Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Neoreactive Web Resources

The biggest risk that neoreaction runs is that it becomes a cool buzzword that people appropriate for themselves without actually, themselves, being substantive people capable of adding to the useful knowledge of the group.

This is what tends to happen to internet communities and intellectual communities in particular: the river of stupidity overwhelms everything else, results in a lot of dumb people running around waving the term around as if they understand it, and thereby drowning out all substantive discussion with their attention-getting gibberish.

In terms of tactics, one mistake is to over-rely on social media services for communication.

The biggest problem with these is that they don’t generate an archive of correspondence, articles, papers, and books that can be easily accessed by people in the future. The strength of social media is in it’s being easy to use, that they’re the way regular people interact with the web, and that they can draw a lot of attention to a website in a short period of time.

It’s good at attracting momentary attention, but terrible at building durable resources. Similarly, without paying for consistent placement with advertising, it’s useless for building a brand (in non-commercial terms, a reputation).

Social media is largely irrelevant to search engines

While social apps have some indirect impacts on search engine rankings, they have much less of an impact than relevant links between permanent websites which are themselves readable, unique resources that provide visitors with an enjoyable learning experience.

If you want to contribute to your favorite blogs, have more time than money, and don’t want to blog regularly, you should instead focus on a single topic, write about it well, and link out to the websites and resources on the right using anchor text terms that indicate what the page you’re linking to is about.

Social media services like Facebook and Twitter essentially do an end-run around the telos of the web. The intention of its creators was to make a set of common protocols to facilitate sharing credible knowledge.

Search engines like Google use links (among other metrics) to determine which websites to send users to. The more relevant links between websites, along with the higher quality of those sites, increases their overall visibility to searchers looking for more information.

If you have a choice between linking to someone with a social media service like Twitter or Facebook, or linking to a website through a blog that’s at least of reasonable quality (even if it has few readers), a link that’s also on a blog will carry more weight unless you have a substantial number of friends, followers, and other similar social subscription metrics.

While these tools are not entirely politically neutral, and are biased in favor of progressives through various means, one of the biggest challenges that conservatives writ large face is a lack of understanding and concern with using new technologies to their advantage.

The outrage cycle is a waste of brainpower

The media outrage cycle is used to shift attention back and forth between properties that make money off of ad network display advertising. What that means is that the site makes money for every visitor that loads their advertising JavaScript. When a site isn’t interesting enough to attract recurring visitors, it has to invent new outrages that travel by social media to encourage more people to load their tracking codes.

This is a waste of the reader’s time, and one of the reasons why what some advertising experts call ‘junk publishing’ has laid waste to the hopes of many companies who had hoped to earn more returns from their websites. The left in particular has ceded a large portion of its intellectual credibility to encourage more people to load their JavaScript.

If you find yourself wasting a lot of time discussing the latest progressive outrage, know that it’s an activity best enjoyed in moderation.

If you link to outrage bait, try to use a website like unvisit or use nofollow tags on your links to prevent your links from passing any relevance to search engine bots to the target page.

Areas that need more attention

Permanent resources like the “Human Biodiversity Bibliography” are good examples to follow. Relatively static websites like that one can be quite useful. If you can make a resource that can guide a new person through a difficult topic, you are performing a good service to the community.

There is also no reason to sign your name to such resources if you are private. If you are looking for a good intellectual project to work on during your nights and weekends, creating such references for various relevant topics is a good use of your time that doesn’t involve having to get up on the big stage of the internet and put on a show.

Wiki-style encyclopedia reference sites can also be useful, and tend to attract links at a higher rate than other site types, further making it possible to carve public opinion in a way that serves your ends.

There’s also a lack of high quality directories for blogs, books, important archival papers, and easily accessible eBook archives of larger blogs. Such resources can help us to attract more motivated, intelligent people to our sphere.

There’s also a lack of a central library website for republishing out of copyright books in accessible formats, with readable summaries and promotions for each title. Some of this can be handled in a decentralized fashion, with multiple websites providing a torrent magnet link to an archive.

Goofy photos and memes published on free services are great at attracting hordes of morons, but I think most of my readers would prefer that those people stay elsewhere. If you want to post propaganda pictures, customize your own using tools like GIMP, and include links on the pictures to larger, more relevant resources. Cross-post the pictures on a permanent website that you control (not a Facebook page, which can be banned at a whim).

The general goal should be to make better information more accessible to poach the best quality people possible from the progressive media culture. You want to skim their best, and leave them with their worst.

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That Coup York State of Mind

There’s been national discussion about the growing rift between the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio following the assassinations of two police officers there earlier this month.

This sort of crisis was easy to predict at around this time last year, and the context for this crime won’t be obvious to you unless you also understand at least some of the economic background to it, also, in the same way that it’s not possible to properly understand the collapse of NYC in the 1970s (“Ford to City… Drop Dead”) you also have to know why the town could not afford to maintain its own security anymore.

The economic backdrop is that there is not enough money for the city to maintain the same growth in payments to the police force while still maintaining all the pensioners and other government functions. Something must give, and the police would rather use their positions as the weapons of the state to preserve its own revenues against its competitors (those competitors arguably represented by de Blasio — teachers’ unions, welfare bums, corporate barons who need tax credits, etc.).

The police force has lost legitimacy among the liberal opinion-forming classes and the poor Black communities that commit a disproportionate amount of crime within the city itself.

Simultaneously, a civilian authority that has no enforcement capacity is no longer a sovereign government, except perhaps in the minds of men.

