me an idea for another post. Thanks!
However, I had never really considered the logistics of what the chaos looked like until your post. That’s really sad.
It is sad, isn’t it? Very, very sad. Both the facts themselves (the natural tragedy of the human condition via HBD, and the man-made social tragedy of encouraging a subculture of celebrated barbarism amongst one of those varieties) and the meta-fact that we can’t discuss the facts in public using our real names (the man-made tragedy of PC).
There are certain kinds of realism that America is not allowed to admit and which can be incorporated into people’s attempts to achieve their legitimate goals only covertly, sub silentio, and through various kinds of costly geographic segregation. Most people don’t really care too much about most of the actual content taught it school (though they should). They don’t need it to be some ultra-elite genius-camp. They just want a good place for their kids to grow up into young adults and reach their potential.
When policy-types debate the efficacy (or, more commonly, lack thereof) of various educational strategies and intervention, it is like debating which shade of red is most perfect for the skin of a rotten apple. No one wants to talk about the rot (actually, no one dares) and so we talk about proxies with just-barely-plausible alternative justifications, as cover for the real agenda.
I’m sure there’s a great Russian word for this, probably a few. Maybe you want a little more private property, but since you can’t admit that, you come up with a socially acceptable way to advocate a ‘more perfect Marxism” reform that has the effect of getting you what you really want.
And what is the agenda? Simple. Decent people want to be able to afford to raise their decent kids and send them to school where they’ll be encouraged to follow beneficial norms by their peers, and where they will be safe around these other decent kids and away from the bad apples. To ordinary decent people without ideological obsessions, this is the political and economic issue of our age, and no one is helping them. That’s what it seems like to me and all my other friends with kids, and of all political stripes.
No one is quite sure what to do about the bad apples, except to keep them away and, somehow, contained de facto. If this can only be accomplished via impersonal economic forces in the real estate market, well, so be it, but it’s awfully unfair to the poor good apples who must bear the burden of the unmentionable passive policy.
Except it’s getting harder and harder to not be a ‘poor good apple’, and so you’ll find yourself bearing a burden one way or another, either financially, or through bad-apple-proximity.
My vision of neoreaction is in fact a very modest one; perhaps even minimalist. I would prefer to live in a society that effectively solves this major social problem, and I would be willing to give up a lot for it. I do, in fact, presently give up a lot for my attempt to achieve my own equivalent of it, and so does every ordinary decent person I know.
But here’s the problem. It seems that giving us what we want simply cannot be done through ordinary reforms and mild adjustments in the present political system. In fact, any policy with half a chance of actually working and having a positive effect is defined, in the present political lexicon, as radical extremist racist fascism. Definitely ‘unconstitutional’ too.
It says a lot about our times that I, and a few of my friends, and perhaps the growing numbers of readers that hand around these DE parts, feel that we have to flee brain-dead, reality-denying, pseudo-‘conservatism’ (and all its relatives) as failed-bulwarks against progressivism, and find an altogether different political theory in a desperate search to find a way to achieve this most basic of bourgeois desires.
What a strange feeling. The thing we want seems so reasonable and so obviously important. A decent life for decent people. And yet we are denied and thwarted and paralyzed and if we express these legitimate frustrations we are simply insulted and defamed to boot.
We are not always told that the mere wanting is itself immoral (though I’m sure that’s on its way), but we are told that anything that can deliver our wants to us is definitely immoral and simply not allowed anymore. And that it will never be allowed. Because democracy and equality and social justice and ‘rights’.
Everybody else has been given every other kind of right and it’s all seemed to crowd out the core experience of modern life – the fundamental hope and expectation of governance: Order for the Orderly. This, we are told, is called ‘progress’, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
Many of us were born and raised and taught, over and over, to believe that these are sacred words with special powers over us; the power to trump all our desires and objections and even neutralize logical arguments. If you are dissatisfied without remedy then you are expected to buck up and take it.
But at some point, my dear novice reader, you will wake up and realize all these sacred words have been hijacked and commandeered in the service of your adversary. You will wake up and say, “If that’s what ‘social justice’ means, then to hell with it. To hell with all these made-up nonsensical ‘rights’. It’s nothing but lies.”
“This is a fraud; the greatest sham on earth. But I’m done with this nonsense. F* that noise! If I can’t get what I need from you bastards, I’ll find it somewhere else.”
And we will be waiting for you, and we will say, ‘Willkommen’.
