This week, Mercedes Grabowski Commits Suicide After Mob Hounds Her For Refusing Partner Who Had Gay Sex. Because there are some standards porn stars—ordinarily liberal ergo “you go grrrl” ergo holy—are not allowed to have. Heartiste comments… ironically.

Something a little out of the ordinary at American Greatness: A hit piece on Sarah Sanders. Who, BTW, totally had it coming. Also, VDH is there: Is a President’s Character His Presidency’s Destiny?

Also this week… Pearl Harbor Day… VDH remembers.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam delves deeper into the social psychology behind Centrality, Power, Sovereignty.

Sarah Perry is up at Ribbonfarm Feeling the Future. Herein she explores the extent to which failure to normally process time figures into a variety of mental illnesses. And even provides occasional relief.

Alf defends The terrible truth—as typified by the Asian horror flick Nang Nak. Sounds purdy creepy.

Imperial Energy trots out the next installment of The STEEL-cameralist Manifesto: Part 6B: STEEL Reaction II (Strike Fast, Strike Hard and Strike with STEEL). Wherein he makes the case for—rather a prediction of—a military takeover of the machinery of empire. The Vendee makes an appearance.

Parallax Optics speculates On Risk.

Nigel T. Carlsbad was busy this week with some light reading: Kaiser Wilhelm I on the eve of the March Revolution. A case study on the uncanny valley of Radicalism in moderation. And he digs up a boatload of ironies and curiosities of right-wing history. Like:

And get this: the Massachussetts Know Nothings outlawed segregation in public schools in 1855, a whopping 100 years before this would be done on the federal level.

That’s right: American nativists invented racial liberalism, because they wanted to use blacks as muscle against the Irish. Of course, segregation remained as a social convention even if scrubbed from legislation.

And he’s got a zillion more. It was worth an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Over at Jacobite, Alice Maz writes about A Priesthood Of Programmers. Maz chronicles the history of communication technology and the role of priests in societies.

The priestly role is, in a word, systematization. Their chief purpose is to construct the reality in which their adherents live. They provide order and grounding, defining the base truths those of a society take axiomatically. It is on these axioms that all else is built.

And she has much, much more to say on the matter. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

By way of Isegoria… An early Icelandic experiment in republicanism—a window into the super-Hajnal soul if nothing else; how Ordinary people blunder into highly advanced systems; why All legal systems need a punishment of last resort—hint: so that it need only rarely be used (yet more on that); a veritable cornucopia of Isegoria posts on Pearl Harbor; a preview of Caplan’s forthcoming The Case Against Education; and a closer look at the less than unidirectional Anglo push for gun rights.

Finally, this week in CWNY, a lament for The Vacant Hearth:

No liberal of the female sex has a right to scream ‘sexual harassment.’ By embracing feminism she has left her humanity and her rights as a woman behind. Why should I or any male be concerned about the alleged sexual harassment of feminist harpies who welcome Moslem and black rapists into our nations while screaming about the sexual harassment of the pornographic actresses in Hollywood? The Victorian maiden and mother has a right to be protected from sexual harassment in word or deed. The modern feminists have no such rights. If we accord them any rights or sympathy, we are supporting the continual reign of terror of our modern legions of Lady Macbeths.

This Week in Jim Donald

A nice three post week from Jim, starting and ending on the subject of Bitcoin. First, Jim reverses his recent declaration and has now decided that now is a good time to invest in Bitcoin. Astute readers will remember that some weeks ago, Jim advises against Bitcoin as an investment, but he’s now back on the train. Let’s see why.

Lately I have heard tell of thought criminals opening bitcoin accounts, because they noticed “Nazis” getting their accounts blocked, and figured that come the terror, they would need some money that could not be blocked.

That, people getting bitcoin accounts for actual monetary use, is a mighty good reason to invest in bitcoin. Time was when these people would have purchased gold or uncut diamonds.

Seems sensible enough to me.

And, inspired by frequent commenter peppermint, Jim pens an entry on Kate’s wall. Take it away, Jim.

Several years ago in California, an invader with no license traveling very far above the speed limit on the freeway smashed rammed my car from behind, wrecking it. Police let him off. I should have seen this as a straw in the wind. One guy who does something bad is just life. One guy who does something bad with social and organizational support from other guys like himself is war and invasion. They are coming to kill us all and take our stuff.

…

Our elites are telling our enemies that badwhites are the problem which needs to be eliminated, but the distinction between “badwhites are the problem and need to be eradicated”, and “whites are the bad problem and need to be eradicated” gets lost in translation.

It needs to be remembered—by us—that Kate Steinle was a 32 year old unmarried woman with a communications degree. I daresay: a thot that needed patrolling. But we must never let our enemies forget that she, by virtue of being killed by a non-white invader, was our 32 year old unmarried woman with a communications degree and we will righteously smash the outgroup in her name. Thus, Kate’s Wall.

And, returning to the topic of Bitcoin, Jim assesses Bitcoin and the May scale of monetary hardness. Jim considers the scaling problems of Bitcoin as money, how that will go in the future, and to what extent that might lead to a soft money Bitcoin and a hard money Bitcoin coexisting. Cue Gresham’s Law.

The difference between hard money and soft money is that people are always happy to take hard money, not so happy to take soft money. Always willing to give you soft money for hard money, not so keen to give you hard money for soft money.

Words to live by, but not to die by, in this humble writer’s opinion. When it comes to Bitcoin, if you can spare some money to play with, definitely pick up some, but don’t kill yourself over it either way. Everyone has lots of theories about what is going to happen with it, but theories have a funny way of not surviving repeated contact with reality, and that should be understood whether you are bullish or bearish on the thing. Don’t invest so much that if it does crash you won’t be able to raise a family, and if you can afford it, don’t invest so little that your kids will curse your name for not getting in on it if it does go to the moon.

This Week in Social Matter

Our week at Social Matter kicks off with the latest installment of the Myths for a New Tomorrow series: Faithful John—a classic from the Brothers Grimm; and expertly narrated by Marcus Wolfe.

On Wednesday, Hestia’s own Wolfgang Adler brings his next installment on Portuguese history Salazar And The Loss Of The Business Elite. It is the next to last installment of his original research into this understudied, and under-appreciated “Right Wing Dictator”. It is a breathtaking in scope as it is painstaking in detail, utterly defying simple synopsis. As always, Adler takes the slow approach to history. And earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his impressive efforts.

The “Smartest Podcast in the ‘Sphere” is almost certainly Myth of the 20th Century. This week’s installment is Episode 47: Lockup—History Of The U.S. Prison System.

Also on Friday, Michael Andreopoulos proves himself rather a Renaissance Man as he explores Language And The Aesthetic Venture. He cautions the “Outer Right” against throwing out the intellectual baby with the academic bathwater. Rightly, I think.

Our educational system is a reflection of the mercantile values and ideals of the ruling class—unconstrained exchangeability. They cannot absorb the fundamentally different, the transcendent or the other. Small-minded and incapable of the labor required for suspending judgement, they cannot think another’s thoughts, cannot run different software simultaneously on their own systems. The technocrat’s incapacity is reflected, partially, in the cheap universalism of the monoglot who refuses to acknowledge the value of any epoch, civilization, or philosophy different from his own.

The Moldbuggian remedy for this cultural malaise is “read old books”—an efficient way of dislodging oneself from the progressive hegemon whose future is fixed, and whose past is always in flux. The point of the exercise is not to make you a clone of Carlyle, but to awaken you to see beyond the ever-flattening horizon. Fundamentally, this is an aesthetic venture, a creative capacity in potentia awaiting activation.

The “Enlightenment” stole our civilization. Now, we’re taking it back. Andreopoulos makes a spirited defense of high culture—restored:

Poetry should not be seen as mere decoration—it is fundamental to the project of creating, maintaining, and passing along civilization. The Greeks, Arabs, and Europeans all saw poetry as memetic technology.

Tho’ they might not have used precisely that term, things are what they are. The play too rises to the level of “aesthetic technology”:

Eventually, he becomes a critic with knowledge about how effects are achieved, the ideology of the producer, the economic pressures of the theater. His experience of the play is no longer that of the first order consumer who goes along for the ride taking everything for granted. His is not only a richer aesthetic experience, but also a far more grounded connoisseurship, framed within a more comprehensive theory of the play than that of his naive counterpart. His model of the play is raised to a higher level which nonetheless contains all lower levels. The naive spectator and the expert watch the same play, but the expert sees it kaleidoscopically.

More please? Definitely RTWT! This was the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

Finally, Poetry & Prose Editor, E. Antony Gray is back with some newly minted verse: The Cutting Of The Cords. That’s not about what I think it is, is it?

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took the week off. We trust all is well.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X contemplates The Facsimile of Meaning now often necessary to remain healthy in a modernity we weren’t really designed for. And, given the explosion in psychiatric drug use, it doesn’t appear to be working.

And for Anthropology Friday, a Part 2 of The Way of the Wiseguy, by Donnie Brasco.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The week opens at our sister publication Thermidor with Walter Devereux’s Silmarils, Synthwave, and Sham Futurism. Devereux makes reply to Gio Pennacchetti’s comments on contemporary Right-wing aesthetics. Says Devereaux…

He will hopefully permit your author to offer some critique of his claim that “the æsthetics of the new Right is sadly inadequate to reflect today’s Zeitgeist.” The reality is, in fact, that the exact opposite is true: the æsthetics of the dissident Right today are inadequate because they reflect todayís Zeitgeist. The dissident Right delights in the “Futurist” label: millennial right-wingers seemingly desire nothing more fervently than to prove to their parents that they are the real rebels, the real dissidents, the real revolutionists (their elder Gen-X cousins and siblings share this fault). They claim to be the futurists—truly forward-looking heroes tearing down the system their parents erected for themselves, without an eye to their posterity. Their futurism, though, is a sham futurism; it is neither forward-looking or backward-looking; instead it looks down at its own two feet and refuses to move at all.

Please read the rest! Devereaux impressed The Committee here and snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Leslie Cuff offers up The Center Cannot Hold: On The Decline Of Jordan B. Peterson. Cuff reviews the fates of other notable “centrists” and comments on Peterson’s failures.

Peterson is the closest thing to an intellectual the “classical-liberal” camp currently boasts. This is why, in my view, he serves as the perfect metric by which to measure the status of contemporary centrist politics. In most circumstances, examining the political center is a waste of time, as it normally contains nothing but tired diffidence, if not downright cowardice.

Europa Weekly podcast this week is Actually, Muhammad was Mannerheim’s Grandpa.

Next up is a reprint of N. T. Carlsbad’s piece on The Transition from Prussian Conservatism to German Nationalism.

Jake Bowyer marks the suicide of porn starlet August Ames with Let It Burn: Porn In America. Ms. Ames’ is a textbook case exhibiting the malevolent debauchery of the Left—as though we needed any more evidence to convict.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

For those with the stomach for it, this might be an illuminating read: The Dictator Pope.

American Dad exposes the voracious maw of the Domestic Violence Intervention Industrial Complex.

According to J. M. Smith (pace GKC), America is merely A Dishonest Church Disguised as a Nation. We could hardly agree more. And it is arguably the single biggest hurdle for Restoration.

Kristor writes Traditional Sexual Morality Works; the Liberal Sort Cannot, & So Tends to Marriage. One is based on simple marriage, the other on the compex notion of consent. Also, contrary to prevalent materialism, Nations are Ontological Reals. So are marriages, incidentally.

Richard Cocks writes this great essay, Foundationalism: in praise of vagueness, inspired by his experience teaching epistemology and also by Jordan Peterson.

The truth of foundationalism is that at the core of someone’s general worldview, his basic stance towards reality, is some kind of metaphysical commitment and many if not all of his beliefs will reflect this basic commitment—depending on how consistent he is. Complicating matters is the fact that a person’s stated beliefs and his real beliefs often conflict. Someone’s real beliefs can be seen through his actions. If someone were to claim to be skeptical about the existence of time but make plans for next year’s vacation, or if someone were to question whether a chair exists but proceeds to unthinkingly sit on it anyway, or if G. E. Moore thinks “is this my hand?” is a meaningful question but withdraws his hand when a knife descends towards it, then the person is a liar, fraud and hypocrite.

Jim Kalb writes about how ideologies that contradict Church teaching are inevitably Anti-ideals, anti-theologies.

The incomparable Ianto Watt continues his ongoing theme with Russian Exceptionalism & The Universal Church. These essays are great for gaining perspective on the modern status of the Schism from this side of the Dnieper.

In this week’s edition of Matt Briggs’s Insanity & Doom Update XV, learn about moderate Al-Qaeda and 10% of men taking their wives’ last names.

William Wildblood makes of William Blake—A Slight Reassessment. Ya think?!

Bruce Charlton posts some nice English holiday season folk songs. Wassail!

Don’t miss Bonald’s Interview With an (hypothetical distant future) Historian: Part I: looking back on the 21st century, Part II: the rise of rabbinical Catholicism, and Part III: the West and its great unfinished project. It’s pretty black pill, but has a hopeful ending.

A 10-year-ld boy make-up artist is receiving international praise. Says Dalrock, Don’t worry. We’ll get used to it. Then he recounts the story of an Australian father Ensuring a safe and pleasurable ride for his daughter who was dating a member of a biker gang. Following up, Dalrock concludes If she has enough self esteem she won’t tingle for Harley McBadboy. Also, more on the trend of women Devouring a lifetime of courtship.

To my future husband: I know you will be worth the wait! But what about her imagined future husband? Will it be worth the wait for him?

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale features the poetry of Ezra Pound: “A Study in an Emotion”. A controversial study which might indicate Psychosis hunts with diversity—wouldn’t surprise us. Lessons in how the Slippery Slope Fallacy never is (i.e., a fallacy): The Freedom and the Damage Done. A hopeful: DeusVult, and the coming unity—there’ll be time for killing each other later!! Two hymns for the Second Week of Advent. And Hilaire Belloc is due up again for Sunday Sonnet.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Jim Kalb get’s the honor of a “Timeless Essay” reprint: The Left vs. Human Nature. Fr. Dwight Longenecker plays Christmas Curmudgeon: Twelve Things I Hate About the Season—my list would be largely orthogonal to his. An extended meditation on (replete with videos of) one of my very favorite hymn settings: Sibelius’ “Finlandia”—including one in the original Finnish. Birzer on Irving Babbitt vs. Progressivism. And Olmstead on Why We Need to Read Literature. In honor of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a rendition of Pérotin’s “Beata Viscera Marie Virginis”. Finally, M. E. Bradford looks at The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver.

In City Journal, Aaron Renn finds Vigor in the Heartland—not that you’ll hear much about it on CNN. Saffran calls the acquital in the Kate Steinle case Jury Nullification, Plain and Simple—not that there’s anything wrong with jury nullification per se. Praise for President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And Heather Mac Donald covers the Bavarian State Opera and Rossini’s un-PC Battle of the Sexes.

A frenetic week over at Logos Club. Kaiter Enless posts 4 new editions of the Radio Enless podcast Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 and Episode 5. He hasn’t started naming them just yet. A bit of outrage pron: “White People Are Devils With No Culture”. A bit more as Youtube Organizes Saturnine Squadron To Memory Hole “Extremist” Content. Enless points to a 220 page independent report that confirms Authorities Allowed Violence To Erupt In August Charlottesville Rally.

Getting back to the Arts, Enless has a visually stunning post on The Beautiful Syncretism of Tatsuo Horiuchi. As well, an audio PSA: Eulogy for Posterity.

Over at It’s Oll Korrect, Richard Carroll dives deep into Reliques of Ancient English Poetry to find Some Scottish Guy’s “Edward, Edward”—a challenging piece for non-native Scottish speakers. And Carroll also has analyses of two “Poems in Motion” flicks: Your Name and 5 Centimetres per Second.

And this was something aways off from the beaten path: Manticore Press explores “The Practice of Philosophical Ecstasy”. Seems like something Alrenous might enjoy.

This Week in the Outer Left

Lyman Stone, our new favorite shitlib who actually has something interesting to say, has More Thoughts on Falling Fertility

It was a nice non-triggering week from the Left this week, just pretty interesting stuff from their misguided perspective.

In The Baffler, Liz Pelly has an extended piece on the problem with Muzak. She takes on Spotify on grounds that I think many reactionaries would sympathize with. Allow me to give you an extended excerpt.

“Chill Music” mixes seem to feature images of beautiful women. Go figure!

Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.

…

These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”

It is endlessly amusing when the bugman SWPL sees the end result of the bugman lifestyle and turns away in horror. You have made your bed, either lay in it or get out of the way so we can fix it.

Two entries over at The Awl worth reading this week. First, in their ongoing series on unusual colors, is fuchsia, the pinky purple of Victorian gardens and Miami Vice. Nothing leftish here, just an obscure history of a color that was popular in the Victorian era, then fell out of favor until it was resurrected in the 1980s by TV shows like Miami Vice. And now it is a mainstay of contemporary synthwave.

And also at The Awl was an examination of flat earthers and the psychology behind conspiracy theories. The Flat Earth thing genuinely puzzles me, and when I first heard of it about a decade ago, I thought it was all an elaborate prank, which really does still seem like the most likely explanation. But we can look at things more broadly to wonder why people believe weird things, and that is actually the phenomenon that Angela Brussel is attempting to discuss here, even though she doesn’t really know it.

One trait that is most prominent amongst conspiracy theorists is a strong distrust of authority. Once they have decided that officialdom has deceived them in one way, other distressing world events lead them to a similar conclusion.

There is more truth there than was intended, I think. People distrust authority at certain times because ‘officialdom’ is made up of people, who have interests that may diverge from the interests of those outside of ‘officialdom’. Once you recognize that, you have already left the Official Story narrative behind. This does not make every weird idea true, but it means that at least one might be. That’s a heady realization for anyone, and sometimes it leads to NRx and other times… flat earth. If you’re going to strike out on your own, away from the Official Story, you are more obligated–not less–to pay attention to where the evidence points and worry about cognitive biases. Just something to consider.

This Week… Elsewhere

Knight of Númenor comments briefly and astutely on The idealistic Nordic race.

Faith & Heritage have a bone to pick with Amazon’s War on the White Working Class. A war made more effective, no doubt, by downward wage pressures due to low-skill immigration. Related: Kraine’s The working man’s mind.

Also at Faith & Heritage: “If everything is racist, nothing is”. Well said.

Unorthodoxy has a fine overview of Trump’s Anti-State Department—nice to see a covert war on BlueGov.

A private spy network is to the CIA as Bitcoin is to the U.S. Dollar. Power is being redistributed from large, centralized states to decentralized groups. When Great Powers are allied, such as the United States and Russia in Syria, a decentralized state such as ISIS will be crushed. Where they are in opposition, they will undermine each other using non-state actors.

This earned an appreciative ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee.

Heartiste has some solid psychological frame tips for WNs (and other “haters”).

Thrasymachus relates the all-too plausible story of Sam ‘N’ Ella’s Farm Fresh Chicken… coming to a Cracker County near you.

Arnold Kling’s The Simplicity Assumption, and its better—but less rhetorically artful—alternatives is an interesting read. But however complex a problem may be, it would seem inarguable that “having one guy in charge of solving it” does make it quite a bit simpler. Kling also reviews Yudkowsky’s Inadequte Equilibria.

Al Fin looks at the remarkably stable (and large) share fossil fuels play in world energy production. Also a large bucket of ice water to pour over a study showing high rates of mood disorders among Mensa members.

Also there, Fin has a magisterial review of psychometrics: Welcome to the Idiocracy: Lynn and Flynn Agree.

Chris Morgan takes an entertaining look at The Spectrum of (intellectual) Obsolescence.

Nullus Maximus gets into the Spirit of the Season writing in Praise The Grinch Bots.

Whilst imploring the reader Don’t hang on my every word, AMK provides some pretty good ones to hang onto…

The more I study the more I think the solution to everything that ails Western civilization is a religion. Progressivism infiltrates because it has a religious characteristic. Capitalism co-opts everything through getting people to adopt its immoral value system of use-value as a moral and religious code. Islam is a threat because of its religious nature. Everything threatening and dangerous is religious. From one perspective this is a reason to try to abolish religion. But then you realize that religion is an integral part of the human brain, that it is going nowhere, and that human nature will always produce an incentive to exploit the religious part of people’s minds. Something has to occupy the religious position. Abdicating that responsibility will simply invite someone else to take up the position and use it against you.

Meta-Nomad unleashes his trademark style for another of his music reviews, this time reviewing Subboreal’s Childhood’s End. I don’t care if this type of music isn’t your thing, or you think you don’t care, but seriously, RTWT for the style if nothing else. It will nudge you towards being a better writer, or double your money back. Just look at this, and recall: it’s just a music review.

As the sterilization comes, you’re already anaesthetised by the suffocation and fall, quietly into a bed made of humming. Bone splinters and spinal plunge, take the hand of steel, let go of flesh, of life, of sense. Come forth into repetition pure. We can give you your memories back for a second or two, it wont help, but the illusion of help might be nice, amongst your trees of youth, horizons lost to polite play, everything you had, had, had.

Short, but then childhood is.

PA revisits Robert Putnam’s optimism about diversity in spite of his own findings now 10 years on. It hasn’t aged well.

David Chapman takes a long hard look at Post-apocalyptic life in American health care, coming soon to a loved one near you. This is actually a very important and careful analysis of what’s fundamentally wrong with our current health care “system”—so to speak.

Welp that’s all we had time fer. I’ve been noticing an explosion around the ‘Sphere of the use the proper dash lately—the html emdash to be specific. We hope we have inspired this in some small part—but remember too much of a good thing is still too much of a good thing. Many thanks to the Best Roundup Staff in the Universe: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/10) appeared first on Social Matter.

The whole sphere got a bit of a scare this week with news of Nick Land’s (self-reported with a maximum of non-challance) pulmonary embolism. Gnon was not ready to take him home just yet. And he’s apparently doing well. Our non-meaningless thoughts and prayers go out for him and his family, nonetheless.

Net neutrality ended this week. Malcolm Pollack says It’s Been Fun. With tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Although it’s politically moot, Heartiste has a worthwhile unpacking of this whole shebang: Roy Moore Did Nothing Wrong.

VDH on Why Trump Should Consider a Post-Twitter Presidency. Well… Twitter might very well ban him for violation of their shiny new TOS. If not, well I suppose Emperor Trump might oughta consider hanging up the Twitter… after his 5th term in office.

American Renaissance has up a snazzy (and clickable, zoomable) Hate Hoax Map. (HT: Unorthodoxy.)

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton provides an elegant kick-off to the week with his Sunday Thoughts—Puritanism edition.

Imperial Energy continues his theme with Some Tough Questions for Neoreactionaries and Some Thoughts on Formalism and Violence. Also there: Napoleon Really Was the Greatest.

Giovanni Dannato believes Dissident Success Requires Cities. We strongly agree. Civilization. Civitas. City. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Spandrell announces no plans to Live hard, die young, tho’ this would have made an epic parting shot. Continuing on the theme he so capably introduced: Bioleninism, the first step:

Any system ruled by political parties will always move to the left. Their business model is based on getting low status people to work for them. Obviously they must give them something in exchange. And they must motivate voters to vote for them. Their promise is simple: You, low status people, help us out, vote for us, obey our commands, and we will give you high status. Don’t vote for us, disobey us, let the right win, and you will remain low status.

The Committee gave this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Titus Cincinnatus zeroes in on Individualism as Western Pathology. The fixation of the West, especially among classical liberals (aka., “the right”), upon the “rugged individualist” myth, studiously ignores the collective behind the curtain. As always, Cincinattus is positively magisterial here—and he’s suitable for (open-minded) normies.

The mythical noble savage, upon which individualism is precariously perched.

[L]ibertarianism and socialism are in many ways two sides of the same coin, both being modernistic rejections of traditional society which depend upon several post-Enlightenment epistemes for their intellectual justification. They reject traditional “grounding features” within society such as religion, hierarchy, the legitimacy of authority, and so forth. In doing so, they atomise society, breaking down social bonds and turning communities into soulless, mindless aggregations of atomic individuals with no loyalties or obligations to each other beyond the rather ridiculous “non-aggression principle.” Both libertarianism and socialism are anti-social in the true sense of the term – BOTH break down these social bonds. Classical liberalism does so to “free” the individual to pursue his own private interests often to the detriment of society, while socialism essentially does the same thing, enabling each individual to exercise political power to try to allocate to himself a greater share of the economic pie.

So… you’re saying halfway between socialism and capitalism, then? Exercise some imagination, Grasshoppah:

The principle of individualism is literally where our word “idiot” comes from. This same mistrust of individualism can be seen in Aristotle’s principle of the Golden Mean (see below), which described the “mean” as the apex in virtue (aretē) between two suboptimal extremes. In the cases of virtues relating to the interface between the individual and his social organisation (e.g. courage, magnanimity, proper ambition, modesty, etc.), the place of virtue is held by the one who keeps the effects of his actions upon his community and society in view, while the detrimental extremes are held by those who veer of into individualistic pursuits (e.g. cowardice as too great a concern for one’s own self-preservation, ambition as a lust for self-promotion rather than glory through service to the polis, and so forth).

And do take a look at Cincinattus’ excellent Golden Mean infographic. Whilst you RTWT, of course!! It earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Adam, at G. A. Blog, explains Moral Thresholds. It’s pretty heady socio-political and linguistic philosophy. He needs a more capable interpreter than me.

Kenneth Clark explains why the Roman Empire fell in his “Civilisation” series.

Devin Helton is Introducing Left-Versus-Right Book and Article Pairings at Counter Search. I perused the pairings. They are voluminous and comprehensive. Devin has put in some hard work here. Spread the word about Counter Search.

Atavisionary has an excellent reminder Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation Series—and embeds all 13 parts. It is simply a magnificent series: Very slow history, heavily focused on the aesthetics, and simply could not be made today. Hate speech-n-all that. Not to mention the vast troves of camera silence. In retrospect, it reflects a last gasp of the Civilization that was. And, we may hope, a breath of life to a Civilization yet to come.

Alf presents some cool music—in lieu of writing something for year’s end. Sounds like Jungle Jive to me… Meanwhile, fans around the world still await the soul-stirring conclusion to The Orb of Covféfè…

Malcolm Pollack has an excellent two-parter: The Personhood Of “Society”, And The Myth Of The General Will and here is Part II. Well, maybe not a “person”, but “living organism” is a remarkably strong and sticky analogy. Empedocles, the Darwinian Reactionary has been excellent on this subject over the years, but specific links are escaping me at the moment.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin observes that Europe can’t into big tech. At this point in tech, Europe is, at best, a distant third to the giants of the United States and China.

German tech guy notes that Europe barely has a presence in the tech sector.

* Hardware dominated by East Asians; Europeans used to do this, but Phillips, Nokia had their heyday many years ago.
* Internet infrastructure (e.g. cloud, DNS) dominated by the United States, though China has its own self-contained ecosystem.
* Platforms (operating systems, social networks, search engines, app stores) are dominated by the United States. Europe has almost zero presence here.
* Europeans do have some successful apps, e.g. some video game companies, various music and shopping services.

By way of Isegoria… New Yorker searches out the origins of “You will not replace us”—finds someone we’ve heard from before. Kids love dinosaurs. The dark underbelly of power-law distributions. Death by light saber wouldn’t be all it’s cracked up to be. Switzerland is prepared for civilizational collapse. And more Star Wars geekery.

Finally, this week’s missive from Cambria Will Not Yield, a hearty Merry Christmas!.

This Week in Jim Donald

A shorter, two entry week from Jim this time around, so let’s get to it. First, Jim observes that the Blue Empire of the consulates gets it in the nads. Only Jim can make tihs point with his characteristic style.

I predicted that Trump would have taken power by now. Obviously he has not. But, he is working on it. Unwise to bet against Trump.

In return for Israel not funding his enemies, he recognizes Jerusalem as the eternal and undivided capital of Israel. State Department furtively instigates world wide outrage against this move, which world wide outrage fizzles out dismally. The elite is maximally indignant, the Pope condemns the move, but the masses fail to show up on cue.

…

Most of the empire continues to servilely move ever leftwards, and ever against local identity, electing a new people. We are still losing, and losing quite badly. But if you are a diplomat who just got fired by Trump, does not necessarily look that way.

“We are still losing, and losing quite badly.” Remember that, always remember that. It has long been the NRx analysis, and continues to be, that Trump can buy us some more time, but that is as far as it can go. No matter how much Trump wins, we are still losing, and losing quite badly. But if we use our time that Trump is buying us wisely, maybe one day we will win.

And, springing off not entirely recent events, Jim explains the trouble with Rotherham. As you might imagine, this is less about Rotherham and more about some uncomfortable facts about female psychology. I desperately want to quote the entire thing, so please RTWT. But here is a taste, because you have earned it, loyal readers.

