perfidy

If my calculations are correct, and they always are, then this is the first political post on the Ministry of Minor Perfidy in almost half a decade. There are many reasons for this, foremost among them a multi-year lapse in posting of any sort whatsoever. On a purely personal level the reasons ranged from laziness to guilt, on to ennui, then guilt over laziness, then guilt over ennui over guilt on laziness, then a sidestep into intermittent incandescent rage.

The real reason was something other. My views evolved - not in the typical bullshit-media sense of 'evolving' in a progressive, whig-history fashion toward ever-greater holiness - but rather in a more scientific sense of merely changing. And as it happens... in a more or less opposite direction. From where I stand, you are likely a communist.

This led inexorably to a sort of mental bog, wherein I was stuck, and unable to see anyway to communicate with the outside world in a way in which it would understand. I could mutter cryptic comments about the Cathedral, or Moldbug, or overton windows... and none of it connected to a political reality that prominently featured a guy named Barack Obama living at 1600 PA.

For the past eight years a disinterested observer - say, that famous guy from Mars, or maybe a herder from Eastern Outer Mongolia - might conclude that Obama's policies might be morally right, good for the environment, or good for humanity taken as a whole. (He might, if he's an idiot. But let's just leave that aside for the moment.)

Hundreds, thousands, for all I know hundreds of thousands of policies, regulations, laws, executive orders and daydreams emanated from Obama's pretty white house over the last eight years. Never once have I thought that even one of them would do me, personally, the least damn bit of good. Best-case scenario, that. For of course most of these schemes not only did not improve my life or that of my family, they caused it active and measurable harm.

A little bit of back-story. So, I was early on the bandwagon picking Trump as the eventual victor of our recent presidential ultra-marathon - Ann Coulter her own bad self only beat me by a month back in the summer of '15. But it took me some good time to reconcile myself to the reality of Trump. Crassness, gaucheness, the hair, shoot from the hip mentality. All of these things put me off my feed. But then, epiphany! None of that shit matters. I accommodated myself, and rejoiced in the defeat of at least a dozen people I truly and deeply despise. These things happen for a reason: and that reason is Trump is more or less exactly what he seems; and intends to do more or less exactly what he says. 

Now, just over a week into the reign of the God-Emperor Trump I have had the novel experience of witnessing a positive flood of orders from the white house, and not a single damn one of them was designed to screw me or my family. Naturally, this makes me paranoid. But then whispers came to my ears that even better things are in the works:

President Donald Trump's next target in his administration's immigration policy will focus on what Silicon Valley fears most: the work-visa programs that tech companies rely on to hire tens of thousands of workers each year, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The executive order is still a draft, according to the report, but if enacted, it could mean major overhauls in the way tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon recruit their employees. Under the order, companies would have to prioritize hiring American workers, and if they must hire foreign workers, then they must prioritize the most highly compensated, according to the report.

"Our country's immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest," the draft says, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg.

"Visa programs for foreign workers … should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers — our forgotten working people — and the jobs they hold," the draft states.

Trump's order affects a number of visa programs including H-1B, L-1, E-2, and B1. H-1B visas are commonly used among tech companies to recruit high-skilled workers from overseas when they can't find domestic talent to fill positions.

The new administration's proposed order would also create more transparency around visa programs by publishing statistics on who uses the programs within a month of the federal government's fiscal year.

Read the original Bloomberg report.

As non-Indian, non-Chinese, American-born IT worker, this is pure meat and no filler. Supply goes down, demand goes up - as do prices. What are the odds that in this year in this place, a president in these United States would do something that intentionally helped the citizens of the country he was elected to lead to the simultaneous detriment of non-citizens? 

[wik] While one can applaud, as I do, the benefits of this (as yet still potential) measure for American citizens, it will necessarily have ill-effects on the holders of H1B visas and jobs at American companies. It will cause disruption in their lives. I find that I have a mild regret for this. But one serious upside is that the non-English speaking tech recruiters will someday cease to be a thing. 

