Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Why Promote Gay Marriage?

It symbolizes equality, undermining the target society’s ability to maintain property rights.

Gay marriage isn’t about marriage contracts between homosexuals.

We know this because homosexual marriage is unpopular among homosexuals. Pew Research states that, in all the states surveyed since 2004, only 71,165 gay marriages have been performed. Census data shows that even in California, where 1.3 million estimated homosexuals live, a scant 18,000 gay marriages have occurred.

Yet some of the most expensive advertising time in the country — during the 2014 Grammy awards, which sold for $1m per 30 second spot — spent an entire segment on promoting gay marriage. The entire segment ran for roughly 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Although not exact, we can say that it’s equivalent to over $15 million in prime ad spending, endorsed by multiple celebrities, packaged with official approval on a broadcast network granted many Federal privileges and censored by the Federal Communications Commission.

This provocation comes a year after the FCC relaxed its obscenity policies after the Supreme Court overturned some indecency cases.

In this, ironically, we see the results of years of misguided libertarian activism that would have been predicted by a classically educated elite but would only be poorly understood by today’s à la carte university graduates.

While state censorship is a brittle method of managing public mores, the law also mandates that television manufacturers receive broadcast TV signals. Cable and Satellite TV operators are similarly obligated to carry those signals by the law. In this way, state censorship is the only means available (besides abstaining from using television) for the general population to regulate the limits of what media can be sent to their homes.

equality
Human Rights Campaign – ‘Equals’ floating in a pool of blood

The patriarchal family is properly understood as a unit supportive of the private property political order, headed by a single executive. Aristotle defined this explicitly in contrast to the society formed around Plato’s ideals of love, especially homosexual love, as exemplified by Achilles’ passion for Patroclus.

Homosexual love is a symbol of equality in that, in the act, it connects two entities that are closer to being the same. Sex between men and women is a conjugation of two inherently unequal beings. Attempting to portray men and women as ‘equals’ requires a lot of continual rhetorical bluster to obscure the obvious reality. Holding up homosexual love as moral paragon comes naturally to egalitarians, because it matches with their political conceptions (which prizes the mental unreality of ideal forms over nature).

Since the convulsions of 1968, the West has flung itself into a Platonist concept of love (in a vulgar form), which is seen as the highest value, even among heterosexuals.

The Aristotelian view is that patriarchy leads to the private property hierarchical social order. There are thousands of years of evidence behind the proposition that patriarchy is the critical cultural bulwark that promotes a politics of private property. Plato agreed on this point. The Communists agree on this point, and as such, advance social orders that undermine patriarchy, because it’s known that it’s the atom of the private property social order.

Merely because an atom can be split doesn’t mean that it ought to be, because doing so eliminates its essential characteristics.

It’s because of this that the left is so aggressively attacking the remnants of patriarchal social order that remains within the Western world. Each destroyed family is a victory for the parasitical forces that make up the left. The distributed hierarchical structure is what makes complex political and economic forms possible. Enabling laws like divorce make that structure legally insecure, and simple to predate upon.

It’s at split purposes to say that a private property legal order is ideal while simultaneously agitating against the distributed hierarchy of secure social order known as the patriarchal family.

For the left, it’s more fruitful to attack ‘the economy’ (which etymologically derives from ‘the household’) than it is to attack larger social units. An egalitarian family structure leads to an egalitarian political structure, which is what the West has been hurtling towards since the mid 18th century, to our detriment.

All the left needs is love, love, love, unrestricted erotic love free of obligations, to achieve its ends in the destruction of civilization. The essential practice of the left is to apply a deadly herbicide to the complicated, evolved balance between flora and fauna that make up human civilization. Then, planners attempt to erect wobbly structures over the salted flats in accordance to their visions of how the world ought to be.

For a deeper contemporary perspective on this issue, Quick Reactions recommends the writings of Dalrock on love.

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Cathedralnomics: How Media Workers Get Paid

With free time & space to fill with whatever message that they like.

Ferris - Writing the Declaration of Independence
Ferris – Writing the Declaration of Independence

People who work in the media are notoriously ill-paid for their work. College graduates, often with master’s degrees, fill newsrooms and editorial staffs for almost universally low salaries. They work long hours, usually including late nights and weekends, and the majority have no social status whatsoever. After years of toil, a small number may come to enjoy plum positions and the respect that comes with it.