Female behavior makes total sense from the point of view of evolutionary psychology when you reflect that the barista with an advanced degree in women’s studies and one hundred thousand dollars in college debt will probably become a cat lady, but if Islamic State was militarily victorious, and auctioned her off naked and in chains at public auction, would probably have seven children and twenty grandchildren.

It also makes total sense if you take the story of the fall seriously. It is the curse of Eve. “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

It also makes sense of female voting behavior. Single women have no country. They want us to be conquered, they want their male kin to be castrated, so they can finally get into the possession of someone strong enough to own them.

On only one point, I must disagree with Jim: we must still restrain Muslims as well, by keeping them the hell out of our countries. Otherwise, Jim is completely correct. I firmly believe that the Fall is the most literally true portion of the Old Testament, for precisely the reasons to which Jim alludes. Nevertheless, Jim snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his work here.

This Week in Social Matter

Social Matter has gotten a bit quiet of late and I don’t actually know why—even from my lofty editorial perch. Still, the West Coast Guyz™ work like clockwork, and delivered the Myth of the 20th Century podcast on-time and intact: Episode 48: Rambo—First Blood.

This Week in Kakistocracy

For an unprecedented second week—well, we haven’t actually checked the “unprecedented” part—Porter has failed to update at Kakistocracy. Rumors are beginning to spread, and a pall has spread over the crime-thinky sphere: Perhaps the fat blue-haired feminists and their band of vegan “male” orbiters have hauled him off to the Tumblr re-education camp. Or perhaps not.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X maintains her abbreviated schedule with only two posts this week. First up, Exciting Bith Data from 1919. And when she says exciting, she means she’s digested a large amount of data and made infographics.

We can pick out several trends: the West probably had more men than women, resulting in lower birthrates. Mormon Utah was serious about making babies. The Midwest and North East had overall moderate birth rates, though there are a few towns in there that look heavily Irish.

“Irish”. There’s probably a meme in there somewhere. LOL.

And for Anthropology Friday, the conclusion of The Way of the Wiseguy by Donnie Brasco, pt. 3/3. But do not despair, her exploration into the anthropology of criminal gangs will continue with a new book next Friday.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Huyuge week over at our sister publication Thermidor. Nigel T. Carlsbad kicks the week off with a Royalist and Rousseauist All the Same. At least in a particular instance.

Alex Nicholson (of Myth of the 20th Century fame) writes In Praise of the Safari—along with some fantastic pictures.

It is meet and right that leaders should hunt, for hunting is the primordial task of men, and a leader who refuses to take game is in a deep way refusing to fulfill his duty as such. From the ancient Assyrians mentioned above to the Soviets (the breakup of the USSR was negotiated over a hunting trip) the mighty have always used their status to secure hunting rights for themselves. Given endless supplies of luxuries and women, these men still chose to hunt, we should ask ourselves why, before like [Michael] Savage, we descend into hysterics over a matter we don’t fully understand.

Many have noted the connection between manhood and the preparation and provision of meat. One of the last vestigial masculine roles in our age of decline revolves around meat. Few men hunt, yet it is almost always the man who tends the grill and the man who carves the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas ham. It would just feel wrong to everyone if the women did these tasks.

But how to explain Michael “Boahdahs, Language, and Cultcha” Savage getting mixed up in this… purity spiral?

Radio host Michael Savage

Michael Savage and his ilk (presumably) object to the returning of trophies from Africa, not because of some data-driven argument about wildlife conservation, but because of causally indeterminate negative emotions. Like unexpectedly small portions in a restaurant, or increased tolls on the Queensboro Bridge, rich white men shooting charismatic mega fauna is intolerable. For Savage, who openly looks down on his flyover audience and their limited understanding, hunting is a bizarre practice, the habit of brutes. The only possible motivations for hunting, being that it requires entry into the scary realm beyond the confines of Metropolitan Statistical Areas, are sadism and perhaps a need to vent sexual frustration. This is of course nonsense.

Nicholson impressed The Committee and earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine research and analysis here.

This week’s Europa Weekly podcast covers “Mushroom Nationalism”, as well as various news items of interest from around the world.

Hoyt Thorpe has a magazine-level entry on Trump And The Return Of Pre-Modern Incivility. Despite it’s title, this article is principally focused on the relatively (and totally undeservedly) obscure 20th century American sociologist John Murray Cuddihy and his take on American Civil Religion, which, by his (and Thorpe’s) accounting, took a shot to the nose during the Civil Rights era, from which is has not recovered.

Today many of our most august and respected public figures identify as heirs to or direct participants in the counter-cultural revolt against civility. While many of the more radical goals of counter-cultural intellectuals have fallen out of favor, the revolt against civility has left its mark on the values of western leadership, covering our most vocal and respected thinkers with a pall of counter-cultural cool. Nearly every sacred event, including the most recent Presidential inaugurations (the solemn coronation of our secular pontiff) are sound-tracked by the most uncivil of rappers, rock and rollers, and pop singers. Politicians openly schmooze with “vulgar” comedians and artists whose works are applauded for their blunt confrontation with reality and disrespectful dismissal of stifling, outdated pieties.

Of course, disrespectfully dismissing outdated pieties has itself become a rather outdated piety… and a particularly fun and easy one to dismiss with disrespect. As the expansion of the Dissident Right and the leakage of its ideas into mainstream culture has shown. And by—as Michael Moore so helpfully and artfully predicted—“The Biggest Fuck You in Human History”. Political incorrectness has become alarmingly high status again. Alarming to the curators of public opinion at any rate:

[I]n a March issue of that most civil of conservative publications, the National Review, Kevin Williamson unleashed his own Id in a declaration that “downscale” white working class communities “deserved to die”. The same mediocre whites whose sexual insecurities were allowed vent by the Trumpian Id deserved the slow death they were experiencing. Similarly, after decrying the fact that Trump freed the “dirty little ids of his Twitter feed’s tiniest minds”, Kathleen Parker engages in her own vulgar and incivil sexual innuendo about the “[sexual] limitations” of Trump’s followers. And of course the oft-repeated refrain that Trump’s incivility is dehumanizing can be compared to the outcry against Jimmy Fallon for his “humanization” of Trump on the Late Show.

Thorpe cites dozens more examples.

Why are these commentators focused on criticizing Trump’s incivility and simultaneously undermining his claim to being politically incorrect? Why does civility coexist with the valorization of incivility? Why the urgent need to qualify and justify? To explain the paradox of commentators with liberated, incivil Ids demanding that Trump and his supporters refine their own Ids, we must return to sociology.

I’m not going to be able to do this article justice by excerpt. Suffice it to say, you must RTWT… This took the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ in a tightly contested week..

And our own “Bad” Billy Pratt gets his name up in Thermidor lights with Authenticity and “The Cable Guy”. New digs, same ol’ Billy Pratt, with his patented social commentary through the lens of cultural artifacts.

There is a decadence to this obsession with authenticity. Our culture fosters a kind of Holden Caulfield-like suspended adolescence where wearing the Metallica shirt isn’t enough, nor is it immediately permissible, but only after an undefined quantity of experience is your ownership of the shirt acceptable. Are you sophisticated enough to understand why you should enjoy chocolate liver pate, regardless of personal taste? Are you watching Mrs. Doubtfire the right way, ironically and detached, or following the film’s narrative as intended?

If the obsession with authenticity is a luxury, indicative of a culture so problem-free that it’s boring itself to death, to what degree is the expectation of authenticity reasonable?

The most powerful authenticity possible is never to care about authenticity. Or at least that’s the approach I take. If nothing else, it lulls your ideological opponents into a sense of complacency. Whereupon, you can whack them over the head with, “Traditional life, of course! Social norms didn’t just evolve over the last million years of hominid adaptation for no reason. Don’t you believe in SCIENCE?”

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Finally, on the blog Jake Bowyer takes a stab at Upsetting the Hikikomori: Against Net Neutrality. His intuitions are much akin to ours: Anything that makes liberals squeal like stuck pigs is fine by us. B-b-but… muh bandwidth…

Look, if your major political rallying point is more endless distraction, then you need and deserve to suffer. America already has too much leisure as it is; it’s making us all terribly unhappy. At the sake of sounding like a cranky old codger, go read a book or go to a bar. Ride a bike, go to the gym, or, for heaven’s sake, go meet people in the real world. You’ll probably find that Rick and Morty is not half as fun as meeting real-life dorks.

Hey, you can cranky old codger… ironically!

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Over at Faith & Heritage, Adam Grey has a nice piece on the long intramural struggle within Protestantism: Two Centuries of Struggle and Division. Heretics always seem to be on the same side, regardless of denomination. Also there: On the unlikelihood of White Fragility. Does mockery count as “racial stress”? And this too was interesting: HSLDA Wrong on Race in Homeschooling. HSLDA (FD: I am a life member) burnishing up its prog credentials?! What’s this world coming too??!!

Cane Caldo points to a terrific-sounding History of England podcast, which may be of interest to our erudite—if somewhat autodidactic—readership.

Universal Dissenter composes apposite remarks on The True Constructive ‘Love’ and the False Deconstructive ‘Love’.

J. M. Smith compares the merits of The Lesbian Rule of Sheriff Andy Taylor to the rigidity of Deputy Barney Fife.

Over at Throne & Altar, Bonald finishes up his Interview with a (far future) Historian with parts IV: the coming of black rule, V: natural selection, and an explanatory Postscript.

And Bonald picks a bone with David Bentley Hart in When the present contests the past: the death penalty

As he grades mid-term papers, Thomas F. Bertonneau vents about grammatical pet-peeves in Linguistic Subscendence. Try not to make these mistakes.

Matt Briggs reports about the old memory hole being ripped open as SJWs Warn Against Viewing It’s a Wonderful Life and about thousand other movies. Then he predicts very little change in The Future of “Merry Christmas” in America. Also among Briggs’s predictions this week is The Final Fall of the Church of England. And the marxists go after ancient horse trainers, a Catholic couple is rejected by Catholic Social Services for being Catholic, the Pentagon actually pays for an “operation,” and girl scouts are trained not to hug their relatives, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XVI.

Filed under What Was That Definition of Insanity Again… Mark Richardson criticizes Tim Farron: the cure for liberal tyranny is liberalism? Instead, Richardson argues, liberalism itself is the cause of modern tyranny.

Imagine if a Christian agreed to the liberal standard, and assented to the idea that moral choices are just subjective preferences, in which no matter what we choose we could just as morally have chosen something else. Surely that would be demoralising, in the sense that it would undermine Christianity as a serious belief about the nature of existence.

William Wildblood posts More Christmas Music—Nesciens Mater, a stunningly beautiful polyphonic vocal canon.

In The heartache of entitlement, She made a mistake once, and Weak men are screwing her feminism up, Dalrock recounts the tale of a Christian woman who ended up alone because she thought she was too good for her potential suiters. A Pearl of Great Price, indeed. Poor girl. Poor old cat lady. And Dalrock warns that, despite society’s promises, married men will receive No respect.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Over at Chris Gale’s place, he digs up some verse from an authentic Puritan Poetwife: Anne Bradstreet—before they went totally downhill. Reports from the ground in Sydney of a society in secular decline. By way of Elspeth, “women love attention from men until it’s somehow in their interest to pretend that they don’t.” How, in Belgium, they are now killing people with depression, which is generally treatable. Finally, an olio for the Third Sunday of Advent as well as the obligatory Sunday Sonnet, courtesy of Hilaire Belloc.

Over at The Logos Club, Kaiter Enless explains The Extraneous Nature of American Political Parties. Extraneous perhaps, but also inevitable. And anyone with the power to change it would have the power to suspend the constitution. Which come to think of it, is not really a bad idea. Enless finds his Inner Lenin is THE PARTY: Manifesto Towards A New Political Party.

And from the Radio Enless podcast Episode 06, Episode 07, and Episode 08—concerning the unification of the Samizdat blogosphere.

By way of Imaginative Conservative, a Timeless Essay on how and why Beauty Will Save the World. Richard Strauss’ “Dreaming by the Fireside”. An exposition of Advent and Melancholy. The poetry of Michael Shindler “Before First-Frost”. Voegelin’s remarkably short (for Voegelin) meditation upon The American Experience. Ten odd facts about Handel’s “Messiah”. Like slow history, slow movie reviews are always right on time: David Hein characterizes the 1962 Western “Ride the High Country”: An Elegy on Leadership.

Richard Carroll goes meta-literary with a review Arika Okrent’s In the Land of Invented Languages. Esperanto, as well as Klingon, get some attention—the former in particular for having created a particularly exclusive (and therefore powerful) subculture.

Finally, over at City Journal, Seth Barron recounts the recent, not terribly successful terror attack at NYC’s Port Authority bus terminal. (Related.) Heather Mac Donald finds a host of liberal Double Standards and Distortions. Joel Kotkin and Tory Gattis set the record straight regarding Houston’s supposedly inadequate urban planning. Polèse on Why the Populist Surge Has Missed Canada—so far. And a window into Portland’s Disgraceful Anarchy.

This Week in the Outer Left

Cyborg Nomade thinks NRx is dead. 1) Define: “NRx” as “the one thing neoreactionaries talk about that is interesting to me”; 2) observe they don’t talk about much any more; 3) declare NRx dead; 4) ???; 5) profit. The much bandied, and even more misunderstood, trichotomy (ethnic particularism, religious traditionalism, techno-capitalism) makes an appearance. Neoreaction lies at the intersection of those branches, not their union.

Craig Hickman is not abandoning his post, just tending to things in IRL life. Which is probably something I should do more of…

Elsewhere on “the left”, another interesting week, including some rather… surprising… pieces.

Two entries at The Awl were worth our time this week. First is another piece of the truly fascinating series on unusual colors. This week is glaucous, the greeny blue of epic poetry and succulents. As per usual, there’s nothing political here, just interesting discussion of an unusual color. This color series is one that I am quite enjoying week to week, and I hope that the readers find it equally worthwhile.

I usually try to avoid schadenfreude in this space on the left, but sometimes it is just too much. That is the case with Dilbert: a Reckoning. Writer Miles Wray is, apparently, a long-time fan of Dilbert and is quite upset about recent innovations in the comic and aspects of Scott Adams’ life. 60 year old Scott Adams posts pics of his abs on Twitter, oh no! He posts pictures of his girlfriend who is half his age, shame! Fair warning, the levels of salt to be found in this piece are dangerously close to a lethal dose, so read with caution.

Scott Adams and Kristina Basham

Adams has just released his fifth non-cartoon book, called Win Bigly. The existence of this book is infuriating at every level you can think of. In the last two-plus miserable years since Trump came down that fucking escalator and kicked off this whole shitshow, the only accusation that he is not completely goddamn guilty of is that he was never saying the nonsense word “bigly,” but actually saying the phrase “big league.”

…

Rarely, though, have we had to get our hearts broken by learning that an admired artist, who made work that really did capture, heighten, celebrate the human condition, is pro-Trump. Dilbert is an exception. It is a compelling work of art made by a member of the alt-right. There’s no reconciling or skirting around this fact. It’s just uncomfortable.

All these flavors and you chose to be salty.

And over at The Baffler, John Ganz is trying to be the first leftist to break the scoop on The Forgotten Man, Murray N. Rothbard. This one is… actually surprisingly fair. There is the occasional desperate reach to try tying Trump and Rothbard together, but otherwise it mainly does stick to the facts of Rothbard’s life and career. Presumably, Mr. Ganz thought the mere facts themselves were succifiently damning that only minimal demonization is required. In any case, RTWT if you’re interested in Rothbard or, as is likely for people reading Social Matter have your own history with Rothbard.

Despite … his prolific writing on every subject from contemporary cinema to the Federal Reserve system, Rothbard’s name is not widely known. It’s not likely to be found in bibliography of a contemporary economist’s paper, but you will find it scrawled on the seamy underbelly of the web, in the message boards of the alt-right, where fewer voices are more in the air than Rothbard’s. One can look at the recent profiles of neo-fascists to find the name Rothbard, and that of his favorite pupil and protégé, Hans Hermann-Hoppe, again and again. In The New Yorker’s piece on Mike Enoch, the founder of the “Daily Shoah” podcast, Enoch notes that his path to the alt-right began with reading Rothbard, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. When asked how he began to move “so far right,” Tony Hovater, the Indiana [sic] Nazi from the infamous New York Times profile, “name-drops Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.” Chris Cantwell, the crying Nazi of Vice News notoriety, says he was a “big fan of Murray Rothbard” and then went on to “read Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed.” Trump backer Peter Thiel’s essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” shows the clear influence of Rothbard’s apostle Hoppe, who invited Thiel to a conference that also hosted American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and VDARE’s Peter Brimelow. For a time before his death, Rothbard had the ear of Pat Buchanan. Paul Gottfried, the erstwhile ally of Richard Spencer, who is sometimes credited with coining the term “alternative right,” was a friend and admirer of Rothbard, and he also delivered the Murray N. Rothbard Memorial lectures at the Mises Institute.

This does highlight an interesting point: many people who end up part of NRx or the alt-right make their first deviation from the mainstream by entering libertarianism.

This Week… Elsewhere

TUJ pays more attention to foreign affairs than is probably healthy. So may as well take advantage of it: The Israeli-Saudi Proxy War Against Iran as Hamiltonian Concentration of Force in Practice.

Hapsburg Restorationist presents: The Origin of the House of Hapsburg: An Alternate Theory.

PA finds some (relative) wholesomeness in the 60s protest era in A ‘Nam Flashback. Certainly the centroid of civil discourse was shifted 73% more sane back in those days.

Al Fin has a bunch of nice stats and infographics on Should Everyone Go to College? Hint: no. And here’s why.

Zeroth Position has a review of Stiglitz’s The Euro, which they received rather cooly. Also there, Insula Qui’s essay On Traditionalism, Degeneracy, and Compassion. It’s actually pretty good, but tends to prove that libertarians are often right, even if for all the wrong reasons.

It's very hard to escape the conclusion that the only way to get a libertarian paradise is iron-fisted authoritarianism.

— ♔ The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) October 25, 2017

All women are married… to “a husband, her Johns, or the state”.

Unorthodoxy posits: Russia Collusion Crimes May Blow Watergate Away. If some critical mass of the media can turn it’s guns on the Democrats, perhaps.

Zach Kraine explains the right reasons to oppose Islam in the West.

Rounding out the week, Arnold Kling displays a remarkable level of ignorance in How I think about Bitcoin. Has he not read his Nick Szabo?

That’s all we had time for. Remember: Only 4 shopping days left til… Holiday… folks! Note to Roman Catholics: You must attend 4th Sunday of Advent mass and Christmas mass at separate times, even tho’ they may very well be on the same calendar day. No two-for-one mass deals. And besides, why would you wanna? Many thanks to the TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler helped out tremendously, as usual. David Grant was out this week due to exigencies of the season. We expect our coverage to be much improved next week by his swift return. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/17) appeared first on Social Matter.

The sphere was jam packed with well-wishes, blessings, and good thoughts for Christmas this week. Logos Club extends Yuletide Greetings. By way of Imaginative Conservative, classy, but not too terribly expensive gift ideas for women of good taste. Unorthodoxy offers a (beautiful) mixed media Merry Christmas. PA rewrites (thereby much improving) John Lennon’s Happy Christmas. And Slumlord chimes in with Christmas greetings and a State of Dissident Right Address. And Evolutionist X throws a Christmas Open Thread, with must-see feature image.

VDH opines on The Internet (as) Executioner. Although there is much ado about “The Internet” shutting down dissident voices, I find Five Minute Hates punish my enemies a whole lot more. Therefore… Pass the Popcorn™. (Goes down heckuva lot easier when one believes in neither free speech nor a free press.)

This week in American Greatness, James Piereson bids a Good Riddance to the Blue State Model.

And Kevin MacDonald’s Unz piece: Opioids and the Crisis of the White Working Class is absolutely not to be missed. He gathers a lot of indisputable facts together on this subject that was (and is) so near and dear to Ryan Landry’s heart.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Imperial Energy offers a Formalist FATWA to the charge that “NRx is Dead”. Wherein IE promises “The Ten Pillars of Mencius Moldbug”. The first of which he promptly delivers. It is excessively long but a worthy one-stop recap of Moldbug’s “Purpose & Procedure”, thereby earning an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Giovanni Dannato argues that Suburban Populism Beats Rural Traditionalism In Mass Identity Politics. He hits upon an absolutely key point crack out of the box:

The dissident right’s model of reality falls short when it focuses on race while ignoring class.

Indeed the signal conflict of Western Civilization is intra-white—and no don’t just mean white versus (((white))).

A suburb that doesn’t appear to suck.

In the real world, most of America lives in the suburban orbit of the cities and not only does a minority live in the more traditional countryside, lots of them are old people. The city and its hinterlands is where most the action is at. The country has the advantage of providing safer territory for right wing populists to operate in, but in any kind of electoral politics, suburbanites both middle and working class have to be the main focus. Even people in the country can use facebook and tinder now. Going “trad” is a recipe for failure at this point. Nobody really can go back or even really wants to. The real question is what replaces obsolete, dead social structures.

He’s basically correct in that, tho’ I do object the implicit equation of “Going Trad” and “Going Rural”. Certainly there is a tendency for people, especially those in religiously reactionary spheres, to equate them, but exploding that instinct—which I argue conflates accidents with essences—is absolutely essential to our project. “Trad”—properly speaking—is a commitment to time-honored and proven social technologies, which happen to be under attack from false, but utterly regnant, ideologies of The (so-called) Enlightenment. Whether you believe “God commanded” or “Adaptive selection rewarded” traditional social technologies (or, as must needs be: both) is largely irrelevant. They work, demonstrably, and very nearly optimally for the types of problems human societies necessarily face. Cop outrage pron aside, this is a very worthwhile read and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also this week at Forward Base B, Dannato’s musings upon The Dance of Cooperation and Defection. Defection is only a successful strategy when it is either not detectable or not severely punished.

Shylock Holmes has a an excellent meditation upon Bitcoin and the Inscrutability of Wealth—which should not be construed as investment advice. My own opinion on bitcoin is that it will keep doing what it’s been doing: skyrocketing up, crashing a bit, and stablizing around ever higher equlibria. Therefore buy (big) dips.

Titus Q. Cincinnatus delivers an eloquent and spirited defense of Hierarchy and Authority as Necessary Components of Civilisation.

Hierarchy and authority are not merely human inventions, but are in fact God-ordained (it is not surprising in the least that rejection of authority among men has nearly always been accompanied by atheism and the rejection of God’s authority as well). Scripturally, God ordained human society and government as a means of diverting the baser nature of mankind into positive channels, or at least to attempt to restrain it from flowing through the negative. God also ordained the patriarchal family as the organising principle for the means of propagating the species and preparing adult members who would be fit for full participation in society. Even if one wishes to rest merely on natural law arguments, one can see that these same principles hold true.

And of the opposite…?

Of necessity, egalitarianism and the rejection of hierarchy rest upon a foundation of radical individualism of the sort which has infected the Western intellect like a mind worm since the Renaissance. Ironically, while in a hierarchical society everyone knows his place and can find his or her individual identity within it, in egalitarian contexts, the individual person is cast adrift, unmoored from a sense of belonging and identity, and is left to try to forge his own identity as best he can. This explains the drive for “uniqueness” among those who have enthusiastically accepted egalitarian principles in the modern West. When you don’t have an identity based upon a set of traditional interlocking hierarchies and roles, your identity becomes built around other sources, usually extraneous and ersatz.

Excellent stuff. No stranger to the podium, Cincinnatus takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his work here. RTWT!

In Generative Anthropology the topic of the week is Sovereign Resentments inspired by the under-explored “Sacramental Kingdom” of Louis IX—the only French king defined as a saint. Adam relates Andrew Willard Jones’ (Before Church and State: A Study in the Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX) account of the remarkable cooperation between “Church” and “State” during the 13th Century reign of St. Louis.

What the sacramental kingdom did recognize is the “business of the peace and the faith,” a business carried on collaboratively by all the power centers of society. Categories like “heresy” and “rebellion” pointed to a single nexus of social unrest that needed to be bound up with the peace and faith of the realm. According to Jones, while the category of “sovereignty” presupposes the primacy of division, conflict and violence, and hence the need to concentrate power in a single source, the sacramental order presupposes the primacy of peace, with conflict and violence seen as aberrations—in which case, power is essentially reactive to breaches of the peace and faith, and can be carried out by any responsible agent—even a tavern owner.

A very worthwhile read, and while dense, not terribly long. Adam gets the nod for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ here.

Alf reads Alan Friedman’s Berlusconi and reports the results.

Friedman harbors typical leftist resentment towards Berlusconi and finds him arrogant, shallow and egotistic and deserving of condemnation by the international community. Yet Friedman cannot help but reveal envy in his writing, because every man would envy the Italian version of Donald Trump. This made for an interesting read.

Alf parenthetically wonders if Friedman is Weinstein’s twin brother, which was worth a couple laughs as well…

Billy Pratt is just in time for The Holidays with The Disillusioned Boomer and “Christmas Vacation” (1989)—a movie he seems to have hated, which is a bit surprising because he seemed to sorta like Family Vacation (1983). What happened? Reagan happened, for one… And by 1989, everyone was buying “Morning in America”, after it had already been sold to Mexico for a future 4th round draft pick…

This time Clark wants a big swimming pool for his big house, theoretically relying on a bonus check from work to pay for it, and when he doesn’t get it Clark goes berserk. Entitlement for the sake of entitlement—Clark wants what Clark wants because Clark wants it. Heartwarming, I know.

Clark has also dropped any sense of idealism when dealing with family. If visiting Eddie was gross in “Vacation,” Clark was still gonna try to be a good guy about it. The joke was less about how disgusting Eddie is, and more about seeing how much good guy Clark could take before losing it. “Christmas Vacation” skips past this with a far less sophisticated take on how much family sucks. Clark is done bothering to put up appearances, and is irritated with his family from the moment they walk in the door. Eddie isn’t even invited this time around, crashing the family’s Christmas, and isn’t it funny how gross he is?

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Atavisionary makes another documentary recommendation with which I fully agree: Connections (1) by James Burke 1978, which dovetails beautifully with last week’s Civilization series. Don’t bother with Connections 2. It sucked. They tried too hard to recapture the magic of the original series, and managed only to eke out too much British snark. To much of a good thing… yada yada yada.

By way of Malcolm Pollack: One Hundred Racist Things. Which gets me thinking about a Twitter bot account that doesn’t yet exist: Every Word Be Racist.

Norther Dawn shakes off its winter slumber with Constantin de Mestre’s debut article Disdain And Mismanagement: A Century in the Life of Our Armed Forces. That’s the Canadian Armed Forces, of course. Which used to be pretty kick-ass, I hear.

An instant classic post over at Those Who Can See: Weapons of Mass Migration: Are You a Target? See especially Section IV on the Brain Drain mass migration creates: There’s more than one Whom to the elite globalist Who. TWCS snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for this one.

Over at Jacobite, Christian Britschgi of Reason gives us commentary on Under-Theorizing Governance. Britschgi’s targets are several authors on Leftist sites who’ve taken issue with public choice theory.

Common to all three pieces is a reliance on Marxist ideology to serve as a substitute for any practical theory of why individuals, interest groups, and governments behave as they do in the real world. Public choice theory is flawed in their eyes, not so much for its lack of empirical insight, but because it fails to conform to ideological conclusions that were arrived at before the evidence. In attempting to expose the evil of governance-optimizing thought, leftists reveal how incapable their own ideas are at describing a world where incentives are real.

Libertarians are not wholly misguided when it comes to political science, and public choice theory is definitely an asset to anyone hoping to build a stable state in the future.

Public choice theory […] takes the realities of incentives and practical governance head on. Unlike solutions of the left that are fenced in by how well their conclusions fit with ideology, public choice theory is value-neutral. It doesn’t lean on the crutch of rhetorical conformity. Public choice scholars accept the fact that most human beings will never be saints. They instead task themselves with formulating structures and mechanism of government that work in a world where not everyone is as opposed on principle to state action as they.

A big week from Anatoly Karlin, with four entries of note. First, the blackpill timeline, a set of pessimistic but plausible predictions Anatoly is making for the next few years. I don’t think what he has sketched out here is the most likely scenario, but plausible? Certainly.

Anatoly also remembers when alt-right was banal centrism, which was… quite recently. Polling of WW2 US military personnel show that overwhelming majorities opposed military racial integration. Just 70 years ago, some kind of sanity was the order of the day on racial questions. We ought to remember that these attitudes can change in what is, in world-historical terms, the blink of an eye. And if you get a, say, Constantine to convert to your side, attitudes can change even faster than that.

Karlin also puts up a rare listicle, enumerating 10 ways life in Russia is better than in America. This is, of course, dangerous wrongthink and in no way encourage Social Matter readers to RTWT. Just look at this:

Rare Nina Dobrev pic.

8. Less Faggotry

Did that trigger you, snowflake?

Nobody in Russia cares, LOL.

