Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Chaos at the Top

Yesterday, the New York Times published a story highlighting foreign influence at major American think tanks, with the Brookings Institution taking the most licks.

The countries named included Japan, various Arab monarchies, Norway, and other countries that needed to get some clout among American bureaucrats, the civil service, and politicians.

For most of my readers, none of this should be either surprising or outrageous to you. That members of the civil service in a democracy are corruptible and corrupt in a way that endangers the integrity of the country should be one of your basic assumptions.

What’s interesting about this article is that, by the fact of its publishing, shows that there is an increasing tenor of dissension at the top of the US governing structure. Figuring out who Brookings annoyed and why is not something that interests me all that much.

What the Times ignores is that the Times itself has a large stake of itself owned by Carlos Slim, a Mexican oligarch who owes his fortune to the Mexican government, who is closely tied to that government. Steve Sailer points this out every chance that he gets.

The Times also ignores the heavy investments made by foreign governments (especially those Gulf monarchies) into the university endowments of our most prestigious schools, which also have enormous levels of influence within the permanent government.

The press is further implicated by this system of influence trading because it is the media itself that profits from campaign ad spending.

All of that would be outside the scope of the article, but I’m interested in providing the missing context.

The people who own the billboards, TV stations, newspapers, magazines, and websites profit from electioneering, regardless of where the money for those ads originated from. All of this economic activity is essentially waste that contributes to the mental pollution of civil society.

The Times suggests that Brookings and other think tanks have been violating a World War II-era law against foreign propaganda. If this is the case, then surely, the many pro-Israel NGOs operating within the United States are going to need to be investigated also. If that is so, many of the environmental groups that have funded anti-fracking campaigns (and even feature films) in the United States will need to be curtailed and censored. The article touches on this aspect in discussing Norway’s efforts to curtail forestry in Indonesia as part of some byzantine global warming indulgence system.

The problem with democracy goes beyond the issue of suffrage. What it does is create an enormous bureaucracy with a big and vulnerable surface area. Populists, foreign agents, and organized conspiracies can push the state this way and that way, in part because there are so few permanent interests that control that state. There is so much hidden complexity that it makes controlling corruption an impossible goal.

Because no one owns the state, the costs to corruption are close to nil, and the profits are significantly more than nil. Since no one has a permanent interest in the state, it exists as an engine of exploitation to be exploited by its own managers, rather than a system to be maintained in perpetuity for its owners.

The main conceit of all Cathedral organs is that of disinterestedness. All of these organs are supposed to contain purified holy people who cannot be influenced by the financial interests that pay their salaries. This doctrine is nonsensical. It’s better to just recognize that people are partial by nature, and to structure institutions around that ordinary observation of human nature.

Many citizens have the experience that they have no control over their republic because it is a true sense. An even worse issue is that the people who actually have the power are mostly opaque and inaccessible to the citizens, so that citizens often have wildly divergent interests from the people managing the state. Citizens have access to politicians who are merely go-between operators for the civil service, the academic organs, and their associated lobbyists.

While the citizens may be formally sovereign, they are not effectively sovereign, leading to endless conflict and confusion.

The problem is not that our precious, pure think tanks have been corrupted by nasty foreigners — although the consequences of that influence will be negative more often than not.

The trouble is that the authority of those think tanks is not properly formalized in law, and that they are such sprawling entities. Before the 20th century, institutions like this were either a part of the state itself or folded within royal courts. The think tanks, as part of what Moldbug calls the Cathedral, are part of our sprawling informal government. That informality is what makes them inherently corrupting as institutions.

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England’s Easy Meat

Focusing on reports of sexual slavery in Rotherham alone down-plays the extent of the criminal culture in question. As an extensive report by the Law and Freedom Foundation entitled ‘Easy Meat: Multiculturalism Islam, and Child-Sex-Slavery‘ details, it’s part of a pattern of behavior that extends to the entire United Kingdom and the rest of Europe.

Having read both the Rotherham report and this one, the Rotherham report is much less damning, but it is what is being picked up by the British press more vigorously than it has in the past. The latter paper also details how journalists and columnists who have attempted to unearth the issue (even mostly-orthodox leftists) have been relegated to less prestigious papers over time. My guess is that it is easier to portray the problem as a localized issue with a small segment of the bureaucracy rather than acknowledging that it is a systemic issue.

To repeat, it’s not an issue limited to “1,400 victims” in one town, but has spread throughout the entire country (and the rest of Europe) over a period of more than a decade.

This is supported by the ‘Easy Meat’ paper, which describes this pattern of public relations undertaken over the last couple decades.

