Recommended Reading & Viewing
[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]
Top Billing! TechCrunch – Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
I found this one fascinating and entertaining on several level: an orthodox PC liberal doing a sort of anthropological drive by on an obscure ideological sect where the Far Right intersected with Silicon Valley, but rejected the libertarian adherence to classical liberalism for a mystical-mythologizing ethos ( they seem to admire the mid 20th C. mummery of Julius Evola).
….Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms. Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy were incompatible.
“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than aristocratic systems,”Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further towards improving standard of living for the average person in an aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”
Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and the aristocracy as shareholders.
For Yarvin, stability and order trump all. But critics like Scott Alexander think neoreactionaries overestimate the stability of monarchies — to put it mildly. Alexander recently published an anti-reactionary FAQ, a massive document examining and refuting the claims of neoreactionaries.
“To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.”
T. Greer – Another Look at ‘The Rise of the West’ – But With Better Numbers
Why the West? I do not think there is any other historicalcontroversy that has so enthralled the publicintellectuals of our age. The popularity of the question can probably be traced to Western unease with a rising China and the ease with which the issue can be used as proxy war for the much larger contest between Western liberals who embrace multiculturalism and conservatives who champion the West’s ‘unique’ heritage.
A few months ago I suggested that many of these debates that surround the “Great Divergence” are based on a flawed premise–or rather, a flawed question. As I wrote:“Rather than focus on why Europe diverged from the rest in 1800 we should be asking why the North Sea diverged from the rest in 1000.” [1]
I made this judgement based off of data from Angus Maddison‘s Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 ADand the subsequent updates to Mr. Maddison’s data set by the scholars who contribute to the Maddison Project.
As far as 1,000 year economic projections go this data was pretty good. But it was not perfect. In many cases–especially with the Chinese data–it was simply based on estimates and extrapolations from other eras. A more accurate view of the past would require further research.
That research has now been done.
Small Wars Journal– ( Sullivan and Elkus) The ‘New’ Playbook? Urban Siege in Nairobi
Urban siege entails combined arms, ‘swarming’ attacks that bring multiple assault squads into play to attack a target or targets. The goal is to draw in defenders to prolong the attack and maximize casualties and disruption. By leveraging multiple, simultaneous assaults (known as swarming) response is complex. As a result, fog, friction, and the smog of terrorism is amplified. As the START Background Reporton the attack noted, extended hostage-barricade attacks with durations over 24 hours are nearly five times as lethal as those that end within a day.
The most notable antecedent to the Westgate siege was the Mumbai attack. In that 2008 action Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) conducted a series of assaults—including complex hostage barricade situations—on seven separate targets in Mumbai, killing 171 and wounding over 250 during their three-day siege. We viewed that as a seminal event in contemporary urban siege. Indeed in our paper “Postcard From Mumbai: Modern Urban Siege” we called it a ‘Back to the Future’ incident where terrorists returned to urban guerilla tactics.
War on the Rocks (Evans) –WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH CHINA’S NEW AIR DEFENSE IDENTIFICATION ZONE?
According to a spokesman for the PLA, the zone “is an area of air space established by a coastal state beyond its territorial airspace to timely identify, monitor, control and react to aircraft entering this zone with potential air threats. It allows early-warning time and provides air security.” It has issued a set of rules for aircraft to follow, including identification of themselves and their flight path. Ominously, the PRC states, “China’s armed forces will adopt defensive emergency measures to respond to aircraft that do not cooperate in the identification or refuse to follow the instructions.”
China claims the zone “is not directed against any specific country or target,” but this is clearly not the case. The zone covers territory claimed by both Japan and China – the Senkaku Islands – and there have been a series of incidents and disputes related to this territory. China claims to be “following international practice” but it is not clear what practice they are referring to. They claim it is “a necessary measure taken by China in exercising its self-defense right. It is not directed against any specific country or target. It does not affect the freedom of over-flight in the related airspace.”