Even though I don’t particularly care for hardcore homophobia, I consider the right to call things and people you don’t like “gay” as one of the most important freedoms there are. Happened all the time at school, but since I graduated in 2006, liberal faggots have all but criminalized this. Russia remains free of this cultural totalitarianism; here, you can still call a spade a spade and a gender non-fluid helicopterkin a faggot (пидор) without any particular worries for your professional career and social status.

I don’t think this will last so enjoy (or suffer) it while you still can.

And, rounding out his offerings this week, Anatoly offers the lowdown on North Korea. I am inclined to think that a shooting war between the US and the DPRK would be a lot more of a slog than Karlin seems to indicate, but overall he offers a more balanced perspective than one usually hears. A definite read if you’re one of those who is fascinated by such geopolitical minutiae.

Finally, this week’s offering from CWNY: Remembrances VII: The Return to Bethlehem. It appears to be part of a series—perhaps an epic master work???—of plays that he publishes around Christmas each year. Here are (courtesy of my incomparable google-fu) links to previous years’ editions: Remembrances (2011), Remembrances II (2012), The Woman Who Loved Much (2013), God, the Devil, and Mau Mau (2014), By the Cross We Conquer (2015), and Thy People (2016).

By way of Isegoria… On the relative cardio-vascular safety of the taser; The Iliad as the greatest campfire story every told; Does Vitamin D prevent the flu?; Saturnalia gift ideas from Martial’s Epigrams; Carlos Slim slashes New York Times holdings—perhaps the market on Fake News is about to turn south; and, speaking of tasers, an etymology on “electrocution”.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim kept us abreast of current events this week, so no grand pronouncements on the evils of female emancipation. Darn. Anyway, Jim observes that the Blue Empire of consulates continues to collapse.

Pakistan expels the NGOs. So, soft power looks like it is not doing too well in Syria, Libya, Sudan, the Philippines, Hungary, and Pakistan.

The NGOs are the foot soldiers of the US State Department, and, as the internal cohesion of the state continues to collapse, act like a plague of locusts. The empire dissolves into a horde of mobile bandits. Gigantic amounts of money were poured into Haiti, and spread famine and disease.

…

Which brings me to hard power and the Red Empire of the Bases (though since Obama placed feminists and transexual commissars all over it, no longer all that red).

How is the affirmative action Navy doing?

The affirmative action Navy seems to be having a spot of difficulty operating all that complicated machinery created by evil white males, especially now that they have stopped those evil white males from engaging in the evil white male microaggression of mansplaining. Lot of crashes lately. Which problem has been solved, or at least substantially reduced, by the simple expedient of staying in port and operating as a floating brothel and a jobs program for people who profile as Democratic voters.

The Empire’s decline is very real, people, and their ability to paper over it with gee-whiz technology is starting to peter out, because, well, it’s the evil white males that make the new technology to provide bread and circuses.

And, on a usual topic of his, Jim has a short entry on Trump and power. In case you can’t even be bothered to click, the story is that Trump has not yet taken power, but he has taken definite, but small, steps in that direction. Unfortunately, this is not the time for measured moves but rather sweeping purges of the Cathedral apparatus.

This Week in Social Matter

Another quiet week here at Social Matter, but we did eke out two items (aside from Ours Truly). The ever-regular Myth of the 20th Century podcast was Episode 49: Konrad Adenauer—First Chancellor Of West Germany

And Poet Laureate E. Antony Gray resumes his Poets Series with a study of Wallace Stevens, whom, like Ezra Pound, is more un-remembered than reinterpreted these days. Which, for Gray, provides a very useful heuristic…

The result of this process is strange, in that it means that when I began to dig for poets that I hadn’t read or heard of, I almost always find treasure; for as a person of reactionary sensibility, it is almost certain that if a poet or writer is good and buried, it is because they are a persuasive conservative of some kind.

Stevens has not always been quite so unheard of…

If indeed, as the literary critic Harold Bloom said, Stevens was the “best and most representative” American poet of the time, how is it that we do not know about him? (From my last essay on Dryden, there seems a pattern here.) Does it then surprise you to hear the Poetry Foundation stating that “by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers.”? At this point, no. While the Gell-Mann effect is not a slam dunk way to tell us that popular publications are missing what is really important and deeply influential simply because we see it in what we know, it should mark a good starting-point for an investigation. We keep turning things up!

Gray provides an abundance of samples of Wallace Stevens’ work, along with astute commentary. The Committee were very impressed and bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his superb efforts here.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter—who was not laying at the bottom of a ditch with his neck broke—returns from a two week hiatus with some more disdain for the way that Trump is spending his political capital in Alphabet Cuts in 18. Taxes, according to Porter, are necessary in order to make society feel the pain of its moral indulgences. The US has been spending more than it taxes for quite a while now however. Why not weaponize tax policy?

…[R]epublicans could have absolutely crushed the globalist money men with punitive brackets on very high incomes, matched with elimination of the earned income tax credit on the bottom… That’s cutting into the left’s brain and muscle.

After all, as Porter notes, the Left cares nothing for the national debt. Its imported clients care even less. Worrying about the nation that the next generation inherits is the domain of high-trust societies, and we are well past that point.

Then, Porter wishes us all a Crypto Christmas. Actually, he has some serious reservations about Bitcoin and the like. But through all the critique, one real advantage of BTC shines through:

Bitcoin allows its holders to avoid the inflation tax. There can only be 21 million bitcoins ever. Their value can not be shaved like fiat currencies. In fact their value is almost mathematically certain to increase as supply remains capped while the universe of goods and services they could be used to purchase theoretically expands forever.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Two Interesting studies: Early Humans in SE Asia and Genetics, Relationships, and Mental Illness. The first potentially pushes back the earliest arrival of humans in Asia by 20k years, and the second features comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s cousin as co-author. No really. It’s an accomplished family.

And the saga of the Original Gangster: The Real Life Story of one of America’s Most Notorious Drug Lords, by Frank Lucas continues for Anthropology Friday.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

At our sister publication Thermidor, N. T. Carlsbad kicks the week off with Some Ironies and Curiosities of Right-Wing History. A lighter piece than Carlsbad’s usual but still an interesting collection of exactly what the title suggests.

The Europa Weekly podcast serves up The Peter Diaries.

Next up, Richard Carroll offers a review of The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and its Imperial Legacy by Yuri Pines. Carroll gives the book a strong recommendation and draws specially attention to the Chinese state’s pragmatic treatment of its intellectual class.

Absolutists may frown and ask why the emperors didn’t clamp down on these troublesome scholars. We should note that several emperors were less concerned with their historical reputation than Shizong in the story above, and did torture and execute particularly troublesome critics. Part of the answer for why others were more tolerant is that the first dynasty, Qin, did adopt Legalism as its guiding philosophy and attempted to enforce stricter uniformity. However, the Qin collapsed after just one king, and was fiercely criticised [sic] as tyrannical. The following dynasty, the Han, was far more tolerant (though it’s worth noting that this dynasty was initially weak, and so perhaps simply unable to enforce its will as firmly as the Qin). Emperor Wu, who reigned 141-87 B.C., ended this lenient policy and granted Confucianism canonical status, in part by instituting the examination system that would gradually become so central to the imperial bureaucracy. Why Confucianism specifically? In part, it functioned as a compromise with the literati. Though other schools would have served Wu’s purposes more directly, many scholars saw Confucius as an intellectual ancestor, so by granting them official status Wu could bring them into the imperial system, make use of their talents, and gain more control over them, while allowing them to maintain their dignity.

Carroll’s excellent analysis here was more than enough to prod The (quite stingy) Committee into an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

K. R. Bolton rounds out the week with another book review, this time of On the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Art in Post-War Germany by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg. Syberberg is not explicitly Right-wing, but that has not saved him from the scourges of the Left, and there is much in his book with which reactionaries will agree.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor admonishes would-be traditionalists on The Rectification of Grammar. So if this applies to you, rectify yourself. Another opportunity for us to plug the heroic (and endlessly entertaining) work of the late, and criminally under-widely-known, Richard Mitchell: Underground Grammarian. I urge completism in his regard.

Bonald writes More on the priority of wholes, elaborating on Kristor’s post from last week, exploring its opposite error, namely, considering a whole to the exclusion of its parts.

J. M. Smith draws parallels between the loss of the great American songbook and the fall of the Roman Empire, both of which were among The Deadly Fruits of Victory.

Matt Briggs writes about the mathematical prediction of the coming world cataclysm in Cliodynamics And The Lack Of A Hari Seldon. Also, The Mathematics Of Santa Claus’ Present Delivery System:

In fact, any argument which attempts to show that Santa could do his job if he were only fast enough always ends disastrously. Santa would have to travel so fast that the reindeer would burn up like meteors entering the atmosphere. However, these mathematical results, while true, are answering the wrong question. And since those presents are delivered, so Santa must be doing something else. But what?

Sorry, no Insanity and Doom update this week at Briggs’. It was Christmas.

Jim Kalb strikes a delicate balance between Honoring Rulers, Honoring Truth. Then he comments on Donald Trump, social issues, and Catholic witness:

Catholics responsible for presenting Church social teaching who are dismayed by the rise of Donald Trump, and by the support he has received from their co-religionists, should look in the mirror for an explanation of the turn events have taken. His triumph has a great deal to do with their failed leadership.

Mark Richardson contrasts the current Pope’s pro-immigration antics with Pope Benedict XV, who in 1920 wrote an encylical about The good course of national tradition.

Bruce Charlton treats us to a reading describing Arthur’s Christmas feast in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Knight of Númenor envisions Australia: an Anglo-Mediterranean civilization in the making.

Finally… ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and… Sydney Trads published their prodigious Second Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, comprised of long-form essays by the reactionary luminaries Barry Spurr, Thomas F. Bertonneau, James Kalb, Frank Salter, Kristor Lawson, Mark Richardson, and Valdis Grinsteins. It posted too late in our week to fully digest. It is massive not merely in textual extent, but moreso in the brainpower behind it. We hope to have some of it digested for next week’s review, but urge interested readers over there to get an early start!

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale has a couple helpings of Ezra Pound, with a dash of E. Antony Gray tossed in. An interesting historical vignette on Why the Victorians drank so much—it depends on your accounting system. Wifely devotion in poetry past and present. Favorable commentary upon Spandrell’s Biological Leninism. Jihad comes to Melbourne. And a pair of (non-mawkish) Sunday Sonnets for Christmas Eve, from John Donne.

Fencing Bear has a hefty dose of fencing geekery applied to popular fending amusements. Also there: the impossibility of proving oneself not a white supremacist in an age when “silence is violence”.

Disney girl: Kelsey Asbille Chow. Disney is quite formulaic, but it’s an impressive formula.

PA—a man of diverse talents and interests—offers A Simple Poem in Polish with his own English translation.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, a capable debunking of progressive “values” in Ordinary People Against the Multiculturalist Intellectuals. A review of: “The Miracle of the Bells”: A Forgotten Novel & Film. Commentary and embedded video of American composer Wm. Henry Fry’s Santa Claus Symphony. This week in Wyoming Catholic College: Looking for Camillus: Why We Need Great Men. And Fr. Dwight Longenecker laments Christmas Without the Angels.

Lorenzo from Oz has perspicacious thoughts on Origins of philosophy. This too was quite delicious: Islam as Philosophical Dead End.

This week in the Radio Enless podcast, Kaiter has a remarkably blasé attitude toward doxing. A review of The Force Awakens—which sucks on its merits. And another Star Wars episode: Rogue One—which he liked a whole lot better. (For those who prefer reading reviews: that version is here.) In Logos Club text edition, Enless catches up to the present in-theaters moment with a A Writer’s Review of The Last Jedi. In non-Star Wars related news, Enless serves up some well-earned scorn for CNN, Younglings & The Fear of Fascism.

Richard Carroll continues his Plato’s Symposium series with an overview of Symposium.

Jonathan Haidt, of NYU and Heterodox Academy fame, stops by at City Journal with an essay, based on a November address to Manhattan Institute, on The Age of Outrage. (Here is Kling somewhat less sanguine than Haidt.) Theodore Dalrymple finds some exemplary old people that give him some hope: O, Brave Old World! Judith Miller argues that America First needs to focus on infrastructure. The dark, fetid (and totally predictable) underbelly of Suspension Reform. A review, but sadly few photos, of the David Hockney retrospective at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art: Cubism and the Camera.

This Week in the Outer Left

The Outer Left was too boring this week to justify the expenditure of our august readership’s time.

This Week… Elsewhere

Heartiste presents a vignette from The Whitelash. And filed under Science Finding Out What Your Great-Grandparents Already Knew: Niceguys Lose, Nicegirls Win.

AMK thinks There are only four problems in the world. That’s incorrect: There is only one…

But America has so many problems! No, she doesn't. America has only one problem: America is a communist country. #NRx

— Moldbuggery (@moldbuggery) December 3, 2017

Also from the Anti-Puritan, a tale of late Roman decadence: The story of Elagabalus: perverted trannie emperor, and virtue signaling zealot.

Arnold Kling doubles down on his utter failure to understand what Bitcoin actually is—despite many knowledgable commentators.

Nullus Maximus helpfully explains Eight Politically Incorrect Benefits of Cryptocurrency.

Al Fin offers an excellent primer on Early Brain Development and the Dangerous Child.

Universal Dissenter has a hot (and new to me) theological take: Wheel Theory, The Projective Line, and the Trinity; Finding the Trinity in A Priori Systems. And manages to do so without heresy, near as I can tell.

Greg Cochran explains why the Lewontin fallacy is a fallacy… probably even on it’s own terms.

Welp… that’s all folks. Many thanks as always to my fine and faithful TWiR staff: Aidan MacLear, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler contributed their usual high quality coverage. And it was tremendous to have David Grant back at his post. As an administrative note: We are still looking for well-qualified contributors to the Arts & Letters and HBD “beats” around the Reactosphere. Apply within. Keep on reactin! Til next YEAR: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/24) appeared first on Social Matter.

From all of us at Social Matter, we bid you a Happy and Prosperous New Year! A preternaturally quiet week around the sphere in this interregnum betwixt Christmas and New Years. I didn’t get a lot of notices of new articles, and nearly half of them were from Arnold Kling finding every way possible to not understand bitcoin, and a few impossible ways. I won’t bother linking those, but his ruminations upon 2018 as a year of resistance is spot on.

Over at American Greatness, VDH has a history lesson with some striking parallels today: Back to the Future: From Scooter Libby to Donald Trump. History is what VDH does best… This too: The Bigmouth Tradition of American Leadership. We don’t have quite the admiration Hanson does for certain less than stoical figures of American History—nor a fortiori the stoical ones—but he provides an excellent set of vignettes with analysis.

And over at Faith & Heritage, Adam Grey has a serviceable 2017: Alt Right Year in Review. PA presents a positively encyclopedic list of President Trump’s Accomplishments In 2017.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Well, it may have been a light week, but a significant fraction of what did get published was of extraordinarily high quality. Shylock Holmes has distinguished himself in the ‘Sphere with his on-going etiological study of auto-genocidal birth rates in the West. This week he looks at Feminism and Birthrates. First, the meta problem:

It is the rich and educated who are having the least children. We are not just shrinking, we are getting dumber to boot. If you doubt me, I’ll gladly stake a wager on whether you should expect to see more articles about “The Flynn Effect” or “The Reverse Flynn Effect” over the next 20 years. One does not have to be a HBD fanatic to observe that, if current trends continue, it is hard to see a scenario where this ends well.

Next a litany of possible causes, which zeroes in on the runaway inflation of the price of “good schools”. This he sees, in large part, as fueled by feminism, which broke down the social equilibrium in which almost everyone benefited by living on one income…

[T]he norm that, in general, women don’t work, was a reasonably strong Schelling point around which to co-ordinate. As long as everyone stuck to the deal, you could afford exactly the same house and school district as before, but now there was someone at home to make dinner, keep the house clean, look after the kids when they came home from school.

As the Schelling point collapsed, we got the school district arms race. The first couple to have dual incomes can move up a long way in the school district/land rat race, but it wasn’t stable. Other people joined in, and before you know it, everyone has to have two incomes just to afford the same house that they would have had before until a single income model.

Which skews birth-rates way down among those most likely to have children that raise average general intelligence. Superb work from Holmes, which garners him an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

At Generative Anthropology, Adam has earned his reputation by veiling one of the most radical critiques of modernity under a scrupulously polite and measured discourse. (This is his superpower. Shhh.) This week the fangs show just a little bit in The Counter-Inquisition.

Liberalism has infiltrated all institutions, but it can never completely conquer them because liberalism is intrinsically parasitic: it needs a center to be de-centered. Counter-infiltration therefore involves holding the center, even if the center is just basic competence, which we now know is equivalent to whiteness. I call victimary moral panics the “Inquisition,” with apologies to the real thing, because they function essentially as human rights show trials. The discourse is prosecutorial, with the charges constructed out of what would be the “pre-crime” of earlier, successfully prosecuted offenses […]. So, accusations with follow-up questions presupposing the legitimacy of the accusation. “When did you stop beating your wife” become “when did you stop the silent, implicit abuse of not believing all women everywhere”? The crimes are all necessarily made up, as terms like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” etc., function in exactly the same way, and have exactly as much conceptual content, as “counter-revolutionary” did in the USSR. They are simply ways of identifying enemies of the people.

Actually, that’s more than a little fang bearing. So what if we turn the inquisition around?

If women can’t co-exist with men in public spaces without constantly falling victim to all manner of sexual assault, shouldn’t rigorous regulation of sexual relations, to the point of not allowing unmarried individuals of different sexes to be alone, be put in place? No, the answer will be, we just need to stop white privilege and toxic masculinity. But where is the boundary between white privilege and plain old whiteness, between toxic masculinity and the new and improved non-toxic alternative? Not only is drawing a line here impossible because of the basic incoherence of the categories, but it’s undesirable because it would inhibit further movement, which is to say, it would block the flow of power, undermining the very purpose of these categories in the first place.

I can’t remember the exact quote, but in the Hacker News where Curtis Yarvin was discussing his own disinvitation from the Strange Loop Conference a couple years ago, he wisely said something like: “OK, show me the positive propositions I must assent to.” Not in those words, but that was the gist. To the believer in actually rational discourse, this is perfectly acceptable request. You’re saying I have evil opinions, let’s nail those “correct” opinions right to the floor here and maybe I’ll assent to them after all. Needless to say, his offer was not taken up. What the liberals want is power, and the freedom to insist “Ever-lefter” is the very source of that power. To spell out a specific orthodoxy once and for all dooms the project. This is why “Content of Character”, color-blind avenues of argumentation is racist. Because your cultural masters said so! Anyway, Adam has much much more here, and I urge folks to RTWT! This one takes the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Imperial Energy offers some more Tough Questions for Neoreactionaries, stemming from Darwinian thought, not so much what as how. The Big Question: Is American, pace James C. Scott, in reality a barbarian nation, thus eviscerating the Menciian Critique? I cannot hope to answer the charge fully here, but I think the answer is contained in Moldbug: There has always been two Americas—the Civilized (centralized, pacified, scrupulously law abiding) Massachusetts America and the “Barbarian” (libertarian, seat of the pants, uncultured) Everywhere Else America. And these two Americas have always been at war, and the “Civilized” side keeps on winning. But they haven’t seen fit to try to wipe out the “uncivilized” claimants for over 150 years. So statistically speaking, much of Barbarian America remains. This is in contrast to Europe, where the Blue Empire literally genocided Barbarian Europeans.

Alf surveys Thee Current Year that was over at Alfa NL. This column, qua Schelling Point, gets a mention. Alf has one of the better senses of humor in the ‘Sphere, and is always a worthy read, even when he’s (rarely) wrong about stuff—especially when he’s (rarely) wrong about stuff. Speaking of which… he’s definitely not wrong here as he pits the Jimian versus Heartistian viewpoints: Heartiste’s 1 pretty lie. I don’t want to steal his thunder, but this is a pitch perfect formulation…

Heartiste gives you tools to get laid in the age of thots.

Jim gives you tools to end of the age of thots.

This one was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Nick Land is well enough to post a (criminally sane) Quote Note.

Building off last week’s listicle, Friend of This Blog, Anatoly Karlin has another one, with the 10 ways life in America is better than in Russia. ‘Merica, fsck yeah!

Guns

American gun rights are enshrined in the Second Amendment and are by far the strongest of any major country in the world.

In Russia you need to fill out reams of forms just to get a hunting shotgun. All handguns, magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds, fully automatic weapons, and open carry are illegal.

Malcolm Pollack has a wonderful follow-up to his 100 Racist Things: Racist Thing #101. Also a cautious, and thoroughly red-pilled take on the Iranian situation.

By way of Isegoria… Doc, how do I know where I should shoot? On the ambiguity of “hunter-gatherer”; on so how do you handle an Eric Garner-sized man who won’t comply?; on Combining endurance and strength training has always been tricky—or impossible; and an endorsement of a sort: He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

Cambria Will Not Yield was reverently silent for this holy week.

This Week in Jim Donald

An abbreviated week from Jim, no doubt he was busy preparing for the new year in the traditional Australian fashion. I don’t know what the traditional Australian fashion is, but I have to assume it involves excessive alcohol consumption, and the world’s deadliest collection of spiders, snakes, and trees. However, Jim did pen a brief reminder that yes, all women are like that. What are all women like? Glad you asked.

Women are attracted to arrogant violent men. They are attracted to IQ<80 criminals because criminals are allowed to be violent, while high status males are not, with the result that the status hierarchy as perceived by women winds up upside down from the status hierarchy as perceived by men. AWALT. All women are like that. When people say that not all women are like that, NAWALT, it is like aging fat feminists saying that different men have different types so you can’t say one type of beauty overrules the others. Not so: Men want to fuck young, beautiful and fertile women. Women want to fuck arrogant, violent, criminal men. That is all there is to it. We may nuance after accepting that, but only after accepting that.

Providing that nuance is left as an exercise for the reader, but in order for you to do that successfully, Jim has to hit you with the hard stuff first. It’s for your own good.

Women have a primitive concept of power. And we men are all dancing monkeys. So, the thing we are forced to do is to become powerful as women understand power.

Which unfortunately is anti civilizational and counter civilizational. Hence the need to modify civilization so that high status males get to perform more private violence. It is easier to have more private policing, to make male status hierarchies more convincing to women, than it is to make women have sex with the men that they should, and refrain from having sex with the men that they should not.

When affluent respectable middle class white males beat misbehaving daughters and wives, and receive any necessary public assistance in so doing from police and authorities, while low lives do not receive similar assistance, then IQ<80 criminals will stop being so strangely attractive to women, and the guy in the corner office will find himself receiving hot letters from women he has never met.

Now, look, no one, least of all Jim, is advocating beating women as an end in itself. It is an unfortunate measure that must be employed to get the situation back in hand, for the greater good of restoration of a decent civilization that is not hellbent on suicide. It is the fact that we allowed other men to remove the real threat of beatings that makes beatings temporarily necessary. The “other men” point is significant. As commenter Coke put it:

Just as nonwhites are fundamentally irrelevant to the political balance of power, women are fundamentally irrelevant to the sexual balance of power. Feminism is nothing but a club with which some men strike down other men.

If this surprises you, meditate upon it until it no longer does.

This Week in Social Matter

Things remained rather slow around here, but the West Coast Guyz™ run the Myth of the 20th Century podcast like well-oiled machine. This week’s history-packed recording: Episode 50: Storm Of Steel—The Great War.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took the week off. This should not be construed as a lack of things to be outraged about…

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another invaluable Cathedral Round-Up #28: They’re not coming for George Washington, that’s just a silly right-wing conspiracy…

I’m old enough to remember when George Washington was admired for freeing all of his slaves in an era when most people took slavery for granted. Today he is castigated for not having sprung from the womb with a fully modern set of moral opinions.

Yes, they are coming after George Washington. So predictably, in fact, that it makes the Archie Bunkers of the world look like geniuses. Mrs. X snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for her tireless and crucial work here.

And for Anthropology Friday, more excerpts from (and commentary on) Frank Lucas’ Original Gangster.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The year has come to a close on a light week over for our sister publication Thermidor. Jake Bowyer starts things off with Third World Creepin’. Bowyer ponders the grim history and present of the great city of Chicago.

For Europa Weekly we have The Lost Legions of Christmas.

Next up is a reprint of Billy Pratt’s The Narrative of Heartbreak and “Big” (1988).

And finally, rounding out the year is N. T. Carlsbad with Geneva 1782. Carlsbad revisits the Geneva Revolution of 1782, a short-lived and lesser known precursor to the French Revolution.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero is winding things down over at Gornahoor. Tho’ we hate to see him go, this may prove a salutary boon to many who haven’t been reading him since 2006(!!), as he promises a final series of digests and distillations. This week he tackles The Order of Things.

According to Kristor, The New Castellation of the Eurosphere hearkens back to reconquista fortifications and foreshadows a new crusade.

Bonald discusses the antimaterialist sentiment of Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy (1958).

Perhaps science does not provide a complete picture of reality because such a picture does not exist (at least for minds like ours), and perhaps religions speak in myths and parables not because they are false but because there are truths that can be expressed in no other way. Perhaps there are even resources here for wider rapprochements between rival religions and philosophies.

A relatively quick read, this one snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

J. M. Smith demonstrates a historical context where the new mass migrations should be considered Seeds of Sedition.

Matt Briggs, reporting on the media, raises this alarm: Washington Post to Christians on Christmas Morning: Jesus Didnít Exist. And in light of the President’s wildly successful first year, it seems that Underestimating Trump is His Biggest Advantage. Also at Briggs, Ianto Watt writes more about the history between east and west, its relevance to the present, and the religious Signposts pointing toward the future.

Mark Richardson calls out liberal conservatives, and particularly Jordan Peterson, because he is Not a true outsider? Then he writes more on the corrosive nature of liberalism, on which train There is no brake.

William Wildblood also rails against liberalism this week, calling it A Bad Bargain – Our Spiritual Destruction.

The Western world is having the spiritual life sucked out of it. The rest of the world follows in the wake of the West. Our minds have been deconstructed and are in the process of being reassembled to reflect a false reality, but we are so deluded that we regard this as progress. We have rejected truth and eagerly embraced a soul-destroying (quite literally so) lie. We are becoming shadows of real human beings.

Sydney Trads release The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted “Oppressor”

The Sydney Trads’ 2017 Symposium

On Christmas Eve, the Sydney Trads released its symposium of longform essays on leadership and strategy within this restoration movement. Each one of these essays is worthwhile and important. Valdis Grinsteins writes Ideas are for Action as the Bow is for the Arrow, which focuses on the qualities reactionary leaders should exhibit.

If you want your activism to be practical and effective, first study and analyze your adversary, be bold and creative in your actions, do not be discouraged by enemy propaganda or initial set-backs and defeats, and look for funding in places where you can build community without having to be dependent on a few big donors or the state. Perhaps most importantly, pray.

Mark Richardson describes the development and criticizes weaknesses in liberalism, predicting The Future Belongs to Us (if we want it to).

Camille and Kennerly, the Harp Twins

Our main competition is right liberalism because it acts as a distraction from the civilisational defining questions that only non-liberal political theory has the courage to address. In other words, our greatest opponent is ill-equipped to deal with the very things that have motivated us towards various forms of activism, be they explicitly political or cultural. However, the right liberal camp is no longer as solid as it once was. Yes, there are some who remain comfortable with what the nations of the Anglosphere and the West have become. But it is notable that others have drifted into the Dissident Right (or even the Alternative Right) because they too are alarmed by trends within the mainstream liberal culture and see the failed attempts to stop this by conventional conservatism.

Thomas F. Bertonneau points to a path of scientific development directed toward traditional anthropology when he asks, Is Practicality Practical?

Praxis, for modernity, means doing things with the minimum of energy at the front-end (although that minimal quantity of energy might be quite large) so as to insure the maximum of physical results at the back-end. Any human concern is external. When modernity apprehends such non-physical notions as spiritual efficacy, cultural significance, and cosmic attunement, however, it knows not what to make of them; it would instinctively never assign them within the circle of practicality, but would laugh them out of court. … A mechanism, no matter how subtly wrought, that did nothing in the world of matter but let us say claimed only to generate metaphysical significance would likely strike a Twentieth-Century mentality as a gimmick, like a magic eight ball, but it could never truly understand it.

Barry Spurr provides some broad context regarding the problems in academia, hopefully leading toward Reclaiming the University.

The source of the range of problems besetting the contemporary university, as of so many problems in contemporary society, is to be found in the 1960s. The previously unheard-of idea was introduced, then ñ in that period of immense social upheaval, when radical notions were taken to their extremities and often beyond, into the la-la land of plain absurdity ñ that ëeverybody should go to universityí. We are paying a tremendous cost today for the commitment to this fatally flawed notion, which, it was maintained, would be a Great Leap Forward for equality and a formidable challenge to whatever remained of the wretched elitism and exclusivity in the world of higher education. No one promoting this nonsense paused for a moment to query whether making higher education available to anyone who wanted it might have the disastrous effects that, indeed, it has had on standards, right across that system: that so far from raising everybody up to a stellar level of intellectual attainment, it would drag all but the most resilient and talented (that is, those who should be at a university in the first place) down to the lowest common denominator of so-called achievement.

