anti anti anti anti reactionary faq

Scot Alexander has answered the anti anti reactionary faq.

The anti anti reactionary faq argument to which he replies is that leftist have a dreadful record of misgovernment, terror, tyranny, artificial famine, and leftists tend to get lefter over a time.  It is a slippery slope, the slope gets steeper and steeper, and at the bottom of that slope, a deep pit filled with sharpened stakes.

Scot’s reply is that these bad things done by leftists were a response to the horrid horrid horrid evil oppression by extremely reactionary regimes, which made the masses so very angry.

The trouble with this story is the King Louis and Tzar Nicholas were very progressive – and very powerless.  To the extent that they were able to exercise any power, it was to reward and protect their enemies, and destroy their loyalists.  It is probably fortunate that King Louis XVI, a supposedly absolute divine right monarch, was completely unable to get any of his policies implemented, because they were all disastrously stupid highly fashionable left wing policies, in particular the proposal to abolish the taille.

178 Responses to “anti anti anti anti reactionary faq”

  1. […] 23-OCT-2013, Jim Donald, “The Anti-Anti Reactionary FAQ” (Series, Part 1, 2, 3, 4, Sluts, War and Democide, anti^4) […]

  2. […] anti anti anti anti reactionary faq « Jim’s Blog […]

  3. […] anti anti anti anti reactionary faq « Jim’s Blog […]

  4. Zach says:

    Said “The number one thing that stimulates people’s abilities is interacting with people of similar ability, and struggling with problems that are on the edge of what they are capable of achieving.”

    Agreed.

  5. fnn says:

    In your version of events, desegregation is a result of elite conspiracy and malice rather than elite empowerment of the little guy and elite compassion. What’s your evidence?

    Has anyone read E. Michael Jones’ book, The Slaughter of Cities?
    I haven’t, just wondering if it’s worth it.

  6. […] anti anti anti anti reactionary faq « Jim’s Blog […]

  7. spandrell says:

    God bless Jim’s patience.

    • Zach says:

      Indeed.

      Never saw him troll once. Yet gets repeatedly abused elsewhere. Obviously not emotionally invested. Perhaps only intellectually.

  8. Mark says:

    “But as integrationist judges pointed out in their rulings, “separate but equal” was separate but not truly equal…”

    This reminds me of an interview with grounds keeper from a city park during segregation. He was asked why the black bathroom always looked horrible. He said that both the white and the black bathrooms eventually needed to be redone. But it only took 6 months for the black bathroom to be trashed and 2 years for the white bathroom to be trashed. So they redid the both bathrooms every 2 years and thus the black bathroom always looks like crap.

    This was pretty much the rule in the separate but equal south. Blacks run facilities required more upkeep due to damage by their users if the property was run by blacks more money was stolen via corruption than at a white facility. Good examples of this can be found today by comparing black runs cities vs non black run cities.

    The problem with separate but equal was the whites in the south viewed it as separate but equal opportunity(and affirmative action for the black middle class) and progressives to this day insist on the insanity of equality of outcomes which is impossible between distinct groups.

    • Hidden Author says:

      You neo-segregationists say that far from hurting blacks, segregation provided affirmative action for the black middle class. But if segregation was so wonderful, why did so many blacks oppose it, *especially* middle-class blacks?

      • jim says:

        The overclass paid them to do so. Power and wealth.

        Which payments destroyed them.

        • Hidden Author says:

          If the white overclass felt magnanimous, perhaps they would abolish segregation in response to black complaints. But why would they have black stooges offer up complaints that did not already exist?

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Why do they still do this?

            Because it’s a good con.

            Progressives on one side say “group x [our enemies] are evil because they oppress group y [group with less future time orientation and usually lower IQ]”. Lo and behold, members of group y appear who echo these complaints. Why? Because they get money and power for doing so.

            Sounds a lot better than “rape and kill group x because they’re our enemies!”. People tend to be suspicious of a group that calls for their extermination. For some reason people don’t get so worked up when a group calls for another group to exterminate or expropriate them.

            It can be left as an exercise for the reader to come up with examples that fit this pattern.

            Here’s a fun example to start with – Osama Bin Laden called out the western world for causing global warming. Wonder where in the Koran he found that one?

          • jim says:

            To destroy their white enemies – the white middle class and white working class.

          • Hidden Author says:

            In your version of events, desegregation is a result of elite conspiracy and malice rather than elite empowerment of the little guy and elite compassion. What’s your evidence?

          • Steve Johnson says:

            The results.

          • Red says:

            Detroit.

      • spandrell says:

        Because they are envious and stupid. They thought with desegregation they would as rich and powerful as whitey. And the media encouraged them to think so.

    • peppermint says:

      Happens anywhere there’s a Starbucks next to a McDonalds. The McDonalds bathroom is disgusting, and the Starbucks bathroom is cleaner than most people’s houses. Why? Because the kind of people who go to Starbucks are willing to clean up after themselves to maintain their environment.

      Obviously, there need to be massive transfer payments from Starbucks customers to hire more staff to clean the McDonalds bathroom. Otherwise, how will the McDonalds customers learn to appreciate nice things and take care of them?

  9. […] anti anti anti anti reactionary faq « Jim’s Blog […]

  10. peppermint says:

    You’ve said repeatedly that science ended at some point in the last century. That misses two of the most important scientific revolutions to affect politics, perhaps ever; specifically, ethology and genetics. Advances in ethology, and certainly communation of ethology to the masses in popular nature documentaries, needed good video cameras.

    Ethology is what put the phrase ‘alpha male’ on everyone’s lips a decade ago. The day is not far off when primate ethology will be properly connected with sociology.

    My favorite red pill is to say that humans are mutant chimps and sanctimony is a way of enhancing one’s social status.

    The Enlightenment was about how humans should be modeled as frictionless spheres of reason, created by the Creator. There may be this list of differences between women and men and Blacks and Whites, but there are no essential differences, because reason is reason.

    When the Dark Enlightenment then replaces that model with mutant chimps and their ethology, it’s pretty horrifying.

    • Red says:

      There have been advances in ethology, but only after 80 years of lies from the ethologists. See Jane Goodall or hiding of the Russian silver fox experiments. I’m not sure what changed in the field, but the change happened about the same time people were allowed to talk about how bloody and murderous primitive people are again. What’s we’re learning is probably just data hidden for a long period.

      • peppermint says:

        It’s one thing to say that peaceful families of zebras wander the plains. It’s another to say that after seeing videos of stallions killing foals they didn’t sire from mares that just joined their harem.

      • jim says:

        It still unspeakable to mention the scientific equivalent of original sin: That we are descended from killer apes, that the innovation that led some of the ancestors of chimps and men on the path to humanity was killing and eating large animals, especially other primates, and making war.

        Everyone knows it is true, but mainstream cathedral scientists still cannot quite say it out loud. They will tell you that cooking supplied sufficient calories to support our large brains, without mentioning that cooking is primarily beneficial when applied to meat, and that raw meat is a lot more calorie dense than raw vegies.

      • Zach says:

        Actually (ahem) a lot more than that, but in general, I think Jim is accurate.

  11. Hidden Author says:

    The murder of half a million people in India was a consequence of British withdrawal not a cause. The independence movement did not plan on killing people; the Muslim nationalists did kill people.

    • jim says:

      The independence movement planned on India for some people, and not other people. If they were reluctant to think about how many people they would need to murder, that makes them more wicked, not less wicked.

      • Hidden Author says:

        So if America was a colony of Russia’s Putin Administration or China’s Communist Party and there was a movement to restore American independence, the freedom fighters would be to blame if alongside them, there was a rival independence movement for Aztlan? Or would the freedom fighters be in the right and their subsequent repression of the racially divisive Aztlan movement be a holy war for true justice?

        • jim says:

          Assume Putin’s Russia ruled North America, including Mexico and much of South America. The Aztlan movement intended to rule most of the Americas, except for what is now Canada and Alaska, and the freedom fighters intended to rule all the Americas.

          India was a hundred states before the British conquered it. Genuine independence would have restored it to being a hundred states again.

          They intended to kill people, intended to kill a lot of people.

          They intended empire, and were not nearly as good at it as the British, and were a lot more ruthless.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Why is your scenario where Putin rules whole continents more analogous to what happened in India than my scenario in which he rules just the United States and the conflict comes from the La Raza crowd coveted the American Southwest?

            • jim says:

              Because India is a hundred states with a hundred languages, a hundred cultures, a hundred religions, and hundred ways of life. India is an empire over many nations and states, not a nation state.

          • Hidden Author says:

            You assume that empire rather than partition causes bloodshed. But as I already explained–and this is a point that you did not bother to refute–partition causes border conflicts which create ethnic wars to adjust the people on the ground to the desired borders.

            • jim says:

              If Hindus are entitled to be independent of the British, are not Muslims entitled to be independent of Hindus?

              And are not the numerous different kinds of Hindus entitled to be independent of the particular Hindus that rule India?

              If claiming a moral right to break up from Britain, how to deny that right to the numerous people who have far greater cause to fear rule by the Congress party than rule by the British?

          • Hidden Author says:

            Britain didn’t have to give India independence; the Indians could have received representation in Parliament. But since the British did not see the Indians as British, they did not get representation in Parliament. Consequently the ruling democratic zeitgeist called for Indian independence so that the Indians could be governed by a Parliament they actually elected. With all concerned being represented in the Indian Parliament, what need would there be for further secession unless inclined to cause trouble for the hell of it?

            • jim says:

              I don’t think Sikh’s or Muslims were causing trouble for the hell of it. They were substantially worse off being ruled by Hindus than being ruled by Britons. The British did tolerate Sikh theocracy over their fellow Sikhs. The Hindus did not.

    • Red says:

      Of course they planned to kill people. If they’d wanted a peaceful end to british rule they would have allowed areas to divided into small states without conflict instead of forming a new Indian and Pakistani empires and trying to keep all the disparate groups together.

