Isegoria

Mencius Moldbug gives a rather rambling talk on how to reboot the US government:

I was aware that Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik’s father had remarried multiple times and abandoned Anders at a young age. I hadn’t heard much about Breivik’s mother though:

According to him, she has been debilitated by an STD. At the age of 48, she married a man who regularly frequents hookers in Thailand, and she contracted herpes.

In his words (pg. 1172):

The herpes infection went to her brain and caused meningitis (this condition is usually rare and occurs in less than 1% of herpes infected individuals). As a result of this brain infection, which prevented the spinal fluid from flowing freely, she had to operate a shunt into her brain as the herpes attacks occurred regularly. She was forced into early retirement as a result and her life quality has been significantly reduces since, and she now has the intellectual capacity of a 10 year old. Her STD has not only cause her much hardships, but it has also cost her and the state up to 1 million Euro.

Both my sister and my mother have not only shamed me but they have shamed themselves and our family. A family that was broken in the first place due to secondary effects of the feministic/sexual revolution. I can only imagine how many people are suffering from STDs as a result of the current lack of sexual moral.

Delightful family.

(Hat tip to Mencius Moldbug.)

The Ma’an News Agency reports that the Fatah Youth released a statement on Saturday condemning the recent attack against their Norwegian Labor Youth comrades:

“It is with consternation that we have received the dramatic news of an awful terrorist attack against a summer camp ran by our comrades of Norwegian Labor Youth ‘AUF,’” the statement said.

The Fatah Youth group had taken part in the summer camp in the past on the Island of Utoya, near Oslo, where over 90 people were reportedly killed in a shooting spree on the Island and a bomb attack in Oslo on Friday, news reports said.

“Fatah Youth declares its consternation about the terror attack. There are no words to describe an attack against people that have been our comrades in our struggle for freedom and independence. Very few people have stood by our side as much as the Norwegian people, and particularly our AUF comrades.”

“We know those who have been cowardly assassinated. Those are people that have stood for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people both in Europe and while visiting Palestine.

“Fatah Youth has participated for almost 15 years in the same summer camp and our youth has benefited by learning and sharing experiences on democracy and advocacy for peace and justice.

“We hope that those responsible for this criminal terror attack will be brought to justice. Such sick minds should not have a place in any society.

“As a people that has been victim of state terror for the last 64 years, the Palestinian people and particularly Fatah Youth presents its condolences to the families of those killed and sends a strong message of support to our comrades from the Norwegian AUF as well as from other sister parties that were participating in this summer camp,” the statement concluded.

A commenter at Lawrence Auster’s site follows up another comment with this:

“Fatah is Norwegian Labour’s sister party through the Socialist International.”

This sentence is so fascinating. It is like finding a living fossil in a quiet, bucolic, farm pond. It is like walking into a small town general store and finding life-sized images of Lenin and Stalin hung in places of honor.

The sad history of the 20th century is studded with horrible episodes, and often one finds the Socialist International bound up in them. Mussolini broke with the Socialist International over Italy’s entry into World War One, but took much of his Fascist philosophy from that organization. If I recall correctly, Orwell mentions the Socialist International in “Homage to Catalonia” more than once, not always in a favorable context to be sure. The various Soviet-run “peace” groups of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were almost always affiliated with the SI.

Vidkun Quisling’s party had a sister party, too, through a different Socialist organization. It seems to me that Norwegian Labor’s alliance with Fatah is a lot closer to Quisling’s alliance than the left would care to admit.

(Hat tip to Mencius Moldbug.)

Recently, around 11 PM in a “bad” part of Chicago, police shot a teenager who was holding a gun. It turned out to be a realistic-looking BB gun.

Anyway, here is the photo his family sent the media:

And here’s how his photo appeared in the media.

Naturally the cop community considers this yet another media cover-up designed to make them look bad:

It has been pointed out to us by a number of commentators that he is representing one of the most violent street gangs ever to grace the streets of Chicago, namely the vice lords. It has also been mentioned that the nearby Piccolo Elementary School has suffered a rash of windows being shot out by BB’s over the past week along with neighborhood cars. Also, the time of the shooting (after 2300 hours) indicates a curfew violation. But none of this is being covered in the media reports now. All we’re hearing is how police are too heavy handed, Jimmell was a good boy, there was no gun, blah blah blah.

A commenter emailed the reporter:

Your first picture on the tribune website, WAS CROPPED, to eliminate the fact this teen was flashing GANG SIGNS. The full picture is available all over the internet. Now your picture of this teen in the hospital is bordering on scandalous. How dare your newspaper use these subtle techniques to slant the news. The fact is he had a realistic looking gun. Was already in the grip of a street gang, these are the things your story should mention, and that this is a BIG problem with youth in certain areas of the city. These are the facts. I feel sorry for the officer and the rest of the CPD that the trouble that your slanted biased coverage will cause. Yellow Journalism is alive and well in Chicago.