James Kalb lays out a plan for Dissolving the Black Hole of Modernity, which culminates in an argument for the widespread readoption of Catholicism.

Without an understanding of human nature, the world, and the particular tradition of which we are part that ties social goals and traditions to the structure of reality and thus turns them into objective standards, there is no reason to interpret a tradition one way rather than another, or to take allegiance to a particular society, political regime, or civilization seriously. We might prefer this interpretation or that, or recognize allegiance as socially beneficial, but why not bail out when thereís a serious personal cost? Also, the current public order is based on a particular understanding of reality. To overcome it we need another that is more adequate to human nature and the world and is capable of inspiring an overriding allegiance. That again means religion.

Kristor J. Lawson pushes Toward A New Aristocracy and gets real about how to actually build a viable ruling class.

If we are to generate nobility then, we shall have to do it from the ground up. To put that another way: we shall have to do it ourselves; and what is more, we shall have to do it to ourselves. We shall each have to become as noble as we can.

Frank Salter brings up some particular “Strategic Considerations for Anglo-Australian Identitarians.” But don’t let the title fool you, universal political principles are described, and the high point is a rare taxonomy of nationalisms. Part 1 and Part 2.

Here we shall examine six types of nationalism popular in Australian history ñ ethnic, liberal, economic, republican, civic and reactive. In the following discussion I argue that an identitarian variant of the liberal type is the most balanced, capturing elements of the other positive types while retaining the authenticity and prudence of the Anglo Saxon political tradition.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale has thoughts (and art and quotes) for St. Stephen’s Day—aka. “Boxing Day”. Inspired (apparently) by E. A. Gray’s piece last week, Gale digs up a gem from Wallace Stevens: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. A psychiatrist’s own lament on Opioids and Millstones. He has a bit of John Donne with timely admonishment To the Young Gentlewomen. And for New Year’s Eve the obligatory Sunday Sonnet, courtesy of Hilaire Belloc.

There never was an official video for Boston’s Amanda. But that didn’t stop people from making unofficial ones.

Over at Imaginative Conservative this looks quite promising: “The Habsburg Manifesto”: A Conversation in Four Acts, an excerpt from Marcia Christoff-Kurapovna’s independent film project: The Habsburg Manifesto: How Modern Democracy Ruined My Life and How I Got Revenge. Promising, indeed! Pearce pulls from Joe Sobran in identifying Big Brother in the Classroom. Malcolm Guite offers an original sonnet (with audio) for The Feast of St. John the Evangelist. Filed under Pretty Much Completely Different: Sympathy for the Devil: The Tragedy of the Altamont Concert—a review of the Rolling Stones’ documentary film: Gimme Shelter, which presents an utterly undigested view of the counter-culture, and why you don’t invite the Hells Angels to do stage security.

Also there, they have the full text of Viktor Orbán 2017 Christmas Address: “We Europeans Are Christians”—bracingly parochial: What’s not to like? Theologically literate to boot.

Up a City Journal, a review of various Words of the Year. The impeccable Merriam-Webster people named “feminism” Word of the Year 2017. Yes, really. Clearly, it was a post-humous award. Husock explores one of the most delicious benefits of the Tax Reform Bill, i.e., who it really hurts. And Stefan Kanfer has a thus-far review of BBC’s The Crown.

Richard Carroll has two year-end summary posts: one 2017: The Speed at Which Cherry Blossoms Fall is a review of the blog and his writings elsewhere; the second a review of the Books He’s Reading. And that dude reads a lot!!

A quiet week (after several very hectic ones) over at The Logos Club. Kaiter Enless kicks off a new sci-fi series: Reclaimer: Episode I.

Chris Morgan offers a one act play of sorts: Dark Interests.

Finally this week in Parallax Optics, Paul Overstreet presents a valuable primer On Beauty. In which he introduces three possible sources of beauty (subjective, intersubjective/socialized, objective) and evaluates their explanatory power. Facial attractiveness is seen to be almost entirely objective, as it is so heavily hardcoded in humans by natural history. A properly nuanced piece, which impressed The Committee, to the tune of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week in the Outer Left

Another light week from the left, hopefully they will return to their former levels of… interestingness in the New Current Year.

However, there was one pretty bright spot this past week. Rob Horning, writing at The New Inquiry, offers a ‘review’ of The Last Jedi. Those scare quotes are very much intentional, because this piece is less review than it is honest, albeit confused, investigation of the collective neuroses of the bugmen. I will quote it at some length, as is my wont.

We went to see The Last Jedi last week, out of an obscure sense of obligation (how else would I be able to participate in society?), and throughout its seemingly endless running time, I kept reminding myself that we chose to be here, we chose to see this, and that they made this movie no better than it needed to be.

Emphasis is mine, and pay attention to that bit, it’s important.

Unofficial “Amanda”.

I began to interpret the entire film, its plot and its character development and not just its mere existence, in light of this feeling. That is, I began to see the movie’s story as a comment on its own existence (maybe all films work this way?) and the stakes of it as whether we should ever have to watch another Star Wars movie again. Of course, Disney is going to make them. That is certain, but do I have to go and watch them? Do you?

…

[w]e are shown a planet full of fat-cat arms dealers who outfit both sides of the conflict, who don’t care who wins the light-saber battles, and who no one with the full flowering of the Force flowing through them seems to have ever thought to struggle against before. If the rich people who fund and profit from “the struggle between good and evil” will survive and thrive no matter who wins, then what difference does that struggle make? Maybe Driver and Ridley really should be joining forces, as Driver proposed, so they can take the fight to the real Darth Icky: capitalism

This scene renders everything else we have ever seen in the Star Wars films moot. None of the ostensible storylines about a quasi-religious struggle over the power of the life force in the universe ever mattered, because behind all those were a cabal of greedy industrialists who truly dictated the action — in fact there has been a star chamber of producers and technology makers who have orchestrated this battle to perpetuate it for their own ends. It’s almost as if the true villain is Hollywood.

Yes, that’s right, literally nothing matters except the struggle against capitalism. This is what socialists (claim to) really believe. But wait, it gets even better, and it is the following that renders these proceedings pure bugmannery, in light of the opening.

At times, I could almost believe The Last Jedi wanted to set its audience free, that it wanted to offer a new hope. But if the backlash is any indication, that audience is not interested in freedom. Most likely, I too will go to see the next film in the series, as if it were some sort of civic duty, and I will be just as disgruntled with it then as I am now. I’ll still want what they are punishing us for wanting, and I’ll still be hoping they can make a better spectacle out of it.

A different “Amanda” from a different unofficial video.

And there it is. The feminized impotence of the bugman on full display, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Capitalism is so evil and fighting it is the only thing that matters, but it’s just too much work to not go see a movie, after all, what will people think? Mr. Horning, I rarely indulge women or children in this lenient a manner, so consider yourself fortunate that I’m extending you this courtesy: on behalf of all reasonable people, I give you permission to save your money and not go see any more Star Wars movies. If you still cannot bring yourself to engage in this simple action, successfully performed by 99.99% of all humans who have ever lived, then I’m afraid the malaise you feel in life is terminal.

Elsewhere… a Mediumite is very—very piously—concerned about “Our Democracy”: Is Social Media Replacing (Real) Self-Governance? Real. Self. Governance. Like we had back in… never. There are probably a million good reasons to nuke social media from orbit. Rescuing our faux democracy is not one of them. (There may be a good half-dozen or so reasons not to nuke it from orbit, too.)

This Week… Elsewhere

Roman Dmowski has a quick update on The Russian Collusion Nonsense.

Lady from unofficial video to Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind.

Al Fin takes a rather disturbing—and shockingly plausible—look at the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come: What Breed of Human Can Survive in the Future Commons?

Unorthodoxy (who appears increasingly orthodox… small-o at least) has a superb bit of art for St. Stephen’s Day. See also: Feast of the Holy Innocents. And the small-o orthodoxy is looking more and more like a pattern with: Saint Thomas Becket.

Over on Medium, this was pretty interesting Bitcoin as the first anti-fragile economic entity. A bit boostery: Bitcoin might “usher in World Peace”? LOL. But still a worthwhile read overall.

This week in Zeroth Position, Insula Qui has quite a bit to say On Individualism and Nationalism. He attempts a synthesis of the two. We wonder: Why not neither?

Greg Cochrane identifies two Strategies for human sexual reproduction. Exactly two. Plus errors.

That’s all we had for this week. Many thanks to our faithful TWiR staff who contributed at least two-thirds of all the words herein: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear, I really couldn’t do it without you. Here’s to the Best Current Year ever… Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/31) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week in American Greatness, Roger Kimball considers The Left’s Hostile Takeover of Corporate America. Not sure how hostile it was… or whether it was ever a takeover, but that the left is in charge of it now—see James Damore and David Gudeman’s class action complaint against Google—seems quite undeniable.

Our friends in the Great White North poked their heads out from under the ice shelf to deliver a review of a collection of essays: The Other North America—including an extensive recount of the conflict between the ideas of radical Thomas Paine and loyalist Charles Inglis, who ultimately fled America for Canada during the Revolution, becoming Canada’s first Anglican bishop. Inglis’ forthright rebuttals of Paine’s godless nonsense are alone worth the price of admission. Mark Christensen snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his high quality work here.

VDH makes the case in The Great Experiment that Trump’s governance has been as “hard right” as Obama’s was “hard left”. Aside from rhetoric, one wonders how terribly hard right or left respectively each one actually was/is. But Hanson is a very worthy interlocutor on the subject, and certainly presents a strong case.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Shylock Holmes graces us with a second essay in as many weeks: On the Dying of the Darkness. He contemplates the not unalloyed good of city lighting, and what a lack of a view of the heavens just might cost. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Antidem emerges to tell the story of Big Bill’s Black Mama Vs. The SJW Cat Ladies—tho’ I much preferred “short-haired white lady brigade” as official moniker. It’s probably speculative fiction… but not very speculative.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam goes very meta in Absolutist Epistemology. Meta on meta(!!), but it’s probably unavoidable when talking epistemology.

Back (by popular demand?) at Alf’s: The next installment in the Orb of Covfefe series: Part VII—Life or Death. Riveting.

Imperial Energy unveils the next installment of his “STEEL-cameralist Manifesto”: Part 6C: STEEL Reaction III STEEL-cameralism

Over at Jacobite, Jacob Phillips meditates on his experience working nights in Escape and Inexorability, wherein he reaches surprisingly deep conclusions about the future of human society.

When the promise of escape meets the inexorability of unassailable forces, hybrid life forms come to the surface. If the forces of capitalism are immutable, if the markets really are minds which now—fired by digital technology—that must mean that the unending commodification of everything and the rewiring of our brains with fiber-optic neuroreceptors, then maybe the battle of this century won’t be between capitalism and one of its alternatives, but between what form of capitalism should take hold, or rather, more precisely, how capitalism can and should relate to nature. The challenges will involve not so much finding alignment with our biological ordering, but defining the parameters of human life so it is intertwined with the natural in a way which can parallel the homogeneous unity of nature and spirit in premodern metaphysics.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, has some observations about female suffrage. None of his points should be news to you, but they are worth repeating.

Women are, fundamentally, conformists. That is, they choose the “handshakeworthy” option largely regardless of ideology.

In the West that would be the culturally pozzed mainstream, i.e. anything but nationalism or the hard right.

…

However, what constitutes “handshakeworthy” has differed down the ages.

Two to three generations ago, it was well known that European women voted relatively more for Christian conservative parties. In most countries, more women than men consider themselves religious, while far more men subscribe to outright atheism; a vast socio-demographic echo from centuries past, when religion was the bedrock of society as opposed to just another consumer item.

In Russia, the handshakeworthy electoral choice is the conservative/patriotic “party of power” United Russia, but not so much the nationalist LDPR, the communist KPRF, or Navalny’s liberals.

Everyone backs the strong horse, the winner, the mainstream conventional wisdom to some extent, but women do so to a greater extent. Be the strong horse, be the winner, be the conventional wisdom. All of which, eventually, we shall be.

By way of Isegoria… Tyler Cowen and Andy Weir discussing space governance. On needing some rules to make some rules. Would you pay $70,000 for a lunar vacation? On understanding the mechanics of radicalization. Jordan Peterson’s 42 rules for dealing with Life, the Universe, and Everything; How Professional ironists love drug history (and how it seems likely that Steve Sailer reads Isegoria); finally, some decent-ish news by way of Audacious Epigone: A remarkably mild dysgenic trend—among whites that is.

Finally, CWNY returns after Christmas Break with an epistle on The Extremism of European Christianity.

This Week in Jim Donald

A short week from Jim, covering one of his usual bailiwicks: the Woman Question. Jim claims that the vast majority of rape accusations and the vast majority of rape convictions are false. Understand, reader, that Jim is more hardcore on the Woman Question than you, and always will be. Once you accept that, it leaves you with a certain sense of peace with yourself. This particular piece is so hardcore that we’ll leave the excerpts to our readers’ discrete imaginations. It’s fairly brief anyway, so just RTWT.

This Week in Social Matter

Activity picked up in these parts with (finally!!) a new installment of our podcast: Descending The Tower—13, 2017 Year In Review, Part 1. Anthony, E. Antony, and I were joined by Harold Lee, Jim Donald, Alistair Hermann, and newcomer Gerald Mann. Michael Perilloux will be joining us in Parte Deux.

The junior podcast at Social Matter is, of course, Myth Of The 20th Century (which has outgrown it’s elder by a solid 5 stone). This week they step out of the 20th Century for Episode 51: 2017—Year In Review.

Returning Friday, William Fitzgerald has an excellent article here In Defense Of Academic Economics. Which you probably weren’t expecting to see here. But…

If the claims of some economists are stupid, they are also bad economics. Economics aims to describe the world around us, and if it fails on those terms, it deserves to be criticized on those terms. The aim, however, is defensible. Even if one believes that there is a progressive influence of poor reasoning, economics is a field worth defending, rather than ceding wholesale to the enemy.

Good point. Fitzgerald takes up may controversial, but otherwise worthy, points defending Misean thought, which is a heckuva lot more mainstream, academically speaking, than Paul Krugman would care to admit. The Committee tapped this one for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took another week off this week. We trust all is well down there. Or up there. Or wherever he is.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X asks: Do Sufficiently Large Organizations Start Acting Like Malevolent AIs (and Society is an Extremely Large Organization)? In two parts: Part 1 and Part 2. The crux of the possibility comes down to the following relatively uncontroversial statements:

[A]s we add more people to a group–beyond a certain limit–it becomes more difficult for individuals with particular expertise to convince everyone else in the group that the group’s majority consensus is wrong.

The difficulties large groups experience trying to coordinate and share information force them to become dominated by procedures–set rules of behavior and operation are necessary for large groups to operate. A group of three people can use ad-hoc consensus and rock-paper-scissors to make decisions; a nation of 320 million requires a complex body of laws and regulations.

Of course, this brings up the question: do 320 million people actually make decisions, or do groups as small as 3 (or 7) do so? If the former, then the argument that society itself is at least a non-benevolent AI would be frighteningly accurate: All algorithm, no actor. The truth must be at least somewhat in-between. No dictator makes every single decision in a society, nor do 320 million people vote of what to do if the Norks launch a nuke. The question of what jeans look good this year, or which hip-hop act is all the rage is pure malevolent AI. Economic aid to Israel, however, still seems to be under human agency. I urge you to RTWT. In an agonizingly close vote this week, The Committee awarded this series the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Mrs. X closes out the week with Anthropology Friday and a conclusion to Frank Lucas’ Original Gangster.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Alex Nicholson kicks off the new year at our sister publication Thermidor with Iran, The Last Gasp of the Anglo-Zionist Empire? Nicholson analyzes the fallout from the defeat of ISIS with particular focus on the recent protests in Iran.

If the Anglo-Zionists do find it harder to raise mercenary armies and goad paramilitary groups into launching revolts, then we may be witnessing the effective end of the empire, or at least, like a virus, a new less lethal phase. The public will simply not stand for big Iraq-like invasions, and if Syria marks the end of the “arms-dump + mercs” strategy that took out Libya and carved Croatia off Yugoslavia, then the only card left is the “Color revolution.”

Nicholson impressed The Committee with this one and earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

The regular Thermidor podcast revives with Episode 24: 2017-A Year In Review, and Europa Weekly offers up Faustian Spirit.

Next up, Walter Devereux takes a trip “down the rabbit hole of Anime productions” in Blood, Soil, and Anime: Studio Gainax and German Occultism. Devereux examines three notable anime for Teutonic inspiration—easy enough to find—specifically occult influences. This too was a darkhorse contender and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

And finally, Nathan Duffy returns to provide a friendly critique of Adrian Vermeule with Exiled in Place.

The character of the Church as a sojourning society having no permanent home in the fallen world of our age can’t be denied. […]

But this truth must be held in tension with the reality of human beings as particular creatures embedded in a physical world, wherein the maintenance of life only comes by way of attachment to certain places. Just as we don’t take Christ’s “hate father and mother” statement as an abrogation of the command to “honor father and mother,” (instead recognizing it as a relativizing of family commitments in comparison to allegiance to Christ), neither is the understanding of the Church sojourning as exiles through this world to be taken to undermine the realities of embodied physical life, and thus the importance of place and its capacity to be sanctified.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cane Caldo recommends Jim Kalb’s contribution to the Sydney Trads 2017 Symposium: Dissolving the Black Hole of Modernity. As do we. Not sure if we mentioned it last week, but mentioning it again can’t hurt. It’s a clear-headed analysis of anti-civilizational trends and a practical what-do guide all in one. Superb!

J. M. Smith warns, Don’t Expose Yourself to demons or romanticized rationalism. Smith is rereading Dostoyevsky’s Demons, and his thoughts inspired therewith are not to be missed:

When Dostoyevsky says that the romantic liberals of the 1840s gave birth to the murderous nihilists and anarchists of the 1870s, he means that their dreamy idealism burned through traditional Russian culture like a wildfire through a forest, destroying as it went all the righteous sentiments of national pride and religious faith. Yet all of the noble ideals of these liberals turned out to be nothing more than the smoke of this fire, so that when the fire had burned out and the smoke had dissipated, all that remained was a charred landscape of blackened stumps and shifting ash.

Dr. Smith garners an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Also at The Orthosophere, Kristor prescribes Islam Delendam Esse, which is Latin for “Islam must be destroyed.”

Bonald reviews the book Before Church and State by Andrew Willard Jones, about power dynamics in medieval France.

Jones notes that the inquisition has tended to have a bad reputation with historians, while King Louisí reforming enqueteurs are praised for helping to build the French state, but in fact they were the same sort of people doing the same sort of thing in service of the exact same project.

Matt Briggs gives his new year’s predictions and invites everybody to Register Your Predictions For 2018. Then he answers How’d We Do On Our 2017 Predictions? Next, he distinguishes between Real Versus Fake Fake News. Finally, science makes having children immoral, the new church of AI and its worshippers, public sex education becoming more graphic, and a transgender toddler’s book, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XVII.

Guest posting for Briggs, The Blonde Bombshell explains Why People Seek Out Alt-Media despite its low reputation, including a little about how it got such a bad rep. Also, Kevin Groenhagen has an idea Why Most Members Of The Media Are Leftists.

As a journalist, Cronkite tended to focus on “what is,” and, as a result, became one of the most trusted men in the country. After leaving journalism, he was much more open about his liberalism and started talking more about “what should be.”

Today, it is obvious that many journalists would rather focus on “what should be” instead of “what is.” “And I believe that good journalism, good television, can make our world a better place,” CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour said in 2000. Of course, it’s not the job of a journalist to make the world a better place, i.e., changing the world from what it is to what it should be. Nevertheless, many journalism schools and media outlets echo Amanpour’s sentiment.

And how else is a journalist supposed to get a gold star on the Sunday School cork-board?

It was the sophists? Mark Richardson is surprised at the origin of the notion of an amoral so-called “natural man.” Then he writes On white knighting and its utter counterproductivity as a mating strategy and suggests better ways to channel the protector instinct.

Who was hurt most by the new tax bill? According to Dalrock, even though it’s still men, it’s being reported that it’s the Women hardest hit. Because, after all, what else can you expect from a thoroughly patriarchal misogynist society?!!

This Week in Arts & Letters

PA has another poem from Zbigniew Herbert, complete with translation from the original Polish (I think).

Richard Carroll has made a name for himself as a Reader of Old Books™ in a wider sphere of People Who Read Old Books™. The Bible, of course, is an old book too. On his way through that, he pauses to take note of Human Sacrifice in the Book of Judges.

Imaginative Conservative has some poetry from Alfred, Lord Tennyson: “Ring Out, Wild Bells”. Orestes Brownson’s 1843 address to Dartmouth students on the Scholar’s Mission. A traditional hymn (which was new to me): “The Seven Joys of Mary”. As well,
“The Gloucestershire Wassail”: A Carol for Epiphany, with embedded video. Finally, Respighi’s “The Adoration of the Magi”, music inspired by Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

Also there: thoughts on Why Conservatism Appeals to Young People—a very erudite essay explaining how young people are more fscked than ever before. And someone who doesn’t get talked about nearly as much as he deserves: Charles Lindbergh and his Philosophy of Vital Instinct

Chris Gale comments on The Return of the True King, with the slaughter of the Holy Innocents as backdrop. And the obligatory Sunday Sonnett, courtesy of Hilaire Belloc.

Over at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald looks at the hatefacts to explain why The Critics of Proactive Policing Are Wrong. Stefan Kanfer offers a eulogy of sorts: “Wild Books, Homeless Books”. And Guy Sorman discusses French economist Jean Tirole’s Economics for the Common Good.

Finally, this week at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless begins with the somewhat baffling First Precepts of the Et Ferro. His Reclaimer fiction series continues with Episode 2. And he proposes a host of aphorisms—some baffling, some fist-pumping—for the discriminating Reactionary.

This Week in the Outer Left

As hoped, this week picked up a bit on the Outer Left, and there was no shortage of interesting fare.

Rachel Bryan writes in The Baffler on the duality of the Southern thing. I have to light up the Southern Reaction (#SRx) signal for this one, because they will recognize exactly what it going on here. I went to high school with people like Rachel Bryan, I know her type. RTWT, and you will too.

It’s something to build on: poor and working-class voters in Alabama could foreseeably be rallied by the Democratic Party—but only when Southern poverty is no longer the punchline of a joke.

things_that_will_never_happen.txt

Over at The Awl, there were multiple interesting articles this week. First up is the continuation of their ongoing color series, rose madder, the pinky red of Stephen King’s worst novel and Hieronymous Bosch’s perverted playground. You guys know the drill by now, nothing too political here, just the history of a color. RTWT if that sounds interesting to you.

And then we turn to the typical bugman perspectives one expects from The Awl. Consider the adults who love Disney. Let me make it clear right out of the gate that this is not referring specifically to childless adults who love the Disney theme parks, so this is a level beyond mere Disney film fandom.

Not an endorsement.

36-year-old Joe DeCarolis grew up with the average American Disney exposure—watching the movies and heading to Orlando on vacation with family—but he didn’t feel a real emotional attachment to the amusement destination until he returned as an adult with his then-girlfriend. The unreality of it all resounded enough for he and his wife to regularly make the trek from New Jersey to Florida for the last 15 years.

“It’s its own sequestered part of the planet where the street signs look different and there’s music everywhere and everyone’s nice—and you’re aware that it’s because of their job—but it still has the intended effect on me,” DeCarolis says. “[At home,] I miss that pleasantness where there’s no sarcasm and ironic detachment. It became this place where it’s my mental escape from the anxiety of real life.”

The bugmen have made the world into their own image, and now they turn away in disgust towards the idealization of Main Street USA that Walt Disney created for children. Sad, many such cases!

Last from The Awl is one I am actually kinda conflicted about. Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard reviews a smartphone app called Forest, an app that wants you to plant a tree and get on with your life. The basic idea of this game is to plant a virtual tree and then not access your phone, or the game will punish you by eventually killing your tree. The longer you ignore your phone, the bigger the tree grows. I hate to admit it, but as much as I want to make fun of people for using such an app, I might actually try it out myself. There are times when you really want to spend time without checking your phone, and a little gamified disincentive might be just the thing for it.

Self-improvement is a long, hard journey. Easy fixes are almost impossible to come by, self-discipline must be gained through hard labour and practice.

Very well said, and I can’t be wholly opposed to things that help build up that practice. Self-discipline is a muscle and you have to start somewhere to work it.

This Week… Elsewhere

Friend of this blog, Lawrence Glarus alerts us to the existence of Spotted Toad. If you haven’t been reading it—and you probably haven’t—you probably should. I’m hesitant to classify the blog as I just found out about it, but it appears to be a very high quality, acrimony-free, and data-packed social science resource. This week’s offerings for your perusal: California Here We Come—an in-depth look at California’s race to the achievement bottom as it “browns”; The Mormon Church is Not Responsible for a Nationwide Increase in Teen Suicides—in case you thought otherwise; and Black Magic Woman—which casts a boatload of nuance on NYC’s famously falling murder rate. Great find! Thanks, Lawrence!!

Nullus Maximus has a (pretty much exhaustive) round-up of Zeroth Position’s The Not-So-Current Year: 2017 In Review. Also there, Benjamin Welton has a view on the little-reported news: Nepal Has Fallen, i.e., into Chi-Com hands. Welton documents the history of Nepal’s precipitous decline from monarchy through democracy to Maoism in little more than a generation. An excellent read and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ winner.

PA has a surprising (and surprisingly positive) review of The First Three “Diary Of A Wimpy Kid” Movies.

Another thing I liked, was the stories’ treatment of antagonists. What always sat wrong with me in American youth comedies, is that the bad guy was almost invariably annihilated, completely. Presumably to the audience’s catharsis, but not to my moral instinct. Watching those comedies back in my school-kid days, I thought, “OK, the guy is an asshole, but he’s just a teenager. Is it necessary to so viciously humiliate and destroy him?” I didn’t enjoy one-dimensional villains and always preferred man vs. man conflicts resolved with the two rivals reconciling and learning from one another. And in the Wimpy Kid movies, unsympathetic characters were handled fairly enough.

I think we’ll be checking these out.

Al Fin asks: Can Africa Rise Above Its Poverty and Low IQ? He’s not sanguine about the prospect. One wonders, however, what damage might be stopped if the West stopped acting as a brain on sub-Saharan Africa. The population most necessary to drive up average IQ is constantly leaving. Related question: Are People with Low IQs Doomed to be Left Behind? Here, Fin is much more optimistic.

Unorthodoxy has his own take on Imperial Energy’s Big Question last week: America, the Barbarian.

Heartiste has a link plus a boatload of perspicacious commentary on Technology And Female Hypergamy, And The Inegalitarian Consequences.

Zach Kraine makes The case for cultural primitivism.

Peppermint is so wide of the mark here that it is worthy of note: Platonism is the cancer killing the West.

For the Muh Moar Data minded… Random Critical Analysis takes a painstaking, and utterly compelling, look at what really correlates with national per capita healthcare spending, and what doesn’t. Number 7 will shock you! No, it won’t. But it’s good to have these facts safely tucked away in one’s mind the next time a Cathedral Cleric blathers on about economics and “healthcare”.

This week in 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace makes an thoughtful return, with some weighty resolutions attached.

Welp… thanks for reading everyone. Many thanks to my tireless staff: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler, I couldn’t get this done without them. Happy New Year everyone… Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/01/07) appeared first on Social Matter.

I guess the biggest news this week was #Shithole-Gate. Which was, at the very least, quite entertaining…

The Left:
THOSE COUNTRIES AREN'T SHITHOLES YOU RACIST

Also the Left:
Illegal Aliens can't go home because their country's are shitholes. pic.twitter.com/CnzYa6iTlK

— Carpe Donktum (@Carpedonktum) January 12, 2018

American Greatness wants to Dismantle DACA Once and for All. As do we. But all the rational arguments in the world can’t stand up a symbol implanted in the national psyche. Turn one of those DACA-eligible illiterate bums into an enduring meme, and maybe we’ll get something. Also there, VDH examines whether Trump is Really Crazy.

And Angelo Codevilla chimes in on Sex vs. Political Correctness?

The fundamental problem with cultural revolution is that it is easier to destroy cultures than to replace them. The end-states sought are inherently undefinable. Each and every revolutionary will have his own ideas of what is proper and improper, since those ideas must be bound up with the struggles of each for his own power. As the revolutionaries clash, incoherence is guaranteed. Beyond that, no matter what the revolutionaries do to disorient people, human nature’s magnetic needles always end up pointing people away from that which is merely politically correct.