      • Hidden Author says:

        You guys say that self-determination leads to bloodshed in the Third World but why should it do so? Because self-determination is used to justify partition which leads to border wars and ethnic wars to justify borders. In fact, before an empire unites a region, such border and ethnic conflicts are endemic–they merely fall under “normal” war instead of the civil war that greets the collapse of an empire.

        But if India had seceded from Britain as a single unit, this wouldn’t be a problem. True there was a bigoted Hindutva movement (which not coincidently was more right-wing and reactionary) but the dominant Congress movement was for unity and against sectarianism. Gandhi even ended pogroms against Muslims by threatening to fast onto death. In general, the Muslim minority of India is far more thriving than the Hindu minority of Pakistan. (In fact, the Muslim minority of India even now outnumbers the entire population of most Muslim-majority nation-states.)

        • jim says:

          But if India had seceded from Britain as a single unit, this wouldn’t be a problem.

          A single unit ruled by who? Hindus had good reason to prefer rule by British to rule by Muslims, and Muslims had good reason to prefer rule by British to rule by Hindus. No one wanted independence if it meant rule by the other. Each intended to rule over the other in place of the British.

          A state always winds up with a state religion, but an empire’s state religion is somewhat tolerant of lesser, subordinate, inferior, religions.

          • Hidden Author says:

            India’s Congress Party was non-sectarian; Mahatma Gandhi was anti-sectarian though himself a pious Hindu.

            • jim says:

              India’s congress party recently engaged in the mass murder of Sikhs on the basis of their religion. It is non sectarian in the same way progressives are non sectarian, which is to say, violently sectarian, and all the more sectarian because the official religion is supposedly not a religion, but supposedly simply the truth. They for a time banned outright Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a party that expresses a slightly different version of Hinduism, and it still gets the treatment that “racist”, and “neo nazi” parties get in the west, though the theological differences appear minute, indeed incomprehensible, to people who are not from a Hindu background.

            • jim says:

              Your theory is that if progressives ruled everyone, there would be no conflict any more, and everything would be lovely. And if there was any conflict, it is the fault of those awful people who fail to agree with progressives on every point of a thousand points of doctrine.

              It is not working out too well in the Congo, where Tutsis somehow mysteriously remain superior, or in progressive speak “Priviliged”, despite ever firmer measures to remove their privilege, which measures amount to the genocide of Tutsi, including the mass murder of women by genitally impaling them with large objects.

          • Hidden Author says:

            The Sikhs rose up in rebellion against the state; in your ideal world, if the Sikhs rose up against the British Indian Empire (the official name of the Raj), they would be repressed as surely as if they had rose up against the Republic of India.

            • jim says:

              The Sikhs rose up in rebellion against the state;

              No they did not. I refer the murder of three thousand Sikhs in a state sponsored pogrom in 1984.

          • Hidden Author says:

            What do you define as “progressive”?

            I say that if a black works hard and smart, he should prosper like a white who works hard and smart but if he does not, then he should not. In other words, equality of opportunity not equality of outcome like true “progressives” advocate.

            But you advocate a system that is prejudiced in the true sense of the word–a black person will not receive an equal opportunity in your system because he or she would be relegated to a specially-designed sphere for second-class citizens instead of being given the chance to thrive or fail in the sphere of the true citizens. By refusing to give the black person a chance because he or she proves to either good or bad, you are pre-judging him–the original definition of prejudice.

            • jim says:

              I say that if a black works hard and smart, he should prosper like a white who works hard and smart but if he does not, then he should not. In other words, equality of opportunity not equality of outcome like true “progressives” advocate.

              Who disagrees? Is there any person in the neoreaction who disagrees with that.

              But when you talk about blacks being victims of a police state, you are denying that blacks that work hard and smart get ahead – although we have some pretty obvious measures that blacks very seldom work hard, that difference being larger and more obvious than the difference in working smart.

              Which denial in practice means that what whites get for working hard should taken from them by leftists (out come the bayonets) and should be transferred to blacks, with the leftists of course keeping a little bit for their trouble.

              a black person will not receive an equal opportunity in your system because he or she would be relegated to a specially-designed sphere for second-class citizens

              Under segregation, a black person faced unequal opportunity in his favor, since Jim Crow manufactured an educated black middle class and educated black ruling class to rule the blacks. Sort of like affirmative action, except that blacks got real middle class jobs, which made them better people, instead of fake middle class jobs, which being fake, being welfare, destroy their souls in the same way welfare does.

            • jim says:

              Everyone is in favor of equal opportunity. But how many cities are you planning to burn, how many women are you planning to have raped with large objects, in order to achieve equality of opportunity?

              That is serious question: Where do you stand on the current genocide in the Congo and the looming genocide in South Africa? Sure, you are against it, but are you prepared to tolerate privilege to avoid it, or are you going to support putting down privilege even it requires UN troops backing up Congo troops who are solving the problems of privilege by impaling Tutsi women with objects larger than themselves.

              If group X is generally more honest, peaceful, intelligent, cooperative, and hard working than group Y, then associating with members of group X rather than members of group Y is going to give you a lot of benefits regardless of your own personal merits, thus, X privilege. For example, the public bathroom is less likely to be smashed up if you are in group X, and group X can exclude group Y.

              Where do you stand on UN intervention in the Congo, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa? This is not a rhetorical question. Equality of opportunity has in practice resulted in the murder of millions. Are you willing to own those murders?

              To end group X privilege, you are going to have to impale women of group X with large objects. Are you willing to do so? If not willing to do so, why are you not complaining about the end of apartheid and UN intervention in the Congo?

            • jim says:

              equality of opportunity not equality of outcome

              I have never heard anyone say he is in favor of equality of opportunity, except he proposes some terrible, blatant,and brutal inequality of opportunity for the supposed purpose of rectifying some entirely invisible inequality of opportunity.

              We are all in favor of equality of opportunity. It is like motherhood and apple pie. But in the real world, people are not going to have equal opportunities and trying to give them equal opportunities involves disturbing amounts of violence. If your parents have books in their house, unequal opportunity. If you look like, or speak like, the sort of person who is apt to be honest and peaceful, unequal opportunity. If you are handsome or pretty, unequal opportunity. If you wind up hanging out with smart people, unequal opportunity.

          • Hidden Author says:

            If the Left wants to have that attitude, people should ask what standard has to be met for things to be fair and good once and for all instead of letting the Left promote incremental interferences that only give the Left fiefdoms for their agitation. But no one proposes to ask the Left just what this standard is.

          • Hidden Author says:

            You deliberately confuse equality of opportunity with equality of outcome. Obviously the two should not be conflated. Instead all sides of the debate should be honest about what is a fair standard in their opinion and then after democratically agreeing on one, give all citizens the chance to live under that standard and not use genocide, mob violence or even demagoguery to give anyone privileges beyond that standard.

            • jim says:

              If group X is more trustworthy, hardworking, knowledgeable, etc, than group Y, then better at cooperative activity than group Y. Then being a member of group X gives one substantially better opportunity than being a member of group Y. Even if one is a bad person, group norms bring one the advantage of other people’s good behavior, and pressure one to behave well. One has more opportunity to obtain the benefits of cooperation with other people.

              If one looks like the kind of person who is good at cooperating, having the same skin color or accent, then one will be able to cooperate with people who are good at cooperating. So your toilet is less likely to be trashed.

              To prevent members of group X from receiving these benefits, you have to smash group X, you have to apply war, tyranny, and state sponsored rape. You have to crush them.

              And even that does not work. They still keep right on being superior, even as their homes are burned down around their ears and their women are raped.

              This neoreactionary theory keeps being demonstrated by experiment.

          • Hidden Author says:

            I’ll give you an example of what I mean. After the US Civil War, the blacks were freed from slavery. But they were not equal to whites. Whites enjoyed an advantage in that they were heirs to colonists and pioneers that had homesteaded the territory that had become the United States of America. Furthermore, the monetary value of the land in Southern plantations was mostly due to the pairing of the land itself with black labor. So the Radical Republicans concluded that if they were serious about racial equality, the plantations would have to be broken up so that each freed slave could receive forty acres and a mule. With forty acres and a mule, even the abolitionist Frederick Douglas felt that the ex-slave would be adequately compensated since beyond that, any worthwhile prosperity could come to the black man only by him standing on his own two feet. That was what people considered equality in a more agricultural era.

            In our more urbanized and industrialized era, there is a disagreement about what the modern equivalent is. Conservatives push for deregulation so that blacks like other poor people can raise themselves up by starting small businesses. Liberals advocate social programs. But whether a politically active American citizen is liberal or conservative, whatever his or her race may be, the solution if even it comes, will emerge by him or her speaking in good faith about what a fair standard is. If people are disingenuous and grab more and more bit by bit instead of such honesty, racial tensions will NEVER go away.

            • jim says:

              We have already had forty acres and a mule, in that non asian minorities were the primary beneficiaries of million dollar loans for people with no income, no job, and no assets, and in the form of section eight housing.

              Did not do them any good, indeed did them a great deal of harm. If you give a black, or a native american, or an indio, assets, chances are he will get drunk, stay drunk, and when the money runs out, wake up with a blinding hangover, blood on his hands, and no assets.

          • Hidden Author says:

            A leftist who advocates such loans is a con-man not a true believer. Obviously loans are a bad idea if the recepient cannot pay them back. How could a loan be the modern-day forty acres and a mule when in the Radical Republican scheme the black’s previous experience of servitude was considered sufficient enough payback for his grant of property?

            And you’re wrong when you say such gifts are automatically wasted–the black middle class is largely descended from those who received forty acres and a mule instead of being denied it like the poor majority of blacks who were terrorized into being meek sharecroppers on white-owned farms by the KKK.

            • jim says:

              And you’re wrong when you say such gifts are automatically wasted–the black middle class is largely descended from those who received forty acres and a mule instead of being denied it like the poor majority of blacks who were terrorized into being meek sharecroppers on white-owned farms by the KKK

              The black middle class owns extraordinarily little compared to white middle class people on similar incomes. Indeed, extraordinarily little compared to white working class people with much smaller incomes. If their ancestors received forty acres and a mule, their ancestors promptly sold the forty acres and the mule, and drank the proceeds.