Handle's Haus 
A lot of people who call themselves progressives also want a decent life for decent people. Since only one perspective on the issue of race is allowed, they are left truly believing that if only enough stuff is redistributed to the Blacks, then they will become decent people. They then calculate that in this richest society on the planet, it is possible to redistribute enough to 13% of the population.
I’m not sure what to say to reach these people, though.
This is very similar to a realization I had about 5 years ago, before reading any DE screeds. When I finally found my way here, after navigating a maze of links, it was like coming home for the first time.
An acquaintance of mine is a teacher in a small place in Croatia, and some time ago she complained about gypsy children who are making hell for other children in her school. Schools are not only obliged to accept them, they are forbidden to throw them out, even in cases of violent crimes, theft, drug abuse etc. During a conversation about shitty jobs we, a group of friends, mentioned her complaining about her difficult work in the presence of a real Cathedral Cleric – a lesbian TV journalist who wishes to specialize in “minority rights reporting”. Her response – she bragged about gypsy kids being exposed to racism and prejudice and how difficult it is for them. Then we reminded her that the biggest individual problem with gypsy kids in that particular school was that one of them urinated all over a disabled white kid who couldn’t run away of fight back because he was in a wheelchair.
So this lesbian TV journalist shrugged her shoulders and jumped to another topic. There was not a quantum of empathy to be seen in her eyes.
Diversity must go on.
What saccharine sentiment. I am reminded of Erik von K.L., describing the type of person idealised in the Third Reich–that manifestation of petty-bourgeois fear and prejudice.
So wanting to raise you kids without having them beaten up, robbed, pissed on, and terrorized is petty-bourgeois “saccharine sentiment”, eh. How delightful! I hope that you enjoy the next big polar bear hunt in your neighborhood. Don’t worry, I sure that all you need to do is quote Kuehnelt-Leddihn to them, I’m sure that they’ll see the light.
Well it is saccharine sentiment compared to “scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.”
I’m in.
The saccharine sentiment is in the idea that Handle has anything other than a patriarchal and distant view of ordinary folk. There is a measure of revulsion and attraction towards their mysterious, silent society, but a fairly clear distinction between those who are embedded in it–deeply interconnected, ruled by emotion, not self-aware–and those who can choose to leave.
Moral actors, when the subject is as abstruse as national politics and law, would have to be at minimum within 10 IQ points of Handle. This would not characterise their style of thinking:
“This is a fraud; the greatest sham on earth. But I’m done with this nonsense. F* that noise! If I can’t get what I need from you bastards, I’ll find it somewhere else.”
A person one would stereotype in that way cannot, in this connection, be “decent”. That’s a category error, and to pretend otherwise lands one in unsavoury company. (Progressives and their opponents in Britain have rarely had such reason to close ranks as when that British soldier was depicated by a Muslim.)
To stick my neck out, I thought A Finn at majorityrights.com had some good ideas about how a sustainable, secure and less anomic life could be realised in the modern world.
Welcome back James, but wrong on many counts I’m afraid.
First, though it was certainly clear enough, let me be even more precise semantically with regard to ‘decent’. As I wrote over at Land’s place:
~~~
Consider Timothy 3:2-5
“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behavior, given to hospitality, apt to teach; Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)”
The Greek Version of the Bible verse above uses the word ‘Kosmios’ which means ‘orderly, decent, harmoniously arranged, proper’.
~~~
It is obvious from context that it is this sense of Kosmios that I mean when I say ‘decent’. Immediate appeal to anti-Nazi criticism is both revealing, and exactly my point. And frankly disappointing.
I have the privilege of working at a very large organization and in an environment with a high level of IQ dispersion (90 to 150), and an even higher level of political-affiliation diversity, but with a very low level of ‘decency’ variance (90-99th percentiles). To add to Kosmios-decency, you may add the notions of trustworthiness, reliability, integrity, discipline, and diligence. There are many individuals without college degrees, but most have children, and out-of-wedlock births and backgrounds with even minor criminal activity are exceptionally rare.
It is, in many ways, a little Japan of Americans. Except it is somewhat multi-ethnic (depending on the particular career skill or specialty), but our NAMs are among the best NAMs in the world. There is even an excellent school there (alas, hardly free), but because it is only open to the children of employees and has zero incidents every year, it is very highly regarded and the waiting list is a mile long. In a way, it’s both a progressive’s dream vision and a reactionary’s ideal. It’s worth mentioning that it is essentially a ‘dictatorship’ with ‘exit’. But it is well run specifically to avoid exit, and so there is very little exit. Perhaps too little, actually.