Moldbug’s ‘polygon hypothesis‘ states:

The key to the Polygon hypothesis is that three words are synonyms: responsibility, influence, and power. The New York Times, for example, isresponsible because if it does the wrong thing rather than the right thing, it can cause a great deal of suffering. It is influential because its actions affect the lives of many people. And it is powerful because there is no conceivable meaningful sense of the English word power which is not synonymous with responsibility and influence. Power is the ability to make a difference, to change the world. Remind me again what people say on their J-school applications?

Understanding what individual journalists and editors are compensated with makes much more sense when you understand the  media business model. It’s a real estate business in the case of text-and-still image media, and time business in the cause of oral/visual media like radio and television. The ‘content’ of an article builds up a certain audience, and then the salespeople within that business sell proportional access to that audience to advertisers, who will use that access to influence the behavior of the audience.

The typical journalist often earns only a pittance in cash, but effectively, if you consider how much access they have to their audience in the dollar terms that are quoted to advertisers, their salaries are often extremely high. A full page ad even in a small newspaper often goes for thousands of dollars. Yet a typical writer might get a half page on their beat in a single day.

That $20,000/year employee can be earning compensation in-kind into the six figures, tax free, that they can turn into a position of real power later in their career. Op-ed columnists can gain absurd levels of reach for what plebeian businessmen would have to spend tens of millions of dollars for.

For example, a full page on Friday for the USA Today costs $$217,900. A color full page in the Wall Street Journal costs $361,703.

A 500 word article in the Wall Street Journal at their 2014 non-contract rates takes up roughly $47,220 in effective advertising space: if you include the headline, it’s probably closer to $50,000. While not every article in the newspaper is competently constructed to influence behavior, it’s often disproportionately effective enough to self-sustain economically.

The same space that runs an advertisement that needs to drive hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales to be worthwhile goes towards an ordinary article in a national newspaper. In a magazine, especially with an affluent and specific audience, the numbers can get much higher.

If you’re a well-connected writer who doesn’t need a salary, that cash compensation looks more like a perk (because it keeps earnest strivers away from the position) than a problem.

While you couldn’t value a journalist’s column-inches in exactly the same way (although more than half of many papers goes to advertising, especially when you include inserts and online ads). The same opportunity for influence that advertisers would have to spend fortunes for goes straight to an ideologically-trained reporter fresh out of a program like Columbia Journalism School. It’s not so much that the graduates of those programs learn much of anything useful: it’s that they learn what to think and how to say it in order to shift the global culture in a direction that pleases their professors and their friends. They also gain access to the alumni social network, and status that they can lord over their inferiors.

It’s easier to comprehend the power of the press when you put it in dollar terms. While journalists are in theory restricted about what they can write, these rules hew to the existing Cathedral line: conveniently, source guidelines favor university professors, doctors, scientists, government officials, and other ideologically vetted authorities. The system is less open and self-organizing than it seems on the outside.

As media workers tend to be ‘underpaid’ (in reality grossly overpaid relative to their abilities when you count the effective non-monetary compensation), it’s trivial to replace one who becomes irresponsible and splits from the ‘professional standards’ expected of a member of the respectable press.

This method of social control, while effective, has been breaking down for a few reasons:

  1. It has lost credibility with the mass audience. Too many obvious lies have damaged too many people, and left them distrustful of their spiritual authorities.
  2. With the liberalization of media laws, the ‘mass audience’ has fractured into countless non-overlapping clans.
  3. Their customer base of advertisers has more affordable options, and access to ‘audience’ is more of a commodity than it once was.

So the Cathedral has been wracking itself in fear about ‘what comes next,’ and has hoped that the new era of decentralized ‘social’ media will provide it with new avenues of control. Control, however, has been difficult to come by: the expense of monitoring and shaping the gross quantity of communications that has erupted is threatening both the legitimacy and technical feasibility of the entire project.

The chief problem the Cathedral has right now, from an economic perspective, it’s entirely destructive to the people who are most faithful to it. If you follow the Buzzfeed lifestyle, you’ll become a wormlike, semiliterate, androgynous moron. While the traffic that it drives for its advertisers might help them increase sales in the short run, in the long run, it’s churning out a young demographic that’s  more marginal in economic terms than its elder cohorts.

An ad guy at Consumer Reports whom I shared a beer with years ago told me that the reason that his magazine had stayed relatively insulated from what had ravaged the others was that it was a subscription to the magazine was part of the ‘standard package’ that came with a house in the suburbs, a wife, and the first kid.

Sluts and pajama boys don’t care about lawnmower reviews because they’ll never be able to afford either a house or a lawnmower in great numbers. They’ll also be unlikely to have many children, which makes them undependable sources of demand for a broad class of goods. They’re terrible demographics to advertise to, which makes it much harder for the media complex to self-sustain.