              The reason the lottery usually gives the winner an income rather than a straight cash payment, is that when blacks receive a large straight cash payment, they are apt to die from self indulgence.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Let’s see. The Sikhs after independence wanted their own province because Congress neutrality towards religions was not sufficient. When Congress did not meet all their theocratic demands, the Sikhs fought Hindus in many riots culminating in terrorists barricading themselves in their holiest sanctuary. When said sanctuary was destroyed, they assassinated the Indian Prime Minister; thereupon Congress incited Hindus to riot against them. Tell me, if India was a reactionary state, how would it treat a community that rioted, launched an insurgency and assassinated the Grand Emperor?

            • jim says:

              A reactionary empire would allow subordinate and inferior religions to have their own theocracy over their own people, requiring at most rather minimal expression of respect to the official, ruling, and superior religion. Congress was forcibly converting everyone to progressivism.

              So under a reactionary empire, the Sikhs would not have had their initial grievance.

              Supposing they were intransigent despite this, they would be crushed. Supposing that some Sikhs engaged in terrorism after being crushed, we would not launch a pogrom against them. The army would deliver precisely controlled violence, rather than turning a blind eye to krystalnacht and encouraging the mob to run amuck. The army, the police, or the secret police, would deliver highly directed violence, rather than standing back while houses got looted by the mob.

            • jim says:

              Let’s see. The Sikhs after independence wanted their own province because Congress neutrality towards religions was not sufficient.

              “Neutrality” was not neutral, effectively forbidding major and important aspects of Islam and Sikhism, while compelling a mixture of progressivism, hinduism, and progressive hinduism. Kind of like Obamacare requiring the Roman Catholic Church to fund sex change operations. Hey, that is neutral. The porn industry gets to fund sex change operations, and the Roman Catholic Church gets to fund sex change operations. What could be more neutral than that?

          • Hidden Author says:

            Which aspects of Sikhism were forbidden?

            Also allowing mobs to carry out pogroms against minorities is perfectly reactionary–that’s how feudal kings drove the Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe to Eastern Europe.

            • jim says:

              There is nothing reactionary about conceding power to the mob. You will notice I have been having a long debate with another poster accusing Czar Nicholas and King Louis of of being moonbat leftists terrified of fashionable opinion.

            • jim says:

              Which aspects of Sikhism were forbidden?

              Sikhism requires Sikhs to exercise police authority, that every adult male Sikh is something like a policeman. It also forbids democracy.

        • Hidden Author says:

          What you’re saying is that a reactionary state would have to treat the Sikhs as natural-born lords because they say they are. Of course, the Sikhs only adopted that attitude because they thought they could win. In America, they do just fine without such an arrogant posture.

          • jim says:

            Sikhs only have to be natural lords over sikhs. Worked OK for the British. British fought a bloody war with them, British won, Sikhs surrender, and agree to be soldiers for the British, and police for their region. The Sikhs loyally and bravely served the British. Hindus, however, don’t want Sikhs to be soldiers or police. They want Hindu police over Sikhs, and Sikhs to be disarmed civilians.

            Hindus have a quota maximum for the number of Sikhs allowed to be soldiers, much as Harvard used to have a rather low quota maximum for the number of Jews allowed to go to Harvard. British expected every Sikh to be a soldier, in accordance with the Sikh religion.

          • jim says:

            Sikhs only adopted that attitude because they thought they could win. In America, they do just fine without such an arrogant posture.

            A Sikh goes to America, he expects to do things the American way. A Hindu goes to the Punjab, he expects Sikhs to do things the Hindu way.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Actually even under the British, the Sikhs democratically elected the management of their temples. So you don’t know what you’re talking about.

  12. Hidden Author says:

    While parts of libertarianism lend themselves to reactionary attitudes, some aspects of libertarianism lend them to the Left; this is especially true regarding civil disobedience campaigns. In British India and the segregationist South, the authorities could not assert their authority without violating the Non-Aggression Principle while the civil disobedience campaigns could protest and by doing so peacefully, they illustrated who was violating the Non-Aggression Principle every time the authorities repressed them. Thus even if there was a media baron back then who was as reactionary as you are Jim, he could not counter the good press the civil disobedience campaigns won by staying on the right side of the Non-Aggression Principle via peaceful protest. After all, who is more of a vicious thug: a ten-year-old black girl chaining herself to a post or Bull Connor spraying her down with a fire hose?

    • jim says:

      Bull Connor had no problems with black girls chained to posts. If he had his way, would destroy the key.

      A ten year old black girl chaining herself to a post does not in itself get integrated schools. To bus, to integrate schools, progressives had to initiate violence and unhesitatingly did so.

      Similarly, making India independent required the murder of about half a million people, whereas keeping India subdued only required killing a few thousand.

      To apply the non violence principle to get progressive conclusions, you have to apply it in a highly selective manner. Some people turn out to be more equal than other people.

    • peppermint says:

      How do you know one side was a few lone wolf violent terrorists, normal, decent folk were on the fence, and the other side was peaceful protests?

      Because of the media filter.

      You don’t think of the White girls forced into integrated schools at bayonet point. You don’t think of the peaceful protests against integration – that never happened, it couldn’t happen, Vox Populi is Vox Dei, after all.

      You don’t think about Eldridge Cleaver raping so many women and then bragging about it in his book (“Brilliant and revealing” — New York Times Review of Books). The Black Power movement, while regrettable, was not affiliated with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. How do we know this? Because he said so:

      > And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

      > It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

      > Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself… the United States Negro is moving with a sense of urgency towards the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community… If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.

      Hear that? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would never make terrorist threats or play good cop / bad cop with Elijah Muhammad. We know that it’s not a terrorist threat because he says it isn’t a terrorist threat, and our understanding of Whig history informs us that it is, indeed, a fact of history.

      • Hidden Author says:

        But even a peaceful segregationist protest advocated state violence to impose repressive segregationist law onto the black population. Advocacy of repression/violence defeats the aura of sanctity created by being non-violent. (This is why “peaceful” Palestinian protestors only influence those who are already sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.)

        • jim says:

          Different laws for blacks and whites are no more “violence” than different laws for young and old.

          Observe that blacks and whites self segregate at the school cafetaria. Suppose that an administrator, to avoid ambiguity, placed a sign over the black section of the cafetaria, saying “black section”, which separate section received equal cafetaria service. That is not violence.

          Suppose state guards go into schools with fixed bayonets to remove the sign and make sure the students are mingled. That is violence.

          • Hidden Author says:

            But as integrationist judges pointed out in their rulings, “separate but equal” was separate but not truly equal…

            • jim says:

              They lied. Consider black and white drinking fountains. Same taps, same water.

              A black university’s degrees were viewed as inferior to a white university’s degrees not because of inferior teaching, but because they were conferring their degrees on people whose IQs were too low to get a degree at a white university.

              Integration resulted in white universities conferring degrees on low IQ blacks, affirmative action degrees. Integration left the problem unchanged, and arguably made the problem a good deal worse.

              Now, with integration, formerly black universities for the most part demand more and better performance from blacks than do traditionally white universities. Today, if you hire a black engineer from an Ivy, he is probably trained in hating whites and knows nothing of engineering, but if you hire a black from a formerly black university, they actually made him learn engineering and genuinely pass some genuine tests. Probably the standard to pass was lower than that of a white engineer from a formerly white university, but considerably higher than that of a black engineer from a formerly white university.

              So now education is integrated but unequal – not because of an evil plot by whites, but because the races genuinely are unequal.

        • peppermint says:

          Gee, you started by comparing a Black ten year old chaining herself to a fence, which is to say, child abuse by the people who would egg such a child on to do such a thing, to Bull Connor using firehoses, which are the most humane method of clearing the streets of rioters ever invented.

          Then you casually ignore the rapes and murders of the Black Power crowd, because they don’t fit into your Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. narrative, and say that the real violence was by the state.

          Well, yes it was.

          The state forced integration, through integrationist judges filing court orders and then the National Guard forcing little White girls into integrated schools at bayonet point.

          • Hidden Author says:

            You are demented. If one of the biggest problem in a black girl’s life is being a second-class citizen, using her in a protest against such an imposition serves to empower her.

            And you haven’t provided any evidence that American soldiers *literally* prodded schoolgirls with bayonets.

            • jim says:

              Since the abolition of slavery, there has never been one black person for whom the biggest problem was being a second class citizen.

              Not even Emmet Till.

          • Hidden Author says:

            There is a reason why I insist that you guys provide evidence that the schoolgirls were *literally* prodded by the soldiers’ bayonets.

            Think about it: If a black person compared a higher interest rate for black people–as racist and as horrible to his or her sensibilities as it may be–to rape, you’d think that such a comparison trivialized rape. Likewise when you conflate American soldiers using bayonets to *defend* black schoolgirls with using bayonets to *attack* white schoolgirls, you trivialize the seriousness of assaulting people with a deadly weapon.

            • jim says:

              But black schoolgirls don’t particularly want to mix with white schoolgirls. So, bayonets not needed to defend black schoolgirls. Imposing desegregation is not a matter of protecting blacks from coercion, but of coercing both whites and blacks, especially whites.

              Your argument is that this coercion involved minimal violence. Maybe. I cannot prove otherwise, because we have an internal iron curtain in place. But I can prove that a very similar project in the Congo involves a great deal more than very minimal violence.

              The Ceylonese civil war was touched of by an educational integration (busing) program, that wound up employing state sponsored rape, mass murder, book burnings, etc. The government searched from house to house to find signs of children being homeschooled, and tended to wind up torching the houses and murdering the heads of households.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Are you kidding, Jim? The pro-segregation white student protectors spat upon and assaulted the incoming black students. THAT is why Eisenhower sent in the National Guard. The National Guard no longer has soldiers in schools because there are no longer segregationist white protestors that spit on and assault black students.

            • jim says:

              I heard the same about the tea party. It was not true of the tea party.