Of all human nature’s aspects, sex is among the most intractable to political power.

But… when all you have is a hammer…

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton kicks off our week (and I wish he did it every week) with Sunday Thoughts—taxation is not theft edition.

Imperial Energy gets pretty alarmist here: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis I: the Warrant for War. He might very well be correct. On this bit, at least, I think we can all agree:

[W]ith respect to regime change, the Chinese must play a major, if not decisive role, in any North Korean regime change. The best solution, perhaps, is for North Korea to become a vassal state of China.

Also there, IE trots out the next installment of The STEEL-cameralist Manifesto: Part 7: The Three Cameralist Systems and the Art and Science of Statecraft.

This week in GABlog, Adam tackles Absolutism, the Axial Age and the Laboratory. The “laboratory” being recorded history. “Higher Law” (natural law, God’s revelation, or both) seem to be an inevitable attempt to answer Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? which ends up being an exploitable, yet seemingly inevitable, bug in human governance.

[T]his is the problem that has gone unsolved until this day. Some Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe seemed to be close for a while, but those efforts didn’t last. We can blame competing elites for exploiting the opportunities afforded by the very concept of a “higher law” to introduce a wedge between that higher law and the “earthly” one, but the problem nevertheless remains, unless one believes it possible to dispossess ourselves of the acquisitions of the Axial Age—and no conceivable power center could do that because so dispossessing itself would not only make it too evil but too stupid to rule.

As always, there’s much more there! This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Titus Q. Cincinnatus has some timely remarks on Biblical Hospitality and Immigration, or why it’s just a teeny bit suspicious when theological liberals suddenly become biblical hyper-literalists.

The necessary synthesis that needs to be made here is to understand that God exhorted Israel toward kindness to strangers within the context of well-understood customs and ideology relating to hospitality rules that anyone in the ancient world would have rightly understood. Granting hospitality to strangers was not “being nice” and “caring about people,” it was an act designed to prevent strangers from disrupting the unity and social cohesion of the Israelite polity. If a stranger came to Israel, he or she was (as Ruth did) to reject their former culture and become completely Israelite in every way. Let us also note here that the context ALWAYS seems to imply individuals or family groups, not large masses of foreigners as a body—which would rightly have been understood to be an invasion.

And he goes on to explain why almost none of this biblical context applies to open borders advocacy in The Current Year. The Committee was pleased to give this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Mrs. Sarah Perry looks briefly into Cringe and the Design of Sacred Experiences. While I find her view of “sacred experience” a bit… well… “not very sacred”, we link her because she’s an Official Friend of This Blog, and she continues to do Gnon’s work in developing an understanding of religious psychology (the good and the bad kinds) for the New Social Science™.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, projects the possibility that Poland will legalize gay marriage within 10 years. Say it ain’t so, Anatoly!

As I have pointed out, despite its cool nationalist marches, Poland is now actually one of the least “based” societies in Eastern Europe, less so than even Czechia with its top of the charts atheism and per capita porn star production rates. They are the only country in the region where a majority are comfortable with their children being in a relationship with Blacks (see map right). They also have the most people who think it is “time for a gay leader.” At the rate things are going, I would not be surprised to see gay marriage legalized in Poland by 2028.

Recipes to keeping the Poz at bay: 1. Kick out Western NGOs, Western media, promote cultural anti-Americanism; 2. But don’t be an insufferable lout and get in people’s faces.

One can expect that timetable to accelerate if the Roman Catholic church cucks on the Homosexual Question in a big way in the near future.

Malcolm Pollack finds free speech alive and (reasonably) well at Harvard in Pinker And The Priests. Unorthodoxy thinks Steven Pinker Needs a Time Machine. Well… Harvard confers some institutional privileges, even to its heretics, not generally available to the hoi-polloi.

By way of Isegoria… This is freakin’ hilarious. Notes from The birth of the digital camera. NYT admitting monarchists have a point. More big chunks on the “Clean” Hypothesis. In Australia, Raptors are intentionally setting/spreading fires on purpose—Eucalyptus fires presumably. An interesting anthropological note on Filipino hunter-gatherers: The Agta. And Yes, dolphins are smart.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: The Inner Vision.

This Week in Jim Donald

A big week from Jim this time around, so let’s not waste any time…

First, Jim acts, as he has so often in the past, as a dispenser of white pills re: Trump. This week, he reminds us that Trump is on the ball and getting things done. This particular post is more linkfest than anything else, linking well over one hundred positive items from the first year of the Trump presidency. If you’re one of those thinking “what has Trump actually done for me?”, definitely RTWT.

Later in the week, Jim wrote an excellent post on the crucial subject of fixing Christianity. There are few questions that on which discussion cannot be avoided if one is on the political right in the West, but even fewer where one cannot even avoid having at least a private opinion. The Christian Question is definitely in the latter category. There is often a desire to—in some sense—table the issue and just let everyone be. The concept of Gnon, for instance, is an obvious attempt to bracket the issue and set it aside for a time. Jim is having none of that and rather says “Christ is a big deal, so let’s talk about it”.

Some argue that Christianity is irretrievably cucked, and is the cause of our current problems. And there is much truth in that. Maybe we just have to say “Let Gnon sort them out”.

But, on the other hand, Europe was saved, and indeed formed, by the Roman Catholic Church under the holy Roman Emperor, and we got World Empire, Science, and Industrialization under the officially official State Anglicanism re-established by Charles the Second. We became what we are under throne and altar, and without throne and altar, are declining from what we were.

If you are going to have a state, you are going to have an official established Church. If you officially do not have an official church, you will unofficially and informally have an officially unofficial Church, a formally informal Church, the arrangement that we first saw with Cromwell’s puritans. Which unofficially official Church tends to wield unaccountable power and is subject to holiness spirals, so they became holier than Jesus, thus Unitarian. A unitarian Bishop, rather than striving to be like Jesus, congratulates Jesus on striving to become as virtuous as her very holy self. Then holier than God. Today’s progressives are holier than God puritans, who have dumped God for insufficient holiness as the unitarians dumped Christ for insufficient holiness.

And so Jim lays out just what is at stake in the Christian Question and the basic positions. But he locates a large part of the Question’s difficulty in an interesting area.

Natural selection has a huge amount of explanatory power for describing the world that is, and accounting for how it came to be; Evolution contains vital and important truths about the nature of man and the world, which we must not discard. The story of the fall, the book of Genesis also contains vital and important truths about the nature of man and the world, which we must not discard.

But the story of evolution tells us that we are risen killer apes who rose over the corpses of a thousand genocides, whereas the story of the fall tells us that death only entered the world in the fall. We have to reconcile these positions.

Either we go with Darwin alone, or we go with a Christianity reconciled with Darwin. Anything else is the death of European civilization. And very few people can handle Darwin alone. Most of those who claim that they can, are lying, and are in fact preaching progressivism, a form of Christianity rendered observably false by being transliterated from the next world to this world.

The doctrine of the fall contains important truths about the nature of man. The doctrine of evolution also contains similar important truths about the nature of man. Our state religion is going to have to deploy both doctrines simultaneously.

And the doctrine of evolution is that we are risen killer apes who rose upon a thousand genocides. So, death did not literally come into this world with the loss of innocence. Rather, it is a spiritual truth about the black pill, about spiritual death.

A lot of it is a matter of explicating what predecessors said and did reverentially but not uncritically. If the process of explication uncovers errors and defects, it has to be pointed out and fixed accordingly. This is how you make old books live again and recover and reactivate traditions.

Amen. The Committee were pleased to present an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Jim’s work here.

This Week in Social Matter

Newcomer Henry Olson has a gem here, unpacking the NYT’s “Nazi Next Door” and other leftoid hate-fnords in Rediscovering Normality. What thoughtful citizens thought in 1998 has become utterly unacceptable, to say nothing of every well-born person prior the French Revolution…

For us, teetering on the border between social-media censorship and outright government repression, it is hard to find much in the way of “humane security.” The media, Silicon Valley, our political elites, Hollywood celebrities, Fortune 500 companies, and their hordes of enablers have done everything in their power to stigmatize, destroy, humiliate, and bury every common-sense tradition passed on through generations. Everywhere that some authentic expression of the white European experience has evolved, reflecting the accumulated wisdom of countless generations, there our ruling class attacked, seeking to replace our real culture with the mass-produced e-snark of corporate celebrities like J.K. Rowling or George Takei.

This is a wholesale replacement of everything organic, true, and beautiful that evolved from the lived experience of a real, concrete people struggling to understand and improve the world around them. In its rejection of all that, the polyglot replacement culture is at the very least post-European. But even more, it is post-human. It is the reflection of a soulless, monolithic corporate pseudo-culture that exists only to provide complex technological toys to a passive consumer base whose chief interests are porn and Netflix and whose social and political worldview, to the extent they have one at all, is solely crafted around virtue-signaling points and getting the most likes on Facebook.

Excellent work from Olson. And it earned him an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

James LaFond joins the West Coast Guyz on this week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 52: Sports—Ritual Hegemony.

And then we got up Part 2 of Descending The Tower—2017 Year In Review, wherein we are joined by Michael Perilloux, and in which Australia’s deadly trees—obligate fire spreaders, according to Jim—play a major role.

Social Matter’s content mini-explosion continues with Benjamin Welton’s The Worker State: Ernst Junger, National Bolshevism, And The New Worker. Welton shines the light on the origins of a little-known ideology that gets lost in the forest of coverage of the inter-war period in Germany. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Finally, for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose, the multi-talented Michael Andreaopulos has some well-crafted verse Pacta Sunt Servanda.

This Week in Kakistocracy Quas Lacrimas

Porter was off this week, but Quincy Latham emerged from hiatus with a smattering of posts. So we’re giving this slot to Latham on an ad hoc basis. First, a rip-roaring game-theoretic analysis of Status and Women. He begins with the well-known Women Ruin Everything (When They Invade Guy Spaces) Problem:

This breakdown is sort of sucky when it happens to some dumb nerd-thing you do with your nerdy friends, like playing Pokèmon or sending astronauts to the moon. But the big-picture worry about feminization of male activities is that feminization goes hand in hand with subversion. Whether we are talking about religion, literary circles, academia, or anything else, the subversion of the institution (and the consequent damage to society) typically has feminine fingerprints all over it.

Christianity is not only the truth and the light, but also, our God being filled with charity, a eucivic faith. Provided that you don’t let women talk in church. It actually says it right there in the “directions for assembly” when you open up the box: bitches should shut up in church.

St. Paul was such a hater. Latham takes it a couple levels deeper. Yes, “No Girlz Allowed” is a good heuristic, but understanding why exposes more valuable principles: You still have to solve the Generalize Status Problem.

Planning a “restoration” where women become magically indifferent to status because they “know their their place” is as crazy as de-kulakization. Young girls take popularity every bit as seriously as young boys take athletics, and as they mature they transfer that focus onto their place in a social hierarchy which is vast and complicated.

So simply keeping a tight Patriarchal reign on young women doesn’t ultimately resolve the status problem. There must be new avenues with real feedbacks by which women may obtain status in eucivic (or at least less dyscivic) ways. This one took home the big enchilda: ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Latham also goes toe-to-toe with Richard Carroll on The Analects, for example whether we even know what the originals said, much less meant. Very inside ancient Chinese baseball.

He makes a very interesting introduction of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling in Docta Ignorantia. Schelling, it seems, had massive holes in credential backpack. But this doesn’t seem to have affected the quality of his work…

Learning the raw mass of background material, no matter how useful it could be, will never be the only useful thing. In a healthy culture, the proof of mastery is the masterwork.

If you can produce the masterwork, you’ve proven the value of your apprenticeship. But if there is no one there to judge the masterwork and recognize its merits, then ordinary people start to take the sorts of things an apprentice would normally do (like “three years experience sweeping the floor of the workshop”) as a substitute for the true evidence of mastery which they would be incompetent to judge even if it smacked them in the face.

This one snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also at Quas Lacrimas: an extended rumination upon Frenemies on the Right—or why we Nazi-bash, or at least some of us do. I suppose it’s probably inevitable that, just have we come to accept “racist” as a descriptor—meaning, as leftists intend it, a person who doesn’t see a problem with disparate de facto racial outcomes even in the presence of equal de jure opportunity—so too we’ll come to accept “nazi” or “fascist” as a descriptor—meaning, as leftists intend it, any person with political views to the right of Mitt Romney. To drain the dark linguistic magic of its power, one must be an aloof jerk. The more economically and reproductively successful aloof jerks there are, the less the magic will work on anyone.

Finally, Quincy Latham contemplates What should imperfect people do? And does so by increasingly close-to-home doses of imperfection.

No. This was the finally… Usury: the basics. And his take on the topic strikes me as more workable in our present exigencies (especially in view of bankruptcy) than other theories.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X applies her hand to the making of a beautifully illustrated tract: Having a Baby vs. Having a Cat: A Response to The Oatmeal. It is excellent. And also hilarious. I think, in the interest of fairness, one can have both children and pets, but to have the latter at the cost of the former is absolutely degenerate and deserves all the mockery we can muster.

And Anthropology Friday gives way (but for how long?) to Book on Friday: Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaf

Mammals are in the phylum of chordates; cephalopods are mollusks. It’s a surprising lineage for one of Earth’s smartest creatures–80% mollusk species are slugs and snails. If you think you’re surrounded by idiots, imagine how squids must feel.

We’ve all been there, brah.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The week starts off at our sister publication Thermidor with N. T. Carlsbad on Scientifically Historicizing Progress. Carlsbad reviews the history of neoconservatism, focusing on the intellectual development of the ideology and the mental gymnastics involved. And the work here garnered him an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Next up, Jake Bowyer chronicles the disintegration of Sweden under the weight of its immigration policy in Sweden is a Blast.

In Catalonia and the Problem of Separatist Leftism, Titus Quintus discusses many of the curious contradictions of the Catalonian nationalist movement. Though ostensibly aiming to preserve Catalonian language and culture, the movement in fact will accomplish no such thing.

In 2009, about 16% of the population in Catalonia was born outside of Spain, with the largest sources being Morocco, Romania, and Ecuador. This has interesting implications for claims of linguistic preservation as a reason for supporting independence. Presumably, the Catalan separatists want these people to learn Catalan rather than Spanish, but since they want the provisional Republic of Catalonia to remain in the European Union while leaving Spain, they really won’t be able to impose such measures on immigrants. And because Catalonia is to the left of Spain, they are by definition even more open to immigration from the global south as well as closer integration with the European Union, where freedom of movement is guaranteed.

Not all readers responded positively to Quintus’ analysis, and so editor P.T. Carlo got to share with us another amusing piece of hatemail. Possibly not a troll. Poe’s Law-n-all.

Finally, Nathan Duffy offers up First Things Bombshell Stirs Up Catholic Web. The occasion for Duffy’s remarks is an article in First Things concerning the case of Edgardo Mortara, but Duffy focuses on the responses of various other commentators such as Rod Dreher and Ross Douthat. The brouhaha has been quite revealing.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Over at One Peter Five, a book review of Philip Lawler’s (still forthcoming) Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock.

Moose Norseman checks in with many of the Changes going on in his life. All for the better, near as I can tell. (Except for the not working out enough part.)

J. M. Smith ponders, over some ancient poetry, What Exile from Himself can Flee? Then he uses more recent poetry to cast Ashley Madison in the low-light of Our Long Fool’s-Errand to the Grave.

Briggs contemplates What the Atheist Claim of the Meaninglessness of Life Would Mean (If It Were True). Then, noting that there are more cameras in the USA than in China, he poses the questionShould Big Brother Watch Us If He Would Keep Us Safe? Then he answers What Does Global Warming Have to Do with ESP? They both are pseudosciences destined for oblivion. Finally, Germany announces a duty to let the government spy on you and algebra is now a civil rights issue, both in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XVIII.

James Kalb points out an Overton Window problem with The Idea of an Inclusive Society.

“Colorblindness” and the other formulations on which antidiscrimination laws originally rested have long been superseded by a more affirmative approach to inclusion, so much so that the colorblind ideal is now dismissed as racist.

Mark Richardson makes More intellectual inroads linking similarities between so-called conservatives in America and Australia.

Dalrock points out the backwardness of current the annulment practice which is basically Sentence first; verdict afterwards.

If one party to a marriage believes the marriage isn’t valid, the tribunal insists that the first thing to be done is to get a divorce. Only then, after the required divorce, will the tribunal take up the question of whether the marriage was really a marriage.

Rightscholarship asks, hopefully, Is THIS the Century of Corporatism? If you don’t know what corporatism really means, and most people don’t, this is a good place to start.

John Fitzgerald writes about Britain’s perennial Redditor Lucis Aeternae, or “Restorer of Eternal Light,” and the obstacles such a person would face in Europe’s current political climate.

The EU’s big problem is that it has no spiritual dimension whatsoever. It doesn’t know how to connect with people on the level of spirit and imagination. It has no spark, no fire, and has, in recent years, become increasingly hostile to the Gospel despite the religious faith of its founders and its roots in post-war Christian Democracy.

This Week in Arts & Letters

PA has an excellent reflection on Morning Songs, along with another original translation of Karpiński.

Fencing Bear pulls out a can of whoop-ass on the de-mythologizing “theology” of the execrable “Catholic” theologian Rudolf Bultmann in Angels, Demons, Heaven, and Hell: On Christian “Mythology” and the Spiritual Life.

Chris Gale finds in the poetry of Wallace Stevens an error that leads to a truth. Stevens again paired with two beautiful musical compositions (and one stunning violinist: Anastasiya Petryshak). And the obligatory Sunday Sonnet—courtesy of Belloc and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He defends Empire over civil war—even if that Empire happens to be American. We at Social Matter tend to agree. And, donning his medical hat, Gale looks into the heritability of Schizophrenia.

Over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless has out the next chapter of Reclaimer: Episode 3. The rather ugly story of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and his campaign of hate (and epithets) on Kiwi pop-star Lorde for boycotting Israel. And he has a heavily resourced, two-part TLC Report on US & Iranian Geo-Strategy, Part 1 and Part 2.

At Imaginative Conservative, Birzer discusses The Conservatism of Robert Nisbet, who apparently saw conservatism as a thoroughly modern ideology, and that didn’t seem to bother him. A reprint of Russell Kirk’s 1973 essay/address: Liberal Learning, Moral Worth, and Defecated Rationality. Extensive commentary upon the sublime Sibelius Violin Concerto (including an embed of the thing itself). A look into Francis Bacon’s “New Atlantis” as Enlightenment fable and its deficiencies. And Fr. Longenecker praises (and reviews) “The Crown”.

Richard Carroll presses on through Plato’s Dialogues: This week’s interlocutor is Phaedrus.

Finally, this week at City Journal, Husock looks at What Anti-Gentrifiers Overlook—like your community being less of a #ShitHole. Heather Mac Donald looks at how #MeToo has become a war on men. Aaron Renn explains why “Middle” neighborhoods the Lifeblood of Cities—Affordable Family Formation, FTW. Saffran records the few last gasps of the freedom of association in Then They Came for the Frats…. And Ms. Mac Donald is back again with a eulogy for Bruce Cole: Defender of the Humanities

This Week in the Outer Left

Another illuminating week from the left. 2018 has thus far been a year of leftists inadvertently telling the truth, so let’s hope that trend keeps up. Fair warning: nothing here about shithole countries, we probably have to wait for next week for the salt mines to ship out that particular vintage.

That isn’t to say there isn’t delicious salt to be had mixed in with the accidental truth-telling. Maytha Alhassen sobs at The Baffler about the plight of our [sic] refugees. She points out, correctly, that there is an awfully strong correlation between countries that the United States attacks and countries from which the U.S. is supposed to take refugees. Or, as we on the right like to put it, the USGov pursues a policy of “invade the world, invite the world”.

The refugee policies that previous U.S. administrations set up could be conceived as a secret apology for the displacement caused by our wars and invasions.

This is something dangerously close to truth in the Current Year. But it is fundamentally a dishonest two-step. Almost universally, the people who support banning refugees, who do not want to invite the world, do not want to invade the world either. The Prog Deep State, or Cathedral if you will, is the driving force behind attacking recalcitrant countries that reject the Progressive Pu-Pu platter. The same Cathedral then has bleeding hearts for all the people who endure the hardships of their attacks, and demands that those people be moved into Western countries, and, at least as far as the United States is concerned, resettled in red states, where they just happen to terrorize decent people and turn red areas blue. A neat trick that.

The Awl continues its color stories series with all the whites you cannot name. I am actually a little shocked at how apolitical this entry manages to remain, but the author actually largely avoids the dog-whistling one would have expected given the title. She pretty much sticks to talking about the aesthetics of colors, so… kudos, I guess? My expectations are so low that just doing your basic job looks praiseworthy.

Keeping my attention on The Awl, I find that Kieran Dahl is seething with hatred for the miscellaneous bros of Bodybuilding.com. As I understand it, Bodybuilding.com has a forum, as older websites often do, and one of the sub-forums is a nothing-is-off-topic board called Misc. Posters there discuss low-status-to-Brahmins subjects such as which women they’d like to bang. Additionally, liberal and feminist ideas get mocked, oh no! This is all very triggering for Kieran, who, based on his appearance, does not even lift.

What emerges, when you spend enough time on the Misc., is a ghoulish portrait of a place that embodies the white, male id currently at the helm of S.S. America. The Misc. is a stone-faced Uncle Sam with Popeye’s forearms and a cocked pistol in each hand. It’s a screeching bald eagle with a foreign Bad Thing in its talons. It’s everything that defines America’s bro culture, magnified and weaponized.

U mad bro?

But what is truly illuminating is how desperate he is to paint Misc posters are basement-dwelling autistic virgin trolls. 3,000+ words on a subject is a fair bit of work for any writer. I think that we are seeing new lines of attack on masculinity opening up from the left. For quite some time, the left has attempted a divide-and-conquer strategy on men, setting up a dichotomy between jocks and nerds, and recruiting the nerds against the jocks. But what we’re seeing here is a tactic of saying to the jocks “You wouldn’t want people to think you’re actually autistic virgins, would you? Better stop posting on Bodybuilding.com, better not be a ‘bro’.” The left is scared, nay, bed-wettingly terrified of straight white men organizing for the collective interests of straight white men, and they will exploit anything even resembling a fault line to prevent that from happening.

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin finds American Universities Ripe for Neo-Revolution—or, as we like to call it around here, “Restoration”. In the Department of Dangerous Children, he looks at Perfect Pitch, and the importance of starting early.

Inside libertarian baseball, Nullus Maximus makes a strong defense of Hans Hermann Hoppe in Bill Wirtz’s Helicopter Skydive.

Heartiste suggests a fantastic new vector for right propaganda: It’s Time To Mock Credentialism As Foolish And Womanly. Also there, perspicacious commentary on Just Like Us: The Gay Marriage Lie.

This week in Thinking Out Aloud, Lorenzo has a superb—and totally normie compatible—takedown of Marxism and popular descendants, in The founding falsities of postcolonialism.

True to his new year’s resolution, Ace has publishes a timely warning: “Burnt the flowers in my hand, I was almost there…”

Zach Kraine points out the difference between democrats, and autocrats, and it’s “really just a question of your honesty (yeah, your honesty)”. Or as we like to call it: Formalism.

Roman Dmowski makes the case that Donald Trump is Clearing the Augean Stables. We certainly hope so.

Filed under: This week for me… What would a sexually transmitted pathogen do to it’s host if… it… could. (HT: Imperial Energy.)

Anton Silensky, from the internal chat, recommends this excellent overview: Hypergamy—The Misconceptions.

Meta-Nomad had a magisterial work of philosophy this past week, weaving together Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari, and capitalism. He calls it the experiment of the future. I definitely recommend everyone RTWT, and probably more than once. It took me quite some time to digest this one, and I still feel there is more there to be appreciated. A taste…

Herein lies the fatal bridge between Nietzsche’s late—decoded—attempts at offering a solution for man’s potential becoming and Deleuzoguattarian capitalism; for man has become and is always becoming a desiring-machine of unconscious desire, such a machine acting as a part of and as the process of capitalism itself, driving his desire ever forward, yet remnants of recurrent stability remain. His attachments are still to the old as a means of pleasing the strong, he must relieve himself of familiarity and accelerate himself, overcome himself as a process towards the future. Deleuze & Guattari’s call to “accelerate the process” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013: p276) is a call of acceptance towards the emancipative powers of capitalism in relation to man’s overcoming of himself. And so this production of process and its reverse, the process of production, both acting as capitalism itself and as man, should not be lapsed or halted, but in fact should be accelerated pushing man ever further towards his limit, towards the future, towards his birth as Overman.

The Committee were pleased to bestow this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Greg Cochran reviews The Long Divergence, a book which ties the under-performance of the Moslem World to cultural factors. Cochran’s not buying it. And besides, even if only cultural factors, it’s still racist against Moslems (their “culture”).

Welp… they’re calling for snow here, but I’m not seeing any just yet. Many thanks to my great TWiR staff—the best staff that no money can buy: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fielder. Thanks for reading (or at least skimming). Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/01/14) appeared first on Social Matter.

Unamusement Park breaks a 3 year silence with a quick note, by way of the Harvard Crimson, of the Academic inferno. Does mean the book is complete? We certainly hope so. Either way, welcome back Unamusement Park, we hope you stick around!

Cathy “So You’re Saying…” Newman handed the Dissident Right a gift this week. Thanks, Ms. Newman.

Over at American Greatness, coverage of the Shadowbans and the Twitterdämmerung of Free Expression. Also, we get a View from Britain: Bonfire of the Pieties.

Our friend, VDH, heaps praise upon President Nobama. And he managed to get this hate-filled (I kid) op-ed in the LA Times: What the ‘Dreamer’ fight is really about.

One would have thought that all Republican presidents and presidential candidate would be something like the antitheses to progressivism. In truth, few really were. So given the lateness of the national hour, a President Nobama could prove to be quite a change.

Our oft-stated theory is: Trump can (and does) reward conservatives because he isn’t one.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton kicks off our week in the ‘Sphere with Sunday Thoughts—Allied Victory mostly misinterpreted edition.

Related…

If Nazism had won its war, citizens of the Nazi 2007 would see history as an inevitable progress toward the National Socialist present.

— Moldbuggery (@moldbuggery) January 14, 2018

This Week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf has a look at The Rise and Fall of Owen Cook. And he explains What really grinds his gears: “the appropriation of genuine connection by mindless corporations”. Like plastic trees.

Imperial Energy reflects upon The True, The Good and the Useful. And he continues his analysis of the Nork Situation: The North Korean Crisis II: Prospects of War. He contends that war is “highly probable”—bigly probable—and that it will be soon. Also there, IE has a useful disquisition on the Nature of Left and Right and National Socialism—or whether the Nazis were “right wing” or “left wing”. They were, of course, right wing. Just not nearly enough. And an installment of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 8 STEEL Sovereignty: From Equipoise to Energy.

The inimitable William Scott returns after a 6-month hiatus with the first installment of a very promising series on Tradition. And a very deep treatment of it thus far… Real tradition is not just a widespread preference (cf., “Jesuit Tradition”), but has some social function:

[C]onsider sexual liberation, and the mangled ‘traditions’ that have formed around this ‘ideal’. Not only will practitioners of this tradition tenaciously defend their own licentiousness, but will also speak of this liberation as the greatest good to ever come upon mankind. Apologists will speak of it with reverence; as though the value of free love or the freedom to tear families apart in pursuing ‘true love’ were so deeply rooted in the truth of human nature and community that it needs no explanation.

Twue Wuuv… So how’s that all working out for us? Scott continues…

Common to all PoMo intellectual and cultural traditions is the Hermeneutic of Resentment. Disaffected youth, they hope to be free of Tradition and live in an ever present newness of their own design. The Brave New World is the preferred utopia for pleasure bots everywhere. But Nature is inescapable; “gravity always wins“. It is not possible for humans to live day to day without familiar patterns of perception, and habit settling in. Tradition is both a guard against the terror of metaphysical chaos on a spiritual level, and an assumed cultural language, without which Community would be impossible on the ground. This is even so for communities of institutionalized rebellion.

Excellent work which earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ from The Committee. (Extra props for the Radiohead link.)

Over at GA Blog, Adam dons his Big Linguistic Philosopher Hat in a discussion of Programming, Power and Declarative Culture.

Parallax Optics has an intriguing, Inside Cybernetics Baseball, look at Left Accelerationism, Right Accelerationism and Land: Or, Prolegomena to R/acc.

When Spandrell is good, he is very very good. And he’s simply off the charts this week with his initially unassuming sequel: Leninism and Bioleninism. (What he is when he’s bad is classified.) He starts with a deceptively simple, and really uncontroversial, premise: The Invisible Hand of Politics:

[I]n a free political environment, if there is power to be grabbed, someone will find a way to grab it.