Amongst all this human variety one of the most frequently discussed origins of socio-political-economic frustration is exactly that which I have expressed above, along with the sense that ‘the system’ has utterly abandoned the goal of giving these people the same kind of life in public and in their neighborhoods and they experience and enjoy daily in their secure work setting. It is a kind of despair hungering for alternatives. These people understand order, it’s benefits, and what it takes to maintain it.
Perhaps it is all a bit ‘unsavory’. But not to me. I find its absence unsavory. That this absence is due to reasonable and rational methods being permanently forbidden is especially unsavory. It is certainly not advocating for a fourth reich to find a way to offer these people what they want.
Why do you come here? Your not interested in changing your mind and we are not changing ours. Your jedi virtue signaling does not work here, goy. Waste of breath, waste of life. Keep defending your cuckoldry. You may get the white-free world you dream of yet. Then atlas will shrug and you’ll be fucked.
I live in a land (mostly) without underperforming minorities. The place I was raised in had a progressive education system but again no savages, at least back then.
Bad as education already is without NAMs, I really can’t start to imagine the permanent anxiety that life in America must be.
This is a great slogan and a good rallying point for all branches of the trichotomy.
Handle when you understand what Section 8 Housing does, you’ll understand it all. Prog motive and action towards der Amerikaner Volk are MALICE. As for the schools….burn them.
Progs hate us all with insane passion, they’d bring down the world to hurt us. They simply lack the courage to take up the gun as the Bolshevik did. Oh and they’d get crushed. That too.
“I would prefer to live in a society that effectively solves this major social problem, and I would be willing to give up a lot for it.”
I think others give up a lot, yes? Surely you don’t mean the magic circle gives up anything. This would be offered as dictatorship in exchange for decent schools. Any fool who believes he’d get the decent life from any conceivable American elite dictatorship no matter what it called itself deserves his fate. His children don’t, except in HBD terms. Which I don’t accept as any basis for policy, because I understand who is making this offer. Don’t take it personally, we know who we serve.
As to “The Dire Problem” it requires no dictatorship, just the common sense of self defense that pretty much is biologically uniform. It took Prog dictatorship by the Federal Register and Feminist Dictatorship to henpeck it back. Here’s how schools and decent life are restored – by Rule .40
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/11/21/Teen-Playing-Knockout-Game-Gets-Shot-Twice
“This would be offered as dictatorship in exchange for decent schools.”
You mean like Singapore?
They will never give us anything but subsistence subsidies, criminals on free rein, porn and drugs. We’d get that unfettered in exchange for dictatorship and necessarily surrendering our arms. Lee Kwan Yew didn’t hate Malays Handle, he understood them.
They hate us Handle. Americans. It’s not hard to understand, just to accept.
You have to know how to pick your battles. This isn’t as adversarial as you think. A lot of progressives are caught in the same trap, victims of their support for their own failed policies, and just as desirous of relief. We don’t need to crush or even convert them, but success, at a very minimum, means they relax their ideological death-grip that is restraining the security organs and rendering them unnecessarily ineffective.
Don’t think of it as ‘war’ – think of it as making a trade – of marketing a sale. “Let us provide security, and do it our way, and we promise we will give you what we all know we all really want. You can’t get it any other way.”
The Left wants to be holier than thou. We can’t provide that.
True enough, but I don’t think we have to. That’s not what we’re offering. We’re not trying to be a competitive ‘global force for good’ (sorry Navy). In modern progressivism terms, we are offering a deal with the devil. We provide order and prosperity, and when it violates your oh-so-sensitive conscience, then you shut your mouth and look the other way. They are Faust and we are Mephistopheles. (though, in Hebrew, the name brings up a connotation of ‘The one who destroys by means of false propaganda’ – which we would say is a good description of the Cathedral).
The whole point is the contrast between the ‘holy and imaginary’ and ‘effective in reality’. By definition, when fantasy conflicts with reality and is implemented into policy, it will screw things up. For the sake of having a common moral superstructure, society can absorb a little of this ruin, some times, and that’s fine. It can’t absorb collapse indefinitely, so the fantasy needs to kept away from the most significant but fragile functions.