              If there are no longer guards with fixed bayonets in our schools it is because we have given up on busing, and given up trying to integrate the school cafeteria, and shutdown the playground for lack of integration. The withdrawal of the bayonets occurred simultaneously with a massive reduction in the ambitions for integration, therefore the bayonets were needed for those ambitions.

              Needed for those ambitions, not needed to protect blacks from being spat on. Therefore, needed to threaten white schoolgirls. In Ceylon, needed to actually impale Tamil schoolgirls.

              There has been a massive retreat from school integration, and that retreat happened because the level of violence needed to impose that level of integration was unbearable and intolerable.

          • Hidden Author says:

            The Ceylonese civil war? That didn’t happen in America during desegregation so how is that an applicable example?

            • jim says:

              Ceylon shows how much violence is apt to be needed to impose equality of opportunity and educational integration. If they did not need to shove the bayonets all the way into white schoolgirls in the US, they did need to shove them all the way into Tamil schoolgirls in Ceylon.

              And the war on the Congo is happening under American sponsorship, via the UN, so if you disown the imposition of social justice in Ceylon, where do you stand on the imposition of social justice in the Congo?

          • peppermint says:

            http://i.imgur.com/80FBFXO.jpg

            See this picture?

            In it, soldiers need to defend girls going to integrated schools from angry, racist mobs who want to attack them. Notice how the soldiers need to have their bayonets near the girls in case someone from the mob jumps out and needs to be stabbed quickly.

            …really.

            From poking girls with bayonets to convincing them to tie themselves up. Does torturing little girls give you a boner or something, you sick fuck?

            I’m sure it’s all for the greater good, isn’t it. Like in those Jewish Holocaust pornos where in the end the concentration came gets liberated. Did I mention that you’re a sick fuck?

            How about we leave girls out of politics.

            In fact, how about we leave sick fucks like you out of politics too.

            Leave politics to rational adults who are capable of understanding nuances like human dignity *and* race realism, and are capable of admitting when they get something wrong and making it right.

      • Hidden Author says:

        Another thing: You people blame Martin Luther King, Jr. for not being as saintly as the media portrays him but if you and your people were subject to the repression of a bigoted police state, would you act as he did? Or would you join the more violent types like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam?

        • jim says:

          We have not had a “bigoted police state” for a very long time, if we ever had one, which I much doubt. We have had black privilege for a very long time. If there had been a bigoted police state, they would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.

      • Hidden Author says:

        Yet another thing: Just because the National Guardsmen at Southern schools had bayonets on their rifles, it doesn’t mean that the bayonets were used to prod White girls. The bayonets were used to protect incoming black students from racist abuse.

        • jim says:

          The bayonets were employed to violate freedom of association.

          Applying your logic, if a burglar enters someone’s occupied house, gets into an argument with the owner, and shoots the owner, he was using his gun to prevent abuse.

          • Hidden Author says:

            So you don’t like the presence of National Guard bayonets in schools! But there is still a difference between unpleasantness and using a sharp instrument to prod schoolgirls!

            • jim says:

              Let us visualize what happens when an administrator puts up that sign, and men with fixed bayonets go in to remove the sign. It is immediately obvious that everyone continues to obey the now invisible sign. Which problem must be fixed. So the men with fixed bayonets do wind up prodding schoolgirls.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Also if black taxpayers are paying for this really wonderful school, shouldn’t their children be admitted, if that is what the black taxpayers want?

            • jim says:

              Black taxpayers do not pay for schooling. Only white taxpayers.

              Schools are funded based on property tax. Blacks do not save, have short time preference, therefore have very little property. While there is substantial overlap between between high IQ blacks and low IQ whites, there is very little overlap in time preference, hence very little overlap in property ownership. Whites subsidize black education, and have always done so.

          • Hidden Author says:

            How could blacks own property if the land was taken from Indians, given to whites and rendered valuable by their slave labor? That’s why the Radical Republicans advocated that each freed slave receive forty acres and a mule.

            Now of course many blacks receive welfare but that covers necessities. Why do you think crackheads on welfare steal to pay for their habit if welfare benefits give such a generous payout?

            • jim says:

              How could blacks own property if the land was taken from Indians, given to whites a

              Nothing stopping them from buying a house the way I did. Getting a job.

              You let slip your belief in black privilege. That blacks are entitled to live without working, while whites have a duty to support themselves, their wives, their children, blacks, and numerous black spawn.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Jim, the assertion that American soldiers prodded schoolgirls with bayonets demands far more conclusive evidence than the assertion that you had pizza for lunch today.

            • jim says:

              Observe the lunch room at a typical american school. Clearly it takes a lot more violence to desegegate than to segregate.

              Did soldiers actually prod US schoolgirls? There were soldiers with bayonets desegregating. That is what desegregation takes.

          • Hidden Author says:

            I’m not saying black people necessarily deserve reparations; what I’m saying is that it’s not shocking that whites have more wealth than blacks when they have a head start. The question is: for those who run education & law, what allows blacks to catch up to those with a head start (poor whites being an exception)? Do you give official reparations? Social programs? Or the simple provision of justice?

            Perhaps blacks will never catch up, finding themselves unequal to the task. But before we say that the science is conclusive, let’s find out the actual physical and genetic structure of the brain. And who knows–perhaps if we find a definite inequality, we will also find the means to fix it!

          • Hidden Author says:

            When I say, poor whites being the exception I do not deny that they deserve fairness and justice like any other citizen. I’m merely pointing that while many whites received material benefits from white supremacy–a head start, if you will–this was not true for all whites.

            • jim says:

              Yes, but many whites, such a myself, got no head start. I did not inherit any land stolen from the Indians, yet nonetheless have hundreds of times the assets of the typical middle class black.

          • Hidden Author says:

            If you’re so innovative, then perhaps you should run the educational system. What, in your opinion, fosters a youth’s natural-born talents?

            • jim says:

              The number one thing that stimulates people’s abilities is interacting with people of similar ability, and struggling with problems that are on the edge of what they are capable of achieving.

              So, the number one thing we can do to educate people is to stream them according to IQ, willingness to work, honor, and cooperative propensities, and give them stuff that is tough for their level of ability.

              For this streaming, we should use tests that measure IQ (the LSAT) and tests that measure achievement (the SAT)

              In theory this is what we have been doing since 1870, but they were profoundly embarrassed to find that their tests tended to select white males from affluent families, and have been trying to “fix” this problem ever since.

              We should not try to “fix” this problem, but, on the contrary, should use all available indicators that correlate with ability, willingness to work hard and postpone gratification, including skin color and parental performance, parental performance generally being a more reliable indicator than test results. Thus someone with under performing parents should be streamed into a lower group than someone with equal test scores, but high performing parents, and someone with lighter skin color should be streamed into a higher group than someone with equal test scores, but darker skin color.

              We should use all available indicators in proportion to their predictive power to stream people into their appropriate educational group.

              For criminality, the reverse procedure. We should use all available indicators to keep dangerous people away from peaceful people, but the exclusion should be minimally punitive for indicators other than actual bad conduct. For actual bad conduct, apply Singaporean methods. Prison should be punitive, rather than a welfare state that relieves those who don’t like to make decisions from the burden of making decisions.

              The major indicator of criminality, other than actual criminality, is fatherlessness. I suspect that if we control for fatherlessness, blackness is a relatively weak indicator. The fatherless should be excluded, though if they stay out of trouble and get favorable reviews from their employer, they should then be allowed, eventually, cautiously, back into civilized society.

  13. Kolya says:

    A reference doesn’t have to be Harvard official truth. There are piles of books arguing that the Tsarist regime was overthrown by a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy, that support the Confederate cause in the civil war or number of other anti-Cathedral points of view.

    Your *eccentric* theory about the cause of the Russian Revolution seems to never in the last 100 years have occurred to anyone else. Did the Black Hundreds complain at the time that the Tsar’s reforms were subsidizing the revolutionary intelligentsia? Did any of the White Russian exiles in Berlin or Paris in the 1930s say this?

    “If there were few jobs for leftists compared to the modern west, there were more jobs than the day before, and the promise of even more jobs the day after.”

    Did you look at the table in the article referenced in my previous comment? Reference please?

    You seem to think the civil service under the Romanovs was like a Tsarist version of HUD, stuffed with lefty bureaucrats who spent their spare time and cash making immanentizing the eschaton.

    This is a fact free fantasy.

    • jim says:

      Your *eccentric* theory about the cause of the Russian Revolution seems to never in the last 100 years have occurred to anyone else. Did the Black Hundreds complain at the time that the Tsar’s reforms were subsidizing the revolutionary intelligentsia? Did any of the White Russian exiles in Berlin or Paris in the 1930s say this?

      It is impossible to find a single complaint that the English enclosures were a distribution of land from the Lord to the peasants, and it is equally impossible to find a single complaint that collective ownership in Russia was a dangerously bad idea. This is evidence of pathological leftism, of history being filtered through left wing eyes, not evidence that collective ownership in Russia was sane, nor evidence that the English enclosures were a distribution of land from the poor to rich.

      Your argument presupposes that white russian exiles were right wing, rather than not quite left enough to keep up with the ever changing requirements of political correctness. Similarly, you will find today’s reactionaries arguing for firmer measures against Lenin and the like, but you will not find anyone so horribly ultra extreme right wing in Tzarist Russia to argue for firmer measures against Lenin and the like. I can similarly provide no citations that Lenin’s penalties were a slap on the wrist. But a spot of hunting, fishing, and horseback riding in small town Siberia is not a very effective measure to crush the mob.

      The fact that the enclosures are maniacally demonized, while Tzar Alexander the Liberator walks on water and can do no wrong is evidence for my theory, and also a demonstration that there can never be any citations.

      The English enclosures gave land to the peasants, and Alexander the Liberator gave land to the peasants. Why is one demonized, and the other beatified?

      Because the enclosures gave land to the peasants, while Tzar Alexander the liberator gave land not to the peasants, but to those in charge of beatification.

      Similarly, it seems impossible to find a single complaint that the English enclosures were a distribution of the Lord’s land to poor farmers, and there is a gigantic pile of complaints that they were a horrid ultra extreme ultra ultra super ultra super duper extreme right wing dispossession of the poor.