I've been thinking about this a bit, and while I can see certain tactical advantages for those who oppose Obama - this strikes me as on the whole entirely bad. Despite the decline in trust in our public institutions, the Supreme Court remains prestigious, and it has leant its imprimatur to a staggeringly bad policy. I can imagine the Republicans using this as a whipping horse, and it may help them retake the presidency, and possibly even the Senate (though almost certainly not a filibuster-proof majority...) Once again in power - how does this go away? If it had been struck down in its entirety, which we were apparently one vote away from doing, we could have a) done something sensible for once - unlikely in the extreme, b) done something marginally less stupid - moderately likely, or c) done nothing at all - also moderately likely. Option C would likely be best - we could have edged stepwise to better solutions like what Singapore has, or toward a more purely market solution, or even just reforming the most egregious abuses around the edges. But with Obamacare still in place, we have to hope that 535 self-involved, semi- to completely corrupt psychopaths will see it in their own best interest to remove something that is already a fait accompli. The badness is really intense. Consider:

1. We are already throwing money onto the fire at a ridiculous rate. This one program alone will add a minimum of a trillion dollars to the burn rate.
2. We are now for all intents and purposes going to be paying taxes to private entities. Remember how tax collectors were regarded in the New Testament?
3. It establishes a precedent for even greater government tentacle - your ass interface. The IRS will be watching whether you are paying the insurance company, and come down on you with all it's famed respect and care for the individual. Given their regard for due process, this is going to be fun.
4. The effect on jobs - are you going to start a new company when you might - in addition to all the normal risks - be subject to tax evasion if you let your insurance lapse?
5. The general fuckedupedness of the whole thing. The problem with our health care system is that patients are not the customers. You are spending (psychologically) someone else's money for your health care. More tests? Why the fuck not? Insurance covers it. Doctors and patients are marginalized. Try and find out how much something medical costs before they do it. I dare you. Obamacare not only does nothing to address this or other problems, it adds to them. The only 'positive' thing is that more people have coverage. Everything else is nightmarish.
6. The Supreme Court ruling basically gives the gubmint all the justification it needs to construe any behavior-modification scheme as a 'tax' and know that it will fly. The commerce clause is dead, long live the tax power! Granted that the constitution is mostly dead, this gives them a fig leaf the size of Rush Limbaugh's gut. Which is altogether too big.

I could go on. But this is bad, and it will all end in fire.

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[sub-wik] original image died a lonely death somewhere in the vasty depths of the internets. So, begin your guided visualization of what once was here with this starter meme template: 

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[alsø alsø wik] Through the magic of the Wayback Machine, I have recovered the original image that was lost:

Interesting discussion on stuff going on over here. A little bit more here.

Discussions of political taxonomy are always fraught with danger. Danger in that you are starting out from a counting angels on pinheads sort of place, and then heading into the deep from there. Still and all, Aretae and the other commenters have had some interesting thoughts.

One contribution I made was to suggest this:

That's why I am somewhat dubious about Leonard's distinctions between traditionalists and conservatives. I mean sure, we see differences between self-labeled advocates of those positions on the internets - but conceptually I don't think you can suss out meaningful categorical boundaries between them. An intuitive understanding of the law of unintended circumstances is a powerful starting point. It isn't fear of change, per se. It's something closer to humility, as opposed to the radical/progressive's hubris.

The difference between this position:

France being ours, we'll bend it to our awe,
Or break it all to pieces: or there we'll sit,
Ruling in large and ample empery
O'er France and all her almost kingly dukedoms,

and this one:

conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits - and then Re-mold it nearer to the heart's desire!

are real. However both are active, meddling, arrogant. But, both are different in the same way from conservatism and libertarianism. The latter two passive in that they want either their world or themselves to be left alone.

You could plant a flag and say:

For more on what that might mean, go over to Aretae's.

... this post by Borepatch is pretty good. It points out the one good thing about Newt.

Well one of two things. Obviously the best thing about Newt Gingrich is the fact that he's named Newt Fucking Gingrich.

I alluded to Newt Gingrich's moonbase plans earlier. I am not totally convinced of the shark's claims to have colonized space - I admit I have my doubts - but even absent a selachimorphic space empire the Newt's plan is problematic.

First and foremost, in the speech Newt hisownself used the term grandiose to describe the adventure. Not a good sign, really. A second relaunch of the JFK? A monolithic governmental exercise that pursues a politically chosen goal at all costs, consuming and destroying all other options as it progresses; a program that might (only if successful) result in something kind of amazing but which will leave a sterile policy wasteland where even cockroaches and lobbyists have trouble surviving? More, please.