Because bureaucracy tends to act not for its surface purposes, but to protect and expand its own interests, none of this behavior is shocking. It is what should be expected of bureaucracy. It is not even a scandal. It is precisely how a right-thinking person should expect bureaucracy to behave.

Ironically, blaming the problem on political correctness or fear of consequences for appearing racist is completely off the mark. Blaming the problem, which is a pervasive practice of enslavement of non-Muslim girls for profit, on a specific bureaucratic doctrine misses the root problem.

It is not even a problem with Muslims, who are only behaving according to their laws and traditions. Muslims are going to behave in this way because it is their culture to behave in this way. It is mandated by their holy texts and reinforced by generations of Islamic scholarship. It’s also incorrect to place it as a Pakistani issue, because it’s a core aspect of Islamic law shared throughout the Islamic world.

Another misconception corrected by the report is that it’s mostly ‘trash’ girls from broken homes who are targeted. In fact, many of the girls are from intact, middle class families or better.

Most people in the older generation of England and America don’t really comprehend how dissolute moral life has become for the younger generation. Many people willfully push themselves to ignore the behavior of their daughters, especially if they’re well-to-do and respectable.

The root problem is the gross ignorance of the legislating class, of the criminal incompetence of the most prestigious universities, and of the overall political structure of modern Britain.

That is a problem that can only be solved through the most terrible means imaginable, and far be it from me, an American whose ancestors (mostly) fled or were driven out of England centuries ago, and have only lived in England during a few short periods, to lecture British people about how to handle their problems.

It would be wonderful if the problem was merely that the English-speaking ruling class was devious, wicked, and ingenious. Unfortunately, it is devious, wicked, and stupid. There was no grand design behind this enormous political error. It happened due to feebleness of mind and of heart at the country’s top. It would be wonderful if it was merely a problem of wickedness, because in that case, a few hangings could resolve the issue.

In some cases, the cause may be more sinister. As detailed in the report, Oxford-educated Mehdi Hassan has been recorded using terms like ‘kafir’ to refer to ordinary Britons, to no career consequences. Characters like him infest the country, and indeed have many analogues in the United States. Hassan is a biographer of Ed Miliband the leader of the Labor Party, giving a hint as to his position within the British system.

James Delingpoole, in exile from the Telegraph at Breitbart, writes about another Muslim official implicated in the enormous cover-up.

The parallels to the Soviet infiltration of the US in the 20th century can be drawn, but the scale and character is necessarily different

The problem is more like a decline-and-fall problem, in which the upper crust has transformed into a scab, and hangings just exacerbate the chaos and poor leadership rather than providing opportunity for a better class of emperor.

What’s interesting about this issue is that it is a clear example of a modern state that has largely ceased to exist, and has ceded some of its core functions to invaders that have been peacefully invited into the borders. The British police are not sovereign on the streets. The gangs are sovereign within their territory, regardless of whatever the maps say. This is a miniature of the greater world crisis described by Henry Kissinger of the state system.

Even in the best possible light of stating that there is a capacity for the authorities to intervene, but no will for them to intervene, in the terms of war, the gangs are the force in control, and the law of the British state has no sway over substantial swaths of its territory. If the will of the British state has been broken by the gangs, then it is the gangs in control of their territory and not the state. The British press and the British officials have admitted that there is no will to exercise control and to stop the ‘polite’ slave raids from taking place right outside the walls of the official buildings of the British state.

The state is further frightened that its control will be broken by other entities other than the gangs. It is less frightened of ceding sovereignty to the Muslim gangs than it is of ceding sovereignty to the imagined populist gangs of White soccer hooligans.

This dynamic also mostly fits within the narrative of 4th Generation war theory, and could be used to teach about its concepts. The bureaucracy perceives itself as besieged and threatened by the native stock.

The British state is terrified not of the sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of its girls, but is explicitly terrified of vigilante behavior that threatens its franchise on violence. It is particularly frightened of opposition organizations like the EDL, (the mostly defunct) BNP, and UKIP.

The chief problem with this failure of Anglo-American domestic policy (invade the world / invite the world) is a failure to understand the history and character of foreign cultures and religions. This failure to understand is roughly analogous to the solipsism of Marxist-Leninist academia, which spent so much time agonizing over a world of pure theory that it neglected to spend much time studying human history, culture, and geography.

Because it holds a basic, inviolable assumption that all people are of roughly the same character, and that their history is irrelevant, it can’t handle the complexity of real problems that arise due to human differences.