The reporter replied:

A couple of things…

Our “first” picture — I take it you mean the first photo we posted — was uncropped. If you’re a regular reader on our site, you’ll know that most of the pictures we post are cropped, so our photo folks cropped it as they always do.

I’m not aware whether the picture is “all over the internet” but we posted it with the family’s permission.

I don’t know if the gun in question was realistic looking, I haven’t seen it, though from past experience, many BB or pellet guns do look like their real counterparts. I don’t know if he was “already in the grips” of gang life, either.

Yellow journalism refers to the sensationalism of the news. What you’re accusing us of is the exact opposite: still incorrect, but not yellow journalism by its definition. Your statement is wrong because it flatly states that we as a newspaper, or I, as a journalist, have a pre-determined point of view.

I’m a fact gatherer. Sometimes we get the facts, sometimes we don’t. Whatever we get, we pass it on to our readers.

I like to interact with readers. I like it even better when they’re correctly informed.

I hope this clears a few things up.

W.

(Hat tip to Mencius Moldbug, who considers this a dispatch from the real America.)

Gary Brecher found his book, The War Nerd, criticized by a “goody-goody lefty” named Daniel Luzer, leading him to ask, Who are these Luzers?

These American lefties, I swear to God. Other countries have revolutionaries like Pancho Villa. I could back somebody like Pancho in a second. But these little preachers — that’s what they remind me of more than anything: preachers  — and not Pentecostal ones either because to give them credit Pentecostal preachers are a salty bunch. More like Anglicans. Yeah that’s it: Leftists are like Anglican preachers. In fact half of them are Anglican preachers. The women, mostly.

And what these lefty preachers hate more than anything is bad language. Seriously. Nobody notices but it’s true. Everybody think because the movies say “fuck” a lot that we’re all past the bad-language thing, but the bad words have just changed, that’s all. These preachers are as twitchy about language as they ever were. That’s why Daniel Luzer had a problem with my book.

I was expecting him to continue his tirade with an attack on political correctness. Instead, he mocks Luzer for writing “s–t”.

One of the commenters immediately saw the parallels to Mencius Moldbug’s argument that American leftism is protestant millennialism minus the whole God part.

In Unchecked and Unbalanced, Arnold Kling argues that knowledge is becoming more diffuse while political power is becoming more concentrated. Foseti disagrees:

I unreservedly agree with Kling’s argument with respect to knowledge. Knowledge is becoming more complex and diffuse. Kling focuses on the financial industry. Knowledge has become more specialized, and therefore more diffuse. Kling also repeatedly cites the example of the internet as a inherently diffuse source of knowledge.

Unfortunately, with respect to power, I have some disagreements with Kling. Let’s take his favorite example of TARP. Under TARP, Congress allocated close to a trillion dollars to buy “troubled assets” (my favorite term from the financial crisis) from failing banks. Kling uses this example to show how much power Congressmen have — they can spend trillions!!

But, a closer look at TARP reveals who really had the power. Congress was essentially blackmailed by the financial bureaucracy into passing TARP. Did Congress want to destroy the global financial system? Of course not. So, they only had one choice — pass TARP. The financial bureaucracy told Congress to dance and Congress did. There was clearly a crisis, did Congress have any better ideas? Of course not — please don’t be ridiculous.

Once passed, what did TARP actually do? In short, it gave a trillion dollars to the bureaucracy to spend as it saw fit. The bureaucracy had changed its mind by the time TARP passed. Instead of investing in “troubled assets” the bureaucracy now wanted to invest directly in what we might call “troubled banks.” Nothing in the bill prevented bureaucrats from totally changing how the money was spent (a good indication of who was really in charge). TARP was therefore immediately used to inject capital into banks and into auto companies in a decision that could only make sense to the bureaucracy (if the plebes don’t like bank bailouts, maybe they’ll be happier if we bailout some plebe companies, and who’s more plebe than GM?).

So, if I’m right, it’s overly-simplistic to describe what we see as a concentration of power. I admit that in some ways power is more concentrated — someone is clearly exercising a huge amount of power. But who and how? If we don’t know, are they really that powerful? The exercise of power is also not particularly direct. TARP was — perhaps more than anything else — an unorganized mess. Whoever was exercising power was doing so in an incredibly haphazard and disorganized way. I think these facts — that we don’t really know who is exercising power and they don’t seem to be able to exercise it very directly or effectively — are as salient as the fact that the power has become more concentrated.