      You are objecting not to the facts, but that the meaning I give the facts is non standard, the implications I draw from the facts. Well of course it is non standard. Anything that deviates from Harvard is non standard.

      But the facts on the English enclosures are the initial condition before an enclosure was that access to the commons was by the Lord’s permission, and subject to his rules Enclosure required a supermajority vote, four fifths vote, of those affected, in which the Lord, who previously had the entire say, had the same vote as any one filthy peasant, and the outcome of the enclosure was that each peasant came to own outright a chunk of the land that formerly he had needed the Lord’s permission to access.

      It is a little known fact, for which I can provide a citation, the relevant law, that distribution was agreed to by a supermajority of those peasants supposedly victimized by it. But I cannot provide a single solitary citation that they were the beneficiaries, and the lord the loser, not one solitary citation, not a one, whereas you can find a billion citations that the English enclosures cruelly crushed the peasantry under the iron heel of the bloated landlord class.

      Yet I cannot find a single citation saying this was a distribution of land to the peasants, just as I cannot find a single citation saying that a spot of hunting and fishing was an insufficiently severe punishment for Lenin.

      What the left intellectuals objected to about the English enclosures is that the English enclosures failed to create collectivism, whereas Tsar Alexander the liberator did create collectivism, so walks on water and can do no wrong.

      Collectivism, observed in practice, always means that the peasants get screwed by the intellectuals. Which is why the intellectuals hate the enclosures with a hatred hotter than ten thousand suns, and love Tsar Alexander the liberator.

    • jim says:

      Your *eccentric* theory about the cause of the Russian Revolution seems to never in the last 100 years have occurred to anyone else.

      It never in a hundred years occurred to anyone that collective ownership by the peasants was unlikely to work, and was not in fact working?

      Despite the fact that they kept reinventing the mechanisms whereby collective decisions were made? Presumably if you need to regularly re-invent collective decision making, it is because collective decision making is not in fact working.

      This is pretty similar to the fact that it never in a hundred years occurred to anyone that the English enclosures were a distribution of land from the lord to the poor, though if you look at the enclosure law it quite obviously was.

      You are arguing from authority, from Cathedral authority.

      Reality is that collective ownership by the peasants was unworkable, socially disruptive, and a cause of revolution. If no one was prepared to say so, it was that no one dared be to the right of the Tzars, and the Tzars were far out raving moonbat left and getting lefter.

      And if the Tzars were far out raving moonbat left and getting lefter, then of course I cannot find a citation to say so.

      What I can find is that their policies were to the left of objective sanity – for example collectivizing the peasants, and being nice to Lenin and Stalin.

      • Alrenous says:

        seems to never in the last 100 years have occurred to anyone else.

        I’m the smartest thinker in 100 years? Thanks! Yes, yes I am.

        Oh wait was that supposed to be an insult?

      • B says:

        All this stuff (the nature of Russian intelligentzia, the Revolution being caused by the moral weakness and unwillingness to kick ass of the Russian upper classes and the subsequent shenanigans) was discussed in some detail by Ivan Solonevich, who was a real reactionary character and great analyst (his analysis improved once he went through the collapse of the Third Reich.) Solonevich is discussed here: http://archive.thetablet.co.uk/article/12th-february-1938/15/a-russian-view-of-the-soviet-russia-in-chains-by-i

        His books are widely available online in the original Russian, but the only English translation I could find was here: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/22236185?q&versionId=26834283

        In sum, Jim has it exactly right: the Tzars were weak towards the end, and coddled the intelligenciya, which was an outgrowth of the lower echelons of the bureaucracy (the “chinovniki,”) an exact equivalent of today’s American bureaucracy, paid little, knowing less, doing still less, and very dissatisfied.

        Incidentally, many of the radical revolutionaries were in bed with the Okhrana secret service, its paid agent provocateurs or informants something along those lines. Priest Gapon and Yevno Azef, for instance. Solzhenitzyn suspected that Stalin had been as well. We see much the same thing today with the Islamist radicals; not only are the ones in Egypt, Libya and Syria in bed with US intelligence, but every time some Somali retard is arrested for a plot to blow something up in the US, it turns out that the FBI had recruited him, explained the true nature of Islam to him over months or years, suggested that the best way to serve Islam would be to blow something up, then gave him the “explosives” to do so. Hmmm….

        • jim says:

          the Tzars were weak towards the end, and coddled the intelligenciya, which was an outgrowth of the lower echelons of the bureaucracy (the “chinovniki,”) an exact equivalent of today’s American bureaucracy, paid little, knowing less, doing still less, and very dissatisfied.

          Jobs for the left.

          We see much the same thing today with the Islamist radicals; not only are the ones in Egypt, Libya and Syria in bed with US intelligence, but every time some Somali retard is arrested for a plot to blow something up in the US, it turns out that the FBI had recruited him, explained the true nature of Islam to him over months or years, suggested that the best way to serve Islam would be to blow something up, then gave him the “explosives” to do so. Hmmm….

          Nonetheless there are real Muslims in the US today, and there were real commies in Czarist Russia, despite the fact that it was hard to tell whether the secret police had infiltrated the commies, or the commies had infiltrated the secret police.

          For examples of real, non FBI sponsored Muslims in the US today, consider John Allen Muhammad, Lee Boyd Malvo, Dzhokhar, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Major Hasan.

          • B says:

            It’s not so much that these were jobs for the left. Rather, by the very nature of these jobs, i.e., low-paying sinecures with a mild degree of prestige attached, something like social work, those holding them were transformed into leftists. Then you had the fact that the entire Russian philosophical academical apparatus was based around a prestige competition where the contenders would regurgitate half-digested fashionable German and French theories, which theories were progressive.

            All the guys you listed, interestingly, were either government dependents or employees for extended periods of time (except for Malvo, who was basically Muhammad’s bitch.) I am, obviously, not suggesting that some nefarious conspiracy in the US govt recruited and trained fat, lumpy-headed retard Hasan to shoot up its own soldiers in a false flag operation. Rather, just pointing out how in the US revolution and governmental employment/dependency often go together.

    • jim says:

      This is a fact free fantasy.

      I don’t think we disagree about what the Tzar actually did. I think we disagree whether what he did was frothing at the mouth rabid moonbat leftism, or horrid evil extreme right rightism.

      Compared with what the English did about serfdom, which is to say, compared to what worked, it was frothing at the mouth rabid moonbat leftism.

      • Kolya says:

        I don’t know about English enclosure system and I’m only going to discuss Russian history, which I do know something about.

        Re Khodynka, for *hundreds and hundreds* of years the Tsars had been playing ‘little father tsar’ and promoting the idea that the tsar and his people were bound to each other by mystic ties of love. Rulers tend to find that having your subjects think that you care for them is very useful.

        The Obshchina was an inefficient and bad system, sure. But it too had been around for *hundreds* of years. It wasn’t just a crazy “left” idea which was pushed only by leftists and helped the Bolsheviks take power in a Road to Socialism way. Also, it was largely self-governing, it wasn’t a big money pot for your mythical hordes of leftist bureaucrats.

        The important, direct causes of the Tsarist regime’s collapse were: food shortages caused by the economic and infrastructural strain of WWI, the Tsar being blamed personally for military defeats (he personally commanded the armies), popular hatred for the German Tsaritsa who governed incompetently in Nicholas’ absence. Gee, what was I saying about how rulers find their subjects’ affection useful?

        “white russian exiles were right wing, rather than not quite left enough to keep up with the ever changing requirements of political correctness.”

        “no one dared be to the right of the Tzars, and the Tzars were far out raving moonbat left and getting lefter.”

        Dude, you’re the one who’s far out crazy. You know NOTHING about Tsarist Russia. You’re just shoehorning reality into how neoreactionary theory tells you it should have been.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Pobedonostsev

        “Pobedonostsev held the view that human nature is sinful, rejecting the ideals of freedom and independence as “dangerous delusions of nihilistic youth.”
        In his “Reflections of a Russian Statesman” (1896),[4] he promoted autocracy and condemned elections, representation and democracy, the jury system, the press, free education, charities, and social reforms.”

        • Kolya says:

          “you are arguing from authority, from cathedral authority.”

          I just want you to support your wild talk about the tsar “funding his enemies” with some actual evidence to support your wild talk.

          Even an anecdote will do at this point! A completely hypothetical example – If you could show me, say, a passage from a book written by some German socialist touring Russia in 1910:

          “Arrived at small town of X. Made the acquaintance of a Herr Smirnov, a functionary in the local zemstvo administration. He introduced me to his colleagues, all delightful gentlemen and most progressive! Smirnov assured me that although higher authorities are regrettably hidebound and reactionary, he and the many progressive younger bureaucrats who think like him are able to have the most positive and liberal influence on the government.” 

          then I’d take your ideas more seriously. But you don’t have such evidence, because you pulled the whole theory out of your behind.

          • jim says:

            I just want you to support your wild talk about the tsar “funding his enemies” with some actual evidence to support your wild talk.

            Even an anecdote will do at this point!

            Spandrell already gave an anecdote about the Czar being left wing, or terrified of left wing opinion.

            Stolypin tells us that the Mir and the Obshchina produced leftism. But his program for dismantling them was gradualistic, a compromise on a compromise on a compromise until there was almost nothing left. They should have been shut at once, and anyone who resisted, shot. The left wanted them, the right did not want them. Many peasants found that they were still bound to the land, were still serfs: According to Wikipedia:

            Due to the community’s ownership of the land, as opposed to the individual’s, an individual peasant could not sell their portion of land in order to work in a factory in the city. A peasant was required to pay off long term loans received by the government

            This is what I referred to when I said that the serfs were not freed, but rather the land and the serfs were taken from lords and given to leftists.

            A large part of the Stolypin reforms was the introduction of Agricultural cooperatives, managed, of course, by the state, which is to say, managed by leftists busily manufacturing new socialist man at gunpoint, the latest in an endless series of ad hoc measures trying to make collectivism work.