We are just now recovering from the original sin of Apollo. NASA's finally shed itself of the ridiculous abomination that was the space shuttle, though I imagine most of the tens of thousands of people who worked on that program are still on the payroll. The 21st century re-imagining of the Apollo program - known collectively or in its parts as Orion, Constellation, Ares, EDS (sounds like a disease you'd be embarrassed to have), Altair and for all I know, "Oh shit we better think of something or we're fucked" - is on the ropes as well. NASA, through massive effort, the dedication of thousands of brilliant engineers and managers, and the application of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars has managed to achieve the impossible: get to the moon six times forty years ago, and make space travel seem as exciting as a local zoning planning board meeting.

There are now several enterprises looking to change that, mostly funded by tech-industry billionaires. Of these, Space-X has the most hardware in actual use. They've successfully flown a rocket large enough to put a capsule in orbit. That capsule is about this close to being man-rated, and could carry as many as six people into orbit. They've got plans for a heavy lift vehicle that builds off the success of existing rockets and there's no reason to imagine it wouldn't work. Elon Musk could be on the moon a decade before Newt, and for far less money. Significantly, far less of our money, since Senor Elon will be spending his own money to do it. And even if Space-X fails because a rocket falls on Musk's head, there are others - Paul Allen working with Scaled Composites, Bezos with Blue Origin, and more besides.

Please, please, please don't start another government space program. Because if you do, it will kill a private space industry that is just about off the ground. I want to go into space, and I trust Elon Musk more than I do Newt Gingrich. I said that so I can say this:

I think the most interesting thing about Newt's speech is that he thought that the moon could become the 51st state. A "Northwest Ordinance for Space" has been ridiculed by some, but I think that making fun of one of the great achievements of the Confederacy is mean-hearted and unwise. The Northwest Ordinance was probably one of the most successful government enterprises ever. By setting things up such that the colonists pushing back the frontier would come into the union on the same terms as the original colonies, now states - that more than anything assured the success of the American experiment.

If we are to avoid a repeat of the whole belters vs. flatlanders wars that we read about in science fiction, we'd need a Northwest Ordinance. Having a framework for communities in space to join on equal terms with their compatriots back home on Earth would be a good thing. And if people heading out knew that they would, in time, be on an equal political footing with those who stayed behind and that the rule of law would extend into space with them, we'd do more for space settlement than spending any amount of actual tax dollar money could ever do.

I don't know how significant this is, but in my recent travels through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Ohi0 - and then back - over the Christmas holiday I saw "Ron Paul 2012" etched, inked or carved next to five urinals in mens' restrooms. Given the number of stops I made thanks to the infinitesimal bladders of my children, that was a Ron Paul Pisser ratio of about one out of two.

I saw no exhortations for Mitt Romney, Obama, Gingrich or any other announced candidate.

This is a good observation:

"Great presidents (Roosevelt and Reagan) transform their times; good presidents (Eisenhower and Kennedy) understand them almost without trying; bad presidents (Buchanan and Carter) are overwhelmed by them. Obama is the first who has tried to defy them."

I think I might have to read the article.

The worst president

from View from the Right

The Dominion of Canada wonders what will happen if the US economy really tanks. I haven't listened to this yet, but I will tonight. Apparently the BBC has unearthed a coup plot in the US from the 1930s. A new book claims that the Roswell aliens were a Soviet Hoax. It's discussed in this piece at NPR, down in the "highlights" section. This is the interesting part:

On flying discs and conspiracy theories "The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. ... American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc. "The idea behind it remains, why? Why were they looking for a flying disc? And conspiracy theorists have had their hands on this declassified file for over a decade now, and they say it proves that this flying disc came from outer space. If you read the documents, the takeaway that I found fascinating was that at the end of it, the Army admits finding the Horten brothers, and that the Horten brothers admitted their contact with the Russians and that's where the file ends. Everything after that is classified." On why Area 51 is actually classified, according to a source "The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft. "The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there's a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, 'Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.' And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there's no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg." On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about "The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman's bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn't compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. ... "What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin." On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax "The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack."

Sweet Untimely Meditations has a this, on the idea that things will only get worse. A basic rundown of the obvious threats, and a pleasant read. Fjordman posts at Gates of Vienna on preparing for Ragnarok. Well, if there's one thing I'm ready for, it's Ragnarok. Dinner tonight, not so much - but I've got Ragnarok covered.