Which is why, ideally, you don’t wanna leave that stuff laying around. But back to Spandrell:

A state is but a gang of dudes who then grows into an army, then conquers a territory. As a gang the dudes did little more than drink beer and the odd assault on trading caravans. But eventually the grew into a state which does pretty much everything. Plenty of examples of that in Chinese history. For something closer to home: the East India Company. Started trading spices. Then ended up ruling over 400 million people. Why? There was marginally more money to be made in every step of the process.

So [what] happened when political parties started to form in the 19th century. Parties formed in order to secure power in parliament. But once you have a machine to grab power, why stop there? There’s a lot of power out there outside of parliament too, whatever the constitution says.

Enter socialism… He goes on to explain the Gramscian March, which has been more successful than even Gramsci might have predicted. (Tho’ he was Italian and probably would’ve predicted a lot!)

The great discovery of the 20th century wasn’t atomic power. It was the power of cliques. A few people in positions of power sticking with each other is the most powerful force in the universe. They can make lies become truth. They can make toilets be sold as art, they can make women be combat soldiers. They can do anything. It was quite easy for socialists to get their hand in the media; after all journalists are all natural socialists. Smart-ish guys good at writing with no talent for making money. And the same goes for teachers. Teaching doesn’t pay very well. And it’s exhausting. Why would anyone want to be a teacher? Well, for the greater glory of socialism, that is.

There’s so much more here, I can’t hope to excerpt it with justice. You’ll just hafta read the whole damn thing. With great respect to other contenders The Committee was compelled to grant Spandrell the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for this seminal work.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, remarks upon the centenary of the Bolshevik usurpation. He notes that Bolshevik supporters were mostly ethnic minorities, rebelling against the Russian majority. That doesn’t sound familiar at all.

Malcolm Pollack has a nice piece On Laïcité And The Cryptoreligion Of the Modern West. It’s not long and definitely worth your time.

[I]f religion is, as Bill [Vallicella] says, an essential, deeply rooted aspect of human nature that answers “deep human needs that cannot otherwise be met”, how, then, can an entire generation of civilized and educated people simply discard it?

My answer is that they can’t, and more importantly, they haven’t…

Indeed Leftists have a created a theocracy more terrible and absolute than anything they feverishly imagine might have existed in the Middle Ages: There’s no empirical evidence for the Hypostatic Union one way or another, but there’s abundant observational data on human inequality.

By way of Isegoria… Here’s Edgar Rice Burroughs’ humble take on the (occasionally) sublime craft of fiction. Tyler Cowen estimates the value of Free advertising for mass killers. A personal take from Hawaii’s missile false alarm. Senegal is (pretty much literally) a shit-hole, but not a hell-hole—good to know. Murder rates: St. Louis vs. Iceland. Astute commentary on Jordan Peterson’s BBC4 Interview. And… Isegoria turns 15.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, The Horror—with a soul-stirring kickoff from Edmund Burke.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim opens up the week with a request for research assistance. Specifically, information on how the state religion of Charles II handled courtship and marriage.

I hope to find a clue in the County microfilm records: Library of Virginia: Available by interlibrary loan.

Lancaster County:

Reel 102 Marriage Bonds & Consents, 1706 – 1819

Reel 350 Marriage Bonds, 1701, 1715-1736

Northhampton County:

Reel 99 Marriage Bonds & Consents, 1706 – 1780

Reel 62 Marriage Register, 1706 – 1853 c, Unpaged (Stratton Nottingham Compilation)

The consents and bonds are the juicy part, since that is the parent or guardian contracting with the prospective son in law that he damn well will get married.

So, if you’re a Virginia-based NEET reader or otherwise don’t have too much going on, I am sure Jim would be most appreciative of any help in this research and would give you full credit for the assistance.

Jim also observes that the (metaphorical) Reichstag is on fire. The Trump situation, as it stands right now, is unstable, and needs someone to take some kind of decisive action to resolve the instability.

Stunning photo of Ann Margret.

If Trump had been successfully given the perp walk by social justice warriors wearing recently issued police uniforms on the basis of a court order obtained by Mueller on the basis of being an accomplice after the fact in Russian spying on Hillary from some judge no one has heard of, or if he had been successfully stuffed into a straitjacket by social justice warriors wearing recently issued psychiatric orderly costumes, on the basis of a long distance mental health diagnosis by some psychiatrist no one has heard of, this would have been a deep state coup by the permanent government against the merely temporary and merely elected government.

If, however, high ranking members of the deep state are arrested for illegally spying on American citizens, which is to say, illegally spying on members of the merely temporary and merely elected government, this is a coup by the elected government against the deep state and the permanent government.

Those look like the two most likely outcomes at this juncture. Personally, I, contra Jim, think that the deep state has enough of a grip on its leftmost elements to tolerate the instability until 2020, when they believe Trump will get voted out of office. If Trump does not get voted out in 2020 and in fact wins reelection, then the deep state will likely pull out all the stops to get rid of him. Recall that it was only after Nixon’s reelection that the deep state swiftly removed him, after first getting Spiro Agnew out of the way.

This Week in Social Matter

On Monday, Costin Alamariu returns with something completely different: Civilization And Cuisine. There’s a lot more to it than you think… or at least than I thought.

Decaying aristocratic palace cultures invariably nurture complex cuisines. The three most sophisticated cuisines of the world, the Chinese, the Turkish, and the French, were a sort of long-term residue of palatial decay. The prerequisites are not only ritualized pomp and circumstance, but an aristocracy eviscerated of its military powers. An aristocracy bound to the king’s palace that has to relinquish physical virtues in favor of cultural and intellectual; and where the competition is not so much for power by force, but for gaining the king’s favor by wit and intrigue; historically this is the audience that cultivates the best foods.

Great foods, but at what cost? Very insightful work from Mr. Alamariu and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century is Episode 53: Falklands War—The Empire Strikes Back.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter was silent yet again this week. We hope all is well.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Homeschooling mom Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Homeschooling Corner: Erdos, Fibonacci, and some Really Big Numbers, a review (goods and bads) on a whole passel of math-related books for kids.

Next up, a very fine meditation upon Unemployment, Disability, and Death, backed up of course by Mrs. X’s painstaking research. Disability, it turns out, is a way to keep unemployment numbers low.

In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability.

One wonders whether the Dire Problem might not just have snuck up on us. This snagged a ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee.

And for (I’d still call this Anthropology) Friday, she has a partial review of Caleb Everett’s Numbers and the Making of Us.

Everett tries to claim that cultural ratchet is all there is to human mathematical ability. If you live in a society with calculus textbooks, then you can learn calculus, and if you don’t, you can’t. Everett does not want to imply that Amazonian tribesmen with no words for numbers bigger than three are in any way less able to do math than the Mayans with their place value system and fancy zero.

But this seems unlikely for two reasons. First, we know very well that even in societies with calculus textbooks, not everyone can make use of them. Even among my own children, who have been raised with about as similar an environment as a human can make and have very similar genetics, there’s a striking difference in intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Humans are not identical in their abilities.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

N. T. Carlsbad kicks off a busy week at our sister publication Thermidor with Controrisorgimento. Carlsbad pays special attention to Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian-nationalist firebrand with extensive English connections.

Europa Weekly gives us Revolt Against the Discord Bots, as well as The Nazbol Manifesto—the intended episode for last week.

In The Barkeep as Guardian of Civilization: Recovering the Lost Art of Epicurean Mixology, Walter Devereux serves up a cocktail of commentary on alcohol and its social function.

A good mixologist is thoroughly social—a glue binding the group together, he assumes the natural role of leader and link. A bartender will be sociable, of course, but taverns need to survive on money and he will therefore always have a lurking sense of insincerity that he will need to overcome in order to be successful. In the case of a public house, this is especially true, while in the case of a local beerhall or fixture of a local community, the mercantile quality may be less disruptive. In any case, good drinks ease society because of the way they manifest personality, be it communal or individual: the mixologist, therefore, requires the skills of a good confessor as much as a good host, knowing how to blend his guests and knowing them each personally. The barkeep or tavern-master of a community plays quite nearly as important a role as the local priest, and the more impersonal he is, the less cohesive the community will be.

The bulk of the article focuses on the eminently practical art of mixing drinks, and garnered a somewhat surprising but well-deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Next up, Richard Carroll reviews the works of the Roman poet Catullus in Stately Bawdiness. Carroll discusses not only Catullus’ own work but also modern translations.

Finally, Lancelot Andrewes makes his Thermidor debut with California Dreaming: Light and Dark. Andrewes reviews several examples of film noir from the ’40s and ’50s to uncover the dark underbelly of America in general and California in particular during that day and age.

What were these and other films like them trying to say about their times? For one thing, one is struck by how much the main characters resemble the lonely figures that haunted Edward Hopper’s shadow cities on canvas, estranged individuals that warn of what progressive, technological modernity really means. Fifty years before Robert Putnam’s inquest into the demise of American civil society, film noir presents a world full of characters who are very definitely bowling alone, people very frequently without families, certainly in the sense of extended kinship groups of siblings, cousins, uncles etc. Children are rarely seen. God is almost always absent. The protagonists may not be burdened with responsibilities to others, but rarely is there any individual, family or community who can counsel, chide or restrain them; they are horribly alone when the going gets rough. Very often, their isolation is also bound up with movement; our anti-heroes have frequently fled or been lured from another part of America in search of better fortunes elsewhere. One can’t help but notice that their escape-cum-quest is often made westward.

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith reminds us of the gentler terminology of a bygone era while issuing Strictures on the Portable Pit Privy, to euphemize Trump’s terminology.

And here we see what some might see as a flaw in the President’s metaphor (on top of its regrettable vulgarity). It’s not the pit that moves, but the privy, although wherever the privy is moved to, there will be, of course, a new pit.

Smith also laments how most “people in Texas” (not Texans) would rather “Forget the Alamo!” Then he indignantly distends his nostrils over the current Christian state of Living on Sufferance. Lastly, he goes over the stages of a polity Falling to Pieces: Party > Faction > Conspiracy > Great Conspiracy > Civil War.

Bonald Defies the moral arc of history: The Catholic tribalist and the will to live, despite a society where we are encouraged to renounce our old collective identities. Genocide, of the soft sort, is alive and well:

Famous person Cara Delevigne

[P]eoples do choose oblivion. Every people that has abandoned the Catholic Church, their mother, has done so. Once there was an Irish people, sons of Saint Patrick, with a proud history of national defiance, at the heart of which was the Catholic faith. Yet not one generation after getting their own country (a republic, alas), they repudiated their own identity by renouncing their own faith and embracing that of the enemy. Where once they identified as Catholics, now the Irish formed a new identity as victims of the Church. Those they used to remember as leaders are now remembered as oppressors, and the viewpoint has shifted a largely imaginary Irish people who always longed for the free air of liberalism and sexual degeneracy. This isn’t just a change of beliefs; it is a change of identity.

A very passionate “rant” from Bonald. That hits the nail on the head and snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Also at Bonald’s: A new batch of deplorables—courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.

Kristor argues The Right of Exit Does Not Entail the Right of Entry.

[W]ho is inclined to trust a man who has abandoned his own native people as much as a brother or cousin who has not? No one. Who is inclined to treat a man as if he were a distant cousin, when that man has betrayed and abandoned his own real cousins? No one.

Matt Briggs, reporting on the academic front, writes Lack of Ideological Diversity on Campus: A Feature, Not a Bug, Say Professors. Then regarding that book Fire and Fury: It’s False, That’s How We Know It’s True is a fallacy growing in popularity and exemplified by the same book. Finally, Asatru on the rise in Iceland, homophobic child extremists, and Quranic homosexuality, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XIX.

James Kalb recommends a natural law approach to Harassment, social progress, and the Church.

[W]e live in a very odd world that talks about “inappropriate” conduct without a way of explaining why something is inappropriate, eliminates courtship while complicating pairing up for people who get to know each other in the work settings where that happens today, and abolishes standards for consensual conduct while imposing absurdly demanding standards with which no one is likely to comply for what constitutes consent.

Mark Richardson stridently challenges new revisionist literature on the historicity of an Open borders & individual dignity ethic.

According to Dalrock, contrary to the prevalent matriarchal view on the civilizing effects of marriage, Headship makes all the difference. Then he writes on the heresy of The gospel of child support.

Donal Graeme, responding to Dalrock, distinguishes between an Incentive V. Motive Force which causes the civilization of men.

Rather, women can act as an incentive to men to civilize. However, it is men who civilize other men. [And women too, while we are at it—but that is for another post.] And the approach used, if one wants to succeed, is always the tried and true method of the carrot and the stick.

The new, and always stunning, Regina Magazine is out: Volume 29: The Millennial Issue.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale explains that The Proles are rotten because the Elite are, and takes a stance on The Thot Question. He also comes down in favor of Theocracy, and has a few words to say On Babel. He exhorts that we Choose Christ, and gives us some advice: Write what you know. Especially if it’s unfashionable as far as our critics are concerned. Finally, more Belloc for our Sunday Sonnet.

On the Imaginative Conservative, Peter Hartwig introduces Jeremiah Webster’s After So Many Fires. A 1973 “Timeless Essay” from the late Stephen Tonsor on The Siren Song of Anarchy in Western Art & Literature. Benjamin Lockerd’s introduction to Russel Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things.

Richard Carroll brings us the words of St. Alphonsus, and How to Pray at All Times. According to this Catholic saint from 1753, the Lord doesn’t mind a casual chat.

Harper McAlpine Black sets out to prove just how lost the art of poetry recital is by introducing us to Crowley’s (!) Hymn to Pan. Crowley, make no mistake, was about as much of an enemy as one can be. But the exercise is interesting nonetheless.

Fencing Bear reports Fear and Trembling in the Cloister. Apparently the rudeness and hatefulness and all-round uninclusiveness of medievalists has gotten completely out of hand, and become something up with which the Academy… Shall. Not. Put.

At The Logos Club, Kaiter Enless brings us the belated Part 3 of his Porn/Erotica distinction. And Gio Pennacchietti gives us an excellent rundown of the Modern Bugman. Also of note is Part 3 of the Iran-US Geostrategy Primer.

Finally, in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has a warning to the #MeToo movement on the impossibility of Policing Sexual Desire. Kerry Jackson on Why California is America’s Poverty Capital—just bad luck I guess. And Mac Donald is back in short order with a defense of the Met’s Faithful rendition of Tosca: which is, apparently, “marred by . . . too much beauty, and too much fidelity to the composer’s intent”. LOL.

This Week in the Outer Left

Coverage of the Outer Left opens this week on a bit of a bittersweet note, an announcement that The Awl ends. They have stated that they will be ending “editorial operations” at the end of the month. As regular readers of this space know, The Awl has been a staple of our coverage of the outer left. While their political commentary was frequently of a very low grade and rarely graced the august pages of This Week in Reaction, their non-political and cultural commentary was a valuable insider’s take on the lives of bugmen, the kind of content one would not find at other outlets, and just damn interesting. But, still, The Awl was founded by people who had worked at Gawker, and we must not forget that. So, ultimately, good-bye… but also, good riddance.

Keeping with The Awl, the ongoing color history series continues with a personal favorite of mine, Haint Blue, the ghost tricking color of Southern homes and gullah folktales. #SRx calling all Southern Reactionaries for this one.

Over at The Baffler, Maximillian Alvarez presents the view from inside the Cathedral on the year history died. We all know how we feel about the ability to communicate our message in ways that didn’t exist, say, 30 years ago. It is a commonplace that this represents some amount of power taken away from the Cathedral. Mr. Alvarez confirms just this, and provides a view of just how scared and enraged the Cathedral is over just this tiny loss in their power. And behold the cycles of despondency in one low-level priest’s hysteria. Let’s go to the extended highlight reel. If you should happen to hear dry laughter in the background as you read it, that’s just Nick Land enjoying the schadenfreude.

As much as it is a type of memory, history is a form of authority. The ultimate difference between “history” and “the past,” after all, is that the former always imposes itself on the latter. The past is always in the past—the past always was—but history can only be insofar as it can recover and represent the past through stories…. Even if it does so with the utmost respect and gentleness, history can never be entirely neutral or wholly inclusive in its recuperation of the past through stories. Stories always need authors, and authorship is always, inescapably a condition of authority.

…

To fit into a narrative that can be understood, available information must always be interpreted and ordered to “make sense”; choices must inevitably be made about what to include, how to present it, and what to leave out; questions of causality must be explained with hypotheses; etc. “Something is always left out while something else is recorded,” Trouillot writes. So, naturally, it matters who is doing the recording and how.

…

With such authority comes the power to set the acceptable standards for what history should look like, how it should function, and so on. At least since the end of the Cold War, the national popular consensus of neoliberalism… had seemingly settled on a core collection of shared assumptions about these concerns. Of course, this is not to suggest that all historiographical debates were magically settled (quite the opposite, in fact). But there was a certain continuity, an apparent shared consensus regarding the most basic historiographical demands ranging from who got to speak “with authority” about history and which (real or imagined) audiences they were expected to engage in suitably deferential fashion.

…

We are living in an in-between period, an interregnum, in which history has lost all semblance of agreed-upon authority. Far from serving as a reassuring arbiter of social goods and larger political goals, the past today is a battlefront in a metastasizing war of all against all. The combatants are familiar enough to anyone glancing across a newspaper’s front page or a battery of cable chyrons: politicians, citizens, pundits, institutions, extremist groups, media outlets, social-media feeds—all are frantically jockeying to redefine and rezone the acceptable sources of historical authority as an essential step in their own parochial quest for political, cultural, and economic domination. This entails, among other things, directing their most vicious efforts at discrediting, destroying, or elbowing out traditionally accepted sources, practices, and standards.

…

The real issue right now is the end result. When history has been unmoored from the sanctified markers and standards that anchor its authority, when accepted discourses and institutions are being viciously discredited, when individual and collective memories have been so dangerously flattened by the pace of the digital content stream, the result is a history up for grabs and a free-for-all battle of competing historical visions that operates, not by persuasion or compromise or consensus, but only by the singular principle of blunt force.

…

Now it’s our turn to fear the abyss. Now it’s our turn to fight against oblivion. The frightening truth, however, is that for too long, too many of us have continued to operate on the same privileged belief that the supports holding up our given idea of history will not collapse—the same, shibboleth, in other words, that has sheltered us from ever having to consider what it would be like to face the kind of threat we’re now facing. Too many have failed to acknowledge that the Trumpian political mission is determined, not just to secure a place in history, but to dictate what history will be moving forward. Because such a prospect has never encroached on our privileged ability to expect that history would always have a favorable place for us (or any place at all), we seem to be utterly incapable of recognizing it for what it is. And time is running out.

“Sanctified markers and standards”…? Is this guy for real?? Dude, do you even irony??? I don’t know about you, but reading that kind of impotent leftist anger fills me with the desire to light up a cigarette.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA has an excellent bit of perspective with An American Nationalist Visits Warsaw. And he has another work of translation in A Poem About Leftism.

Some important kernels in AMK’s exposition on the paradoxical relationship between Truth and Morality.

TUJ wonders Has Lord Keynes Outmaneuvered Pragmatically Distributed?

Over at 80 Proof Oinomancy, Ace checks in: “But find the ones that bring you life and you’ll find me”.

Xavier Marquez has a remarkable history of Official Socialist Linguistics with Stalin as Reviewer #2 (and Editor). Also some updates to his Democracy Data, which are of some interest to the New Social Science. “Democracy”—well-defined in his studies, but still…— may be on the decline lately, but it can’t disappear fast enough for our tastes.

Unorthodoxy responds briefly but piquantly to Latham’s Frenemies on the Right.

Filed under Hubbert’s Peak Local Maximum, Al Fin looks at how US Petroleum Output Rocks Global Economic Calculus. And he has a whole passel of travel risk maps that have the unfortunate and unintended consequence of confirming stereotypes.

Filed under Not At All Dangerous Children: Infancy is Now Officially Being Extended to Age 25.

Zach Kraine has some brief comments about his Future, and thanks us for sending some readers his way.

Nullus Maximus notices some patterns in the way leftists (i.e., mainstream authors) fundamentally misunderstand conservative ideas and dispositions in (increasingly) predictable ways: On Leftist Academics, Respectable Opinion, and Civil War. Maximus develops this into an excellent analysis of the phenomenon we tend to call the Overton Window, but which goes by several names, each of which highlights peculiar features of this force. He zeroes in on an even more pernicious culprit…

Whig historiography and echo chambers, while important factors, are only proximate causes of the intellectual limitations of leftists. A more fundamental source comes from the dynamics of social coordination and is known as virtue signalling. Virtue signalling is a conspicuous and/or invidious expression of one’s opinion on a moral issue done primarily to maintain or enhance one’s social status.

Any people governed by Public Opinion is governed by the curators of that opinion…

When the Overton window is combined with an ideological echo chamber and reinforced by copious amounts of virtue signalling, it can become thick and opaque, hardening into an ideological pocket universe which can only be entered or re-entered with great difficulty. This Overton Bubble, as neoreactionaries call it, can form when the establishment effectively controls the Overton window and uses this control to maintain political power. When the range of respectable opinion is policed with sufficient rigor, having an accurate understanding of opinions outside of that range is enough to make oneself the target of a political witch hunt.

And he has much more there. Excellent theoretical contribution from Nullus Maximus and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his efforts.

Loretta the Prole has a <``a href="https://lorettatheprole.org/2018/01/21/i-believe-we-are-absolutely-getting-a-great-big-fat-amnesty/">very black pill on the upcoming Amnesty. Perhaps.

Random Critical Analysis has a follow-up post On the relevance of the income inequality to expected health expenditures—a huge follow-up post.

Meta-Nomad put up another of his incredibly well-written music reviews, tackling Clwnwrld Presents: The Ringleader’s Symphony by New Shoppe. The music itself is fairly challenging, but the review itself is recommended purely on grounds of style. If I could write like Meta-Nomad, I would churn out novel after novel in a William S. Burroughs style and then retire to shoot paint cans and call it art for SWPL rubes.

You’re sat in this cafe, this cafe. The windows, the large, bowing panes of glass feel as if they’re vibrating, reflecting and strumming against bulb lines. Maleficent trembles as your entire glaze’s over, eyes over chips and under-others into a chem-soup. Into the muzak-home of a banal existence, falling backwards into plastic and mundanity as one does during a slow mourning; the daily march overstrung by a realist chorus of chiming techscape.

And Greg Cochran applies his typical sardonic wit to the Rise and Fall… i.e., of Empires.

That’s all we had time fer, folks. As always, I was assisted by the trusty (and based) TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant and Aidan MacLear contributed bigly. I had the pleasure of meeting Aidan IRL this week: Very sharp, good lookin’ guy, ladies. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/01/21) appeared first on Social Matter.

Over at American Greatness Steve Lipman explains the The Impossible ‘Dreamers’—and finds them not all they’re cracked hyped up to be. Related: VDH on the Mythologies of Illegal Immigration.

Angelo “New Clerisy” Codevilla asks: Can the First Amendment Protect Us from the Ruling Class? The cynical answer being, of course, “It will protect us from whatever our Ruling Class wishes it to protect us… Comrade!” Codevilla correctly notes that the risk to “First Amendment Freedoms” stem principally from private corporations and not formal government. But he is far too sanguine about the strength and putative longevity of the First Amendment: A spike was driven through the head of free association (the only freedom enumerated in the Constitution with a natural law leg to stand on) in the 1960s. Yes, a return to the strict text of the First Amendment would be nice, but it is no lasting salve for the problem of Chronic Kinglessness.

In the Great White North, Constantin de Mestre returns to Northern Dawn with an analysis of The State of Arms: Evaluating Canada’s Military. It’s a heckuva lot better than you might’ve thought.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Unamusement Park’s revival continues. First, there’s Anna Kendrick dating tips—very Jimian. A deceptively articulate shiv to those ol’ worry warts at NYT regarding the “risk” of declining democracy. Related: Waves of confusion in the Polite Press over what just might be driving an eerie spike in socio-political divisiveness. Hmmm… Unamused’s furry, cute-kitteny fun continues with The deconstruction of Rome—a 4-gauge fisk applied to the soft tissues of “Celebrity classicist” (LOL) Mary Beard’s Sunday Times Fake History. Commentary on the burgeoning Hate-Speech Crisis™ that has wracked Canada: Prickly white folk: a setback for love.

With three years of pent up social commentary, Unamused is not at a loss for words (and outrage). He offers some Richard Weaver in this moment of candor for a corporate woman who’s coming doubt that she’ll ever have It All™. Finally, some Latter-Day Pamphlets applied to the Lockheed Martin F-35—which appears to be Too Much, Too Late. I wonder how many trebuchets $400 billion would buy.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam plumbs Technology and Magic, Doings and Happenings.

Contingent, Not Arbitrary has a brief announcement of New Year, New Plans. Which is followed quickly by By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them: “Beliefs held by temporal beings have material consequences in the temporal world”. It’s a tricker row to hoe than it looks.

Cecil continues his exploration into Bridging the Gap, i.e., between religious belief and scientific belief.

I got interested in religion because I learned it works in the pragmatic sense. That took nontrivial intellectual effort and a number of assumptions that are not commonly shared. If the practical benefits—and the necessity of faith for reaping those benefits—can be established in a more accessible way, we have a compelling case from the secular point of view.

When St. Thomas Aquinas and Charles Darwin agree, you can be pretty sure you’ve arrived at the truth… or at least the most plausible explanation. And where they disagree? Well… where’s that exactly?

Finally, Cecil collects his thoughts in a Grand Theory, First Draft.

Friend of This Blog, Ralph Branaugh, has a superbly crafted post-rationalist response to How to biohack your intelligence—with everything from sex to modafinil to MDMA. And Ralph has an equally brilliant follow-up. Hey, maybe one million years of primate evolution already is the killer biohack! Ralph Branaugh, Apostle to the Rationalists, snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent missionary work here.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, reports that PISA will now test for tolerance. Fortunately, it is currently voluntary on the country-level, but we all know how long that will last. Right now, England, the United States, Germany (!), France, and the Netherlands (!!), among others, will not be subjecting students to this element of the PISA testing. Click on Anatoly’s link to the questions (pdf warning); the three he quotes aren’t even the worst ones.

Here are some of the questions that Scots, Australians, and Canadians will be asked in this test:

• I respect the values of people from different cultures.
• I value the opinions of people from different cultures.
• Immigrants should have the opportunity to continue their own customs and lifestyle.

Since possible answers are all variations on Agree/Disagree, wouldn’t it be easier to just ask “How much do you agree with SJWs out of 100″?

Karlin also reports on the result of the recent Czech presidential election, Zeman scrapes out a win. Current president, Milos Zeman, was looking for re-election, and seemed to be gunning for an easy win, but some campaign missteps gave his opponent, Jiri Drahos, a chance. Cue media meltdowns because, while Zeman was once chairman of the Czech social democratic party, he has been very publicly opposed to th EU’s plans to force rapefugees on the Czech Republic, so, naturally, he is Literally Hitler. Drahos was your standard issue globalist, so even though Zeman is far from /ourguy/, I’m still chalking this one in the win column. Immigration is not a fundamental issue, but it is an urgent one in the Current Year.

At Jacobite, Nicolas Hausdorf pens Historiography Wars, a consideration of how changing technology and culture have affected our contemporary understanding of history.

In contrast, the internet, with its minimal publishing costs and far-reaching freedom of speech, changed everything. All of a sudden, obscure, revolting and previously marginalized pamphlets become weaponized as compact meme-truth, “redpills” in internet lingo, capable of spreading rapidly and thus poisoning the information foundation of historical narratives. Kissinger is on trial and he is not alone. Whether it is reinvestigating Stalinist terror, or the introduction of “nuance” into WWII narratives (which has been made illegal in many Western countries), the floodgates of revision have been opened. We are reminded that individuals cannot access history in its pure form but only as mediated through fallible historiography.

—David Grant

Malcolm Pollack shares some notes on The New Cathars in the highest halls of Academe.

By way of Isegoria… Jordan B. Peterson’s… well… what can we call it but faith: No one gets away with anything, ever. The problem of metrics and unintended consequences: You are quite likely to grind up the humans in the process. I sure was surprised: Fanta was created for Nazi Germany. In case you weren’t already convinced: Modern universities are an exercise in insanity. David Brooks on Jordan B. Peterson. Finally, Asian antelopes straight outa Dr. Seuss.

Finally, this weeks epistle from CWNY: They Do But Sleep—the “they” being us.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim took a well-deserved break this week. It’s probably part of his comprehensive plan to shave an additional 20 years off his appearance.

This Week in Social Matter

A busy week at Social Matter kicks off with the long-awaited return of Mark Christensen who brings a perspicacious book review: of Elmory Thomas’ 1971 The Confederacy As A Revolutionary Experience.

