The left has run a successful campaign to interfere with the lives and businesses that employ skilled labor for centuries now. One of the chief methods by which it has accomplished this is by expropriating children from their families, interfering with the traditional system of apprenticeship, making family businesses run on residential property illegal, and by mandating a universal system of education which churns out a mixture of half-capable proles and indolent Brahmins with expensive educations to act as pliable bosses. Marxism and its offshoots has been the typical method for the left to co-opt skilled labor by encouraging them […]

Good intentions are all that matter in the religion of Americanism. The purer that you can portray your intentions to be, the more reach that your words will find. People who reveal the negative consequences of actions taken with the purest intentions tend to be regarded as cranks. This is because their ranting tends to make the new moral crusade more difficult to sell. In some cases, bad consequences seem to be the entire point of the exercise. When the well-intentioned struggle ends in death, those deaths can be portrayed as a demonstration of how sincere the beliefs that motivated […]

The typical social justice warrior is a student or a graduate from a Western liberal arts program. Their beliefs are in no way exceptional. They are repeating what they learned in class, which was reinforced by the university administration, and then further stoked by the media and the culture. What do they want? Equality. How far are they willing to go to achieve their desires? Well, not far at all. The farthest that they’re willing to go is to write, make videos, write some more, and occasionally go out to an unarmed protest, which will dissipate with an imperceptible impact […]

The common method that minorities use to shift public opinion is to adopt a radical position, and then to speak towards the political center. Radicals establish moral authority through their zeal combined with their usually superior intelligence and knowledge. Frequently, they’re able to access greater concentrations of funding for their pet causes than the political center can, because they can articulate a more specific program. This is the way that the left operates, and one of the reasons for its enduring success during the era of popular government. When leftists sense a threat, they tend to project that the threat […]

Western governments have constructed bureaucracies to reward malingering behavior. In return, ordinary people have responded to those incentives in enormous numbers, prostrating themselves before medical authorities, proclaiming all kinds of strange ailments. Doctors and pill-manufacturers invent new ailments as rapidly as old ones fall out of fashion. The facts are less important than the plausible construction of theories. Syndromes are particularly popular for this, because they can be diagnosed based upon symptoms alone. Many people will happily rewrite the entire story of their lives based upon a syndrome invented in an addled brainstorming session with an ad agency executive, some […]

Universal basic income arguments have become increasingly popular, thanks to high-profile advocates like Charles Murray, who is in turn adapting a proposal by Milton Friedman for a ‘negative income tax.’ [1] I haven’t had the time to read Murray’s In Our Hands, so I can’t address what he says in that directly. In any case, the majority of people that you’re likely to run into who argue for basic income tend to shave off the serial numbers of their arguments, instead just pretending like the idea came to them through the ether. Because many of the advocates for it are […]

The refrain we read in most of the conservative papers is that the ‘culture war’ is over and that the left won. The truth is that the left won the culture war in the late 18th century and has just been solidifying its control and issuing new edicts with every succeeding century. There’s not all that much more culture left to destroy, unless the left goes through our remaining museums, burns them down, and digitally purges records of past literature. This wouldn’t be all that necessary, because the alternative to complete destruction is quite serviceable. When you pump out junk […]

When you travel in European cities that are older than modernity, and contrast them with modern cities, the difference in both scale and in public decoration is stark. In modern cities, the trend is to have no recognizable human features to any of the buildings or public decorations. Where there is representational art, it tends to be fractured like a Soviet collage, in Socialist-Realist style (especially if it dates to the New Deal era), or intentionally mimicking the primitive art styles of African or Native American art. What’s absent from modernist cities (and the interiors of modern homes) is, with […]

‘Rape culture’ is a concept in contemporary feminism that states that it’s a culture in which women are taught to avoid situations in which they might be raped, instead of a culture that primarily concerns itself with training men to stop being sexually aggressive. One reason why this argument has become so popular (other than all the government money dedicated to advancing it) is that this basic position is part of what makes civilization distinct. Civilized men are civilized because they observe a sophisticated etiquette regulating their sexual behavior, usually codified in law. Tribal cultures without written law still have […]

Yesterday, the Umlaut published another article (this time by Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University) [1] about neoreaction’s supposed inability to understand the positive aspects of democracy. Let’s start with praise: unlike the majority of articles written about neoreaction, he links to a few relevant articles and spends a minority of the piece discussing them. Dourado spends most of the piece explaining why a journal article [2] refutes Mencius Moldbug, the authors at More Right, and Nick Land. Dourado should not have wasted his time attacking neoreactionaries, who are mostly presenting cases developed by […]