According to the French writer Guillaume Faye, for the first time humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to begin in the decade before 2020 — a crisis provoked by degradation of the ecosystems and geopolitical contests for scarce resources like agricultural land, oil, and above all water; by the fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and the massive indebtedness of democratic states; by the return of epidemics; by the rise of terrorism and nuclear proliferation; by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offensive; and by the dramatic aging of European populations, whose below replacement-level birth rates are confronted with rapidly growing masses of young people in the dysfunctional countries of the global South, coupled with mass migrations to the North. This convergence of catastrophes will mark the transition from one era to another. The USA will most likely cease to be the leading world power by mid-century, perhaps cease to exist at all in its present form. The global center of power will then move back to Eurasia, where it has almost always been previously. The strongest power will probably be China or what Faye calls “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of Europe plus Russia. He doesn’t think this is literally the end of the world, merely the end of the world as we know it. Something new may arise from these events, since Europe is a civilization of metamorphosis. Faye predicts two possibilities for European civilization over the coming century: regeneration based on a resurgence of ancestral values, or else disappearance. Europe, especially the western half of the Continent, is currently being invaded. This is coupled with an incredible masochism on the part of Europeans themselves. Only a terrifying crisis can awaken them, and war is the most merciless of selective forces; a people that abandons its will to power inevitably perishes. A “mental AIDS,” a virus of nihilism, has severely weakened their natural defenses. Consequently, Europeans have succumbed to self-extinction. The primary symptom of this is “xenophilia,” a systematic preference for the Other over the Self. The current advanced state of decadence owes much to the secularization of Christian charity and its modern egalitarian offshoot, human rights. In the widest possible sense it was the same civilizational genius that gave the world the concepts of universal gravitation and universal human rights. After the unprecedented successes of the Scientific Revolution, post-Enlightenment Europeans fell so much in love with the power of their own ideas that they ultimately came to define their very existence as one big idea, hence the concept of an “idea nation” or “proposition nation” was born. The leaders of this were the Americans and the French, whose Revolutions in the late 1700s came to view their countries as universal republics. This ideal was not and could not be implemented at that time, but two centuries later, coupled with the rise of global communications, it won out over ethnic identification. Faye believes that Europe now faces a danger unparalleled in its history and refuses to see it. It has been colonized by peoples from the South. This non-European invasion began in the 1960s and was largely self-engendered, by politicians contaminated with Marxist ideas, by an employer class greedy for cheap labor, and by Utopian humanitarian ideals or misplaced post-colonial guilt. Illegal immigrants/foreign colonizers are very rarely repatriated, but receive lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by anti-white forces in control of the state: A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than ‘terrorism.’ The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation. The state’s utopian plan for ‘republican integration’ has nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogeneous… European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I have to try to resist these thoughts, because I know I am fascinated by disaster scenarios. But as I look around, there are indications of all sorts of potential nastiness - economic and otherwise. More for my own reference, but here's a link to that post from a while back where a guy commented on Mangan's about the real US government ideology, following a Moldbuggian sort of line. If you haven't read it, it's worth it. Also, just read everything on Zero Hedge to get your mind in the right place for the coming econopocalypse. Just recently, they've had a few good ones: on attacking the Fed, on game over, on spinning out of control. Plus, there's more! I really should stop reading ZH, it makes me sad.

[wik]: I almost forgot a couple more. From Simon Rierdon - Solar apocalypse, Detroit apocalypse, and Economic apocalypse. Looking at pictures of what Detroit has become is depressing.

In old cartoons, you'd often see a character beset by a moral dilemma have a little angel and demon appear, one over each shoulder to argue the merits of the case. For me, thinking about politics, I have three.

I have a little Aretae, a little Foseti, and a little Bruce Charlton.  To me, at least, these three each represent an aspect of truth - the sort of truth that is not to be found in the mainstream.  But they don't exactly agree with each other.

• I agree with Aretae almost entirely, with the simple but large caveat that I don't think his thinking applies as well to people who are not very bright libertarians.  I would like to live in a society composed of people like me, Foseti, Bruce and Aretae.  We could have a minarchist system with free trade and cookies and skittles.  But, sadly, the world is inhabited by people with different levels of abilities, and different time horizons, and different propensities for violence.
• I agree with Foseti almost entirely as well.  The reactionary model of politics we both got from Moldbug is powerful.  It explains much.  But as we've seen with Moldbug's attempts, it is not exactly prescriptive.  Coming up with a new model reactionary system would either fail immediately, or soon fall prey to the same flaws that are dooming our current system.  I mean really, a new reactionary system?  How can that really work?
• I agree with Bruce slightly less, but the fault is mine and not his.  He is a convert to Orthodoxy, as am I, but I feel pretty sure that his conversion was rather more thorough than mine.  But the questions he asks are important ones, and ones for which the perspectives represented by Little Aretae and Little Foseti on my shoulders have no answer - if they even consider them at all.  Faith, tradition - you could call it culture, but that's not what it really is - it's what is missing.

