Faggots shitting on metalheads are faggots

The Book Burners are at it again and  they've chosen a music that has as its main point to be offensive & loud. They have tipped their hand & now they will learn what irrelevant really means. This is what metal is about:

I don't think fans of Amon Amarth are interested in political correctness let alone Darkthrone.

I have always been a meliorist

I came across the term meliorist/meliorism while perusing the New World Dictionary as a teen. Before the age of the internet this is what nerdy, curious kids did instead of playing sports or talking to girls. I was immediately struck by the idea that the world is improvable, but that there is no guarantee that the world will get better. 

As a teen and as a child I was well aware that not everything got better as time went on. The strange zeitgeist of post Vietnam America that combined pessimism with the ceaseless grinding misery of Progress. A zeitgeist that pushed official optimism for social engineering & increasing the strength of the US government while simultaneously promoting paranoid fantasies about the power of the military industrial complex. According to the current wisdom America need only strengthen the state to continue its mission of desegregating & deracinating the US to achieve harmony & justice. Meanwhile throughout my formative years (the 70's & 80's) the rate of violent crime sky rocketed, especially among blacks. The Cosby Show was on every Thursday night expressly stating that all was well with black America and the evening news was on every night showing exactly how wrong that sentiment was.

It seemed obvious to me that things were not getting better culturally, socially, intellectually, but were getting better in other ways. Technology improved, the economy seemed to improve, living standards were rising & the 1987 stock market crash did not dim our country's outlook. What I saw when I looked around was a world headed in no particular direction. Progress on one front offered no benefits on others & some progress seemed to be worse than what came before. On the whole I imagined that the actions that this country & its people took determined the direction we went. Stupid or malicious actions led to exacerbation of our country's problems while hard won wisdom could guide us away from destabilizing societal maelstroms. Meliorism therefore seemed as obvious as the old programming slogan, "Garbage in garbage out."

What is Meliorism?

Simply it is the belief that the world can be improved through human intervention. It is part of the intellectual framework of liberalism & progressivism, but it should not be rejected by reactionaries because of that. Obviously in the long run I believe the natural world wins out and that man is a part of that natural world and no amount of effort will disentangle us from the real world. Meliorism at least at its core is the belief that we can change what is alterable, but our faculty for change is limited by reality. Meliorism is therefore practical concerned as much with what can be changed as with attempting to change. 

All reactionaries are implicitly meliorists because despite the obvious headwinds we fly into we believe things as they are now are not as they should be. There are better ideas than blind adherence to the cult of Progress and a restoration of tradition will lead to better place. 

I have come to think about meliorism & its place in neoreactionary thought thanks to a wonderful essay on Leibniz by Marc E Bobro at the New Atlantis. I do not know if many in the neoreactionary movement have read his work, but he seems to have a philosophy that bears consideration. His views are definitely melioristic to quote from Mr. Bobro's article:

A forward-looking form of optimism (sometimes termed meliorism, or more rarely, agathism) is the optimism of the working scientist, who is confident that the unknown can be made known. Perhaps possessing this kind of confidence in progressive knowledge is an essential characteristic of the scientist, without which he has little drive or motivation. But this, of course, does not mean that such progress is always linear. The great nineteenth-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtzcompared himself to a mountain climber who, “not knowing the way, ascends slowly and toilsomely and is often compelled to retrace his steps because his progress is blocked; who, sometimes by reasoning and sometimes by accident, hits upon signs of a fresh path, which leads him a little farther.” Leibniz used a similar analogy, writing that “we sometimes retrace our footsteps in order to leap forward with greater vigor.” He was drawn to the image of the spiral; it represented for him non-linear, yet non-circular progress. A spiral and the words inclinata resurget (what declines will rise again) were inscribed on Leibniz’s coffin.

This is the sort of thinking that created the neoreactionary critique and certainly comports with my way of looking at life. The neoreactionary is climbing down the mountain to avoid catastrophe in the hopes of actually enduring the journey upwards while the progressives seem to think the shifting ice beneath their feet is going to carry them to the summit.

The case for Tradition part 2

I give you exhibit B: Nun Komm' der Heiden Heiland

Decriminalizing Rape

So at Brett Stevens's Amerika blog he says legalize rape. Read the whole thing, because he makes a very insightful point. The criminalization of rape was based on a different (i.e. traditional) understanding of the role of women & sex. Once upon a time a woman's virginity was her honor and to be bereft of that made her nearly untouchable. To disuade men from forcible defloration in an era when easy virtue (among the elite & middle classes) kept women from marriage.

Now since we no longer hold such rational Puritanical opinions the laws are a sad monument to a long lost era of sexual probity. As we say a farewell to old institutions so too should we say adieu to this archaic tradition.

I am persuaded, but I don't think feminists will be.