The only way that a person can believe in the existence of ‘modern secular Islam’ is to be wholly ignorant of the Koran and hadith. I know that at least some of this is taught in university in a double-talk sort of way because I learned about it first-hand in university going over the primary sources in question.

The idea that Islam could be transformed into a progressive force, much as Christianity has, has been attempted at enormous expense throughout the Middle East. It will be very difficult to put this concept to bed.

It’s important, as I’ve written before, to not consider this behavior as the expression of some oddball post-modernist expression that isn’t ‘true Islam.’ It is the mainstream of its own history. What is not in the mainstream is secularism, which is arguably an aberration in the Western nations as well.

Page 298 of the study sums up the problem:

Yet the multiculturalists want to pretend that they glory in diversity, whilst secretly believing that there is no such thing as truly diverse values – the unspoken assumption of multiculturalists is that all people, all over the world, and throughout all of history, have held the same beliefs as western European liberals of the last 50 years. They praise diversity and multiculturalism, but cannot really see beyond their own enlightenment ideology: they think that, ultimately, all the world shares their values.

What happens when events contradict this belief is that the liberals tend to tunnel away from the uncomfortable observation. The people who bring up the message are marginalized, with their careers targeted for retribution.

When authors like Dan Simmons used to write in these terms, I once considered them ridiculously paranoid, even with the knowledge of Islam’s history. I figured that it would be inconceivable for Westerners to commit suicide in such a way. However, it’s happening, and the prospects for reversing it don’t seem positive at this time.

Both David Cameron and Angela Merkel have attempted to signal a new policy that sanctions Muslim groups that do not avow support for the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the core doctrine of what Moldbug calls ‘ultra-protestantism.’ To me, this seems unwise.

The only people who care about the UDHR are people from the scabrous upper crust, and even those people only pretend to care.

As the authors of ‘Easy Meat’ describe, sex slavery is just Islamic behavior. It is not ‘extremist Islam.’ It is mainstream Islam. There are some good reasons as to why there is so much ‘prejudice’ against Muslims among Europeans. It has to do with centuries of slave raids, warfare, and occupation in Southern Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Spain by the bannermen of Islam. That’s a long record of fighting with few interruptions.

Modern liberalism tends to start history at 1930, with some brief detours for a few paragraphs about a few older wars. It has trouble understanding that, even in primitive foreign countries, older history is still quite influential. It even has trouble understanding how older history influences its own mores.

This is a poor-quality map of Ottoman territory at the peak of the empire:

Ottoman Empire at largest territory

And of course, the Moors ruled most of the Iberian peninsula (Spain) until the reconquista completed over a period of several centuries. It did not finish until 1492. Yes, 1492. These should not be obscure facts. But, owing to the low standards even at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Oxford, they are now obscure facts for millenials.

If you’re going to engage with Islam, you have to understand at least vaguely what it is. I don’t think permanent war with the entire world population of Muslims is a good idea, because I’m not completely crazy. What is needed is an approach based in an acknowledgment irreconcilable cultural differences. I don’t believe that we can impose heaven on earth. Muslims will continue to rape each other and everyone around them so long as there are Muslims on this planet. The political approach has to be to keep them killing each other instead of killing people that we care about.

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A Riot At the Cathedral

Over the last couple weeks, a digital riot erupted after an unhappy ex-boyfriend wrote a blog post explaining how his former paramour had cheated on him with a succession of men in the video games industry and the games press. It became a broader riot against the leftward drift in the games press over the last several years.

The best summary is in this video:

This has recently culminated in a number of writers vocally abandoning the audience that has rejected them.

Just about everything that Leigh Alexander writes in that article is not true from a business perspective. My first substantive writing experience was in writing, editing, and forum moderating for an amateur games website. At least a few ‘minor celebrity’ game developers posted on our forums frequently and hung out in our chat rooms.

I’m pretty familiar with the industry, although I’ve not done all that much work within it, because everyone that I know who’s either professionally in games or who has worked in games tends to warn anyone who isn’t to avoid the industry because of its low wages, bad work environment, and unethical management.

Leigh is wrong because the largest businesses that have been built in video games over the decade have catered to the demographic that she has declared toxic. The lauded casual games revolution has resulted in multiple stock bubble-pops.

The two recent casual-games IPOs have been failures. Many of the legacy companies attempting to reach the mass audience have failed due to cost overruns. One of the chief causes of those over-runs are prohibitive marketing costs.

Serving the ‘core gamer’ audience is more profitable, reliable, and easier to market to.

