Announcing Jacobite magazine

We’re please to announce the beginning of a new magazine called Jacobite. The publication features articles on culture, politics and philosophy with a focus on “exit” — that is, building alternatives to systems rather than trying to lobby within them. Check out Nick Land’s primer on accelerationism, Mark Lutter on the geopolitical realities of private cities, Kantbot on how the Chapo Trap House are just LARPing as people with dangerous ideas, Andrea Castillo on the LD50’s latest “alt-right” exhibit, and Chris Morgan on the Entourage-like hubris of Fyre Festival.

Follow us on Twitter at @jacobitemag.

A Heaven For The Modern World

The Federalist published a piece I wrote about the heavy-hitting Black Mirror episode “San Junipero.” While some called it a brighter episode in the series, I think it was a dark, sophisticated meditation on morality and salvation. Check it out.

But this isn’t just a matter of homosexuality; the logic for same-sex marriage has been baked right into opposite-sex marriage for decades. Where marriage was once, in our society in decades past, a set of obligations to people, past, future and present, it is now about love—two (or more?) people enjoying one another in a relationship they can terminate at any time. How, then, can we justify preventing two people who enjoy each other from getting married, no matter what their sex?

Thus, the homosexual relationship and the contraceptive heterosexual relationship of mutual enjoyment can be seen as microcosms of the paradise world of San Juniper: their existence is not justified by any created purpose, but by the moral philosophy that matter, consciousness, and existence are all to be melted down and rearranged to maximize individual enjoyment. Even if there is an option to have children in San Junipero, it would exist in the same way that gay adoption exists in our world: something—a consumer choice—that is instrumental to satisfying desires, not an end itself.

When reality comes crashing

I published my first editorial at The Daily Caller. Check it out.

Venezuela should have been the Norway of South America. Pundits had been predicting this since 2010, when it was clear that the country would dethrone Saudi Arabia – a much wealthier country with an almost identical population – as having the largest oil reserves in the world.

But in spite of all this, Venezuela has still managing to undergo what Time described as a “complete collapse of society.” The democratically elected socialist government tried to faithfully implement a centrally planned economy and smash capitalism. By some metrics they succeeded. They smashed the markets for toilet paper and made it nearly impossible to come by, they smashed the market for food and forced citizens to wait in hours-long breadlines, and then they even smashed those lines by removing people from them based on the last digits on their government ID cards. Now food scarcity is so bad that people are set to be forced to work on farms.

The chasm between the notional and the actual couldn’t be larger. Not once did the ruling elites of Venezuela consider that their naïve – no, psychotic – utopianism might lead to bad results. President Nicolás Maduro’s adherence to ideology led him to blame the crisis on “economic warfare promoted right-wing sectors” of the country. It’s clear that, in making that statement, he was under the influence of ideology and not facts. He, just like every other socialist, is trying to relitigate 150 years of known economic fact: countries with free markets and powerful “right-wing sectors” don’t have breadlines and don’t have catastrophic shortages.

Future things III: Tokyo Drift

(First and second)

• The pro-choice moral philosophy will continue toward its logical conclusion and it will become legal for women to kill homeless people, provided that they do it discreetly.
• Thanks to news reports and social media, “migrant” will move down the dysphemism treadmill until it’s no longer used except as a pejorative.
• Advances in remote sensing and biometric technologies will make it trivial to see how aroused someone is at any given moment, resulting in a WikiLeaks-like database of everyone’s sexual preferences.
• There will be a film adaptation of “The Most Dangerous Game” that involves two Donald Trump supporters going to the North Sentinel Island in cutting-edge weapons gear, and their goal is killing the entire uncontacted Sentinelese population there.
• Facebook will have a system for people to directly share emotions/experiences with each other (memories at the beach house!), but it will quickly become a scandal when a lot of people use it to get high.

The Purge: Election Year synopsis

Two days before Purge Night, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (Elizabeth Mitchell) attends a presidential debate as part of her campaign for the Presidency intending to end the Purge, stating how it only serves to eliminate the poor, the homeless and other lower classes of society that make up of the majority of America’s population. She is rivaled by Donald Trump (Kyle Secor), a Republican candidate who intends to maintain the status quo. The Republicans, headed by Reince Priebus (Raymond J. Barry), view Clinton as a threat to their rule and plot to use the upcoming Purge to eliminate her from play.

The day before the Purge, the Republicans revoke the Purge rule that protects high-ranking government officials, appearing to attempt to reconcile with the people. Convenience store and deli owner Joe Dixon (Mykelti Williamson), his noble, undocumented immigrant assistant Jose Antonio Vargas (Joseph Julian Soria), and EMT Beyoncé Knowles (Betty Gabriel) confront a pair of teenage shoplifters who attempted to steal a candy bar. No longer able to afford his insurance premiums for the Purge, Joe decides to stake out and guard his store. Clinton decides to wait out the Purge from her unsecured home in order to secure the popular vote of the common people. Her running mate Tim Kaine (Frank Grillo), orders her home locked down and surrounded by a security force made up of Bernie Bros.