Either the Federal government would need to liquidate the rebellious police force, or some combination of the rebels and local gangsters would step in to fill the sovereign void. Alternatively, the rebels could form a new civilian government that is closer to their liking.

Chuckle it up if you think that can’t happen in the US, but there’s a reason why former mayors and police executives are making the rounds-about TV shows making a case for that in different words, paying publicists to place “…growing calls for the mayor to resign…” into the pens of dozens of journalists at the same time.

Civilian government exists only at the permission of the most capable, unitary group of fighting-men. Legal rhetoric is just chatter without the force to support it.

Fighting-men are not magically bound to civilian political authority. America may like to pretend that it is a history-free zone, but this would not exactly be the first time that a weak executive has been deposed when he discovered that words have no force by themselves.

These particular police have the problem that they have limited legitimacy, or rather, divided legitimacy: the civilian authority, in an attempt to satisfy the mobs (in this case, actual mobs of protesters), promises that it can bring its soldiers under tighter control while still executing the vast body of laws that the state has beholden itself to.

The dilemma there is that what the civilians have promised isn’t possible, even if it truly desired make that happen.

I can’t say that I feel too broken up that a Communist mayor is in risk of losing his sovereign position over America’s premier city, but as with most power struggles, the fight itself is not likely to resolve the underlying issues that the city must tangle with to maintain anything resembling its current position.

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Book Review: Behind the Housing Crash

Behind the Housing Crash by Aaron Clarey book cover

Aaron Clarey, also known as Captain Capitalism, began his career as a commercial banker.

You might have read about the housing crash from the perspectives of hedge fund managers before, in best-selling books like “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis, but you probably haven’t read an account from someone who was actually examining the underlying loans that were grouped up into those famously toxic CDOs.

In this book, “Behind the Housing Crash,” he writes about his experience evaluating almost universally bad loans, wrestling with banking bureaucrats who won’t even let him optimize a spreadsheet, and glad-handling fraudulent real estate developers to help his bosses make their quarter.

Clarey writes:

Completely ignoring the burgeoning level of supply, brokers, bankers and developers used data dated from the hot and undersupplied housing market of 2004 to legitimize their pricing, and would approach me with deals that when you looked at their appraised values and pricing, you had a hard time taking them seriously.

It was entirely possible to look at housing supply data and nix developments before construction began, but nonetheless, banks continued to green light lending. Fraudulent appraisal methods also added to the problems, as banks assumed that they would be able to recoup losses through foreclosure based on impossibly optimistic projections of home values.

This memoir is also leavened with some humor about the pervasive vanity of commercial bankers:

Ultimately I concluded the bank was very much like the militaries of dictatorships or one of those African rebel groups where seemingly everybody is a “general.” Where all the enlisted men curiously start off as “captains,” giving themselves inflated ranks and titles to boost their egos. Therefore, if you filed, faxed and made the coffee at my bank you were considered a “reserve vice president.”

Although the book doesn’t get into the broader economic context of what was going on during this period, it does have many enjoyable slice-of-life observations of contemporary American life:

I developed the term “Trophy Wife Economics” to describe a phenomenon I noticed while looking at the tax returns of rather well to do clients. If the tax return was filed jointly, typically what you’d see is the husband making all the money and the wife would have some kind of token business that was perpetually losing money. For example, the husband would be a surgeon and the wife would run a little trinket store called “Beads and Bobbles” or “Daisy’s Doilies.” The store would never make money, and I was left to surmise it was some trophy wife who wanted to feel productive, and so the husband would give her some seed capital to start a business.

I have seen this, myself, also — the woman will run a loss-making business that feeds her sense of vanity more than it does her pocketbook. There are rare exceptions, but the Trophy Girl Entrepreneur is the general tendency.

Another thought-criminal act of noticing that Clarey engages in:

They don’t know the difference between debt or equity spending. Trophy wives don’t care if the money you spend on them is debt or equity, as long as you spend it on them. They don’t care if you actually make the money or borrow it, as long as you spend it on them. In other words, you could buy them a diamond bracelet on your credit card or pay cash and they wouldn’t care, let alone know the difference. You could buy them a Ferrari with a home equity line or cash and they couldn’t tell. And the reason why is all they care about is ownership and consumption, not how it is financed or actually paid for.

This fact also makes up the core plot of “The Merchant of Venice:” Portia can’t tell that Antonio has borrowed the gold with which he uses to court her. His gambit is that he’ll be able to borrow from Shylock and overcome her father’s riddles and win her heart, and then repay the lender with his winnings from the marriage.

My main criticism of the book is that there is little to tie the events on the ground with business cycle theory. This prevents it from being a ‘full’ account of the crisis, which is only properly comprehensible within a coherent system of economic theory (which I know that Clarey gets into in other posts elsewhere on his blog).

These problems recur often in the history of banking in the US. When banks can issue credit arbitrarily, they reduce lending standards in a systematic fashion, especially when put under political pressure to do so.

In more direct words, the history of banking in the US is a history of fraud and malpractice at huge, recurring scale. American commercial banks have never enjoyed a reputation for rectitude, apart for some brief periods in which recovery from  the most recent crisis embarrassed the establishment into enforcing something resembling a disciplined banking system based on sound money.

Clarey comes off as someone who should probably be a commercial loan officer, who would have probably done well in banking before 1971, but who found himself out-of-step with the trend to lend as much money as possible to as many people as possible, regardless of their creditworthiness.

My closing critical comment is that this book is better-written and better-edited than I thought that it’d be. If you’re interested in finance, economics, and the recent history of the US with the propaganda filters knocked off, take your $5.50 down to the link below and buy the Kindle edition.

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