The reason for this is simple: when you try to reach a mass audience, you have to buy advertising space to do it. You have to buy a LOT of advertising. When people are well-organized into niche markets, it’s cheaper to reach them more effectively, because they voluntarily sign up for lists, magazines, and other publications that identify them as predisposed to buy.

In the world of board games, the market tends to be very efficiently organized (as in a literal market and not the economist-abstract concept of market) in that board games get test runs with enthusiasts at a basic level, later go into high quality production with a limited run, and then receive store space and a larger marketing budget after having succeeded in the niche market of self-identified enthusiasts.

Also, when enthusiast customers organize themselves into discussion groups, they sell products that they like to each other, which can further drop your costs if you have a quality product. This is why this audience is not ‘going away’ and will remain profitable to reach.

Advertising in these small, focused publications is cheaper than advertising in mass market publications.

This audience is understandably annoyed that the same people that are supposed to be helping them make better purchasing decisions are more interested in selling leftism than they are in selling software.

Writers like Leigh tend to think that their moral responsibility is to shift the industry leftward, and that the material responsibility to make better products and sell them is tertiary.

Her thesis that ‘traditional gaming is sloughing off’ could not be more incorrect. The only successes in the market have been going after this particular audience. Although Twitch.tv is still unproven, Amazon bought them for almost $1B on the basis of its reach to this specific audience. Jeff Bezos does dumb things sometimes, but even when it’s a mistake, there has to be a sophisticated reasoning process behind it.

This audience has also built one of the fastest-growing and most valuable private companies in the world in Valve.

To make matters worse for Leigh’s argument, many of the top 20 Youtube channels in the world are also targeted to this maligned audience of ‘core gamers.’ Youtube ad spending is on a tear. A lot of that growth is built upon the enthusiasm of this audience (which you could argue is mostly young men hiding away from a collapsing real world).

The numbers just don’t support her business analysis.

This is how Alexander sees her job at a trade publication:

These straw man ‘game journalism ethics’ conversations people have been having are largely the domain of a prior age, when all we did was negotiate ad deals and review scores and scraped to be called ‘reporters’, because we had the same powerlessness complex as our audience had. Now part of a writer’s job in a creative, human medium is to help curate a creative community and an inclusive culture — and a lack of commitment to that just looks out-of-step, like a partial compromise with the howling trolls who’ve latched onto ‘ethics’ as the latest flag in their onslaught against evolution and inclusion.

Actually, her job is pretty simple. It’s to serve the interests of the readers of the trade publication, to help them make better decisions, and to promote the success of the industry.

On the consumer side, the job of a consumer reports publication is to rate products, describe features, and help consumers to make smarter purchasing decisions. More respectable consumer reports publications don’t take advertising (like Consumer Reports magazine) to avoid conflicts of interest and match their incentives to their readership. Critics can educate consumers and cultivate the taste of the readership. That’s their main job.

The culture is supposed to be exclusive, in the same way that Wine Spectator excludes most beer and hard liquor coverage. Else, it’s not useful for the advertisers, because it becomes a mass market publication. The ideal Wine Spectator subscriber buys wine by the case, runs a restaurant, or operates a liquor store.

Bridal publications are entirely geared towards women, but it’s unheard of for anyone to try to reach out to grooms. In fact, the female readership of bridal magazines is so close to totally female that the thought of gearing any of the content in them to men is just about unthinkable.

Getting mad at readers of niche publications for being niche publication readers is stupid.

It’s also stupid and hypocritical to complain about ‘beauty standards’ and then to insult nerds for being fat and ugly.

In this case, we have a riot from the readership of these increasingly left-wing publications complaining about being so poorly treated by the writers and editors who hold them in contempt. There’s also concern about corruption and partiality among people who are supposed to be reviewing products with relative impartiality (at least those are the surface complaints).

What’s interesting about this is that we have a swath of left-wing commentators in nerd culture vocally despairing about their temporary setback.

Gaming Will Always Be a Gendered Interest

Video games are usually some form of simulated hunting behavior or an abstract competition. Across the animal kingdom, males spar with each other. It’s not even just a mammalian or primate thing. Humans tend to develop elaborate sparring rituals that men throughout history have taken an avid interest in. Part of left wing behavior has been to try to open up these sparring rituals to women, and to mandate that women should spar like men do.

Any man who says that boys don’t have an inherent drive to spar doesn’t remember being a boy, or suffers from some sort of weird mental defect. It’s repetitively observable across cultures and time periods.

Almost every video game ever released is an abstract sparring ritual, sometimes with a morality play tacked onto it.