I keep thinking that there's some synthesis of all this.  But maybe it's nothing more complicated than economics should approach as much as possible what Aretae recommends, politics aim more toward Foseti, and that in the end it won't really work unless the people believe in something, together.

I was surprised to see this at Breitbart's Big Government site - in tone it's more what I would expect from Mangan, Devin or Foseti.

Witness, Andrew Mellon:

Universally, democracy is being exalted.

Everywhere one turns, one hears of its virtues: how democracy ensures human rights, fosters prosperity and shepherds in modernity.

Yet democracy represents nothing more than the tyranny of the majority. In other words, contrary to the ideals of western liberalism, democracy does not ensure that the smallest minority, the individual is protected.
In the vast majority of circumstances, people free to choose their government get the government they desire. In Russia, the people have chosen again and again to elect KGB criminals. In Gaza, the people have chosen to elect either Hamas or Fatah, terrorist parties in perpetual war. Democracy does not a free society ensure. Even in America, citizens have not only allowed but encouraged the growth of a rapacious bureaucratic tyranny.

Wait, that last sentence was me. Mellon continues:

Democracy is merely a system of election – it is not inherently good as its results are entirely predicated on the voters themselves. Freedom-loving peoples will generally establish a political system to protect freedom. Those who prefer strict rule will devise a political order that squelches it.

This has obvious implications. But Mellon is speaking of Egypt.

I would argue that any Islamic society will refuse to establish a system grounded in property rights, individual liberty and free market principles because it is completely anathema to Islamic culture, history and religious tenets.

So why are doing the same despite our clear lack of Sharia? Finally, he wanders close to the point:

In our own nation which shifted from a Republic to a democracy (against the wishes of the Founders mind you), we have seen poor results. Even with a populace composed ostensibly of freedom-loving peoples, we have developed a social welfare state with crony capitalism, plunderous public unions, major slices of the private sector either outright or de facto nationalized and widespread wealth redistribution. When combined with political correctness, a chief component of cultural Marxism, our society in many respects has been rendered impotent.

Now all he needs to do is embrace the dark side and understand that Democracy is the cause of these tragic developments.  It didn't just allow them to happen, it didn't create an environment where the malevolent could make them happen - it created our world.

A couple fun what if links:

• Hawaiian Libertarian points to an article about how life might be different if the Fed had never existed. I think the the most important item is that the present-day dollar might not be worth 4.5 cents compared to the 1913 dollar. We could get back there, though, if we adopted the Buckethead currency plan.

• Radley Balko aims us in the direction of a list of Eight Crazy Constitutional Scenarios. My favorites:

  5. Two House Members Could Stage a Coup 

  We’ve all seen those late-night C-Span telecasts of the near-empty House chamber where one member is in the chair and the other is on the floor speaking to an empty chamber. Suppose word came during this “session” of the House that the president and vice president had been simultaneously killed. What’s to stop the House member on the floor from moving that he (or theh guy in the chair) be elected speaker of the House and the member in the chair saying, “Without objection, it is so ordered.” I’m not saying this would hold up in court, but technically the new “speaker” would then become president by virtue of presidential succession law. It’s a legal House session unless there’s another member present who suggests the absence of a quorum.

  6. Congress Could Allow the President to be Recalled

  There’s no way short of impeachment to remove a sitting president, right? Wrong. The 25th amendment creates a huge loophole. In order to provide for cases of presidential disability, the amendment allows a majority of the cabinet to declare the president disabled, subject to a congressional override if the president insists he’s fine. But the amendment also permits “such other body as Congress may by law provide” to issue a disability finding. The amendment’s sponsors no doubt intended this to mean a panel of physicians. But they didn’t say that. So what’s to stop Congress from declaring the American public as a whole that “other body” and empowering a majority of them to decide, at any time, the president is unable to discharge his duties? Voila, a backdoor recall provision! (Of course, this would just elevate the vice president to acting president, but still.)