It is through this route that we get to Moldbug’s ‘Separation of Information and Security’, which, when you think about it, is not that much different from Matthew 22:17-22
Is contemporary Progressivism capable of ‘rendering unto Caesar’ the things they habitually, inescapable screw up, while keeping a ‘holier-than-thou’ status machine operating within a contained, de-clawed, harmless realm? I believe it is. Like any border, it won’t be stable without guarding; there will always be tension and the need for eternal vigilance.
Even if I’m wrong, and if you’re right about needing a much more distinct new religion (as opposed to a contained progressivism), then it would be a desirable feature for it to keep its paws off certain core areas of governance and economy, and if fact for it to preach that it ought to keep its paws off, because those things are Caesar’s, not God’s.
“Is contemporary Progressivism capable of ‘rendering unto Caesar’ the things they habitually, inescapable screw up, while keeping a ‘holier-than-thou’ status machine operating within a contained, de-clawed, harmless realm? I believe it is.”
On what evidence do you base this belief, because it seems to me that you are totally wrong here. The Cathedral will never take the Mephistophelean deal. Their only response to their habitual failures is to double-down, to try the same thing even harder; to consume ever more social, economic, and genetic capital in the attempt. This, it seems to me, will stop only once they have consumed every last scrap of civilization, and perminantly undone the industrial revolution, and put us irreversably into something like Greer’s “deindustrial future” of medieval peasants with hand-built analog electronics powered by scavenged solar panels.
And Spandrell may or may not be correct about “needing a much more distinct new religion”, but no such religion will be forthcoming. The kind of particularist religion we would need only ever arose in pre-literate cultures. As many books on comparative religion or the history of religion will tell you, the trend since the Axial age has been the steady expansion of universalist creeds over particularist ones; this shows no sign of reversing. And even if one arose somehow (you cannot simply set out to design a religion), there is no way it could out-compete Progressive religion, given both the ideological/mimetic attractiveness to so many and the social, economic, political, and military power Progressivism possesses.
So please, tell me what, besides optimism bias makes you think the Cathedral can be contained, because I’m just not seeing it.
Well, what level of evidence would it take to convince you. Some kind of political science randomized clinical trial study, or what?
What I have are my anecdotal experiences with plenty of progressive friends, relatives and colleagues. I also have my job. Part of my job involves persuading progressives, from the very heart of progressive agencies, who see it as their mission in life to stop un-progressive things, to nevertheless relent and sign off on some very un-progressive things. Witnessing those Austerian ‘unprincipled exception’ / ‘revealed-preference’ fault-lines over and over, especially in the favorite conversation topic of urban professionals – real estate, neighborhood, and school – gives me a certain amount of insight into where thin edges of wedges can be inserted.
There is also the History of progressive retreat (though not without a lot of posturing and grumbling about it, though, in the end, a practical acquiescence, which is enough and would suit me fine). I would invite you to read Stuntz’s “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” which I will review, hopefully, before the end of the year.
From about 1958 to the early 90’s, the liberals had made so many disastrous changes to American Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement that crime had exploded to catastrophic proportions. Staring in the late 80’s, the legal-political pendulum began to swing the other way, with massive amounts of long-term incarceration, and the crime situation (at least by official statistics) has been improving ever since.
Again, you will always find prominent progressive legal intellectuals decry all these developments and our ‘reactionary’ system throughout the past two decades, but in the end they lost influence and, at least for a time, plenty of liberals around the country were privately voting for politicians that they publicly called ‘fascist’. A strange kind of secretly tolerated fascism, to make neighborhoods livable again.
Compared to the 60’s and 70’s, the jurisprudential frenzy over crime has abated almost entirely, with a new equilibrium that, combined with advanced in forensics and technology, tends to favor the police more than in the recent past. So, we did not in fact witness endless doubling-downs and vicious-cycle collapse. We hit rock-bottom (though not at bad as Jamaica or South Africa) and we bounced back. I think that deserves an explanation, and I think that explanation favors my thesis.
There are other anecdotal examples, such as certain instances of deregulation and the lack of current interest in government price-controls (which, since WWII, has once been so popular even Nixon enacted them). These led to disaster, and the progressives stepped back from their cliff. It is possible, it’s no mystery or miracle. Or if it is a miracle, then miracles do happen.
I think at this point I can reasonably shift the burden to you. What is your evidence that it is not possible? What is you explanation for these progressive concessions and abandonment of interest, and diversion of focus into other social-movement realms?
