nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Again the media’s horns call the dogs to the hunt, again the crusaders for Justice take up arms and keyboards to fight the menace of the legal system. “The botnet knows better than you!”, they cry, brains thoroughly owned, actions directed by kernels inherited from Satan knows where; and the botnet spews forth torrents of articles hysterically shrieking of the death of dignity, shitting ever onward to the war-chants of “-phobia!” and “-ism!”. The same tedious scene, repeated since Salem; always the same, enough so that one could easily write an article to run every time. A death of a member of a demographic favored by contemporary progressivism, a media outcry, candlelight vigils, Orwellian bills, a drawn-out trial from hell, a verdict considered harmful by the bloodthirsty bots, beating their two or three talking points like as many dead horses. The bigot Ravi, the Klan-white Zimmerman, and an endless procession of those before them, lined up from New Jersey all the way to the horizon. How tedious. 

What do Dharun Ravi and Lindsay Lohan have in common?

They’ve both been sentenced to 30 days in jail. Lohan received her sentence for a string of probation violations capped off with a DUI charge, while Ravi is credited with cyberbullying his college roommate Tyler Clementi to death.

So you know, same thing.

…

I can’t help but wonder what sort of lesson anyone paying attention to this case has learned. Besides of course that it’s OK to bully gay kids to death.

Thus spewed the ‘new-media’ abomination Unicorn Booty, proving once and for all that the new is the same as the old, only more so. Cyberbullied to death, indeed. Topping even that is the LGBTQ Nation, spoken for by a self-proclaimed “human rights advocate”:

This is an outrage and a slap in the face, not only to the judicial system by
the Judge, but to all who have experienced homophobia under the cloak of mere and apparently what the Judge now considers an acceptable bias. This goes a step further by actually endorsing bias. The Judge has said, in effect, “commit a crime with bias, do not say sorry, defy judicial authority, and we will apologize for having to sentence you!”

…

While I do not doubt that Ravi was put through a measure of hell, knowing that he could be sentenced to a maximum of ten years and be the subject of deportation, I ask why this Judge even bothered to sentence him, at all – he may have well tickled him under his armpit and sent him home laughing, legitimating an attack on the next victim, whomever and however!

He did it! He killed him! And he didn’t say sorry! Never mind that ten seconds on Wikipedia reveals that Clementi’s suicide notes were not entered into evidence, because his suicide was not considered related to the crimes at hand; if you want to blame Ravi, that is what you have to attack, but good luck convincing anyone that someone would be driven to suicide by Ravi’s actions alone. But alone is what they were not.

Tedious. Utterly tedious. Who needs to read the evidence? The affiliations of the players are enough to write the whole script! Compared to reality, the Three Stooges were a class act; they at least varied their weapons. Even disregarding the evidence, as the pundits have: knowing people who knew Ravi, and having gone to the same summer camp as him, albeit obviously during different years (you laugh now, but I’ve seen it convert hardened Glenn Beck fans), the frothing homophobe narrative can appear nothing but laughable to me. He was caught up in his ego, definitely, but one does not plunge into the depths of Brahmindom and emerge as Fred Phelps.

And as a side note, anyone who can see a $10,000 fine as a tickle under the armpit is far too bourgeois to be talking politics. But I suppose that is to be expected from a “human rights advocate”.

Borepatch and Aretae have put out endorsements for the 2012 election, so I figure I might as well also. (Let’s assume for the purposes of this post that voting isn’t just large-scale political homeopathy; where’s the fun in admitting that it doesn’t matter?)

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you can guess two things already:
1. Borepatch endorsed Obama and Aretae endorsed Johnson, so I’m going to endorse Romney.
2. It can’t be as simple as just endorsing one candidate.
And you would be right.

I don’t like Romney. I don’t think he’ll be noticeably different from Obama in most regards; they’re both unprincipled chameleons from a hardcore establishment background, although one small benefit to Romney is that he’s more obvious about it. (It really says something about a country that a black father is enough to make people not realize that the son of a senior economist and an anthropology Ph.D., who went to one of the most prestigious public schools in the country, ended up at Harvard Law, and subsequently went off to teach at the University of Chicago, is establishment.)

I don’t like libertarianism either, at least in principle; but in practice, a more libertarian presidency would almost certainly be a better one. A break from the nutty interventionism of the establishment, a veto-happy monkey-wrench in the gears of the Leviathan, may be just what we need in the White House, so the presidential race should be pushed in that direction. Unless Maryland turns out to be a swing state, which, considering that the parts that matter are BDH to the core and packed with USG employees, it won’t, I’ll be voting Johnson.