I think we'll see something along these lines in our lifetime.

My home town

Actually, things aren't so bad. Except for some soreness in the back from giving the Dad a hand with moving, things are verging on decent.

As Foseti mentioned, we had a little reactionary gabfest on Friday. Along with his observations, I'd add that reactionaries seem to be rather tall. It's unusual that I meet people taller than me, and Foseti is just fricken' huge. Wiry, though. Odd that sometimes when you meet for the first time a person you've never seen, they are almost exactly the way you pictured them. Except for the extra 6-8 inches, Foseti is just how I thought he'd look.

It is refreshing to talk to someone who not only doesn't freak out when I say what I think (my friend Christian is very kind, and doesn't freak out) but actually agrees, or even is more hardcore on the point than I am. The reactionary is decidedly outside the mainstream. And the monkeybrains part of your being just shrieks inside you when you are disagreeing with everyone. Seeing that there is someone who actually exists - not just words on the screen - and agrees with you is very calming.

Devin's Hackertopia idea has got me thinking.

I think the biggest problem would be critical mass. If you don't get a sufficiency of smart, interesting people to move there; smart, interesting people won't move there. How do you bootstrap the process? Rather than planning a large community - start with the village and grow up from there.

If one could purchase a 160 acre plot in the adjacent to the middle of nowhere, it wouldn't cost that much. For example, this place:

Is located in Monroe County, WV, near I-64 and I-81, near the Virginia border. It costs $350k. Not an unreasonable sum, all things considered. A moderate amount of effort could produce a roughed out town square, a home, and the first building of the Hackiversity. Build a nice stone structure, fully wired, and set it up as a hacker space, and you might be able to get it started. Over time, the founders could sell plots out of the original 160 acres - reserving some for the university and some for the public square - to finance public works and to purchase nearby land for expansion.

New residents could buy into the municipal corporation, or not; buy land, or rent. Those who bought shares would have a hand in the governance as shareholders, and would share in the profits, if any.

If the university made a name for itself, the city could grow pretty rapidly.

Devin Finbarr has an excellent post up; Hackertopia: Creating a City as a Startup. This is not surprising. What's interesting is that Hackertopia is a more or less concrete idea for instantiating some reactionary/formalist ideas in the real world.

I like the idea. I think that if it could be created, it would be a nice place to live. The biggest problem I see with the proposal is that while the founders might be able to get out from under some state regulation and taxes, they're not going to be able to escape the fed. And while state regulations and taxes can be add to the burden of starting businesses, creating wealth, or just living your life - they are just the cherry on top of the Everest-sized ice cream sundae that is the Federal Government.

Federal taxes will weigh down every effort of the citizens of Hackertopia. Environmental impact statements and OSHA regulations will slow and hinder every business. And that's just the normal run of things. If certain elements in the government decided to not like Hackertopia, it would be far worse.

What would be needed would be a special economic zone, or the like, where existing federal regulations would not apply. And that is a highly dubious proposition, unless things get much worse.

Still and all, I could see how building a city like this would be for the good - it could at least be a place where most of the worst, localized excesses of democracy are limited. What Hackertopia most reminded me of is Precipice, a city in John Brunner's novel Shockwave Rider. It's a book well worth reading - and though the town in the novel is more of a libertarian utopia, it shares many characteristics with Devin's Hackertopia. But one of the key things that allowed Precipice to come into being is the big one, the giant earthquake that levels SF and is entirely beyond the capacity of the nation to recover from. A large swath of ruined California is effectively abandoned - a "paid avoidance zone" where the rule of the Federal government is light, because the cost of rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure is just too high. In this extra-legal zone, Precipice flourishes because it's economy and people are not warped by the heavy hand of increasingly deranged government.

While I haven't had a lot of time for writing in the last little while, I've been thinking about the wheres and whys of a reactionary experiment. Granted, we have some partial examples - Hong Kong before the takeover, Singapore, and so on. Chili under Pinochet.

It seems to me that part of the problem with the libertarian ideas that Aretae espouses - and which to a great extent I sympathise with - is that they don't take into account the monkeybrains aspect in regard to the politics. Economics - yes. But people are not comfortable professing loyalty to amorphous collectives operating for the common good. And certainly not to co-operative protection agencies and the like. The United States, and to a lesser extent other democracies, have gotten around this by creating a civic religion centered on constitution idolatry and the veneration of civic saints. This faith is failing now, and seems unlikely to recover, and certainly will not be replaced by un-coerced love for the bureaucratic state and its organs.