How do we explain how power has gotten more concentrated, less direct, and more anonymous? Foseti turns to Moldbug, who ranks the preferred sources of policy within a large bureaucracy like the government:

1. The Law
2. Science
3. Public Opinion
4. Committee
5. Personal Authority

For instance:

Congressmen, like everyone else, don’t want to exercise responsibility, so they consult the law, which doesn’t help. Next they consult science. Fortunately, the financial bureaucracy is staffed with many economics PhDs who will be happy to scientifically demonstrate why not bailing out the banks will cause ruin.

The specialists can use “science” and who is a Congressman to question science? Science demands $700 billion dollars! So Congress wrote the check. (Notice that science trumps public opinion).

One of the things that drew Foseti, then a neo-fusionist libertarian-conservative, to Mencius Moldbug’s neo-reactionary point of view was that Foseti had an inside look at how government bureaucracy works, and Moldbug was the only writer who seemed to understand that elected officials aren’t in charge any more.

Now Foseti has written his own piece on government employment, answering questions and explaining how it works:

I’m suggesting that the bureaucracy runs the show. You might take that to be a bad thing. But, it’s important to remember that it’s far superior to the alternative. We would really be screwed if Congress was actually running the show. In this sense, one can agree with me that the bureaucracy is in charge and be very happy (not cynical) about the status quo.

I share my cynicism with people in government all the time. Almost alll agree that agencies have immense power — and they see nothing wrong with this fact. I sometimes push back that the bureaucracy is totally unaccountable. This often gets some objection, but not in the form of a coherent argument opposing my position.

Accountability does not work in the bureaucracy. I can’t stress this point enough. The defining feature of the bureaucracy is lack of accountability. It’s very hard to understand the complex ways in which the total absence of accountability affects and organization.

If someone really really screws up, they will not be given any new work. That’s about the extent of accountability.

The bureaucracy changes it’s mind when the media and the academics change their mind. This is rare — I haven’t seen it happen yet. This also means that only tangible results that fit media narratives and academic biases inform policy.

Read the whole thing.

Mencius Moldbug cites Solzhenitsyn’s From Under the Rubble to explain the situation in Egypt:

The intelligentsia proved incapable of taking action, quailed, and was lost in confusion; its party leaders readily abdicated the power and leadership which had seemed so desirable from a distance; and power, like a ball of fire, was tossed from hand to hand until it came into hands which caught it and were sufficiently hardened to withstand its white heat (they also, incidentally, belonged to the intelligentsia, but a special part of it). The intelligentsia had succeeded in rocking Russia with a cosmic explosion, but was unable to handle the debris.

Foseti reviews another Moldbug-recommended work, The Dark Side of the Left, by Richard J. Ellis:

The radical leftists are uncompromising in a way that no other groups are. Thus, they inevitably win — everyone else compromises with them and the political equilibrium is thus constantly shifting leftward. Radically leftward.

Finally, the non-leftist reader will be struck by the similarities that run through all of the movements covered in the book. The abolitionists are the first group covered. The feminists are the second to last group covered. Yet, we don’t even have to leave the chapter on the abolitionists before we get calls for the end to “the patriarchy of marriage.” Let’s look closer at abolitionism.

Ellis quotes Stephen Foster as saying that “every family” is “a little embryo plantation.” Traditional marriage to many abolitionists was a form of slavery that needed to be eradicated like all other forms. Many of the abolitionists also rejected capitalism, as again, it creates “slaves.” Of course, the abolitionists also became militants. Many eventually gloried in the deaths of the Civil War which killed more Americans than any war. For example, Wendell Phillips said that “the bloodiest war ever waged is infinitely better than the happiest slavery which ever fattened men into obedience.” It would be hard to better distill the totalitarian mindset in one sentence.

I’ve chosen to focus on the most controversial topic (i.e. slavery). Don’t let this shade your view of the book. Ellis is best discussing the violence of the New Left, but I found the initial chapter on abolitionism more interesting.

I should conclude by saying that the reactionary will agree with many positions held by the radical leftists. Specifically, the radical leftists have a disdain of the masses that the reactionary will find appealing. However, the radical leftists believe that this makes the masses expendable. Further, the radical leftists believe that the deficiencies of the masses can be fixed with the right program. The reactionary believes neither. The radical leftist despises the masses but continually embraces democracy — his movements, therefore, fizzle in this inherent contradiction. Unfortunately, the don’t fizzle before the damage has been done.

Ellis believes that the core of radical leftism is radical egalitarianism, but Foseti shares Molbug’s belief that it’s really radical protestantism, which has evolved into a secular religion.