Essay talk:Abrechnung mit Reaktion

"This is one of the reasons why I find the idea of hereditary aristocracy attractive..."
I wonder what rung you see yourself occupying in an imagined new aristocratic social order. PowderSmokeAndLeather (talk) 18:07, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Not as titled nobility, myself. The idea, which I will develop further, is to preserve a place or role in government for people who aren't necessarily driven, competitive assholes. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 19:13, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Very interesting
Always a pleasure to read your essays, Smerdis. You never fail to challenge my preconceptions. Wehpudicabok  [話]   [変]   [留]  07:27, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Glad you like it. The pose is actually fairly natural for me. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Nailed it
The last three paragraphs of "Adaptation" would be just the thing for racial realism article. I think you've hit the nail on the head: with how genetically undifferentiated H. Sapiens is, racial differences in intelligence really would require intelligence to be less adaptive for the wogs - David Gerard (talk) 22:12, 6 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Oh, I plugged your fine work on LessWrong. Let's see who we attract. (If you'd rather I didn't link the LJ, I shall edit.) - David Gerard (talk) 22:24, 6 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Don't mind either. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 03:55, 7 February 2014 (UTC)


 * You have successfully confused the neoreactionaries - David Gerard (talk) 11:46, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Burden of proof
I would contest that the burden of proof is on someone to show that intelligence is always adaptive, rather than for HBD to show it isn't in a particular case. The human brain is tremendously energy hungry, and the size of the skull causes great problems in childbirth. Without consistent selection for smarts, the brain will inevitably shrink because it's otherwise a liability. The more intelligent having more children is nowhere near guaranteed. This actually happened in a terrifying way on Flores. Also, as for hybrid vigor, again the burden of proof is on the proponent to show that mixing populations X and Y will produce a population Z with more desirable and/or healthy traits. This usually does not happen, which is why we even have a term for "hybrid vigor" in the first place. Usually, the populations just regress to the mean, and there's no evidence so far that anything else happens for interracial humans.82.27.120.14 (talk) 11:59, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Um ... human gene pool is remarkably unvaried compared to other species, since the Toba bottleneck. You'd need clear environmental reasons for intelligence not to be adaptive since then. Given we seem to have grown these stupidly large brains in order to figure out other humans, you'd have to assume the social arms race, which had worked up to that time, had stopped for some reason - David Gerard (talk) 13:51, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * It is likely true that anatomical constraints put limits to brain size. The Neanderthals had it worse.  And it's also true that the human brain has metabolic costs.  Those costs are simply baked into being human, and AFAIK there isn't a clear relationship between IQ and metabolism.  Again, if you're trying to propose hereditary differences of intelligence between human populations, you need to come up with an evolutionary explanation that explains how the more intelligent outliers don't re-establish a new norm. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 15:12, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Other way around. The facts are there, the populations have different mean IQs. You create the theory to explain the facts and predict new ones, you don't ignore the facts until you can come up with a theory. 82.27.120.14 (talk) 15:28, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Not only is IQ widely considered a debatable at best measure of "intelligence", but its dependence on things like genetics compared to, say, environment, upbringing, and education, is not necessarily well understood. I think your "facts" would need to be far more concrete for you to draw the conclusions you draw, and I think attaching a theory to those facts (while dubious in the first place) requires some greater focus on what factors actually affect IQ. - Grant (Talk) 16:12, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Moreover, there's enough to the Flynn effect to suggest that improvements in health care, nutrition, and other environmental factors affect IQ test results, and all of these things are independent of the culture that produces the tests. You can't sort by ethnicity without also sorting by ethnic lifestyle choices, including foodways, health habits, attitudes towards literacy, the rural/urban divide, and other things that do affect the test results.  The adaptation paradigm is well established enough that if it's going to be challenged, more than this seems necessary. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 20:15, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * The Flynn effect is hollow gains and a red herring. Nobody ever said that nongenetic factors don't influence IQ - just that genes play the most important role. And yes, we can sort by ethnicity while controlling for other factors - adoption studies and controlling for socioeconomic status. The studies have been done, the science is settled. See http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/the-facts-that-need-to-be-explained/ re: GrantC, IQ is only widely considered debatable in the popular press. The people that actually research psychometrics are pretty much unanimous that IQ is a real thing that predicts real outcomes. 82.27.120.14 (talk) 23:49, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
 * IQ is a real thing that predicts real outcomes, but how those outcomes relate to this concept of "intelligence" is indeed debatable, even to those who research psychometrics. - Grant (Talk) 00:10, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Just have to jump in to say that the BoN's (not me) characterization of entire fields as if they all support hereditarianiasm is hilarious. Even more so when it's based on a bunch of race-realist blogs. 16:48, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Demotism
"Demotism" appears to me a made-up category for "things neoreactionaries don't like", in an attempt to declare dictatorship and liberal democracy the same thing by fiat. I like Scott Alexander's (I think) analogy of a made-up category "grey-ears" which includes both elephants and mice, and using this to claim elephants are the sort of thing that lives in walls and stereotypically eats cheese.