Finally, it would seem ‘pessimism bias’ would be the flip side of optimism bias, and since objective realism is difficult to achieve empirically (since none of us has perfect Hari Seldon Sociology crystal balls), then it would seem rational to side with optimism for the sake of motivation (since it is always easier to convince oneself to do nothing because it’s all hopeless). It is also hard to reconcile ‘optimism bias’ with the insights supporting irrational overconfidence – ‘fake it until you make it’ – in terms of objective social performance.
But they didn’t throw out the new principles of the justice system – they allowed work-arounds because the pressure was too great.
Now the enemies of progressives are weaker and progressives will start to “notice” that the work-arounds aren’t permitted under progressivism. There will be less pressure because people have already accepted a new normal and because progressivism is stronger.
Here was the flow. Thesis “they will only ever double down” antithesis “no, they won’t, and they haven’t. they make and tolerate exceptions for things they care about whenever they start to scree things up too badly. It’s a pattern with them”
It’s going to be a long, long march for us. In the short term, it’s a small victory to even get a temporary exception for a workaround.
And crime is different. Progressive intellectuals were burned bad in the last iteration. They have internalized a fear of the positive relationship between lenience and violent crime, and they fear the political effect of a public reaffirmation from a new dramatic spike in crime with a reversal in policy.
I predict NYC keeps stop and frisk. But frankly, I hope di blasio gets rid of it and murders pop. Bloomberg represents the future of tough on crime progressivism
You might attract a lot of normal people with that idea, but they won’t move until the people with megaphones tell them to do so.
And the people with megaphones today are increasingly not decent people. Foreigners, homosexuals, sociopaths, single hedonists of every sort. They have no families to raise and they don’t care about what you need.
The ‘Belmont’ elite will always live a decent life, as long as they submit to the megaphones, allow their children to become homos or marry NAMs, and let their daughters get raped in aid missions to Africa. And they will go on doing so. When even the elite can’t have a decent life then it’s all over anyway.
@Handle
“I would invite you to read Stuntz’s “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” which I will review, hopefully, before the end of the year.”
I’ve read it. Stuntz pointed out that our incarceration rate (first in the world both in per-capita and absolute numbers), particularly among black men, has made prison such a common experience for many underclass populations that it’s become an expected part of life, and has lost any deterrant value. Only incapacitation remains.
And how long can that last? Remember the court ordered prisoner release in California due to “overcrowding?” And with the ever-increasing array of things that must be provided to prisoners, at taxpayer expense, because, according to the bleeding hearts, denying them would be “inhumane?” When conditions are already good enough that blacks are living longer in prison than out of it? When cheaper, more efficient private prisons are continually attacked as evil? And it’s not even stopping the criminal underclass from breeding; see Tavon White. And look at the ever-growing cost of government, especially the gib-me-dats. When they’re forced to choose between keeping “those poor minorities” locked up for crimes “into which they were forced into committing by systemic racism and stereotype threat” and paying out EBT card balances, which will they choose, really? When they, unlike us, can afford gated communities, and zoning laws that keep criminal minorities priced out of their neighborhoods?
“…combined with advanced in forensics and technology, tends to favor the police more than in the recent past.”
Exactly. That, and as Stuntz noted, drug and gun laws used as pretexts to put away violent inner-city thugs who can’t be convicted of their violent doings because of “no snitching” and black tribalism. How much of this is due to technological advance? And as you said, the legal switch was that the “jurisprudential frenzy over crime” abated; that is, a halt in the leftward movement.
And as time passes, the memory of the high-crime eras will fade on the Left; more people born after that time will come into power. More people like the guy who wrote this arguing for the total abolition of prison, in favor of “rehabilitation”. Some choice quotes:
“Increasingly, especially since the 1970s, social and individual problems are less likely to be dealt with on the community level and are instead criminalized.
“Incarceration rates were stable in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s at around 110 per 100,000. Since 1970, they have risen to about 700 per 100,000. The growth appears to have stabilized but is far above the rest of the world with only one close rival: Russia.”
“Confinement as a form of punishment was an evolved step, and now it is time to move on to more evolved methods of dealing with social problems before we normalize not only incarceration but obscenely high levels of incarceration”
“I can hear the sputtering of thousands of my readers. “But what about bad people who can’t be helped?” I’m not sure such people exist, because no one has ever seriously tried rehabilitation.”
No one has ever seriously tried rehabilitation. That’s the kind of memory we’re dealing with. And here is an example of someone who sees the recovery from the high-crime 70s you gave as an example as a horrible, appalling trend to be stomped out. Expect more like him. Eventually, when enough older lefies die, his ilk will win again.