Reactionaries spend a lot of time fixating on sluts and pickup artists as sources of degeneracy, but the real weakling is the 300 pound loner who spends all day playing free games on his/her (gender can be unclear) used iPhone with a cracked screen, dressed in sweatpants purchased from a thrift store. Demographically, the invisible dropout is more dominant than the flashy urban degenerate.

The economics of the media business (slimming ad rates for each section of the audience) are consequences of the declining demographics of the country.

Having outlined one of their main problems, the next task is to exacerbate it, to make it as close to fatal as possible for our friends in the Cathedral. Over the weekend, Nick Land wrote that “…[the] Left is a disease, and therefore a potential bioweapon.” If it can be treated as a disease, then the environment in which it thrives should be isolated, pressurized, and cordoned off — to exacerbate the deadliness to the infected.

Engineering a controlled detonation could keep the damage localized. The trouble is that the whole Western world is pockmarked with ideological mines, rigged for destruction. This makes the necessary work demand a certain delicacy.

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Can Neoreaction Avoid Libertarian HIV?

rent-hiv

Patri Friedman, noted ex-polyamorist and Seasteading pitchman, has taken an interest in creating a ‘politically correct’ neoreaction.

Jim writes often about entryism — the corollary of Robert Conquest’s second law of politics as retold by John Derbyshire. Reproducing it here:

Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will
sooner or later become left-wing.

This has been evoked regularly on Twitter and elsewhere with reference to libertarians, who themselves have been infested by essentially left wing thinkers of various kinds. Part of this owes to the character and works of Murray Rothbard, who is libertarianism embodied in all of its aspects, good, bad, and ugly.

As retold by Stephan Kinsella, the word ‘libertarian’ dates only back to the 1950s and 60s, as Leonard Read and Rothbard tussled with each other for leadership of what remained of the classical liberal remnant after World War II.

The muddled nature of libertarianism today owes to the muddled nature of its beginnings in excerpt from an article by Dean Russell:

Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trademark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word “libertarian.” Webster’s New International Dictionary defines a libertarian as “One who holds to the doctrine of free will; also, one who upholds the principles of liberty, esp. individual liberty of thought and action.”

Russell, with a boy’s innocence, attempts to unite liberals, conservatives, and classical liberals under the same umbrella. While he stated overt opposition to leftism, the simplistic formulation of the ideology left open the entrances to anyone who could figure out the clever rhetorical crannies into which leftism could sneak into.

Rothbard himself allied with the new left during the 1960s, establishing a journal called ‘Right and Left.’ This strategy ultimately failed, because the left is insane and evil:

“To put it bluntly, the convention was a disaster. As Rothbard feared, many of the SDS libertarians were infected with extreme left- ism. One of the left-wing libertarians denounced “all academic economists” and the wearing of neckties as great evils which the libertarian movement should focus on destroying.”

It’s for this reason that Hoppe hews to the later Rothbard, in advocating for explicit rightism, to the exclusion of the leftists. It’s because, by bitter experience, his teacher taught him that the original formulation of ‘libertarian’ was doomed to incoherence and neutralization by the left.

This is rather serious. John Payne recounts

“Former Barry Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, who had been converted to anarcho-capitalism by “Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal” and conversations with Rothbard, but had drifted toward anarcho-socialism in the interceding year, sealed the conference’s fate when he spoke on Saturday night. Wearing Fidel Castro-style battle fatigues and a Wobblie pin adorning his hat, Hess roared out to the audience, “There is no neutral ground in a revolution. . . . You’re either on one side of the barricade or the other.” He proceeded to implore the crowd to join him in a scheduled anti-war march on Fort Dix the following day.”

Truly, there’s little that’s new in history.

Considering that libertarianism isn’t even a century old, and that it became subverted within its first two decades of existence, it’s sensible to avoid going down the same permissive & disorderly path that it did, to avoid suffering the same fate in the same manner.

The promiscuity of ‘libertarian’ as a term, and the promiscuous nature of many of its institutions, give it something a lot like Human Immunodeficiency Virus, but for an ideology. This is the case for all ideologies permissive to leftism, and to all ideologies that appeal to the leftist psychology, defined as it is by ressentiment, which popular followers of libertarianism are prone to (as criticized frequently by Hoppe).

The solution to this is to not hop onto any leftward social trend that appears merely because it’s both growing fast and dislikes the current government. Discriminating against people that would create a kinder, gentler, more politically-correct neoreaction doesn’t mean destroying them — just ensuring institutional separation and clarity of language.

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