After the Purge commences, Joe and Vargas repel an attack by the teenaged shoplifters, injuring their leader. Beyoncé patrols the city in an ambulance, rendering medical care to the wounded. Clinton is betrayed by the Bernie bros, who signal to an alt-right, neo-Nazi paramilitary force led by Milo Yiannopoulos  (Terry Serpico), who wears various racist symbols such as the iron cross, swastika, and — most evil of all — not one, but two Confederate flag patches on his body armor. The security forces is injured, and Kaine manages to get Clinton to safety, but is wounded in the process. He detonates a bomb in the house, killing the Bernie Bros and some alt-righters. Clinton tries to seek shelter elsewhere, but is ambushed and taken captive by a gang of Russian DNC hackers bent on sabotaging her campaign in the name of Vladimir Putin. Before they can insidiously tell the truth about the DNC’s emails, Joe and Vargas shoot the gang dead and rescue them.

With everyone safe in the ambulance, the group is ambushed by a helicopter piloted by Yiannopoulos and two members of his team. They seek refuge underneath a highway overpass wherein Kaine deduces they were found because the bullet in his chest is a tracker. He extracts the bullet from while they are confronted by a large group of Crips.

“These negroes mean business. Let me try my Crip whistle!”  says Joe, a black man, revealing that he was once a member of the Crips.

The Crips are calmed by the gang’s trademark whistle call. In exchange for Beyoncé helping the gang leader’s “boy”, the Crips trick the paramilitary forces by planting the bullet in another area, and wipe out Yiannopoulos’s ground team.

The group is led to a hideout beneath a hospital protected by Black Lives Matter and DeRay Mckesson (Edwin Hodge) where a diverse, Burger King Kids’ Club-like group of volunteer doctors and nurses administer to wounded Purge victims. Joe, Vargas, and Beyoncé decide to go back to the store, but spot several Republican death squad trucks heading to the hideout. Meanwhile, Clinton discovers that the Black Lives Matter activists are planning to assassinate Trump and tries to dissuade them, as she wants to win the election fairly. They are forced to flee as death squad forces arrive, and the pair meet up again with the ambulance. However, the ambulance is rammed by Yiannopoulos, and Clinton is seized.

Clinton is delivered to Trump at a Vatican-sanctioned midnight Purge mass in a Catholic cathedral while Kaine and the others give chase. They meet up with a Black Lives Matter assassination team led by DeRay and infiltrate the cathedral through a tunnel system. Meanwhile, at the cathedral, Trump joins with running mate and homophobe icon Mike Pence, who is dressed in Catholic clerical garb. Trump has him use a Catholic holy water-imbued knife as to kill a man for his drug addiction as part of the mass, before inviting the members of the Republican Party to execute Clinton. As Reince Priebus prepares to slit her throat, Vargas assassinates him, signaling Black Lives Matter to invade the cathedral and causing the entire congregation to disperse and flee. In the ensuing chaos, many of the Republican congregation are killed.

DeRay and BLM descend into the crypt of the cathedral, and draw their guns on Clinton and friends.

“These are our white people, my negroes!” Joe say to DeRay, and successfully urges BLM to lower their guns and join the Clinton camp.

DeRay captures Trump in the crypt and contemplates killing him, to the protest of Clinton, while Trump goads him on to kill him. DeRay refrains, and spares him on the condition that Clinton wins the election.

DeRay and his activists decide to secure transport to leave the church while Clinton and her group hide in the crypt, but they are ambushed by Yiannopoulos and his mercenaries, leaving the BLM activist team killed and DeRay wounded. DeRay manages to dispatch the remaining mercenaries save for Yiannopoulos, who kills DeRay.

Yiannopoulos and Kaine then engage in a vicious melee combat, and the latter gains the upper hand, killing Yiannopoulos. As Clinton frees Trump’s imprisoned Purge mass victims, Mike Pence emerges from hiding and kills one of the freed victims. After wounding Vargas, he targets the senator but Joe steps in, taking a few shots himself and succeeds in killing Pence with a headshot. Before succumbing to his injuries, Joe urges Clinton to win the election.

Two months after the Purge, Clinton wins the presidency in a landslide with Kaine as her vice president. Vargas and Beyoncé renovate the store and continue to run it in Joe’s honor. A news report indicates that halting the Purge has become Clinton’s highest priority, and that many Republicans have taken to the streets in violent protest. The film ends with an ominous shot of the American flag hanging outside the deli.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purge:_Election_Year

To the powerful, immigration is an ideology

Check out my piece published at The Daily Caller:

Elites will trip over each other promoting every just about every other solution without much fuss from the media: Installing a government backdoor into every consumer device, banning guns, expanding military operations overseas, increase the depth and breadth of the surveillance state and putting soldiers equipped with body armor and automatic rifles everywhere you can expect a large crowd.

We’re expected to accept anything as necessary, whether it be living under the constant threat of terrorism or living in an Orwellian police state, if it means the continual importation of a third-world underclass. In fact, all responsible authorities tell us that the real problem but the fact that Islamic terrorism fuels anti-immigration sentiment, rather than the fact that the population is forced to live in fear, or, for the unlucky ones, were robbed of their lives.

This might seem weird in a vacuum, but it should always be remembered that elites have their legitimacy buttressed by their apparent commitment to diversity and inclusion. But for anyone who is paying attention, asking this much from the electorate is a bridge too far. The belief that racism is the insurmountable evil that warrants the suppression of all other goods might be nearing its expiration date, and the foundations of the power will shift accordingly.

That isn’t to say that racism isn’t evil, but a smarter way of looking at it might be that it’s instrumentally evil rather than evil per se. Could anyone be so bold to take this position in polite society, to say that racism is only bad because it hurts people? The U.S. Department of State already has.