            The economic program was state capitalism State capitalism is jobs for the boys, jobs for the left. The more so when it is supposedly done to benefit the proletariat and the peasants.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Socialist historians are correct when they say that capitalist land norms are imposed on the peasantry rather than voluntarily accepted. But capitalist historians are also correct when they say that socialist land norms are imposed on the peasantry rather than voluntarily accepted.

            What peasants have traditionally built for themselves when they had the opportunity to institute their own land laws was as follows:

            1. Land was allodial rather held in fee. In other words, a peasant owned his land because his clan said so instead of because the state said so.
            2. Just as the state’s authority was expressed through property taxes and eminent domain so the authority of the clan was expressed by distributing the land to the men of the eldest generation to be worked by their sons and grandsons and then periodically redistributing it so each man of the eldest generation had his share of the land in proportion to the size of his household.

            This is generally how land was held by peasants in the absence of the state and such land tenure was even practiced by hunter-gatherers when the land was fruitful enough for them to be sedentary.

            But in general, the peasants *were* ruled by the state which imposed *its* land law favoring aristocrats and causing differentiation even among the peasants by making their landholdings perpetual and by state fiat instead of periodic and by clan fiat i.e. fee simple ownership. Besides making the peasants unequal even among themselves, such land laws had a way of making themselves permanent–since private landholdings were even more private in fee simple form, they could be given to sons-in-law as a dowry breaking up any possibility of the village being the united domain of one clan and therefore manageable by the clans within the state’s domain or even former domain.

            • jim says:

              2. Just as the state’s authority was expressed through property taxes and eminent domain so the authority of the clan was expressed by distributing the land to the men of the eldest generation to be worked by their sons and grandsons and then periodically redistributing it so each man of the eldest generation had his share of the land in proportion to the size of his household.

              This is a utopian left account of primitive tribal systems. I don’t believe it.

              The best known primitive system of agricultural land ownership is that of the new stone age people of New Guinea, which the kiaps interpreted as a mixture of private and corporate ownership, with the corporation not always corresponding exactly to the clan, both in that the corporation was apt to be highly undemocratic, and in that there were multiple corporations in the clan. What you are describing is the New Guinean system with no private ownership, corporate ownership by the clan, and the corporation effortlessly represents the will of the people, rather than the will of the chief or the will of a big man.

              Private ownership was unequal, in that some owned more than others, and corporate ownership was unequal, in that some had a lot more power over the group than others. Thus the kiaps called this form of land ownership corporate, rather than communal.

              Collective decision making is hard problem. We moderns are not very good at it, and primitives were a good deal worse at it than we are.

              When anthropologists attribute to primitive people remarkable success at collective decision making, they are selling commie lies.

              The system described by the kiaps is an irregular mixture of aristocratic feudalism, small scale sole proprietor capitalism, and large scale corporate capitalism. (well, large for a primitive society, which is not very large at all)

          • Hidden Author says:

            I don’t see why the Left would have an ideological interest in such an account. In classic (pre-1980s) socialism, a board of elders–democratically elected in Social Democracy, self-appointed in Bolshevism–holds everything as a single trust on behalf of everyone. By contrast, the way I described it, the land is operated on by individual households, even if the clan retained an ultimate communal ownership. This individualized operation is what Marx overlooked in his praise of the Russian mir. After the peasants instituted this system when Lenin loosened the hold of the Communist Party in the New Economic Program, Lenin’s successors were enraged that peasant households individually operated the communal lands of their villages. Thereupon, the struggle for supremacy among them featured a debate on what to do next. Stalin triumphed so he instituted his program of starving the peasants so that the communal lands of the villages were also communally operated. So while the land law I described goes against capitalist ideals, it also goes against socialist ideals hence socialists starving peasants into submission.

            • jim says:

              I don’t see why the Left would have an ideological interest in such an account.

              That is because you see raving homicidal frothing at the mouth radical leftist moonbattery as normal and mainstream, which it is, in the sense that yesterdays raving homicidal frothing at the mouth radical leftist moonbattery is today’s normal and mainstream, and today’s raving homicidal frothing at the mouth radical leftist moonbattery will be tomorrows mainstream.

        • jim says:

          The Obshchina was an inefficient and bad system, sure. But it too had been around for *hundreds* of years. It wasn’t just a crazy “left” idea which was pushed only by leftists and helped the Bolsheviks take power in a Road to Socialism way. Also, it was largely self-governing, it wasn’t a big money pot for your mythical hordes of leftist bureaucrats.

          The commons works fine when the Lord owns the land and owns the peasants, which was the system before Alexander’s moonbat leftist reform.

          When the peasants own the land in common, and the lord does not own the peasants, that is a completely different system, a radically and fundamentally different system, which requires new socialist man to operate, and lo and behold, a bunch of highly expert experts to create new socialist man.

          And it was not largely self governing, since the state and the intellectuals were continually meddling to fix it.

        • Zach says:

          Many claim to know American history, but do not.

    • SPPH says:

      According to Svetozar Tonjoroff, journalist, Harvard class of 1898, writing in The Unitarian Register, Czar Nicholas II was quite the reformer against the reactionary bureaucracy.

      1) Curbed the activities of the Holy Synod
      2) Sacked the Education Minister after Student Riots
      3) Private audiences with commoners to discuss their grievances

      http://books.google.com/books?id=MPQfAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA920&dq=tsar+nicholas+bureaucracy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YD6jUtjwEvPKsQS6hoJQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=tsar%20nicholas%20bureaucracy&f=false

  14. Kolya says:

    Tsar Alexander II “gave the serfs and the lord’s land to the revolutionary left wing intellectual class.”

    This is not my understanding of the 1861 reforms. Can you give me a reference please?

    “Politically, the Tsars were encouraging and funding the state left, the intellectuals, people who had government careers in leftism.”

    Once again, can you give me some references?

    Actually, the Tsarist bureaucracy was quite small, relative to population.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarist_bureaucracy

    • jim says:

      A reference? You mean Harvard official truth? Of course I cannot give you a reference.

      Tzar Alexander the liberator created institutions to manage the collectively owned land, and the peasants collectively bound to that collectively owned land, collectively owned by the collective land that they supposedly owned, which institutions were not staffed by peasants, but by politicians, who were in large part members of the intelligentsia. Rearranging these institutions, re-rearranging them, and re-re-rearranging them was a non stop political left wing intellectual drama all the way from Alexander the liberator to Stalin. Left intellectuals were front and center in all these dramas.

      • Hidden Author says:

        This theory you have about the Left suggests that Leftists are paycheck activists rather than true idealists. Was this true of yourself when you were a Leftist?

        • jim says:

          If one is a leftist, one wants power over other people. One intends to use that power for good, but is cheerfully a little vague on the details of how that power might be used to do good.

          • Hidden Author says:

            What does a leftist desiring or not desiring power have to do with whether they are motivated by money or idealism?

            • jim says:

              Power, money, what is the difference? Power means that leftists get jobs administering leftism and forcing people to be leftist.

              Czar Alexander the liberator’s reforms required new socialist man, which required a large supply of well paid leftist intellectuals to stand over the peasants to force them to become new socialist man. Standing over them was fun, and better than working in the fields, and also paid better.

              Meanwhile, solving the problem of Tutsi privilege in the Congo means leftists protected by UN troops get to rape and sexually mutilate Tutsi women.

            • jim says:

              They are mighty clear about the power, but rather vague about how that power will give effect to their ideals.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Actually your theory about the growth of leftism makes sense. It explains why leftists can be blockheads about the failures of their ideology. It is actually similar to how piety within a religion promotes the formation of priestly offices to administer the religion whose pay encourages more believers to follow their piety into priestly offices. There too a believer who is paid off by receiving a priestly office will likely (though not always) overlook the failings of his or her religion’s theology.

          • Hidden Author says:

            Another parallel to the priestly offices found within a religion is that the priests proselytize the non-affiliated into being pious within the religion’s framework which involves more people in the above-mentioned feedback loop of piety-priestly offices-pay-additional priests.

    • jim says:

      Tsar Alexander the liberator created a huge number of comfortable administrative jobs for lefties by creating collectively owned land, and every following measure created more such jobs. If there were few jobs for leftists compared to the modern west, there were more jobs than the day before, and the promise of even more jobs the day after.

      If Tzar Nicholas had defunded the left by redistributing collectively owned land to poor farmers, as in the English enclosures, that would have quelled the trouble, and if he had defunded the left by returning collectively owned land to the lord, that would have quelled the trouble.

  15. Aaron says:

    Maybe you just call these A4, A5, etc.

  16. VXXC says:

    Predictable, so planned for. This means Single Payer got closer..everyone on Medicare whether they like it or not. And “The Young Invincibles” – who aren’t – will pay anyway. Obamacare wasn’t supposed to provide Insurance, it is supposed to destroy Private Insurance so that Da Peeple call out for Universal Coverage. No, it’s not Free. And the deferments merely mean Private Insurance is destroyed in Detail [piecemeal].

    When a Commander knows the enemy wishes to destroy his Army as the enemy’s Chief and oft stated aim, it takes a particularily incompetent Commander to present it in Detail. For that purpose we have the Republicans. History’s Matchless Incompetents.

    http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/192132-young-invincibles-spurn-enrollment

    • jim says:

      It is possible, but smooth and continuous change provides a better fit to the observed inequality of humans.

      If the difference between one kind of human and another, and the difference between humans and chimps, is merely a matter of degree, the results of smooth, continuous and gradual change, then if chimps need to be kept on leashes …

  17. VXXC says:

    “the proposal to abolish the taille.” – IS LEFT WING?

    Cutting Taxes and Heads off Tax collectors is a WIN for the French Revolution. The French Revolution wasn’t all bad. Just mostly.

    More Taxes = More State = More Left.

    It’s not just the Left is the State and the State is the Left. It will be 1000 years of non-leftist government before this is not the case. This is one of my chief objections to monarchy or dictatorship. Of course they’ll be leftist.