[Thomas’] thesis is likely to ruffle feathers amongst partisans of North and South alike. His nuanced investigation of Southern class and social structures, and of their geopolitical interests in North America, will not satisfy the need for moral aggrandizement which modern discussions of the South require. However, he likewise refuses to embrace the “Lost Cause” narratives of many “unreconstructed” Southerners; Thomas views this as a post-war rewriting of the Confederate experience, which decisively transformed many aspects of Southern life. In particular, he firmly rejects the notion that slavery was a marginal rather than a defining consideration of the conflict.

Christensen describes the work as vital for “anyone seeking to understand how political projects are achieved”. This could be you.

Thomas emphasizes that the Fire-Eaters were defined by their outsider status. To be one was to doom any chance of rise in party structures. Most importantly, their ideological victory would not result in personal rise. Rather, the implementation of the Confederacy fell to a more moderate coalition, often only secessionists at the 11th hour. Jefferson Davis and his vice-president, Alexander Stephens, had been “doctrinaire states’-righter[s]” but hardly Fire-Eaters. This trend is of course common in all revolutions and radical shifts in administration. We may think of the various anti-Jacobin reactions in France, Stalin’s putsch against the more radical Trotsky, or Hitler’s purge of the NSDAP’s left wing.

… and there is much, much more here. A very valuable contribution from Mr. Christensen to the Reactionary State of the Art, garnering a ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Following close on Christensen’s heels, Fritz Pendleton drops a veritable pamphlet on Tuesday: The Prince, The People, And Everything Between—which merited a rare Trigger Warning from Da Boss. He makes the case that the foundational principles of a society, and thus political reaction are:

one people, one parliament, one prince

You see now why the Trigger Warning was necessary. Parliament??!! But let’s let Pendleton make his case. In truth, he makes eloquent (and quite correct) defenses of the One People and One Prince pieces. And his arguments in support of One Parliament deserve, at minimum, an answer. And I think not a few of our readers will find them quite compelling. In a rare show of tolerance, The Committee bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Pendleton’s painstaking yet controversial work here.

An absolute must-listen in Myth of the 20th Century this week: Episode 54: Holodomor—Harvest Of Sorrow. Myth of the 20th Century is probably the most intelligent podcast in the Dissident Sphere. One notes that Jordan Peterson has been quite careful to lump the Holodomor and Mao’s Great Leap Forward in with the Holocaust whenever and wherever he can.

And… Saturday Poetry & Prose is back in the saddle this week. Poet Laureate E. Antony Gray offers some freshly minted verse: The Apothecary.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Big week over at Evolutionist X’s place. She begins with a quite excellent overview of Local Optima, Diversity, and Patchwork.

Japan in 1850 was a culturally rich, pre-industrial, feudal society with a strong isolationist stance. In 1853, the Japanese discovered that the rest of the world’s industrial, military technology was now sufficiently advanced to pose a serious threat to Japanese sovereignty. Things immediately degenerated, culminating in the Boshin War (civil war, 1868-9,) but with the Meiji Restoration Japan embarked on an industrialization crash-course. By 1895, Japan had kicked China’s butt in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Japanese population doubled–after holding steady for centuries–between 1873 and 1935. (From 35 to 70 million people.) By the 1930s, Japan was one of the world’s most formidable industrial powers, and today it remains an economic and technological powerhouse.

Without the perturbation, however, to jolt Japan away from a local max, it never would have iterated to a much higher one. So is this a case for Diversity Is Our Greatest Strength? Evolutionist X says not so fast. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for being a bit off our beaten path.

Next, she tackles The Social Signaling Problem.

In the midst of increasing crime, an opioid epidemic, starving Yemenis, decimated inner cities, rising white death rates, economic malaise, homelessness, and children with cancer, is the return of assets stolen 75 years ago in a foreign country really our most pressing issue?

No, but do you want to be the guy who voted against the Justice for Holocaust survivors bill? What are you, some kind of Nazi? Do you want to vote in favor of drunken alcoholics? Criminals? Sex offenders? Murderers? Racists? Satanic Daycares?

Well are you?

For Anthropology Friday, the trip continues down through Numbers and the Making of Us.

Finally a quick graphic: Democratic support for Israel sharply down; Republican up. Yes, but is it good for the Jews?

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at our sister publication Thermidor, Jake Bowyer starts the week off with
The Great British Mistake. Bowyer laments how the mighty have fallen.

Britain did conqueror most of the known world, and no matter your opinion on the British Empire, one cannot deny that the British soldier pulled off Herculean feats between the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. If you ever find yourself thinking of Brits as wimpy poofs, then you should read a little about the Battle of Kohima-Imphal or the siege at Rourke’s Drift. For hundreds of years, Anglo-Saxon soldiers, sailors, and adventurers were Orwell’s “rough men” who stood “ready to do violence” on behalf of the British nation and Britannia’s glory.

N. T. Carlsbad delivers for us Nativism and Radical Republicanism: A Curious Relationship. Carlsbad revisits American nativism during the 19th century and along the way discovers important lessons for modern identitarians.

If the nativist endorses his race because it is the only one capable of transmitting the ideals of “the rights of man,” “the emancipation of women,” etc. (and after all, these are largely First World white traits) we are dealing with dysgenic identitarianism. The race is preserved in the short run, but destroyed in the long run as a result of the hijacking of its cultural inheritance by the elite stratum of the identitarian tendency in charge of producing the ideology for mass consumption and mobilization.

This was the dilemma of American nativism, a movement simultaneously racially exclusionary and progressive, in alliance with Radical Republicanism and Reconstructionism by the exodus of the Know-Nothings to the Republican Party, a key reason for the latter’s ascendancy.

Carlsbad snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Next up, Europa Weekly with What if the Ethnostate consents?

Newcomer Lue-Yee Tsang offers up a learned meditation in China, A Fourth Rome? Blending history and theology, Tsang analyzes the West and its impact upon China.

Oswald Spengler has spoken of the (modern) West as wholly different in character from ancient Rome, Faustian rather than Roman, but it is perhaps truer and more fitting to say that in the life of the Western nations is both something we can call Faustian and something we can call Roman, sometimes the one having the upper hand and sometimes the other. For, even if much of the modern talk of Rome and living its glory be counterfeit, a mere conceit, yet something must be there to be spoken of so widely, so long after some have dated the “fall of Rome” at the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in the West at the hands of Odoacer. […] Europe itself, as a geopolitical space and not merely a designation of physical geography, can be said to be a Rome, for a long time a multiple Rome. When aligned with the heavenly City of God, it breathes the spirit of the Rome used by God; when aligned against it, a Rome assimilated to the Faustian spirit. Yet the line between the two Romes, to borrow a line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, cuts through the human heart.

Lue-Yee impressed the Committee to the tune of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Not to be left out is editor P. T. Reflections on a Year of Thermidor, and the Road Ahead. The past year has been fruitful for Thermidor, and Carlo offers important advice to all readers on how to move from conversation and critique to action in the real world.

The action we need to be taking, at the present moment, should be a combination of ceaseless real-world networking and personal advancement. Do what it takes to meet like-minded people in your area and then build something with them. Stop complaining and take the initiative, if something doesn’t exist that you think should then build it yourself because no one else is going to.

Join your local Republican party, advance your position and push the conversation rightward. If you’re a Christian make sure you’re involved in your local church and do everything in your power to make sure it doesn’t succumb to the poison of progressive theology. If you’re an atheist find some decrepit old Elks club and turn that place into a chateau of chic nihilism for you and your new right-wing friends. Be creative.

Get a law degree, take the foreign service exam, break into journalism, if you’re an academic try and become the next Adrian Vermeule. Make a long-term plan for yourself. In short: make yourself useful.

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

—David Grant

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor suggests we need Established Sacerdotal Hierarchy Controls for Competitive Holiness Spirals. Like a Church or something. Then, in The Resurrection of the Body: A Simple Explanation for Children, he shares a delightful exchange between himself and his granddaughter. Also, The Gedanken Policy Test of Christianity considers how Christianity’s mitigation of scapegoating increases its competitive edge.

Richard Cocks presents an excellent interpretation of Plato’s Cave:

In The Republic Plato is just showing what the single-minded pursuit of justice alone would entail. Prioritizing justice above all other goods would mean condoning behaviors that contradict the pursuit of other things we believe to be good. Thus The Republic embodies a reductio ad absurdum argument. These kinds of arguments try to show that accepting one proposition will contradict another proposition a person believes to be true, forcing him to reject the proposed notion. The consequences of pursuing justice alone would mean abandoning the pursuit of other very important things: familial love; the love of parents for children and the love between the parents. Therefore, The Republic is actually an argument against the single-minded and exclusive pursuit of justice.

Bonald finds cause for The tribal Catholic’s strange new respect for Pope Francis. And when an atheist asks Is the universe too big?, Bonald responds “not in the grand scale of things.” Then there’s this meditation on the nature of Time and the fear of death and a sweeping survey of The plausibility of theism; notes on the history of philosophy.

Matt Briggs takes a depressing look at Pew’s New Survey on Religious Groups Views on Abortion. Also, Christianity might be a hate crime in the UK and more than a quarter of California youth defy gendering in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XX.

Guest posting at Briggs is Kevin Groenhagen, who suggests the word “controversial” has been weaponized by the media. It’s Controversial. Then Ianto Watt writes about tradition and its disruption, using as a prophetic example what he calls Vatican Zero.

The example I’m interested in today is Vatican Zero. No, not Vatican I, nor Vatican II. Vatican I was all about certainty (“let’s listen to one leader”) versus Vatican II (“let’s listen to everybody, all at once”). The two could not be any different than day and night. In that order, too. What I’m referring to here (Vatican Zero as I call it), is the precursor of Vatican II. And that would be the schism that occurred within the Russian-Orthodox world around 1666. The schism that would produce the Raskolniks (the Old Believers) and would lead to the emergence of their opposites, the Narodniks (the Believers in The People).

When a noted traditional conservative calls for open borders, Mark Richardson asks Why did Birzer get borders wrong? Then he compares two liberal Australian suburbs in terms of their traditional values. Camberwell vs Fitzroy: who wins?

In She’s the boss, child torture edition, Dalrock catches the media glossing over the fact that this couple who severely abused their children consisted of an actual cuckold and his dominating wife.

—Hans der Fiedler

Elsewhere, Cologero expounds upon The Nature of Things and a powerful critique upon modernity for not getting it.

Over at American Dad, Scott shares an up close and personal account of the on-going opioid crisis and a defense of the (almost universal) practice of adoption.

Cane Caldo reverses his previous position and urges: Bring Bastards Back. We agree.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale proclaims that We Are Not Sorry for a whole host of evils related to being white males. Is it just me, or has Chris been getting a bit more militant lately? Not that we mind. He has a few words on Liars and Evidence. When in doubt, call the leftist out as a liar. But there shouldn’t be many occasions to doubt. Riffing on Fritz Pendleton’s article this week, a post on States, nasty, brutal, or glorious. Ours, however, is an Apostate State, and it’s going to hell. Finally, some more Belloc for our Sunday Sonnet.

Over at the Imaginative Conservative, Dwight Longenecker explains Why You Should Read and Write Poetry. Any reactionary will approve of the fact that formal restrictions make the mind, and the creative powers, stronger. Speaking of which, Stephen Klugewicz on The Wild and Terrible Mozart. And Joseph Pearce finds Freud Perpetrating a Freud on Sophocles and Shakespeare—yes, that’s a pun, but an awfully inviting one.

At City Journal, Seth Barron tells the Left to Find Better Martyrs. They’ve picked quite a hill on which to die, this time. Theodore Dalrymple casts a skeptical eye on the British Human Condition Commission—not that a proper government shouldn’t be concerned with increasing loneliness. Seth Barron is joined by John Tierney on the 10 Blocks Podcast to discuss The Trump Infrastructure Plan. And a review of Paris in the Present Tense. Maybe we won’t… Always Have Paris.

Richard Carroll reviews The Baltimore Catechism. If you don’t trust the modern Catholic Church (which you shouldn’t) to set your kids straight, this one is highly recommended.

Over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless has some horror fiction: The Chittering. Highly recommended. And Giovanni Dannato has some fiction of his own, a (not terribly) short story in five parts: Apostasy. And here’s Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. Dannato earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his superb efforts there. As well as putting money where is mouth is.

Tearing down is easy. Building is hard. And building a new aesthetic is what Logos Club is all about.

Finally, Education Realist isn’t too enthused by Get Out, which has the spotlight on it once again as Oscar season approaches. Personally, I enjoyed it for the wrong reasons. For one, it’s a sneaky poison pill for the leftist to swallow: even blacks think white pandering to them is creepy, if not downright suspicious. It also subtly acknowledges low white status, and not-so-subtly, the alienation felt by each race in the presence of the other.

—Hans der Fiedler

Elsewhere, PA has Idle (but very well-composed) Thoughts On Music In The Public Space. Extra kudos for the Foo Fighters embed.

This Week in the Outer Left

There was quite a bit going on with the left this week, including one piece that I largely agree with. Never thought I’d see the day.

The Awl is concluding operation at the end of the month, but they aren’t finished just yet. Their history of colors continues (and maybe concludes?) with one that is a particular favorite of mine, Payne’s gray, the color of English rain and Henry Milley’s Paris. I love a good dark gray, not gonna lie.

The Baffler had a particularly strong week, with no fewer than three pieces that merited inclusion. One is a bit of a black pill, the other a bit of a white pill, and the last is a peek behind the Cathedral’s curtain.

I always start with the bad news, so let’s go to Poland, where Alex Cocotas speaks to a number of Polish feminists, whom he dubs Memory Keepers. This is largely a puff piece for these women, while also functioning as a Two Minutes Hate against Poland for its supposedly misogynistic policies, but some of the facts presented constitute a downer for us. It is difficult to get a legal abortion, contraception is frowned upon and has legal restrictions, there are policies intended to keep families together, 96.7% of the population is Polish, and the Roman Catholic Church exerts a strong influence. All great things from our standpoint. Here’s the black pill: their fertility rate is still absolute garbage: 1.35 in 2017, one of the worst in the world, and it has not been above replacement levels (2.1) since 1988. The Polish labor market is considered one of the most equal between the sexes among OECD countries, and over half of Polish women work. That seems highly significant to me. If I may channel Jim for a moment, even with abortion and contraception restrictions in a religious population, if you let women work so they can fantasize about sex with their high-status boss, they won’t have sex with their lower-status husbands… if they even get married at all, which they increasingly are not.

Gratuitous pic of Maria Kostikova

The white pill I have for you is not nearly of the same magnitude as that black pill, but we take what we can get from the leftoids. Soraya Roberts has some pretty stinging criticism for the phenomenon of Instagram poets, particularly Rupi Kaur. This is significant for a couple reasons.

First, Miss Roberts is apparently white and feels free to criticize Rupi Kaur—who wields her PoC status as shield and sword—in a very left-leaning publication. Naturally, this is couched in terms of offering a criticism of capitalism and neoliberalblahblahblah, but even still, something about the way it is done with nary more than a whisper of apology or qualification feels significant in the Current Year.

Second, Miss Roberts criticizes Kaur, and the other less popular Instagram poets, on the grounds that their poetry is simply bad on objective literary merits. You can go back to at least the 1960s and find the cutting edge of the left attacking the idea of objective artistic merit. By the time I went to college, it was nearly heresy to claim that certain literary works are objectively good and others are trash. One English professor told me “I am afraid you have reactionary taste in literature” for expressing just that view. Yet, here it is in The Baffler of all places.

The final point is a bit more of a mixed bag. She attempts to couch her criticism inside a more general criticism of Instagram and capitalism, as I have said. However, given the actual content, the claim that this is criticism of Instagram and not of the Instagram poets themselves barely passes the laugh test. But one cannot shake the feeling that there is more than a whiff of Cathedral acolyte elitism on display here. There’s nothing too overt, but the juxtaposition of quotations from Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound (oooh, the fascist), and Arthur Rimbaud with criticism of Rupi Kaur for being openly materialistic, commercialistic, and a savvy marketer to the masses feels like the whine of the Cathedral as people no longer have to go through their gatekeepers. Still, in the final analysis, I must tip my hat to Miss Roberts for this defense of genuine culture against trash.

And in a peek behind the Cathedral curtain, David Banks REEEEEEEs about the future being engineered for dystopia, but not in the way you think! You see, engineers are disproportionately drawn to right-wing and authoritarian political beliefs, which simply must be due to the way engineering is taught and institutionalized, so the solution is to bring engineering education and professionals more deeply under the rule of the priestly Brahmin caste. You think I’m exaggerating? RTWT for yourself and you will see that Banks all but outright says just that. The Cathedral truly is a ravenous beast that wants to consume and control every aspect of human life. Even the most nominal independence is hateful to the Cathedral’s acolytes.

Vanity Fair is a newcomer to the august This Week in Reaction round-up, but we welcome them with a piece from Nick Bilton on Facebook’s downward spiral. The downfall of Facebook is a pretty complex story, and as it is still very much in motion, it cannot fully be written. Indeed, many people probably think it is pre-mature to announce that Facebook is on the way down, as the company is valued at over $500 billion. Let’s look at what Bilton has to say.

During the past six months alone, countless executives who once worked for the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives.

OK, that sounds rough, but that’s all industry insiders, many of whom work for competing companies. There’s more.

Is Facebook eliminating news from its site because it realizes that spotting “fake news” is too difficult to solve—even for Facebook? Or, as some people have posited to me, is Facebook rethinking the divide it has created in order to keep growing? After all, much of Zuckerberg’s remaining growth opportunity centers upon China, and the People’s Republic won’t let any product (digital or otherwise) enter its borders if there’s a chance it could disrupt the government’s control. Why would the Chinese Politburo open its doors to a force that could conspire in its own Trumpification or Brexit or similar populist unrest?

This is hidden under hysteria that Facebook “fake news” is responsible for Trump’s election, but a company that relies on continual user growth, like Facebook, only has China left as its big growth frontier. China is famously reluctant to let non-Chinese companies have the kind of access to its people that Facebook requires to work. But the American userbase is also becoming a problem.

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

Anecdotally, I concur with this. In my experience, people have hated Facebook for years and were waiting for some kind of societal permission to get off the platform. The acrimony of the 2016 election, and the fallout from it, seems to have given a lot of people that very permission. Of course, this could all be just a temporary blip for the company. But if Facebook does fall, these events will be remembered as the beginning of the end.

This Week… Elsewhere

Pace Heartiste: someone needs to make this meme. And he warns against excessive Trumphalism: Trump’s 2020 Reelection Is Not A Given.

Occam’s Razor has a send up of The Boomer Cuckservative Interpretation of Western Civilization.

Ace checks in with a timely insight: “I know a word can be untrue and yet still move you…”

Al Fin explains the Technology Enabling $20 a Barrel Oil Costs. That’s pretty bullish for America, and… not quite for Europe.

TUJ, who pays attention to Current Events™ so you don’t have to, is still Waiting for the Persuasion Knockout in FISA-Gate.

Xavier Marquez has a thorough and thought-provoking essay on Charisma and Representation.

America should have the best walls, bigly!

Lorenzo has a, brief for him, comment on border walls. Suitable for normies.

Zach Kraine articulates A Vision For America, in which there is much to like—after the problem of fractured sovereignty is solved.

This week in The Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus offers a review Robert Taylor’s 2016: Reactionary Liberty: The Libertarian Counter-Revolution. Also there: Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Cryptocurrency Bans. A la, “Go ahead, make my day.”

AMK exposes The Righteous Indignation Scam—selling ritual purity is the new simony.

Meta-Nomad has put up part 1 of a delightfully didactic fiction, Chem and Narax. It looks so far like your usual story of a man and a telepathic, intelligent dog wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. We could be in for quite a ride of dulce et utile.

Dawn of the sun above a desecrated planet, its rays bowing pleasantly over yesterday’s cinders; garbage fires, shit-piles and hot corpses litter the ground, their shadows a homage to nothingness; the end of days stretched over all that is and could be conscious. Welcome to 2019 friends, let’s hope that along with all plant-life many of yesteryears’ ideas died too. A world still crumbling, yet hopeful to build a future atop the remains of the past, forget the ruins, forget the remnants… forget your nature and all will go to shit.

Greg Cochran considers Generalized Homeopathy. Homeopathy—pseudo-scientifically doing nothing for placebo effect—started out beating actual medical practice because actual medical practice was just that bad. Medicine caught up and surpassed homeopathy. But many disciplines have not.

Welp. That’s all we had time for, folks. Thanks for reading. As you hopefully noticed, I’ve tried to credit the staff contributors in place now. (ADDED: Those who haven’t objected getting credited.) You can now see just how much they’ve contributed. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/01/28) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week we’re trying a couple new things. Our “This Week in Evolutionist X” subsection has gotten renamed to “This Week in HBD” in the hopes (if not actual execution… yet) of more complete coverage of the wider HBD domain. And a new subsection has emerged: “This Week in Besieged Liberalism”. We’re not thrilled with that, or any other, name, but it’s kind of hard to communicate accurately the purpose of this subsection without prolixity and excessive polysyllabicity. If you’ve got a better suggestion, we’re all ears…

So this week saw the Release of the Memo—a Persuasion Disaster for Anti-Trump. Worse Than Watergate? As well, the State of the Union address.

Over at American Greatness, Brandon Wiechert is not at all happy with AG Jeff Sessions: J’Recuse! The Attorney General Who Wasn’t There. And Roger Kimball finds Trump Restores the ‘We’.

VDH takes us From Conspiracy Theories to Conspiracies.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

The renaissance of Unamusement Park continues unabated. He examines the alleged sneakiness of Japan’s Sneak Attack at Pearl Harbor 75 years ago. St. FDR is alleged to have steered a “neutral” course in the lead-up to the Day of Infamy.

There are a number of weaknesses in (what we might call) the neutrality narrative, which bears a striking resemblance to American World War II propaganda.

A number too large to count really, but Unamused hits quite a few and snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts.

Also there, Unamused puts “Honest” Abe Lincoln under the lens of Old Books™ on the question of Honesty in politics. History, not hagiography.

He takes note of several ways by which to tell if your shithole country just might be Overcoming the legacy of colonialism. Unamused concludes with a fantastic quotation from Evelyn Waugh, who may have known a thing or two about the eevuls of “colonialism”.

He has a report card on American phenotype groups are Keeping together, getting along

Unamusement Park offers a Survival guide, for a racist grandma near you, concluding with a superb meditation from de Tocqueville.

And finally, he analyzes the Gender revolution. Or may “genderal” revolution, in contrast with the sexual revolution. In case you were wondering…

Men and women are identical. They may appear to be different in a number of ways — indeed, they may appear to have always been different in roughly the same ways — but that is an illusion created by an insufficiently feminist society, which forces us to carry out an arbitrarily selected “gender” role forever.

Here, Unamused answers with a wallop from Lothrop Stoddard.

Up at Northern Dawn, John MacMhuirich has a superb essay on Canadian nationalism: What Is A Nation?

I argue that the most ‘true’ sense of a nation will consist of all three features: biology, society, and state.

On that basis, he finds Quebec, for example, to be a different nation than Canada. Perhaps with an even stronger claim to the status of nation—at least in the present circumstances. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Contingent Not Arbitrary continues his path of self-guided, fully-conscious brain surgery in a How To Epistemology. Then he takes a step back to lay some foundational principles of his quest. He considers The Filioque, Reformation Edition.

It’s a good thing Imperial Energy has the… energy… to keep up with the Nork News. His report this week: The North Korean Nuclear Crisis III: Determinism, Diplomacy and Averting Destruction.

Spandrell is enjoying The Jordan Peterson movement, but has legitimate concerns for it’s long-term health. Peterson clearly did not sign up to lead a fascist movement—but that’s pretty much what he’s doing.

Over at GA Blog Adam contrasts “disciplinary spaces” from non-disciplinary in Order and Repetition. As always, it’s very meta.

Attentional spaces, like all spaces, are implicitly absolutist—they want the world held steady while they pursue their interest—but they can’t know themselves to be so, and can easily get distracted by and drawn into schemes of subversion which provide compelling centers of attention. Disciplinary spaces can know themselves to be absolutist because their participants know that only within an ordered state can the activities of the discipline be fully self-generated and therefore genuinely disciplinary. Nothing is more deadly to the disciplinary space than the infusion of power struggles and nothing is more favorable than power resting upon the competent pursuit of a mission.

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Alf outlines the genetic strategies of Rightists, leftists and centrists. And he has a big LOL in explaining Scott Alexander.

And Alf’s speculative Orb of Covfefe novella continues with Part VIII—smoking in Ipswich.

Neovictorian checks in with a teaser from his new novel Sanity, which I am now currently reading.

Just beating the buzzer this week, Shylock Holmes passes in an essay on Narcissism and the Rise of Celebrity Culture. Our particular celebrities at any rate.

Malcolm Pollack contemplates Time for a change—after THIRTEEN YEARS(!!) of blogsistence.

Over at Jacobite, Alessandra Bocchi produces A Field Guide to the Italian New Right. The content is just as the title promises: a description of the rising Right wing in Italian politics.

Congratulations are in order for Anatoly Karlin, as he now has his own entry in RationalWiki. Just in case anyone is keeping score, not even Mencius Moldbug has his own individual entry. Yet.

Anatoly Karlin also had a substantive post on superpower demographics. Basically, if your population has an average IQ over a certain value and you want regional or global power, have babies!

Population size doesn’t matter much if your goal is to live as a small, comfy, unambitious Switzerland or Singapore. But a large population, along with a sufficiently high IQ, remains of sine qua non of being a Great Power or superpower.

…

Increasing fertility towards the upper bounds of what was historically observed in the industrialized world – e.g., TFR=4 in the US during the late 1950s – is basically a cheat code for massively augmenting your national power over the course of just a couple of generations.

By way of Isegoria… We have to be able to talk about cars, too, in which it is alleged merely giving every transit user a car would be more cost-effective than transit subsidies. I think that comparison says more about the clowns in charge of transit than it does about anything inherent to American commuting. Of course, it isn’t as though $10 billion worth of extra cars only costs $10 billion. Filed under things that literally never change: Good guys battle bad guys for the moral future of society, A malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. JBP speaks with Quilette. Thoughts on the actual breakthrough of Bitcoin. Private gun ownership in Kenya, legal and otherwise. And JBP on Joe Rogan’s.

This week in Cambria Will Not Yield: Protecting All That We Hold Dear.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim is back this week with a couple of timely posts, so away we go.

First up, he reminds us that the science is settled, which is one of those phrases that has become extremely politically charged… I wonder why. But what does it mean to say that “the science is settled”? I’ll let Jim answer.

These days, the way to get ahead in any area of science is to discover that your field has some political relevance that is unlikely to occur to any sane person, and then produce data that supposedly comforts the oppressed and saves the earth from cruel exploitation by white males. For an added bonus, you can destroy the careers of your colleagues as oppressors of the weak and vulnerable, because back in the bad old days they upheld the old evil theory (now refuted by your new data) for no reason other than hatred of some saintly victims and desire to cause harm to those saintly and long suffering victims.

And coming in just before the deadline, cause that’s how he rolls, Jim has some thoughts on the big FISA memo story. If you expected triumphant crowing along the lines of ‘see, I told you so!’, you don’t know Jim very well and probably are insufficiently red pilled.

It has long been known, long before the memo, that the Deep State engaged in illegal spying both with a false warrant, and without a warrant, on behalf of the Democratic Party Presidential Campaign.

…

The memo, with much drama, does a big reveal of one part of this story, one small part of a story that we already know, that they obtained a pretextual warrant on behalf of and in coordination with the Democratic Party Presidential Campaign.

Expect, leading up to the 2018 elections, further big dramatic reveals of the story that we already know, which will provide a legal basis for a political purge of the supposedly non political appointees in the Deep State, and to send Hillary to prison.

Expect a 2018 campaign as referendum on impeaching Trump.

If they get the numbers to impeach Trump, or get away with pretending to have the numbers, he goes to jail, and so do many members of his administration, followed by numerous Republicans, leaving only shadow rump composed of a rapidly diminishing number of the most overtly and loudly cucking Republicans—European politics. If they don’t, Hillary, or key members of her organization, go to jail.

Everyone knows that the Deep State tips the scales in favor of the Inner Party. In order to play in the political sandbox, as it is currently constituted in the Western world, you are required to not know that you know the Deep State tips the scales in favor of the Inner Party. I believe that is what Mr. Orwell identified as doublethink.

This Week in Social Matter

Benjamin Welton kicks off the week at Social Matter with a wonderful history on “Mad” Mike Hoare: White Giant.

Hoare, like Ian Smith of Rhodesia, sincerely believed that white civilization could bring black Africa out of its generational malaise. However, both men believed that native Africans had their limits, and [Hoare’s memoir] Congo Mercenary is unflinching when it comes to detailing the savagery of Afro-Marxists and black nationalists once they recognized that the Europeans had pulled out of Africa.