But you say: " Some places (e.g. France) there were demotist political movements;" - so do you think "demotism", as used by the neoreactionaries, is actually a useful category that does work as a theory? - David Gerard (talk) 09:28, 16 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I had understand "demotism" more or less as synonymous with what the rest of us call "popular sovereignty"; government in the name of the people. As such it isn't quite meaningless; and the point is that they seemed to ultimately make little difference in the character of the resulting governments; what ultimately shaped them was not so much ideology as sharing in the culture of the marketplace and the technological base of Western Europe. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 02:19, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Something that puts Stalin's USSR and Hitler's Germany in the same category as e.g. modern Australia (which the neoreactionary usage of "demotist" does) strikes me as a made-up category that doesn't do any work as a theory. Does the word have any usage by others? - David Gerard (talk) 14:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * As far as I can see the only usage by non-neoreactionaries is to mean "a student of the Demotic script and writings" - David Gerard (talk) 15:15, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Coventry Cathedral
Why did they put that ugly thing next to it? O_o 141.134.75.236 (talk) 08:44, 14 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Believe it or not, that's the new cathedral. The Gothic original was bombed during WWII.  Rather than rebuild it as it was, they chose instead to construct a new one in the 20th Century Rectangular style. - Smerdis of Tlön, A ⇒ ¬A. 02:37, 21 February 2015 (UTC)
 * Much as I love Gothic architecture, the new Cov Cathedral is a thing of beauty. In particular, it was designed to be seen from inside rather than outside. With the stained glass windows and the giant tapestry, it's an interior on a par with the best cathedrals in the world. Also, not rectangular. Considering what else was being built in Cov in the 60s, the cathedral got off lightly. They've spent most of the last thirty years pulling those horrors down.Queexchthonic murmurings 16:44, 24 February 2015 (UTC)

Trouble coping with better problems
Today's tweak about Dunbar's number reminds me of the basic problem with reactionary ideas: we have actually seriously advanced in all sorts of ways, and life is incomparably better now than a hundred or so years ago. People no longer routinely worry that they'll die just giving birth - down from 1 in 10 to under 1 in 1000 in the first world - and that's not from political or philosophical disputation. A lot of e.g. neoreaction is whiny first-world brats not knowing that they do in fact have it very fucking good indeed and precisely why nostalgia is brain rot. (But then so is most of antivax.) - David Gerard (talk) 21:35, 20 February 2015 (UTC)
 * That's an optimistic way of looking at it. But we are programmed for dissatisfaction.  When we solve our basic needs for food, shelter, and sexual release, we only roll over and sleep soundly for a time.  We awaken to find vague hungers and discontents that preoccupy us and become big deals, at least until the old appetites reassert themselves.  Part of it is Life's agenda.  Fill the world with copies of our genes until resource depletion or the evolutionary arms race set a limit.  Our saving grace, instead, is the fact that, for some people, the human mind is complex enough to be able to substitute artificial pleasures for natural ones.  These artificial pleasures may only distract for a time; and if we make them too good, they can override biology itself and become "bad for your health".  Which is why I generally am in favor of everything that's bad for health.
 * Which brings it back around to the main flaw I find in neoreactionary thinking. They think they can build Ruritania with high-speed internet and Google toys.  They don't see how financialized capitalism is to blame, or how it actually would stifle any attempt to build their utopia.  Finance is also an artificial ecosystem that is in some ways too robust, a social addiction that hooks everybody.  You can actually win at heroin addiction.  If heroin is plentiful and available, and it needn't be expensive, you can take as much as you can tolerate and it will keep you content until the end of your days, however that turns out. My understanding is that under these conditions narcotics addiction is in fact fairly harmless.  Unjust laws are the only obstacle to this utopia.  On the other hand, finance is much more rigged against you than heroin is.  A painful cold turkey may be the only way out here.
 * I'd have thought they'd have figured out why it wouldn't work from Wm. Gibson if from nothing else. - Smerdis of Tlön, A ⇒ ¬A. 03:03, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Anissimov's six themes
''Michael Anissimov proposes the following six tenets as the core beliefs of neoreaction:
 * 1) People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all its forms.
 * 2) Right is right and left is wrong. (I.e. order is better than chaos)
 * 3) ''Hierarchy is basically a good idea.
 * 4) ''Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.
 * 5) ''Libertarianism is retarded.
 * 6) ''Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.
 * --Michael Anissimov, Principles of Reactionary Thought, More Right, Dec. 13, 2013.''