    The Founders if they could see The Left is the State and the State is the Left would quite agree. That’s why they kept it weaker as it went up, the one exception being National Defense. They kept that weak too with a small and negilible standing military. The world didn’t let us keep it that way.

    And no man should have free labor extorted from him by anyone.

    As to any idea that in America, in and the Saxon system of local self defense bands of armed men [fyrds] going back 1500 years .. and it kept moving towards the men arming so as to have a say in their fate….the idea that in America 2013 you’re going to have a King or Nobility extorting labor because “they’re entitled” is horribly mistaken. By mistaken I mean the consequences of looking at such men and uttering the entitlement would be horrible consequences.

    If NR/DEC intellectuals were the Norman Vikings [who never quite had them at their utter mercy either, indeed the Kings used the fyrds against the nobles, and established the King’s Law and the local gentry to do so]..the idea that right wing intellectuals are going to master Americans of 2013 is ridiculous and horrible.

    If you had THAT in you, you wouldn’t be getting mastered by queers, barren women, and thug eggplants.

    Who are your masters, and ye chafe.

    What makes you think most men don’t chafe under a Master?

    NO TAILLE.

    NO MASTERS.

    Don’t even think about it.

    • jim says:

      Abolishing the taille, if not replaced by other taxes, was utopian, since French taxes were already very low. Abolishing the taille, if replaced by other taxes – well, that was what the Revolution did.

  18. VXXC says:

    O/T – Jim you called it on Francis. But what’s interesting is the reaction against him has begun.

    http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/12/04/pope-francis-is-catholic-churchs-obama-god-help-us/

    BTW – I called it as Pope Social Justice I during the conclave.

    This guy could be both Torquemada and a mute, they’d put social justice in his mouth.

    • jim says:

      Heh!

      “My fellow Catholics should be suspicious when bastions of anti-Catholicism in the left-wing media are in love with him.”

      And I really love how he is tolerant of homosexuals getting married, but highly intolerant of those that celebrate the old Roman Catholic rituals which explicitly affirm Roman Catholic doctrines now found to be embarrassing.

  19. amir says:

    Why is abolishing the taille left-wing?

  20. […] The trouble with this story is the King Louis and Tzar Nicholas were very progressive – and very p… […]

  21. Kolya says:

    How on earth do you consider Tsar Nicholas very powerless and progressive?

    Tsar Alexander III reversed many of Alexander II’s progressive policies and reestablished autocracy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_III_of_Russia#Domestic_policies

    Nicholas II believed in autocracy also. “In a speech made in January 1895 he had said: ‘Let them [the people] know that I, devoting all my efforts to the prosperity of the nation, will preserve the principles of autocracy as firmly and unswervingly as my late father of imperishable memory.'” http://www.alexanderpalace.org/hanbury/eande.html

    The 1905 Revolution was put down brutally. “According to figures presented in the Duma by Professor Maksim Kovalevsky, by April 1906, more than 14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned.[42]” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution#Height_of_the_revolution

    Even regarding the 1906 Constitution: “This charter had been granted under duress, and Nicholas abhorred its restrictions upon his power, which he had sworn at his coronation to pass on to his son. He dismissed the First and Second Dumas when they proved “unsatisfactory” to him,[1] and unilaterally altered the election statutes (in violation of the constitution) to ensure that more landed persons would be elected to future Dumas.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Constitution_of_1906

    It’s worth emphasizing that still under the 1906 constitution Nicholas II had very broad powers – he was *not* almost powerless: “While the Duma held the power of legislation and the right to question the Tsar’s ministers, it did not have control over their appointment or dismissal, which was reserved to the monarch alone. Nor could it alter the constitution, save upon the emperor’s initiative. The Tsar retained an absolute veto over legislation, as well as the right to dismiss the Duma at any time, for any reason he found suitable.”

    The October Manifesto of 1905 was virtually the only progressive feature of Nicholas II’s reign, but it was issued under duress, insincere and only half-heartedly implemented. “Promising to flesh out the October Manifesto’s barebones structure, the Fundamental Laws instead reveal the insincerity of the manifesto’s authors, and their true desire to preserve the autocracy.”
    http://books.google.com/books?id=memSLRVjpn4C&pg=PA71

    As for Jews: “In his attitude toward the Jews,” Witte wrote, “the Emperor’s ideals are at bottom those of the Black Hundreds. The strength of that party lies precisely in the fact that their Majesties have conceived the notion that those anarchists of the Right are their salvation . . . Did not the Emperor himself call on all of us to rally under the banners of the Union of Russians, which openly advocates the annihilation of the Jews?” http://books.google.com/books?id=AQgEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA191

    • Hep says:

      The 1905 Revolution was put down brutally. “According to figures presented in the Duma by Professor Maksim Kovalevsky, by April 1906, more than 14,000 people had been executed and 75,000 imprisoned.[42]”

      Funny how what would be considered brutality wouldn’t have even been noticed once the democratic revolution hit Russia. 14,000? The reds probably killed that many before breakfast.

    • jim says:

      I believe the queen of England theoretically has similar powers, but seems disinclined to exercise them.

      Reading the news of the times, they report that the prime minister did this, and the prime minister did that, not that the Tsar did this and the Tsar did that. The Tzar sought to influence events by inviting one person to tea and not inviting another person to tea, measures that were not all that effectual.

      • Kolya says:

        Queen Elizabeth II has much smaller, purely theoretical powers which she *never* *ever* EVER uses. Tsar Nicholas II had much greater powers which he could and did use. Completely and utterly different.

        Nicholas II had ministers and prime ministers to do the everyday work of government for him, which he found boring. He also disliked confrontation. But he set overall policy, called the shots and hired and fired ministers.

        “We talked for two solid hours. [Nicholas] shook my hand. He wished me all the luck in the world. I went home beside myself with happiness and found a written order for my dismissal lying on my desk.”
        Count Witte, Prime Minister under Nicholas.

        • jim says:

          Queen Elizabeth has unlimited powers, which she never ever uses. This is in fact entirely typical of constitutional monarchs, that they are both constitutional, and also above the constitution.

          Due to moonbat leftism by Tzar Alexander the liberator, property rights in land in Russia were a mess, and Prime Minister Stolypin was trying to straighten them out. To do so, he needed a vote in the Duma, which he did not entirely get, messy land rights got a messy compromise.

          And as a result, property rights in land still screwed up today.

          If Tsar Nicholas had had autocratic power, what did he need the Duma for? He could just unscrew what Tsar Alexander screwed.

          • Kolya says:

            And Stolypin was thwarted because Nicholas was only very ambivalently on Stolypin’s side. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZlptU4A2HkUC&pg=PA173

            Nicholas was forced to establish the Duma (which he still mostly controlled) by a vast wave of riots and unrest, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_1905) but he was still a very, very powerful Tsar/Dictator. No one has Fnargl-like powers in the real world. Hitler could carry out the extermination of the Jews, but he couldn’t have carried out the extermination of the French.

            • jim says:

              The revolution was driven by the intellectuals, by a privileged elite. This elite became a problem at the time of Tzar Alexander the liberator, and was a direct result of his actions, which created a plausible and prosperous career path in utopian revolution, in immanentizing the eschaton.

              So I would say that on the contrary, the Duma was created to feed the crocodile, that the thing to do would have been to do what Stalin did, prove that being lefter than thou was not a guaranteed and secure career path, that seeking to immanentize the eschaton would get you executed for heresy, that it was not a viable job, not a career.

              What the Tzars needed to do was to get land ownership into the hands of individuals, get all of it swiftly into the hands of individuals, the easiest way to do this being to give any land with complex ownership back into the hands of the lords, and to shut off all career paths in politics.

              Land with complex ownership is an attractive nuisance, because you get control of it through politics, so, if ownership complex, creates trouble. You need all land in charge of entities that will use it effectively and set the dogs onto anyone who wants to use it differently. To prevent trouble, you need to put assets and revenues out of reach of politics. So assets and revenues need a clear rightful owner who will take a shotgun to anyone who wants to horn in on them.

            • jim says:

              He was not “forced” to do anything, in that the revolution was decisively and thoroughly crushed. I would say that the Duma was created to inflame revolution, by creating jobs in politics.

              The problem was that Alexander the liberator funded the left, and subsequent Czars were too embarrassed to be so horridly unfashionable as to unfund them.

              I would say the underlying thinking of the creation of the Duma was

              “Oh no, we have utterly crushed the revolution, making us horribly unfashionable. Our overseas friends will write unkind editorials about us.

              How can I give the troublemakers enough power and money that people will not call me an oppressor of the masses?

              I know. I will yield up my power to my enemies! That will show them!”

    • spandrell says:

      Tsar Alexander III reversed many of Alexander II’s progressive policies and reestablished autocracy.

      Because Alexander II was muredered by leftists. That’s what progressive policies get you.

      Nicholas II was also a “serve the people” do-gooder.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khodynka_Tragedy

      http://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/compassion-as-a-leftist-scam/

      • Kolya says:

        Witte convinced the Tsar, who believed it was his sworn duty to preserve the autocracy, that creating the Duma was necessary to relieve popular anger and prevent what eventually happened in 1917.

        “I would say the underlying thinking of the creation of the Duma was

        “Oh no, we have utterly crushed the revolution, making us horribly unfashionable. Our overseas friends will write unkind editorials about us.”

        Can you give a reference – a contemporary speech/diary entry/memoir to support this bizarre claim?

        Nicholas II didn’t give f*ck about what the overseas Cathedral thought of him.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Laws (seriously, read this one)

        “A grotesque deputation is coming from England to see liberal members of the Duma. Uncle Bertie informed us that they were very sorry but were unable to take action to stop their coming. Their famous ‘liberty’, of course. How angry they would be if a deputation went from us to the Irish to wish them success in their struggle against their government.”

        • Kolya says:

          More repressive government =/= more secure government. Why did Alexander II release the serfs? There were 712 serf uprisings in Russia between 1826 and 1854. Serfdom was hugely economically inefficient. Serfs made bad conscript soldiers compared to the free Western Europeans. If the serfs hadn’t been freed, all these problems would just have gotten worse and worse.