If I lived in a state where the election results weren’t essentially predetermined, however, I’d vote differently; in that case, sending a message is less important than voting the best realistic option. There are admittedly few differences between Romney and Obama. They’re both firmly on the side of “the 1%”, as much as I hate that term. But the differences are nonzero.

One benefit to Romney is that nobody likes him. He’s a Republican, so the Democrats (and the media… as if that needs to be specified) don’t like him; he’s a blatantly establishment Massachusetts Optimate, so the Republicans don’t like him; and he’s a pasty-white Mormon, so he can’t personality-cult the college demographic. (In the primary polls for my home state, Romney’s favorability increases with age, and Santorum’s, somewhat counterintuitively, decreases.) All other things being equal, the less liked president will be put under more scrutiny, and I’d prefer more to less. The Republicans and the Breitbart crowd have been going after him to a degree, but with few resources and most of the establishment firmly on his side, their capabilities are limited, compared to what could be done if both sides of the media hated the president’s guts.

Even a leftist would find it to their advantage to support Romney; they’re both neoliberals, but if you have to choose between two devils, take the one who everyone knows is a devil. There are still people in this country who think Obama is on the left in any sense but the meaningless electoral one; granted, the ones I know think that mostly because they think it’d be racist to think anything else, but they’re still dumb enough to buy it.

Another difference is that Romney’s appointments will draw from a different crowd. Obama was a college professor, and it’s obvious from his appointments. I can’t imagine Romney appointing someone like Eric “My People” Holder, and really, between his department providing guns to criminals, his lying about his department providing guns to criminals, his obstructing the Congressional investigation about his department providing guns to criminals, and his admission, backed up by his actions, that he sees 87% of the country as foreign, that near-treasonous nut is enough of a reason in and of himself to vote Obama out.

And… well, those are the only differences I can think of. They both make me sick, but one is clearly a lesser evil than the other, and, contra passivism, evil is to be opposed when possible. (Of course, if I had any desire for power, I’d force myself into passivism; but I’d really rather just fish, and the only reason I do anything more is that I can’t not speak out against immediately visible displays of utter idiocy. Besides, voting doesn’t really matter anyway.)

Contra Borepatch, I don’t think there’s much hope for America, and the little hope there is comes neither from the government nor the already thoroughly co-opted and establishmented(?) Tea Party: the government merely responds to the will of certain monitors, so the monitors need to be taken in order to effect any real change. (I hope someone throws Santorum on a talk show like they apparently did Huckabee; he’s the only one around who can articulate a real alternative to liberalism, and if one alternative makes itself known, the people will become aware that alternatives exist, and might even find more. Of course, on a metapolitical level, it’s entirely possible that almost any sort of consensus is better than none at all, but I doubt it, especially since liberalism is running out of unprincipled exceptions that can be reasonably eliminated, if it hasn’t already. And no, a liberalism that pretends that society doesn’t exist is not a real alternative. But that all is beside the point.)

So, to sum up: go Romney in a swing state and Johnson otherwise. Romney is better than Obama, but he still sucks, and Johnson’s platform is less bad, enough so that the GOP should be pushed in its direction.

Everyone’s favorite smug sack of fecal matter is at it again. As if cheap Googlebombing campaigns weren’t enough, Dan Savage decided to put on his New Atheist hat and do what they—and 13-year-olds on Livejournal—do best: rattle on about the Bible in the same tone of self-righteous willful ignorance as they imagine conservatives adopting on evolution. “If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys, huh?” If Leviticus talks about shellfish, why do Christians still eat shellfish, huh?

Now, I’m not concerned here with his embarrassingly simplistic New Atheist view of theology, wherein all religion that was, is, and ever will be is fundamentally isomorphic to overliteral bookstore-Protestantism; having been raised into a thoroughly secularized version of said Protestantism (albeit one with some strange bits mixed in—I’ve put pepper on food maybe twice in my life), I’m most likely the least qualified person to talk theology out of those who are aware that there’s more to it than reading what’s in the monosyllables-only translation picked up for $5 at Walmart. (Now, now, Julius, put down that Talmud. You aren’t a rabbi; stop playing at it. You’ll poke someone’s eye out.) I’m also not going to bother with the lines he recycled from that hack Sam Harris; a ten-year-old could do that, unless the demon-virus Whiggery has already implanted itself in their knowledge of history. Even his shifty-eyed insistence that Universalism is somehow on the decline, when one would have to be delusional to think gay marriage will not be widely accepted in thirty years, will be left aside for now. My question here is a simple one:

“Pansy-ass”? Really? What are these high school students doing applauding a kindergarten line?