Business Insider –US NAVY: Hackers ‘Jumping The Air Gap’ Would ‘Disrupt The World Balance Of Power’
Chicago Boyz –Daniel Hannan’s new book: Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
The National Interest – Interpreting the new Iran Deal
Shloky.com – Announcing the Origins of the Lean Start Up
The National Interest – Interpreting the new Iran Deal
Recommended Viewing:
J.M. Berger being interviewed on his book Jihad Joe:
November 25th, 2013 at 8:01 am
The Neoreactionaries are an interesting bunch. I am sometimes surprised by how many of my readers (an almost embarrassingly large amount) hail from the Neoreactionary fold.
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If one delves deeply into the Neoreactionary milieu you find a community obsessed with minor distinctions, fond of speaking in codes, extremely defensive when faced with criticism, and generally misanthropic, insular, abrasive, dogmatic, and shrill. But they are hardly alone in this: the description holds equally well for peak-oil doomsters, Austrian economists, radical leftists, the permaculture folks, anarchists, survivalists, Objectivists, or almost any other ‘ist’ niche community composed of ideologues that are both 1) much more intelligent than the average population 2) utterly convinced they alone posses truths the rest of society will not accept (to its ruin). The echo chamber communities of Web 2.0 only intensify these attributes.
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They are not too bad to have around though. They provide constant – and occasionally very powerful – critique of modern shibboleths. For this alone they are very useful. But you have to be careful. Spend too much time down in the rabbit hole and i becomes hard to distangle fantasy from reality.
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P.S. Probably the best introduction to the movement was written by Scott Alexander. He also wrote the movement’s most compelling refutation. Reader beware: both of these articles are insanely long. To the rabbit hole we go…
November 25th, 2013 at 3:52 pm
Interesting insights on “neoreactionaries.” This bit:
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“….Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms” made me think of the Rod Dreher post on TAC called “The Shantytowns of Silicon Valley”:
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“From the Right, I wonder if the Standard would have published a similar takedown of the habitats of Wall Street executives. After all, the Hamptons, the tony resort towns on Long Island that cater to wealthy Manhattanites, are notorious for having become too expensive for their own year-round residents to live in. They’re not all Wall Streeters out in the summer Hamptons, of course, but the point is simply that it’s probably not hard to find a similar story on the East Coast. Silicon Valley is a tempting target for right-of-center writers because it’s the Bay Area, and because behind the casual, eco-friendly, lifestyle-left façade is the same old class dynamic — and that’s what Allen identifies so very well in this piece. ”
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I’m not interested in the R vs L angle but in notions of aristocracy and class behavior, something I sort of never thought I would be interested in. And yet, my most formative years were spent parsing this sort of behavior as an immigrant, the class codes of the upper middle class so different from the more exuberant tastes of those of my own immigrant background until sometimes the overlapped, as when Bollywood went from embarrasing and ethnic, to cool and ethnic, to just now a bit mainstream and overplayed and we are all into Tollywood and Nollywood now (well, that is sort of 2007 but you know what I mean).
November 25th, 2013 at 4:00 pm
Oh, haha, I totally misread the neoreactionary piece. Forget my comment, it belongs more to your oligarchy series, zen.
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As for neoreactionaries….those are the guys you think are onto something until you really start digging and then you realize they made a mistake in their math or whatever. And then you politely leave a comment that, uh, did you consider this?
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But, no, your point is ridiculous, doesn’t matter, I didn’t make a mistake because I could never make a mistake.
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T. Greer’s point is a good one. But the danger of neoreactionaries is that their errors are at a VERY high level so that unless you understand what they are talking about in incredible depth, you can get fooled.
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The funniest run in I had was in one who kept saying that the US should follow the British in Afghanistan, meaning we should be like the British Raj. They had it right.
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Of course, COIN dogma that we followed did just that, sort had a hard on for the British Raj and Kipling and all that.
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It was a hysterical error to make and yet they made it because it never occurred to them that their neoreactionary idea was exactly what we were doing.
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Hahahahahahahahahah!!!!
November 25th, 2013 at 4:04 pm
Okay, to be more clear:
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Mencious Moldbug or Derbyshire or someone like that was all, “the British really knew what they were doing in India and colonialism had it’s points and we should do that in Afghanistan, rubble don’t make trouble.”