The idea of a monarch gives a human thing for people to latch on to, give their loyalty to, and to build community around. Providing you can get to the point where having a king seems like a good idea, and people have agreed that that particular guy is the one who should be king. A Moldbug-style neo-cameralist CEO probably wouldn't inspire that, unless it was Steve Jobs. To me, the idea of having a Calvin Coolidge sort of king - one who would not interfere in the economy, or in our lives, but would serve as a guarantor of order and prosperity; and at need a final arbiter of disputes - that would be best.

I have benefitted greatly from the home brew/craft brew movement.  Over the last 30 years, I have enjoyed many a tasty beverage.  It could be argued that America has the best beer on the planet.  And we have Jimmy Carter to thank for that.  Thank you, Jimmy Carter.

But it never occurred to me wonder why the rules aren't the same for liquor.  It came as a mild surprise to me learn that the revenuers are still raiding moonshiners, and breaking up their stills.  Yet, they are.  It is a felony in this country to distill even a drop.

Back twenty years ago, I was climbing in WV, and at the camp that night the populations of out-of-state rock climbers mingled with the locals.  The locals had 'shine in mason jars.  And that was some of the best whiskey I've ever tasted.  It was like drinking an alcoholic hot pepper, and it was like smoking a cuban cigar, and it was like breathing in the air on a cold Fall day.  Nothing I ever paid for in a liquor store ever matched it.

This video from Reason explains a bit of why almost no one ever gets to experience that.

One can imagine many threats that might require the use of armed force to contain.  A crazed gunman.  Terrorist plotters with bombs.  Criminals about their evil business.  What you normally wouldn't include on that list is hippy organic dairy farmers catering to those with a hankering for raw milk.

But you wouldn't be the federal government, would you?

With no warning one weekday morning, investigators entered an organic grocery with a search warrant and ordered the hemp-clad workers to put down their buckets of mashed coconut cream and to step away from the nuts.

Then, guns drawn, four officers fanned out across Rawesome Foods in Venice. Skirting past the arugula and peering under crates of zucchini, they found the raid's target inside a walk-in refrigerator: unmarked jugs of raw milk.

"I still can't believe they took our yogurt," said Rawesome volunteer Sea J. Jones, a few days after the raid. "There's a medical marijuana shop a couple miles away, and they're raiding us because we're selling raw dairy products?"

The government, of course, insists that it is acting to protect consumers and ensure a level playing field.

"This is not about restricting the public's rights," said Nicole Neeser, program manager for dairy, meat and poultry inspection at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. "This is about making sure people are safe."

If it's not about restricting people's rights, then why are people's rights being, ah, restricted?  The raw food movement has been growing, but apparently only one particular type of raw food is being singled out for armed raids.  Can we guess the reason?

But raw milk in particular has drawn a lot of regulatory scrutiny, largely because the politically powerful dairy industry has pressed the government to act.

That's all from this LA Times article.  This article offers more details.

When the 20 agents arrived bearing a search warrant at her Ventura County farmhouse door at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday a couple weeks back, Sharon Palmer didn't know what to say. This was the third time she was being raided in 18 months, and she had thought she was on her way to resolving the problem over labeling of her goat cheese that prompted the other two raids. (In addition to producing goat's milk, she raises cattle, pigs, and chickens, and makes the meat available via a CSA.)

But her 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine, wasn't the least bit tongue-tied. "She started back-talking to them," recalls Palmer. "She said, 'If you take my computer again, I can't do my homework.' This would be the third computer we will have lost. I still haven't gotten the computers back that they took in the previous two raids."

The tactics of the war on drugs meets rent seeking industry lobbyists.  Radley Balko has documented ad nauseum (often literally) the abuses that local and federal law enforcement inflict on us daily.  150 Swat raids every 24 hours, on average.  The average joe thinks, well, they're all drug dealers and criminals.  Except when highly trained expert law enforcement personnel get the wrong address, or guy, and while they're there, they shoot the dog.  Using these tactics to enforce a milk cartel that already makes us all pay more for milk seems yet wronger.