The answer, of course, should be obvious to anyone who has read Moldbug. One quick find-and-replace, and…

[Savage] really goes beyond smugness. Searing arrogance is more like it. I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

Crocodile humor, from a crocodile. Notice his tone throughout the speech: raining curses with one finger raised, reveling in the worthlessness of his constructed enemy, he smirks and shakes his head at the filthy, fuck-dumb proles. I’ve seen it before: it’s the tone, the exact same tone, my professor takes when he goes colonial, starts rattling on about the backwardsness of the idiots in town, how silly they are for caring about little things like the college bringing in a crane to pluck the cross from its chapel, built on the highest point in town, or for almost electing a newcomer over an “all-around great guy” who just happens to be a colonizer Democrat. Dan Savage wishing that the Republicans would go away sounds exactly like the professor wishing… well, that the Republicans would go away. Odd coincidence, that.

“These savages don’t have a leg to stand on!”, the crocodile cries. “Why won’t they get out of our way? After all, we know better. We are better. With actual power, just think what we could do!”

The mere existence of active opposition, no matter how powerless, is enough to set the crocodile off. The enemy must be crushed: converted if possible, raped and slaughtered if not. (This, I suspect, is why crocodiles are so drawn to the left: a movement that advocates the mass rewriting of society will naturally draw those who want to rewrite society in their image.) Fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war; but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for the International Community is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the rhetoric of war fits so naturally here; the main difference between caste-war and the normal kind is that the latter has an end. And once the Kernels are situated, that is when the game is afoot. The true war begins, light versus dark, good versus evil. This is a war that the forces of light are always destined to lose…

As Ron Paul rises in the primary, a 15-year-old controversy rises again in the news: that of the newsletters published under his name, and the questionable content therein. A torrent of articles now pours forth from the pens of both the left and the establishment right, raising to a deafening roar the cries of racist! homophobe! antisemite! that, predictably, resurface whenever the machine deems it necessary to dismiss one of its components without calling into the slightest question its undoubtedly shoddy construction. A Twitter account tweeting lines from the newsletters has almost six thousand followers, and the prominent left-liberal magazine Mother Jones says, accurately, that the newsletters are Paul’s “one problem”.

This itself is a problem, and a serious one.

I am not denying here that the newsletters contain content that is, to say the least, highly problematic; I just see no reason why they are relevant. In similar cases of politicians’ personal beliefs or actions being called into question, there are two arguments that I have seen for their consideration: that those beliefs or actions can be used to predict the political behavior in office of the candidate in question, and that the personal character of politicians reflects on, or otherwise affects, that which they govern. These arguments are certainly not always invalid, but their validity in this particular situation is dubious at best.

For the first argument to be valid, there must not be a body of evidence significantly more useful for making such predictions. Expressed personal beliefs are certainly better than nothing, but as we all know, politicians say things to get money, votes, or media attention that they neither believe nor intend to implement while in office. Ron Paul is no unknown Chicago one-termer; in fact, as he said in tonight’s debate, he has served twelve terms in the House. One cannot spend over two decades as a politician without accumulating some sort of record, but Paul’s record appears to be a non-issue here. As for the second argument, any ‘racist’ message that Ron Paul’s election may send must be contrasted with the message of toleration for the disastrous neoliberal status quo that any other candidate’s election certainly would send.

Another argument, peculiar to this case, is that Ron Paul’s claims that he was not aware of the articles run under his name show a lack of management skill that makes him unfit for the presidency. This commits the same error as the first: it assumes that Ron Paul, a politician, does not lie. It is possible, of course, but it is far too convenient to simply assume incompetence, especially since Paul has not mentioned that the only byline on any article published in the newsletter was not his.

I suspect that the issue of the newsletters came about thus: Ron Paul, after being defeated in the 1984 Republican primary, agreed to the ‘paleolibertarian’ support-building strategy of Lew Rockwell, chief of staff for Paul in the House, vice president of the corporation that published the newsletters, and suspected ghostwriter, in an attempt to get back into office. This strategy consisted of, as reason put it, “exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist ‘paleoconservatives’” by including in the newsletters the rhetoric that is now being used against him. This explains the time table: Paul was defeated in the 1984 Republican primary and reelected in 1996, and almost all of the citations in the two TNR attack articles are from that period: (the only citation after 1996 is a 2007 campaign letter “invok[ing] the Branch Davidians [by questioning the necessity of the Waco siege, although TNR declines to mention that] and ‘the mysterious death of Hillary’s pal Vince Foster’”)

In other words, what we have here appears to be a politician playing politics, and then, in refusing to admit it, playing more politics, and if we take this at face value, the concept of playing politics is so new to the entire media establishment that they are scrambling to do something else with it. But if this concept is not new to them, their statements are not to be reflexively taken at face value; they are to be seen as a political strategy, the most thoroughly unsurprising thing in the history of voting, and the surprise of the pundits shows their utter lack of comprehension of the voting public, and most likely a disdain for democracy. (A disdain which I share, albeit for different reasons, but at least I admit it.)