Thinking about these and what my counters would be to them, largely as a way of distinguishing my own reactionary thinking from neoreaction.

1. ''People are not equal. They never will be.'' True enough. We reject equality in all its forms. Does not follow, but it does make things easier. I hold no special brief for equality. If it's your social ideal, you are certain to fall short every time. There are plenty of other worthwhile goals that you are guaranteed to fail at. This is not an excuse to abandon them; it is a reason to reject the world that conspires to defeat you.

2. Personal freedoms are more important than political freedoms. The right to eat, drink, and smoke what you please, have sex with whomever you please, marry whomever you please, and otherwise to live life on your own terms is a hell of a lot more important than the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The value and purpose of free speech is in self-expression rather than political discourse. Political discourse is mostly useless; nobody listens unless they already agree. Most "political speech" is as obviously selfish and deceptive as advertising. In government, order may trump chaos; in personal life not so much.

3. The value of order is stasis. Above all, people need security and confidence that their way of life can continue, so they can make their little plans and reasonably hope to see them fulfilled. Technology and capitalism both directly threaten this kind of order. Left unchecked, they make it impossible.

4. Hierarchy and traditional sex roles are inevitable and inescapable evils. These are things bred in the bone, immune to persuasion and argument. Legislation against them only holds sway under the direct observation of the surveillance camera. What moral arguments against them actually prove is that life itself is unfair and therefore evil. Whatever the merits of those moral arguments, this conclusion is also inevitable.

5. Libertarianism is retarded. No argument here. Humans have a blueprint for human societies hard-coded into their brains. The societies they build may not satisfy every philosopher's theory of justice, but they will at least work; their outlines are older than Homo themselves. These blueprints feature various sorts of mutualism designed to preserve families and societies as social units. They have nothing at all about 'free markets'.

6. Western civilization is irredeemably flawed and bound to collapse. Seems obvious from America, anyways. The United States seems a doomed polity from here. Huge swaths of its yeomen profess great love for America as a country and people, while holding the actual institutions that define the United States as a nation in utter disdain. Something similar happened towards the end of the Western Roman Empire, where people seem to have simply abandoned there was any value in Roman citizenship or the Roman state and its institutions. Eventually, the Vandal and Goth armies stopped observing the forms of imperial rule and, at least in the West, nobody minded. Much of the United States is three quarters of the way there already.

May try to work this material somewhat more artfully into the essay. - Smerdis of Tlön, If you burn with an inner fire, you are already damned. 02:59, 21 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Point 1 is childish equivocation on the word "equal" between how people measure up and what social considerations should be extended to them. The first is why the second is a point of contention. Anissimov is no doubt very proud of managing to impress himself quite so much with his own cleverness here - David Gerard (talk) 09:32, 12 April 2015 (UTC)
 * That's an interesting point. One of the problems with identity politics is that by focusing on social influence and image, it ends up turning into an etiquette whose chief point is pretending that everyone is equal when in fact they are not.  The fact that equality will always elude our grasp doesn't oblige us to encourage inequality, or to reject the sorts of human mutualism that allow even the people who draw the short straw to get by.  Inequality is simply the product of Dame Fortuna's wheel. - Smerdis of Tlön, LOAD "*", 8, 1. 20:17, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

This essay is COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA
As Uncle Karl told us:

See? SEE?! - David Gerard (talk) 09:04, 26 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The old fellow had his moments of lucidity, that much is sure. On the other hand, the problem really started with agriculture. - Smerdis of Tlön, LOAD "*", 8, 1. 01:04, 27 July 2015 (UTC)