If any sufficiently connected lobby or influence group can get the right laws passed, they have highly aggressive and none-to-smart police to enforce them, and who don't seem particularly concerned about their fellow-citizen's rights.  Frankly, it's a miracle that the dozens of raids these articles have talked about haven't resulted in injuries or puppycide.

What I was attempting, distractedly, to do in my last post Devin has accomplished in a much more thorough-going fashion. He's laid out a sensible taxonomy of government types, into which all our governments can be squished. He also hits on an excellent way of phrasing the distinction I was arguing with Aretae about - legitimist v. lawless. A monarch is typically, though not always, going to be a legitimist regime; and will be behaving far differently than, say, Mao.

Having that taken care of, the remaining tasks are to figure out - hopefully in a detailed way, how the elite selection mechanism relates to the other things we are about. Economic growth, individual rights and liberties, justice, defense and, in general, quality of life.

I'd start right now, but it's past my bed time.

Andy Grove discusses how start-ups will not necessarily be a jobs engine for the American economy:

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular -- masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

...There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Over the last week or so, the Onion has been dredging up some articles from its sordid past.  Several of them have a distinctly Moldbuggian tone:

• The first one starts out actually on a more Libertarian track, but it's just a precursor.  New Poll Finds 86 Percent Of Americans Don't Want To Have A Country Anymore:
  

  "I already belong to a health club, a church, and the Kiwanis Club," Tammy Golden of Los Angeles wrote. "I'm a member of the Von's Grocery Super Savers, which gets me a discount on certain groceries. These are all well-managed organizations with real benefits. None of them send me a confusing bill once a year and make me work it out myself, then throw me in jail if I get it wrong."

  "I think we've come far enough as a nation that we don't need to have one anymore," Wheldon wrote. "It's not like we're Somalia, where the warlords run everything, or Russia, where it's all organized crime. We've had over 200 years of being Americans. I don't think we still need the United States of America to show us how to do it."

• American People Ruled Unfit to Govern - wherein the Supreme Court decides that "the American people will no longer retain the power to choose their own federal, state and local officials or vote on matters of concern to the public."  A prime Moldbug concept, that the Supreme Court holds sovereignty.
• And finally, Exiled American King Triumphantly Returns To Washington - Rather explicitly anti-democratic:
  

  "Huzzah!" said Diane Sowell of State College, PA. "At long last, we are rid of that corrupt, antiquated system of government known as democracy, a system that has done nothing but maintain the status quo of political inequality, economic stagnation, and social injustice. Our good king will change all that."

  Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, applauded the king's return but questioned some of his policies. "As much as I support welfare reform," Matthews said, "replacing it with a nationwide network of debtor's prisons, as His Majesty plans, strikes me as a little extreme. Still, it can't be much worse than what we've had."

Just because I've always loved it, Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong advertisement:

It is my pleasure to welcome all quality folks to visiting of Hong Kong. Whether seriously in business or on a fun-loving hijink, make yourself totally homely in this meager environment. If any aspect is not utterly harmonious, gratefully bring it to my notice and I shall strive to earn your satisfaction.

We of Greater Hong Kong take many prides in our extravagant growth. The ones who saw our isle as a morsel of Red China’s pleasure have struck their faces in keen astonishment to see many great so-called powers of the olden guard reel in dismay before our leaping strides and charged-up hustling, freewheeling idiom of high-tech personal accomplishment and betterment of all peoples. The potentials of a all ethnic races and anthropologies to merge under a banner of the Three Principles to follow

• Information, Information, Information !
• Totally fair marketeering !
• Strict ecology !

have been peerless in the history of economic strife.

Who would disdain to subscribe under this flowing banner? If you have not attained your Hong Kong citizenship, apply for a passport now! In this month, the usual fee of HK$100 will be kindly neglected. Fill out a coupon (below) now. If coupons are lacking, dial 1-800-HONG-KONG instantly to apply from the help of our wizened operators.

Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong is a private, wholly extraterritorial, sovereign, quasi-national entity not recognized by any other nationalities and no way affiliated with the former Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which part of the People’s Republic of China. The People’s Republic of China admits or accepts no responsibility for Mr. Lee, the Government of Greater Hong Kong, or any of the citizens thereof, or for any violations of local law, personal injury, or property damage occurring in territories, buildings, municipalities, institutions, or real estate owned, occupied, or claimed by Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong.

Join us instantly,
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Mr. Lee