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And COIN is more of an airy fairy reading of colonial history but the thing is, they are both based on a kind on an intellectual hard on for a certain type of adventurer.
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Eh, what am I doing? What I learned with neoreactionaries is to ignore their analysis while taking an interest in their reading lists.
November 25th, 2013 at 4:05 pm
Even more clear is T. Greet:
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But you have to be careful. Spend too much time down in the rabbit hole and i becomes hard to distangle fantasy from reality.
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Yeah, don’t do that. Walk away slowly….
November 25th, 2013 at 4:53 pm
There’s this odd romantic and even sacral gloss that monarchy consistently acquires in the eyes of some of the inhabitants of this country. When the House of Stuart Hannover Saxe-Coberg-Gotha Windsor inevitably acquires its latest shiny new charismatic, many Americans reflexively kow-tow in the direction of the blood descendants of that silly little clown their forebears firmly booted out. Young Americans are raised drinking the wrong fairy tales, those ones where kings, queens, princes, or princesses live happily ever after instead of losing their heads. Men like Chuck Stuart, Louie Capet, and Nicky Romanoff, if the Lord had willed them to some other slot, strike me as decent family men who’d be solid backbenchers in the town hall meetings and congregations of some small American town. But, given too much power and subject to too much expectation of what one frail being can do, they failed even when well-intended. And so they and their families, unnaturally elevated over their peers, innocent or not, reaped the whirlwind.
I’m even more “reactionary” than these young boys with more Google Books than sense. I’m a theocrat: my King is Christ, my ideal government is one where my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ reigns in person, an actual resurrected and glorified personage, nail prints in His hands and feet, spear wound in His side, here upon this earth. Before that great and dreadful day though, I see lifting up one man as a false idol in place of the One True King as anathema. I’m even suspicious of the office of president of the United States as sketched out in a few lines of ink on parchment and two centuries of mixed results. Calls for “presidential leadership”, as if appeal to such debris constituted some sort of magical pixie dust that cured all ills, make me wince: this is America, why do we need one lump made of perishable flesh and blood for guidance in government or any aspect of life? Führerprinzip is not the American way. If it has become so, the American people have sinned. The first and greatest commandment of classical republicanism is THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER KING BEFORE ME. As it says in one of the foundational republican tracts that worked their way into Western civilization:
November 26th, 2013 at 2:06 am
“He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
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Yes.
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But until then we have to make do with flimsy second-bests.
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The old parchment is better than most of the alternatives.
November 26th, 2013 at 10:08 am
Of course, the neoreactionaries are not really about monarchism persaye. Their true causus belli is progressive ‘social justice’ thought. At their heart they are social conservatives whose project is obsessed with resurrecting the cultural mores, gender norms, and social hierarchies of the 18th century. Monarchism is just a tool – a way to build the kind of aristocratic order capable of dragging society back to a world where the masses and minorities are not meaningful political actors. If they believed flimsy parchments could do the job, they would support that too.
November 26th, 2013 at 3:10 pm
“Monarchism is just a tool”
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I think that’s a fair assessment
They are, in the only way they know how, reverse engineering history. Deconstructing and extracting what they think are the ingredients in order to reconstitute, like the modern Prometheus, a better mousetrap.
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It makes sense when you think about what they’ve been expecting and advocating lately – the utopian singularity. Only it’s not exactly following their plan. People aren’t getting smarter as more information becomes available. The government has gotten more diverse – we elected a black president for God’s sake in a campaign that a lot of their boys worked on – but the weight of a crushing bureaucracy is weighing down any progress.
We’re actually going to have cars that drive for us very soon, but for some odd reason their still shooting people in the inner city.
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They’re too used to their parabolas – smooth trajectories of unlimited abundance.
The whole equals the sum in the shelter of laboratories and accelerators and combinators, but in the real world it’s a lot messier.
The mess is where the beauty emerges from and where the real work gets done.
You get the feeling that they’re all due for a reality check soon to knock them back down to earth.