Gaming in particular is an abstracted form of sports that bureaucratic boys and men can easily participate in. There are no Cabela’s in big Yankee cities, and many rougher sports aren’t even played all that much. The lack of walk-able neighborhoods in suburbs also encourages boys and men to turn to virtual substitutes to get their ritual violence fix.

Soft urban parents are frightened that their little ones might become injured, and the war-preparation purpose of games is moot owing to the expectation that their children will never experience war.

Female sparring does not usually attract all that much interest, relatively, because it doesn’t scratch a biological itch for them. It’s just a sort of curiosity, an abstraction built upon an abstraction, instead of an abstraction of a deeply felt biological drive. When women do play games, they usually focus on the community aspect much more than they do the competitive aspect. This is why there are no female eSports champions despite enormous prize pools, a limited physical component to competition, and attempts to open up tournaments to women.

Men either must out-compete other men or find themselves at the bottom of the masculine hierarchy. This is why arbitrary competitions seem so intrinsically important to men in a way that defies the explanation of surface rationality.

Women just need to be part of the herd, and they compete with one another through in-grouping and out-grouping. It is less of a top-and-bottom competition and more of a center-and-periphery competition.

In Leigh’s article, you see her doing this: she attempts to consign her male readership to the periphery, while redefining her own cultural clique as central. The reality is that her views are peripheral to the market her job description tells her to serve, and that the center of the market has passed her by.

As long as women have been attempting to integrate gaming, they have been trying to turn what is an abstract sparring ritual into a storytelling or togetherness ritual. Men will also sometimes participate in storytelling or togetherness rituals, just as women will occasionally fight each other, but not in the same way.

People who believe that gender is not biological will tend to be willfully obtuse about the differences between male and female lived experiences. They tend to be shockingly ignorant about the history of western culture, of fiction, of our plays, of our myths, and our religious traditions, because that was the goal of the cultural revolution in the 20th century, and it has been achieved.

Is This A Cultural Inflection Point?

Yes and no.

There is no such thing as a right wing mob. No one who understands rightist politics ought to be glad for mob action, nor should support mob tactics, nor should inflame mob passions.

I don’t think that the popular conflict is about what it’s supposedly about on the surface, in the same way that the colored mobs of charioteer enthusiasts of old Byzantium really cared all that much about the races themselves.

What you have is a political faction that has tried and failed to implement an impossible program that could never have worked in theory and has failed in practice. Some people are opportunistically taking advantage of the loss in credibility by various marginal consumer-focused web publications. It’s a relatively minor event in the context of a much larger impending cultural breakup.

For the press, it’s a more significant event, because their own witch-hunt tactics are being used against them. Tellingly, no one has lost their job, not even journalists implicated in unethical behavior as defined by the Society for Professional Journalists.

Leigh’s own article actually contradicts the SPJ ethics code, at least in spirit, and certainly all the reporters involved in the Zoe Quinn scandal violated the letter of the code, although it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that none of them are SPJ members.

The same progressives that are always complaining about unethical behavior by capitalists routinely violate their own professional standards established by nonprofits to maintain the aura of holiness around the Western press. The ethical standards of professionalization also exist to ensure that the press maintains a moral high ground over its critics. These standards are supposed to extend to cover the trade press as well. Although the trade press is less broadly influential, it can still exert a lot of influence over the industries that each outlet covers.

This general breach of previously established standards of ethics causes problems for journalists in other areas. It is one of the reasons why Putin has been able to purge Russia of Western journalists with minimal consequences: because the US and other Western governments have routinely ignored the legal and ethical standards that journalists proclaim to uphold, mixing reporting with opinion-molding and espionage.

Ceding that moral high ground is not terribly intelligent of them, but these are millenials that we’re talking about, so perhaps we ought to be grading on a curve.

Part of the reason as to why we have all these mobs roiling the public is because of the conscious breakdown of our culture, pursued over hundreds of years by our intellectuals.

The West, like many of the other world cultures, has a disaffected young man problem. Disaffected young men usually take to destruction out of a lack of productive alternatives. The left manufactures disaffected young men and takes great efforts to increase their disaffection and alienation from a positive Western identity.

The correct response is not to fan those flames, but to help guide our young men towards a more positive identity.

Success for a rightist does not look like a mob that agrees with you tearing your opponents limb from limb. The opposing mob loves it when this happens, because it’s occasion for more destruction. The proper goal isn’t more destruction, but to establish and maintain order.

We’re not going to solve this problem by fixating on criticizing a few marginal feminists. Neither will it work to make shallow and misguided calls for equality. A positive program is needed, and that program must have a cultural component.

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