“the lack of current interest in government price-controls”
That’s because they’ve found better, more subtle methods; complex regulations with more opportunies for “discretion”, special exemptions to be handed out to allies in return for their obeisance, while making the rewarding of friends and punishing of enemies much less obvious. Add in the fact that they’ve converted far more of the former targets of such things to the Progressive religion since then.
“the progressives stepped back from their cliff”
From this cliff, for now. But while they might, for a time, stop moving leftword in one area, they continue to “progress” in others, and when they hit a cliff in one or another of those areas, they’ll eventually come back to this one.
“Finally, it would seem ‘pessimism bias’ would be the flip side of optimism bias”
Actually, look up “depressive realism”. A more accurate perception of reality correlates with clinical depression. Which way the causation runs… well, that’s the question.
“It’s going to be a long, long march for us.”
Death marches generally are.
“In the short term, it’s a small victory to even get a temporary exception for a workaround.”
The key word is “temporary.” All our “victories” are temporary workarounds, momentary pauses in the otherwise torrential Leftward flow. And it’s not just the short term; they’re temporary in the long term, too.
“Progressive intellectuals were burned bad in the last iteration.”
Progressives are always getting “burned” when their ideas meet actual reality, and yet, in the longer run they keep reaching back to that fire…
@Steve Johnson
“Now the enemies of progressives are weaker and progressives will start to “notice” that the work-arounds aren’t permitted under progressivism. There will be less pressure because people have already accepted a new normal and because progressivism is stronger.”
Exactly. As I commented in Nick Land’s post on the “nuclear option”, what we are seeing, in the increasing polarization in DC, is the Left slowly awakening to the fact that no viable opposition to them remains, and that they can, in fact, do want they want without all the hiding, window-dressing, and frog-boiling incrementalism.
@Spandrell
“You might attract a lot of normal people with that idea, but they won’t move until the people with megaphones tell them to do so.”
Yes, exactly, and there’s no way for us to take those megaphones.
“The ‘Belmont’ elite will always live a decent life, as long as they submit to the megaphones, allow their children to become homos or marry NAMs, and let their daughters get raped in aid missions to Africa. And they will go on doing so. When even the elite can’t have a decent life then it’s all over anyway.”
This.
The Cathedral only ends when they’ve run out of civilization to destroy, and then there’ll be nothing left to save (and no way to rebuild).
I’m not interested in giving the security organs a death grip. The people they’d be after are AMERICANS. Not because they hate us, because the Masters do. And the security organs – unlike the military and police – seem to have made their decision. They’ve thrown in with the Master. Now as an American having a master is bad enough. Having an insane and evil one who hates me is too much. They won’t relax the grip to police the Malays Handle. They’ll want the death grip on Americans.
And you don’t pick battles. They pick you. He who picks your Battles is your Master, and some of us have chosen poorly.
Deo sicubi et terra ostende me.
Pick Battles indeed.
As far as getting it someplace else – better start with the man in the mirror. Or you’re wasting your time. Really. I love this Exit nonsense – where? Where? Galt’s Gulch required a Cloaking Device. Which won’t work if you take any women along….
Exiting the Republican party is a start.
The ocean, The moon. Maybe even Antarctica.
All that’s needed is the initial capital and a near monopoly on a particular resource exploitable only by virtue of the reactionary nature of the colony-society.
Without those things, there will always be the incentive of Cathedralist states to hamstring, divide, and ultimately destroy such a social project.
“The ocean,”
Seasteading will never work. First of all, it’s still within easy reach of Cathedral forces, and quite fragile and vulnerable. Second, who will come to a seastead? The hyper-individualistic libertarian sort who is the standard seasteading enthusiast will not enjoy the highly limited freedoms, minimal privacy and forced contact that comes from being crammed together in a floating tin can, particularly when it turns out they won’t be allowed to smoke dope.
Which leads to point three. Most human beings have, among their various cognitive biases, one called optimism bias, which underlies the likes of Parkinson’s law and Hofstadter’s law. Thus, would-be seasteaders underestimate both the difficulties involved, and the level of deprivation and discomfort seasteading pioneers would suffer. Thus, in the slim chance a seastead were built, many (I would say most) colonists would, upon experiencing the actual conditions, far short of what they imagined and worse than they were prepared to undego, will turn around and go home. Past settlement attempts had this same problem, only stopped, back in the age of sail and horse, by the cost, difficulty, and sometimes impossiblity, of going back, and were thus stuck where they ended up. Such barriers to return no longer exist on Earth.
