About the racial equality:
It takes half a brain to realize people are different. Not much more to understand different races have characteristic features other than the looks. "The Cathedrals" "lying" and "bad-policies" are imho misinterpretations of the actual noble cause to provide an environment where all the different people may flourish and feel equally respected, which is the right thing to do.
The comments below are about sexism (masquerading as the realities of differences between sexes), but can be similarly applied to racism (masquerading as the realities of differences between races).
If I am correct at representing the thinking of the D.E., we can't "provide an environment..." because there is a natural order to such matters. The (unscientific, faith-based model, i.e. can't be falsified) Christian Traditionalist ("Ethno-Nats") faction argues the cause is biblical (e.g. woman is a rib of man). The anarchists ("HBDs") such as myself (actually a contentionist, realist) argue that (
everything is determined ultimately by power from economics and) when society collectively tries to alter that which is natural, we bankrupt ourselves via the power vacuum of democracy (I have not articulated that well, and will try to capture my meaning via some quotes which follow). Note that I hope the natural economics don't bring us back to James A. Donald's warlordism lynching model. This is why I work hard to create decentralized technologies (e.g. anonymity for crypto-currency) so that the system performs better without warlords than with them. For me, I can accomplish much more good by innovating than by
playing politics which ultimately collapses into the power vacuum any way (please read that link!).
Btw, I am happy to note that the one of cryptographic papers that the latest Zerocoin improvement cites is by two women! Cool!
Melissa Chase and Anna Lysyanskaya, "On Signatures of Knowledge".
http://cs.brown.edu/~anna/papers/cl06.pdf
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-424677That’s not a justified inference. The Ethno-Nats do want to “preserve these group differences”; the HBDs, on the other hand, have more of a pitiless, neutral “that which can be destroyed by the truth should be” attitude.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-424679the core premise of the Ethno-Nationalists is that not all cultural memes are created equal
There’s some of this going on, yes, mixed up with old-fashioned racism and nativism. I think it would be theoretically possible to disentangle these tendencies from each other, but I don’t see the Ethno-Nats actually doing that.
The Dark Enlightenment specifically opposes Enlightenment political philosophy, or at least it opposes the political philosophers usually associated with the Enlightenment (such as Locke and Rousseau). In particular, many members of the Dark Enlightenment—especially neoreactionaries—embrace a more traditional understanding of sovereignty and reject the notion of “natural rights”.
Sovereign just means “possessing supreme or ultimate power”, i.e., there is no higher power that can bind the actions of a sovereign organization. A recent post by ESR shows the disconnect well:
[W]e absolutely do not want the government to have an easy pretext to forbid people from bearing arms; that is too dangerous a power to let government have.
From the Dark Enlightenment point of view, this is a political perpetual-motion machine: the government is sovereign by definition, so there is no “we” who “let” it have some powers and not others.
Closely related to this understanding of sovereignty is a rejection of “natural rights”. Instead, many partisans of the Dark Enlightenment believe that all rights are political...
Esr's response below is that if you don't play politics well, things end badly. My response to him is that is why I work on anonymity to diminish the economic relevance (ability to tax, prosecute, shame, and blame) of politics.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-424743(A less inflammatory phrasing might be “Every right derives from might.”)
This is true, and the reason I advocate for an armed citizenry both physically and morally prepared to defend the rights it asserts.
the liberal (and libertarian) defense of “natural rights” appears as a simple category error: the confusion of a Humean ought with a Humean is.
This is also a fair criticism. The classical-liberal/libertarian position is, however, salvageable under a consequentialist interpretation that unpacks to “If ‘All persons are not equal before the law’ is not one of the premises of your politics, your politics will end badly’”. This is actually a topic I’ve been meaning to blog about, and analyzing Neo-Reactionary thinking will be a good context in which to do it.
Then Eric admits that politics trends towards is the repeating over and over again "everyone loses" Olsonian end-game collapse and rebuild from ashes.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-424853it is inequality in the eyes of the law that ends badly
You’re right. Possibly there’s an extra negative in the sentence that shouldn’t be.
My experience is that “being more cognizant of the socioeconomic ramifications of technology” turns people into libertarians, not left-liberals.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-424997The European Pirate Parties tend to be rather fond of the welfare state
Well,
there’s a surprise, given that a lot of their support base is all about wanting to take other peoples’ stuff for free to begin with. The leadership, people like Falkvinge, is smarter – and more libertarian.
The way to understand the Nazi death camps, and the Gulag, is as the logic of statism taken to its conclusion, which is expressed in Bertolt Brecht’s grim joke: if the government doesn’t trust the people, it dissolves them and elects a new people.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-425083Jeremy, a wife withholding sex from a husband is an issue calling for discussion, counseling, or divorce, not force.
Then I would suggest that a man withholding funds from a wife or ex-wife should not incur penalties that raise the force of the state to enforce alimony/child-support/etc… If one act is allowed the force of the state, then certainly the other should be too.
I mean, lets be real here, I don’t disagree with you or anyone else that the use of force to extract sexual relations from a wife is an abuse of power. Likewise, divorcing a man for any reason (and they don’t need much these days) and using the power of the state to forcibly extract such payments, is just as evil.
So if we’re going to say, and enshrine in law (which is backed by the force of state), that men must financially support wives and mothers no matter what (and we have absolutely done that), then how can we justify telling men that they cannot use force to extract what they need from marriage?
On this issue of marital rape which Esr responds to below, when marriage contracts can no longer be enforced in my idealized economically anonymous society (the one I am striving to create with technology now), the man (instead of forcing sex on his "wife") can simply go get another female when his wife stops giving him what he wants. If he loves his children, he will support and visit them. Parents of daughters and women will become much more careful about selection of mates. This is a male dominated world, and that is the reality. We get there either by the state collapsing under its own bankruptcy and/or with anonymity technology for commerce and investing.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5238&cpage=1#comment-425160Esr is old enough to remember when he and his entire family took what is now called “Marital Rape” as completely legitimate and proper,
Don’t project your slimy beliefs on civilized people. Even as a child I knew better than this.
I’m surprised Eric hasn’t linked JAD’s [James A. Donald's] point to statism by noting that the state increasingly undercuts males running the provider strategy (that is to say the vast majority of men).
I would, but other commenters have already done a pretty good job on that one.
P.S. This
Fertility from James A. Donald will really make you think, if you are rational and don't just let your emotional reactions rule your brain. A woman wants the genetics from the most alpha-man she can get to impregnate her. She has to balance that within realities of child-rearing, limited fertility window, and her income earning potential. Without the state to give her free education, free health care, free child care, and rent assistance, she is probably unable to support herself and needs a beta-male husband. Thus the state causes divorce and destroys the family unit, by altering the natural economics of marriage. This is why the west doesn't have enough children to pay for the cost of the elderly, and one of the reasons we are horridly bankrupt and heading for an apocalyptic collapse.
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