          You can play this unfalsifiable, fact-free game of “Oh, the Syrian government had some very, very slightly consultative features, if only Bashar Al-Assad had REPRESSED HARDER he’d be unchallenged in a peaceful Syria today” but it’s absurd.

          • Nick Land says:

            Neoreactionary advice to any regime seeking stability is to do two right-wing things.
            1. Suppress mob politics with whatever ruthlessness required. (A government unable to do this has already surrendered the Mandate of Heaven.)
            2. Modernize efficiently. This requires hosting an autonomous economy with minimal interference.

            No government doing just (1) will lose power to domestic forces, but it will eventually succumb to external ones. Doing (2) without (1) risks emulsification into domestic chaos.

            • jim says:

              None of the Tzars suppressed mob politics with appropriate ruthlessness, as illustrated by the kid glove treatment of Lenin, and the minor slap on the wrist received by Stalin.

              The Tzars created a political, rather than truly private, economy, a non autonomous economy with maximal interference, by collectivizing land and organizing apparatus to vote on collectivized land, thus creating a huge number of careers for intellectuals and activists, and by intervening extensively to benefit the urban proletariat, thus creating a gigantic pile of bureaucratic jobs for the professional government left.

          • jim says:

            A Tzar could free the serfs English style (and English serfs were indeed freed to make better soldiers) Tzar Alexander the liberator did not free the serfs. He gave the serfs to the left wing intellectuals.

            Which failed to make better soldiers.

          • jim says:

            The trouble in Syria is merely one part of “the Arab spring”, which has created very similar trouble throughout most of the middle east.

            Viewing the Middle East as a whole, and the Arab Spring as a whole, it is clear that lack of repression led to disaster, such as Syria, while firm repression led to order, tranquility, and harmony.

            The arab spring was caused by western encouragement, the promise of western support, and western demands that arab regimes refrain from repression.

            The arab spring tells us what you get by not repressing the mob. Egypt failed to repress the mob. Result: Disaster ensued – in the form of democratic government.

            Realizing their mistake, the Egyptian army turned around and firmly repressed the mob, killing as many as necessary to restore order. Result: Order, Peace, tranquility, and military dictatorship.

            If Assad in Syria had followed the present policy of the Egyptian army from the beginning, he would be fine, as Egypt is now fine.

            Egypt shows that Arab Spring troubles are the result of failure to deal with the mob. In fact the entire middle east shows that, but Egypt is a particularly clear case, since they tried treatment one, tolerance and democracy, and then tried treatment two, kill the bastards and take out the trash. Killing the bastards worked.

      • jim says:

        Thanks, Spandrel

        This is the citation
        that Kolya asked me for, Czar Nicholas as limp wristed leftie, but I could not provide.

        It will not make him happy though, since official truth is that Czar Nicholas was a bloodthirsty baby eating arch extreme right winger, and official truth does not need to be consistent with observable facts.

        No amount of evidence that Czar Nicholas was was weak leftist can counter official truth that he was a right wing despot, unless someone approved by the Cathedral interprets those events as leftism.

    • Nick Land says:

      By making ‘autocracy’ the question, you’re repeating Alexander’s mistake. The pre-revolutionary French and Russian regimes were already on the slope to Left Singularity because they were doing left-wing things — formal powers are irrelevant if substantial policy options are directed by appeasement of the mob.

      Alexander is determined not to ‘set the clock’ until catastrophe is already reached — and then he says “see how fast it happens?” Rather than focusing on monarchical / demotic political forms, he should concentrate upon the policy trend. History shows that monarchies can move left. It is less obvious that democracies can ever move right.

      • Nick Land says:

        (“You” is Kolya.)

        • Kolya says:

          What *specific* left wing policies was the Tsarist regime pursuing?

          Were the Stolypin land reforms that failed – because they were opposed by conservatives and landowners and abandoned by the Tsar – part of ‘efficient modernization’ and ‘getting land into the hands of individuals’ or a bad leftwing idea? Was stopping persecuting the Christian non-Orthodox a left wing policy or a good way of reducing hostility to the Tsarist regime? What else do you mean by leftwing policies? Are you saying that “only” exiling subversive elements to Siberia + a few decades= leftist singularity?

          What *specific* left wing policies was the Tsarist regime pursuing?

          • jim says:

            Politically, the Tsars were encouraging and funding the state left, the intellectuals, people who had government careers in leftism.

            Economically, the Tsar were continuing with the insane collectivist policy of Alexander the Second, which did not truly free the serfs, nor give them the lord’s land, but rather gave the serfs and the lord’s land to the revolutionary left wing intellectual class.

            There is a right way to free the serfs, illustrated by England.

            There is a way to distribute the lord’s lands to the former serf that does not create a class of intellectuals whose business is manufacturing new socialist man and new socialist land, illustrated by England.

            This method of distribution (the enclosures) caused outrage among the English intellectuals, because it failed to replace the authority of the Lord with the authority of the intellectuals, instead getting the land into the hands of individual farmers each of whom had demonstrated his ability to operate a farm. So they wrote it up as the confiscation of land from the poor to the rich, though in fact it was the distribution of the lord’s land to poor farmers. This has forever since enraged the intellectuals, who wanted the poor and the land distributed to the intellectuals.

            In an English enclosure, the vote of the filthy half starved peasant farmer counted equally with the vote of the Lord, although it was in fact the distribution of the Lord’s land that they were voting on. The intellectual, however, had no vote, and little influence, hence their venomous and volcanic rage that continues to this day.

            Since in an English enclosure, all those that were voting on the distribution of the Lord’s land were farmers, and none of them were intellectuals, all those voting agreed that individual farmers got the land, cutting intellectuals, political activists, and assorted trouble makers out of the redistribution, thereby preserving the tranquility of the realm, which is normally apt to be torn apart by land distribution.

            Hence the utterly venomous rage of the intellectuals, and the hateful way in which they have depicted the enclosures ever since.

            So, Tzar Alexander the second, being fashionable, proceeded to distribute the poor and the land to the intellectuals, manufacturing an intellectual revolutionary class, doing what the intellectuals thought should have been done in place of the English enclosures.

            Which created and funded an intellectual class that needed to be destroyed.

            Which needed to be destroyed by actually distributing the land to the poor, or by giving the land back to the lord, or by giving it to anyone except the intellectuals and political activists.

            What Russia needed were English style enclosures, and if you think Stolypin was right wing, you can imagine how English style enclosures would have been deemed. Ultra super duper hyper extreme repressive right wing.

  22. peppermint says:

    Alexander appears to be claiming that when a revolution happens, either there is a left singularity within 20 years, or someone arises to halt the leftward movement.

    It’s actually quite reasonable.

    • Toddy Cat says:

      Yes, that’s part of his problem – Alexander is actually a pretty sharp guy. He’s trying to argue against reaction while agreeing with about 65-75% of what reactionaries say. And as Alexander himself has pointed out, saying “yes, the opposition is basically right, but they go TOO FAR!” is not really an effective debate strategy. Once you’ve conceded the basic rightness of your enemies’ position, it’s pretty much game over. Alexander is very close to doing that.

      • Michael says:

        you’re both right they cant intelligently argue even against neocons without leaving their insane world. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up many will be foolish enough. Most intelligent leftys are doublethinks. A few will realize this so its worth a try former leftys make the best zealots but most will revert to thats racist.atrocities is all that will change minds en masse

    • jim says:

      He is claiming that the revolution is caused by, and made necessary by, the horrid right wingness of previous regime, and its stubborn resistance to reform, though in practice, the French and Russian revolutions were caused by government reforms, and the government state sponsored left getting out of hand, were a manifestation of the spiral of leftness leading to more leftness.

      The cause of the Russian and French revolutions was that the monarchs allowed themselves to become powerless, and their reforms were in substantial part fashionably insane, rather than realistic. Tzar Alexander the liberator should have followed the English model. If you are going to give the Lord’s lands to the peasants, give the lands, don’t attempt common ownership.

      The problem was that the English land redistribution to the peasants was already under attack for being insufficiently progressive, so Tzar Alexander the liberator fashionably went part way to accommodating the insane left, who can never be accommodated.

      It is like making concessions to Palestinians, or bleeding in shark infested waters.

      The problem with the Russian Revolution was not that Stalin went too far, but that Tzar Alexander the liberator went too far and Stalin contained the resulting crisis.

  23. Toddy Cat says:

    And as numerous people have pointed out, Scott Alexander is already way, way off the progressive reservation, even with regard to his critique of Reaction. He’s essentially admitted that the primary reason that blacks are lagging behind in the U.S is NOT racism, he’s pretty much admitted that mental differences between the races do indeed exist, he’s admitted that the sexes have brains that are wired differently, he’s admitted that the track record of Socialism has generally been one of bloody failure, and he’s even willing to admit that democracy may not be the be-all and end-all of good government. Alexander may not be a reactionary, but he’s very much to the right of the governing consensus in any Western country. His only really valid criticisms are of Monarchy and Neocameralism, which are not core Reactionary positions, anyway. Chalk up a win for the Reaction, I’d say…

    • jim says:

      You are easily pleased.

      In his anti reactionary faq he argued, or rather simply took for granted, that the under representation of blacks and women in high status activities is proof of white privilege. He also took the progressive position on the double standard, which presupposes that men and women are obviously exactly the same.

      • Toddy Cat says:

        Yes, Alexander contradicts himself a lot. Women are exactly the same when it suits him, and different when it suits him. Ditto the races. And yeah, he’s still a progressive. But he still has had to move significantly to the right of the current governing consensus in order to even attempt to refute the reaction. I’d still maintain that that is a victory of sorts.

        • jim says:

          Progressives have always admitted and denied racial and gender differences. It is not a significant concession. A significant concession would be to deny equality, to admit adverse outcomes as evidence of inferiority.

        • jim says:

          Now I realize why the Cathedral has been ignoring us rather than repressing us. Even to notice us, they have to move right to avoid their frothing at the mouth insanity from becoming obvious.

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