And further, seasteading isn’t economically viable. I’ve read the Seasteading Institutes pitiful attempt at outlining how a seastead could be made economically sustainable. After ruling out all the fields that would bring down the immediate wrath of the Cathedral (in the form of the US Navy), such as drugs, tax shelters, internet gambling, internet piracy, et cetera, what do they end up with? Medical tourism. And pardon me, but there are far more economical options on land for that.
Look, why haven’t rich seasteading “supporters” like Thiel just spent the money and built one already, or just bought a cruise ship like in one of the plans? Because they know that they’d just be throwing that money away. Thus, their “support” is limited to “wouldn’t it be nice if…” musings.
“The moon.”
Even worse. The depth of the gravity well in which we rest, the cost of putting anything into space; all that a long-term habitation would need: air, food, water, protection from radiation. It’s all too expensive, completely out of reach for any private group. And there aren’t any resources out there valuable enough to even begin to defray the astronomical (forgive the pun) costs.
Add in all the international treaties one would be violating; there’s no way you could get a colony self-sufficient before the Cathedral cut off supplies from Earth to force their surrender.
“Maybe even Antarctica.”
Take just about everything I said about seasteading, and add in the bit about international treaties with regard to moonbases.
“All that’s needed is the initial capital…”
As I pointed out, the initial capital is too big for at least space, and not likely to be forthcoming for the other ideas.
“…and a near monopoly on a particular resource exploitable only by virtue of the reactionary nature of the colony-society.”
There are no such resources, and it doesn’t appear there ever will be
“…there will always be the incentive of Cathedralist states to hamstring, divide, and ultimately destroy such a social project.”
Yes, there will always be, and that is why meaningful exit is totally, truly, completely, utterly impossible.
(And infiltration/entryism against the Cathedral is also utterly futile, Mr. Laliberte.)
Apparently, you never heard of Spacex, have you.
Empires don’t last forever.
Spacex has radically changed the commercial launch scene to the point that ESA is panicking. It managed a controlled re-entry of the 1st stage from Mach 10 and almost did a soft landing above the water (there are pictures).
3d printers are advancing rapidly. If you do not understand the implications, of that, you should refrain from saying that is “impossible”.
And Exit worked for San Marino and Venice back in the day.
“A decent life for decent people” is the rallying cry of white flight.
That’s why everybody moved to the suburbs instead of fighting for the cities back when they had a chance. Fleeing to the suburbs represented the easiest method of obtaining a decent life for decent people.
But the problem with fleeing is that eventually there is no where left to run. We are not there yet, but I think many people can sense that flight is rapidly growing more and more difficult or expensive in terms of opportunity cost.
“A decent life for decent people” is ultimately a conservative, rather than a reactionary slogan. We certainly want to restore this possibility, but we need to go further. We can’t stop once that possibility has been restored, for any respite will be a temporary one. There can be no peace with the left; such a concept is foreign to them. They only recognize a temporary cease-fire or hudna, which they will simply use to gather their strength before attacking again.
“That’s why everybody moved to the suburbs instead of fighting for the cities back when they had a chance.”
Indeed. Above “single people” where blamed, but even the family man has a better chance of saving his own particular family by selling out rather then fighting the good fight. Most evil progressives I’ve met have children, and many are intensely focused on the good of their own children. If that can be achieved at the expense of others children so be it.
This isn’t that hard. There has to be a varying set of rules governing relations between people based on distance and other factors. Neither hyper individualism (or focus only on ones family and fuck everyone else). Nor complete universalism. This kind of subtlety and nuance can’t be achieved solely through reason, nor can it be transmitted through mass social interaction in modern society. And it is most definitely the enemy of mass media.
> Actually, look up “depressive realism”. A more accurate perception of reality correlates with clinical depression. Which way the causation runs… well, that’s the question.
This is disputed science. The correlation itself, I mean.
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2013/12/04 | Free Northerner
Pingback: Accepting Exceptions to Expected Unprincipled Exceptions | Beor the Old
Pingback: Announcing: The Neoreactionary Canon! | This Rough Beast
Pingback: Neoreactionary Canon | More Right
Pingback: Neoreaction Research Reading List | More Right
Pingback: Equal protection of the laws | Beor the Old