My inherent skepticism is not as limited as one would expect it to be. I have to wonder about the reasoning behind the NYPD’s supposed assault and battery of protesters. I can see four possibilities:

1. They aren’t, and it’s all being made up to gain sympathy further the cause
2. They are, as a result of legitimate violations of the law, most likely obscure assembly regulations
3. They are, because cops are violent, ruthless protectors of the oligarchy
4. They are, and the police are acting on orders from above

1. is unlikely, and 3. is far too convenient to be likely; that likelihood diminishes further for anyone who chooses to believe the stories going around about police being reluctant to take action against the protesters. This leaves 2. and 4., which I think are equally likely; the protesters do not seem like the sort of people who would take care to jump through the proper bureaucratic hoops to stay on the right side of the law, but it is also plausible that the police have been ordered to take that action, for one of two reasons: the higher-ups either favor the oligarchy or oppose it and want to put on a show to further the cause.

Actually, the oligarchy is not even what is being protested; the targets are a certain small subsection of the oligarchy whose power is mostly limited to short-term financial action. The Kochs seem to be the only ones, or at least the most visible, who have a clue as to how power is really maintained, but this makes sense. One whose only reason for obtaining power is to make money does not need to maintain power over the long term.

That said, I think the main effect of these protests will be organization. US Uncut did not have any discernible impact, but that was probably due to failure at networking and marketing, and as an offshoot of an obscure UK movement, that is understandable. These protests, on the other hand, have captured the rich white college student demographic, which may well be the one most suited to making it go viral. The best realistic scenario at this point would be for it to go viral and coalesce into an anti-neoliberal movement for the Democrats to co-opt, in a mirror-image repetition of the Tea Party situation, but the difference between the Tea Party and this is that there is not yet the mainstream support that the Tea Party had. Mencius Moldbug got this point, albeit in a different context: that of violent political action (i.e. ‘terrorism’):

Why does left-wing terrorism work, and right-wing terrorism not? As Carl Schmitt explained in Theory of the Partisan, terrorist, guerrilla or partisan warfare is never effective on its own. While an effective military strategy, it is only effective as one fork of a pincer attack. The terrorist succeeds when, and only when, he is allied to what Schmitt called an interested third party – either a military or political force.

Left-wing terrorism succeeds as the violent arm of a political assault that would probably be overwhelming in any case. In every case, the terrorist plays Mutt in a Mutt-and-Jeff act.

This can be extended to also cover nonviolent political action: the Tea Party was the activist wing of a machine that had already been constructed, the other wing of which is the machinery by which the activists’ views are not only disseminated, but also taught, to the people: Fox News, talk radio, the Austrian economics machine, and so on. Where is the propaganda wing of Occupy Wall Street? Nowhere, because it has no positive platform; it can point out problems, but not offer solutions, so it is useful simultaneously to everyone and no one outside the sphere of neoliberalism. In order for it to grow a propaganda wing, it must first decide on solutions, which, considering its ‘big tent’ nature, is highly unlikely. It would, however, be interesting to see the distributist machine pick up these protests; the only barrier that I can see between distributism and the mainstream is its utter failure to propagandize effectively, especially considering that it should have the support of the world’s oldest political organization.

Excessive militarism was involved in the collapse of two empires before us. Considering this fact and our own circumstances, what makes us think we can survive?

Nazi Germany fell due to Hitler’s megalomaniacal insistence on running more concurrent military operations than could reasonably be sustained. Soviet Russia spent its last years in a drawn-out war against the US-backed mujahideen (a term derived from the same root as “jihad”), where Osama bin Laden got his start as an Islamist warrior fighting communist antitheism.

As a result of the 9/11 attacks and the resulting paranoia, we are now in… how many wars? Who knows? Where does this leave us?

Make people panic and they’ll start behaving irrationally. Make people behave irrationally and they’ll end up destroying themselves. What can be called rational about a game plan that appears to consist entirely of convincing those who dislike our extensive military operations to change their opinion of us through even more extensive military operations?

Osama won. All that can be done now is damage control, but even that is politically unlikely.

But who would want to live in an empire anyway? Empires, by their very nature, are very reliant on entities outside themselves. I can’t imagine Finland spending time and effort propping up tinpot dictators all over the globe to keep the oil and cheap labor available.