Meanwhile, Welton manages to cast a lot of reasonable doubt on the Officially Accepted Congo Narrative: King Leopold of Belgium was literally a “butcher”. And trace the rise and ultimate downfall of the once most advanced economic engine in sub-Saharan Africa: Belgian Congo. The Committee were impressed with this one, to the tune of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

In the essential Myth of the 20th Century podcast, the West Coast Guyz offer: Episode 55: Spanish Civil War—Fascist Uprising.

Our good friend Frederick Franz makes a smashing debut as author at Social Matter look at America As Rome.

America was clearly founded as a new Rome. This was done consciously by the intellectual class and was meant as more than a simple homage. Intellectuals in the new America wanted to create a republic to emulate and surpass the glory of Rome. Any walk down the Washington D.C. Mall will show they were more than moderately successful. Not coincidentally, the first modern historical text about Rome was published in 1776 by Edward Gibbon.

Surprisingly, Franz takes Gibbon’s influential view that Christianity indeed played a significant role in the downfall of Rome. But he thinks the Founders attempts to disestablish Christianity in America fully backfired.

Roman Naval Attack on Carthage

Rome had just won the ancient version of World War II, the Third Punic War. In that war, Rome devastated its rival, Carthage, and remade it in Rome’s image. General Lucius D. Clay, deputy to General Eisenhower and in 1945, the Military Governor of U.S.-Occupied Germany, was the first to compare the events.[1] If anyone was in a position to make the comparison, it would be him. The Punic Wars were defensive in nature, fought to protect Rome from the Carthaginian menace. In the process, Rome conquered the known world in a single generation. Does that ring any bells? Conquering the world in self-defense? The Founding Fathers really had no idea how much their copy of Rome would replay its history.

And the parallels are just getting started in Franz’s account. This excellent, even if controversial, work garnered an
☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

For Saturday Poetry & Prose, long-time contributor Lawrence Glarus pens an epic poem: Pinch.

And speaking of essential podcasts… our own Ascending the Tower podcast made it out on Sunday: Episode XIX—“Reminding The King That He Serves God”. Me and Anthony and Bandleader Antony are joined by my Michael Perilloux and P. T. Carlo for a rousing discussion of monarchical rule in both heaven and on earth.

This Week in HBD

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another invaluable “Cathedral Round-Up”: #29: Pinker, Truth, and Liars. Besieged liberal Pinker suggested that political correctness just might be playing a role in the radicalization of the right. And the usual suspects went apeshit.

The difference between Pinker and the Left is that Pinker is (trying) to be honest. Pinker believes in truth. He believes in believing true things and discussing true things. He believes that just because you believe a true thing doesn’t mean you have to go down this road to believing other, in his opinion untrue, things. You can believe more than one true thing. You can simultaneously believe “Blacks commit more homicide than whites” and believe “Blacks should not be discriminated against.”

By contrast, the Left is not trying to be honest. It is not looking for truth. It just wants to win.

Indeed.

Next up, one of Mrs. X’s “Favorite Things”… Beringian DNA.

And for Anthropology Friday: Numbers and the Making of Us by Caleb Everett, pt 3.

You see, the Piraha really can’t count. Line up 3 spools of thread and ask them to make an identical line, and they can do it. Line up 4 spools of thread, and they start getting the wrong number of spools. Line up 10 spools of thread, and it’s obvious that they’re just guessing and you’re wasting your time. Put five nuts in a can, then take two out and ask how many nuts are left: you get a response on the order of “some.”*

And this is not for lack of trying. The Piraha know other people have these things called “numbers.” They once asked Everett’s parents, the missionaries, to teach them numbers so they wouldn’t get cheated in trade deals. The missionaries tried for 8 months to teach them to count to ten and add small sums like 1 + 1. It didn’t work and the Piraha gave up.

Despite these difficulties, Everett insists that the Piraha are not dumb. After all, they survive in a very complex and demanding environment….

Mr. Everett may have neglected one of the more parsimonious explanations:

… that the Piraha are otherwise normal people who are innately bad at math.

Doesn’t hurt them too much where they are, but they’d have a devil of a time getting along in the moderns society.

Gregory Cochran reviews Bryan Caplan’s new book The Case Against Education. Cochran mostly agrees with Caplan, but argues that Caplan understates the ideological effect of college on students…just because Cthulhu’s swimming slowly doesn’t mean he isn’t swimming. The review is short, so RTWT.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

It was a busy week over at our sister publication Thermidor with a lot of new faces. From the tail end of the previous week is Jake Bowyer’s proposal: Let’s Scare the Oligarchs to Death. Bowyer comments on the Steele Dossier fiasco and expresses hopes for a general “awakening” to the corruption in D. C. That would be nice, of course, but we shouldn’t be holding our breath.

Newcomer Peter B. Miller offers up a meandering meditation in The Soul in Torment. Miller ponders the changes that modernity has wrought on the formation of identity and summarizes well-worn reactionary conclusions.

Before modernity, identity was a given. It was provided by the family and region one was born into and the work that one did. Family names reflected this. As the first industrial revolution took hold, identity became more fluid and uncertain. It gave birth to romanticism and nationalism where the former elements of identity were slowly replaced by myth, nature, and ethnicity (perfectly exemplified by the operas of Richard Wagner). The recent explosion of identity politics is a weak substitute for the more grounded forms of the pre-modern world. Race, sexual orientation, and gender are desperately clung to by people who have lost the more natural components of identity.

Next up, N. T. Carlsbad reviews some forgotten American history in the Czechoslovak Lobby in America. Carlsbad describes the role of Czech agitators and emigres to bring about the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Eternal Czech!!

This year’s March for Life gets two articles of commentary, neither positive. Walter Devereux gives An Anti-Abortion Ally’s Account of the Embarrassing Failure that was the 2018 March for Life. Devereux chronicles the day’s activities and focuses his attention on the rhetoric of the speakers.

There was an adopted mulatto speaker who even took a moment to aside about how race is merely “a human construct”; it was a needless non-sequitur in the middle of a rhetorically effective (if intellectually barren) argument for adoption. This is representative of a pointless and morally ineffectual rhetorical approach adopted by the Pro-Life movement from conservative commentators who think they’re clever because they can poke logical holes in the arguments made by the likes of Black Lives Matter—oblivious, as conservatives usually are, that the principal rhetorical tool employed by such groups is violence.

Devereux also contrasts the speeches of President Trump and Congressman Ryan. Naturally, Trump comes out on top.

Trump and Ryan did essentially the same thing, taking the themes and slogans of Pro-Life and adapting them into a speech aimed to court the Pro-Life movement into supporting them. The difference is that Trump went for substance while Ryan went for style, and Trump delivered a better speech as a result. It was the perfect contrast between the Congressional Outer Party and the Trump movement.

Richard Greenhorn makes his debut with Devilís Bargain: The March for Life and the Novus Ordo Church. Greenhorn reviews the troubled history of the Catholic Church in American on the issues of abortion, contraceptives, and sexual morality in general. As for the March itself, Greenhorn is unimpressed.

Remember the hubbub of Candidate Trump suggesting women who murder their children should be criminally prosecuted? Poor Candidate Trump was only saying what he thought was logically necessary. But pro-lifers said this was off limits. Perhaps some of this was realpolitik—there’s no reason to ask for blood when you have no power, after all. But you got the impression that wasn’t the case. It’s like pro-lifers wouldn’t know what to do with power even if they got it.

As an explanation for this, lack of seriousness, Greenhorn identifies the bifurcation in the minds of Americans between sex and reproduction.

How many Marchers would give up their contraceptives? How many women would relinquish the sexual power the past half-century has given them? Outdoor protests in January are not propitious to short-shorts and tees, but you’ll still find plenty women Marchers wearing contour-fitting jeans and tights behind the “Pro-Family, Pro Women, Pro-Life” signs. For a large part of the Marchers—probably a majority—the issue of sexual morality is tenuously connected or even distinct from that of abortion. The average Marcher, just like the average American, has thoroughly embraced the contraceptive mindset. She has divorced sex from childbearing. Just stop killing your babies—then everything will be alright.

Abortion is a second tier issue. It is the natural result of the liberation of women; the natural result of contraception, of our contemporary lack of chastity. A culture of casual sex by intellectual and spiritual fools requires some kind of suffering to maintain. Yet for almost all abortion opponents, abortion is an issue completely divorced from sex. They operate on the delusion, built by centuries of Christian sexual morality, that chastity, in the form of lifelong monogamy, is natural. But the exact opposite is true.

For this valuable perspective and corrective, the Committee honored Greenhorn with the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ this week.

Europa Weekly this week gives us The Free Market is Gay.

Leonid Savin produces Responsible Power: Towards a New Frame of International Relations. Savin discusses the work of several American political scientists writing about power, its modes and expressions, and decides that Russia needs a new and different set of ideas.

A Russian approach will be effective when it confirms the clear hierarchy of decision-making in the interests of the country and state in harmony with divided responsibility, the goal of global social justice, a long-term strategy for any kind of activity (be it political, economic or cultural), and the impossibility of consensus on a series of questions of principle (for example, the blocking of ecumenical initiatives by the Russian Orthodox Church, which is an organic part of Russian power, or a full ban on gay-propaganda and single-sex marriage in the country). In addition, we consider the alignment of the structure of power to necessarily be linked to our geopolitical approach. Thus, land power must be the foundation of all possible emanations of power in Russia, through military force as well as through different diplomatic instruments, including the activities of different layers of society.

Savin writes specifically for a Russian audience, which makes his piece a bit strange for an American to read. Strange, but informative.

Finally, Thomas de Terminus makes his Thermidor debut with The Maslowian Overman. That’s Thomas Maslow of the “hierarchy of needs” fame. Terminus sees the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, “self-actualization,” as a viable alternative to Nietzsche’s übermensch, indeed superior in several respects.

For starters, he actually exists; any man can, in theory, attain or at the very least approach self-actualization by satisfying the baser needs of human nature, whereas Nietzsche’s Overman was by design an unattainable ideal, a literal superhuman being that all generations of mankind would eternally strive for and fail to reach.

Moreover, Maslow’s self-actualized man possesses a spiritual dimension, in contrast to the purely physical Nietzschean Overman. The Nietzschean Overman was necessarily of the world, deriving his power and his station from his supposed physical superiority. The Maslowian Overman requires no physical confirmation of his superiority—other than the satisfaction of the physiological needs of hunger and homeostasis—and is instead concerned with achieving psychological and spiritual peace and confidence.

Terminus goes on to apply his interpretation of Maslow to the bourgeoisie and aristocracy and derive implications for social and political organization. de Terminus earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent efforts here.

—David Grant

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Faith & Heritage runs some Pew Research numbers on Religion and National Identity.

Knight Stephen of Númenor envisions a New American Mythology, which, we agree, is absolutely essential for long-term restoration. And speaking of Rome, the envisioning continues with: America after this democratic Republic II: Build the new Rome. Very solid points all through this one.

The Roman part must complete the American deep heritage, together with Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Norman and settlers elements. Other elements are Teutonic, Slavic, Greek, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Vasconic and Mediterranean

America must get rid of the Enlightenment equality garbage that its Founding Fathers mistakenly espoused, as well as the yoke of the global neo-Communist “Blue Empire” and become the true heir to the Roman Empire. It must be educated with Roman values and classics. What it means to be a good Roman citizen should inform what it means to be a good American citizen.

It must become the highest expression of European civilization, a nation where Europeans come together to establish something higher, something greater, something brighter and more capable than all the states throughout history.

European history since the fall of Rome may be approximated as a series of attempts to regain what was lost in that fall.

America’s history began not in 1776. It did not on the board of the Mayflower. It did not begin with the history of England. It did begin even with Celtic tribes on the island of Britain. But even that is not enough. America’s history also began with the founding of Rome.

And he has a third installment (conclusion?) here: Envisioning America, the Anglo-Rome. Excellent work from Knight of Númenor, the second article is I think the standout of the series and Stephen takes home the rare ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Knight of Númenor also has a two-part series on “The problem with Reaction and a proposed alternative”: Part 1: How Reaction might fail and Part 2: How to practice republican monarchy and aristocracy

Over at The Orthosphere proper, Kristor shows how the Incarnation & Transubstantiation are Formally Analogous, particularly where they similarly defy human understanding. Then he describes how Nation & Culture Coinhere in Cult rather inextricably, demonstrating the inseverability of religion and nation. Last, he rejects a certain conspiratorial trajectory of history and predicts The Great Sortition, where homogeneous cultures see to their own interests.

Alan Roebuck writes this Letter to My Son: Old Movies and Books Help Inoculate You against Liberalism.

In the old movies and books most men are masculine and most women are feminine. In the old movies and books Christianity is generally honored as the religion of our people. In the old books and movies divorce, adultery and abortion are shameful. . In the old books and movies white Americans do not welcome masses of immigrants and refugees or apologize for their “white privilege” or their “xenophobia.” In the old movies and books, the madness of liberalism only lives in a few villains and other odd characters.

J. M. Smith narrates a modern retelling of an old nursery rhyme in Tussling on a Tuffet: A Tale of Our Times. Then he notices a disconnect between the classical definition of “patriot” and its American counterpart, concluding that New England Patriots is an Oxymoron.

I do not doubt that there are and have been patriots in New England, but cannot overlook the irony that, of all the American peoples, New Englanders have always been the most exuberantly patricidal.

Swedish-born Ann Margret.

Bonald paints the newest Papal proverb, “Time is greater than space” as an illustration of the intellectual vacuity of today’s clerical culture. Then he makes a short, interesting list of possible theories of substance. He also writes The tribal Catholic on the value of loyal intellectuals to the restoration, particularly regarding subjects where reasonable minds can differ.

Matt Briggs argues There Can Be No Consistent Atheist System Of Morality Or Ethics because whenever the implications of atheism are followed to their natural ends, the conclusion is inevitably that nothing matters. Then he asks, Should We Worry Artificial Neurons Can Now Compute Faster Than the Human Brain? Short answer: nope, because mere processing speed cannot compete with actual awareness. Finally, reporting this week on the insanity and doom front, a Pedophile Says He’s a 9-Year-Old Trapped in Man’s Body. Therefore, He Is.

Guest posting at Briggs, the Blonde Bombshell introduces readers to one of the hottest new conspiracy theories surrounding an anonymous channer, asking Who Is Q & Why Might He Matter?

William Wildblood imagines what Evolving Consciousness and its Results might look like if we moved past materialism.

In this world, men and women would understand their true complementary roles, and neither would try to dominate the other unnaturally. That doesn’t mean there would be equality. Equality is an illusion which when enforced, as now, leads to a massive distortion of reality. But there would be harmony as each sex took up its true vocation and genuinely respected the other for what it was without trying to imitate that other. Women would not seek to rival men and men would not seek to diminish women. Each sex would recognise how it needs the other.

—Hans der Fiedler

This Week in Arts & Letters

Seriouslypleasedropit offers a poem that he’s memorized from William J. Bennett’s Book of Virtues: If. Along with… some solid commentary thereupon.

PA is becoming a regular Poetry Translation Machine. Some more this week from the original Polish: “I shake like a spleen ripped out of an eel”

Memorized, translated, and… original: Lulach the Simpler lends his pen to Derb’s call for a Worldwide Nationalist anthem: “The Nationale”. An admittedly tall order… for obvious reasons.

Chris Gale wraps up his Belloc cycle with our Sunday Sonnet. He also offers his Defense of Traditions, along with some Quotage on the issue of women in modernity. Lastly, an observation on how our kids (and adults) are Spoiled Rotten.

Heather MacDonald of City Journal gives a rundown of the Left’s broad-spectrum push to fulfill a panoply of identity quotas in #MediocrityToo.

Richard Carroll dives into the real meat of Plato with his review of Republic. Highly recommended. And an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

At Albion Awakening, John Fitzgerald presents a short story on The Advent of Arthur.

Finally, at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless schools us on some of the Overlooked Fundamentals of Fiction Writing, for the aspiring reactionary writers among us. God knows we need more of them.

This Week in the Outer Left

With the demise of The Awl, it was a light week on the left.

Grace Kelly, American Film Actress and Princess of Monaco

The Baffler had a rare article we can kinda get behind, analyzing the proposed acquisition of much of Fox by Disney as Simulacra, Inc.. It goes to show how confused the true-believing socialist left really is in our current circumstances. The acquisition would make Disney by far the most powerful player in Hollywood, and likely in television and paid streaming services as well. That is supposed to be bad because “muh evil concentrated capitalism”, but Disney is at the very vanguard of pushing the poz, so what is a true-believer socialist to do? Well, go to Baudrillard I suppose, which just goes to show how bankrupt and desperate the left is getting to try to make their worldview make sense.

You probably don’t realize this if you haven’t studied 20th century Continental philosophy, but even among the French post-modernists and post-structuralists, Baudrillard is still considered something of a punchline. It is telling that they have to dig so deep to try and muster up some way to oppose moves by Disney. Our leftists just ain’t what they used to be. Sad!

And our LRx friend, cyborg_nomade had a provocative post claiming that capitalism = feminism. As I said, quite provocative, so give it a read.

individual freedom (responsibility) will soon cease to be optional.

destruction of traditional marriage (patriarchy) is inherent in the development of commercial societies. capital wants to bypass the middlemen and cut a deal directly with women—the matrices of its substrate. thus it becomes ever more economically unfeasible, under capitalism, to keep women out of the workforce. in the end, capitalism = feminism (as a process).

I’mma let him finish this series, but here’s a brief rebuttal: most women are not directly economically productive units. Capitalism existed long before feminism and it had to reach a certain base level of productivity before societies could afford to burn resources by integrating women into jobs for which they are ill-suited, which is most of them. For the median woman in a job outside of certain fields where nurturing is a useful trait, removing her from the company and not even replacing her would constitute an increase in productivity. Ask Jim, he’ll tell you.

This Week in Besieged Liberalism

We kicking off a new subsection this week that is very difficult to name. Think Stephen Pinker, Jordan B. Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, and Sam Harris: Principled liberals, with significant shreds of decency, who find themselves increasingly in the cross-hairs of the blood-thirsty monster that liberalism has created. We like to think of them as… Pre-Reactionaries. Here’s some of what went down this week…

Heterodox Academy put out multiple articles on viewpoint diversity this week. Coleman Hughes has some horror stories from Columbia University, which appears to be somewhat lacking in viewpoint diversity. They also review a study titled “Intellectual Humility and Openness to the Opposing view,” which concludes that intellectual humility leads to openness to opposing views. Unfortunately, the Cathedral’s priests aren’t exactly selected for their intellectual humility. Nick Phillips argues that conservatives shouldn’t provoke professors and administrators by passing legislation protecting viewpoint diversity. We, on the other hand, think that provoking the beast into overreacting is exactly what conservatives should do…if they ever want to win, anyway.

Over at The Rubin Report, Rubin has a two-hour long discussion about “free speech activism” with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Peterson notes Nietzsche’s prediction that societies which kill God will become nihilistic and totalitarian… anarcho-tyrannical, if you will. Peterson is notably less sanguine about the enlightenment than Little Ben. Unsurprisingly.

Danish mulatto lawyer Jacob Mchangama kicked off his free speech history podcast Clear and Present Danger discussing the relationship between free speech and ‘democracy’ in ancient Athens. (Scare quotes because ancient Athenian democracy ain’t what you think.)

Finally, Ribbonfarm has an article on “gray man,” survivalists who prepare in secret. What’s the fun in it if ya can’t brag about it?

—Burgess McGill

This Week… Elsewhere

Well… Moby got a vasectomy—kind of a Darwin Jr. Award: a net gain for Western Civilization. Vasectomy, Heartiste notes, is an Alpha-ectomy, to say nothing of it being a violation of the timeless and irreformable teachings of the Church.

Al Fin is bullish on the Trump Tax Reform: Latest Boon to US Economic Growth. He also has a pessimistic look at Russian fertility statistics. And Fin has a nice overview of Peterson’s 12 Rules: Antidote to Chaos.

Over at Zeroth Position, firebrand Insula Qui kicks off (apparently) a new series: On Libertarianism and Statecraft: Introduction. He proposes the creation of a “libertarian theory of statecraft,” whilst maintaining the non-necessity of the state. A tough row to hoe, IMO.

Libertarianism is fundamentally antithetical to statism, but contrary to popular wisdom, not to governance and statecraft. There is no libertarian theory on how a government ought to govern because libertarianism has been an anti-government philosophy, and confusion between government and governance leads to limited thinking. Furthermore, by not focusing on governance, libertarians are at risk of ignoring the fact that without the state, there still will be massive structures of governance because even voluntary associations require bylaws and organizational structure. Thus, there is only folly in ignoring the question of statecraft.

So what’s “statism” exactly? Serious question, especially if one is going to espouse an ideology “fundamentally antithetical to it. Well, Mr. Qui, offers more here. And it is not terribly long. A recommended read and an impressive ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. We’ll be looking forward to future installments.

Also there, Nullus Maximus has a deep meditation on On Linguistic Warfare. This too was an excellent bit of analysis, earning an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Because everyone in a democratic system has a slice of political power, everyone becomes a political target. The deliberate engineering of permanent conflict in society that is democratic government ensures that weaponization of language is omnipresent. Thus, all linguistic innovation is hindered to the detriment of rationality and real progress, as efforts which could have gone toward higher endeavors is misdirected into internal disputes.

He goes on to describe better and worse strategic countermeasures.

Gratuitous pic of girl with flowers in hair

Ace checks in with considerations on the whens and hows of male submission: “I got the haircut they told me I should get; I can’t remember what they said to forget…”

AMK offers a humorous warning: Don’t create genetically enhanced African warlords: intelligence is not just IQ. I think he’s right, I just don’t think it’s that big of a concern at present.

Unorthodoxy documents: David Brooks Wants to Replace You. Just when we were beginning to think he might not!

Down Under, Lorenzo analyzes The Illusion of free banking.

Justin Murphy is doing some real social science. He uses some “big data” to analyze The Moral Foundations of Social Justice Warriors.

Loretta the Prole has some Feedback for Paul Nehlen. He’s getting shipwrecked on “The Jews” unfortunately.

Zach Kraine posts his thoughts on Welfare. He’s basically correct about the tribal nature of it. No one minds helping out Our Guys, but no one wants to pay for Those Lousy Bums. I’m remain unconvinced about automation arguments. If automation increases the productivity of labor—which seems obvious—why would it lead to fewer people being employed? No one has ever riddled me this. Also there: considerations on Masculinity and Femininity.

Meta-Nomad continues his film review series in two entries, TSPDT 2, and TSPDT 3. Number 2 also has a bundled reflection on Outside, and 3 opens with a brief missive on Satoshi Nakamoto and organic economics, so give them a read.

That’s about it folks. A hearty welcome and thanks to newest member of the TWiR Staff: Burgess McGill. He along with Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans def Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear keep this machine hummin’. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/02/04) appeared first on Social Matter.

The neoreactionary community was hit hard by breaking news of Tom Petty’s death on Monday. Well, at least I was. For better or worse (and mostly for the better I think) Petty’s simple 3 and 4 chord music was the backdrop of this Gen-Xer’s life. Tom Petty (1950-2017), Requiescat in Pace.

VDH considers The Strange Case of Confederate Cool. You see it in Hell on Wheels as well. Not to mention Firefly.

[I]n such a Jacobin climate, shouldn’t civil-rights activist Joan Baez, for example, be condemned retroactively for her thought crimes?

She jump-started a second career in 1971 with her rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Her likely motivation for redoing the tune, aside from natural career concerns, was that it’s a powerful lyric piece and a magnanimous expression of empathy for the South’s post-war poverty and humiliation. But for anyone else, romancing slavery and racism would still be a felony in the eyes of the Orwellian thought police.

All politics is identity politics. And Joan Baez is one of the good guys (from NPR’s perspective).

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Our good friend Fritz Pendleton kicks off the week with (blessedly) brief Sunday Thoughts.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam focuses his considerable analytical skills upon (P)ower, which he sees primordially coming into existence by the extension of (social) credit—not far, I think, from the NRx concept of worthiness. So why does power seem to grow?

One of the ways I like to remember Tom Petty.

“Secure” and “Unsecure” are relative terms. An early medieval king ruling over a territory the size of a small town may consider his power quite secure if he can on occasion rouse his lords to mobilize their soldiers to defend against the predations of a gang of nomadic looters; the modern state apparently feels its power is insecure if there is a single “white supremacist” who can hold down a job. Why, though, describe the purge of “white supremacists” in terms of “unsecure” power rather than simply power hunger? What is it the state wants to do that it perceives the “white supremacists” to interfere with?

Jim Kalb in (the increasingly prescient) Tyranny of Liberalism frames the phenomenon as destruction of natural mediating power structures that are resistant to bureaucratic control. But back to power…

At this point the best qualifications for filling the highest offices no longer include the charisma of leadership, or earned credit—rather, those functionaries are recruited from the broader cultural training grounds established so as to continually replenish the elites with facsimiles of the existing ones. And what the future elites are trained in is how to play the idealized “principles” of Power against Power, the equality reflected in the abstraction of all individuals before Power against the insufficient degree of equality presently presided over by that Power.

Well that was a taste. There is much more. Adam, as always, provides high-quality penetrating analysis. This snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ from The Committee.

Imperial Energy’s STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto continues apace with Part 5A. The European Minotaur of War I: The Origins, Nature and Development of the Minotaur. Along the way, he takes a lot of insight from Jouvenel’s On Power: A Natural History of Its Growth, for which IE has much praise. This needs a closer reading than I am competent to give.

IE also delivers the latest Imperial Circular.

Spandrell takes note of A sad day for diversity—courtesy of KSA… and Foggy Bottom.

Social Pathologist takes a break from talking about Nazis, to talk about other fake-rightists: Strauss and Cthulhu. It is quite good… even before he gets into Strauss:

I think one of the great accidental disservices of Burke was to interpret the Revolution along temperamental lines. The Left being seen as innovators, imprudent and champions of novelties while the Right, their opposite. The real action was at the metaphysical level. The triumph of the Jacobins was the triumph of the secular over the Christian worldview. And what the Burkean interpretation has resulted in is the association of the Right and Left with temperamental qualities, whereas a more correct interpretation of it would be between Christian and Secular world views. The temperamental interpretation has also resulted in a conflation of Christian with Right and Secular with Left, whereas in reality, both Christian and Secular world views can have their Right and Left dispositional variants.

He knocks it out of the park on Strauss too:

For Strauss, faith and reason were incompatible, yet influential upon each other. Whatever Strauss’s view of religion, it is clear that he felt that it had no obligatory right on reason: it existed in a separate domain. Sure, religion may be an influence, an inspiration, a tradition, etc., but if reason came to a conclusion separate to religion, reason had to be given its “latitude.” At its best, Straussian Neoconservatism is a secularism that is “respectful” towards religion, at worst, it plays cynical lip service to it.

This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Alf is not at all happy with “the babyboomers”. I understand why people feel this way. It’s still the wrong way to feel. (And no… I AM NOT A BOOMER!)

Shylock Holmes makes a welcome—and very late-in-the-week—reappearance with George Lunt and the Tragedy of the Civil War. Holmes has been reading through the Menciian Canon of Old Books. This is a key term paper.

Discussions of the Civil War take place in a bizarre environment of historical illiteracy. Not about the Civil War itself, or of America’s experience with slavery – Americans actually know quite a lot about their own history, even if they’ve only heard one version of events.

No, the ignorance that is more striking is the ignorance of the slavery experience anywhere else on the planet. Of which there was plenty. And in particular, the ignorance of the other ways that countries went about ending slavery. Because it somehow never occurs to people to ponder whether there might have been other, better ways to end slavery without resulting in 700,000 corpses.

Lots of blame to go around in that tragedy, of course, as Lunt and Holmes document. Holmes garners an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his efforts here and the crucial reminder to Read Old Books®!

By way Isegoria this week… the outlandish wargame, The Campaign for North Africa, was a standard archetype blown out to its extremes. The alarming recognition that the reason we don’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles, is that we can’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles. Some insight into what happens at Harvard to produce the kind of people it produces, i.e., how it helps its richest and most arrogant students get ahead with some equally insightful counterpoint in the comments. Understanding psychology could be more effective than business training. More indicators of decline in the US Army Chief of Staffs’ reading lists. How the 2012 election taught us to trust the data. Jerry Pournelle on Think Tanks. And the US Army’s neglect of Megamission Three.

Anatoly Karlin looks at voting patterns in the recent German election and finds that East Germans vote like Visegrad Europeans. It is actually quite remarkable how strong support was for the AfD in the former DDR, and relatively weak everywhere else.

Anatoly also posits that the Russian Empire was too nice for its own good. I do not think many reactionaries would disagree that the Tsars gave in to demands from liberals too much, particularly in the 20th century, but the liberality Anatoly documents was quite a surprise. Definitely RTWT if you have interest in Russian history.

Malcolm Pollack explains Why You Should Subscribe To CRB. We consider Claremont Review of Books to be among the least annoying of mainstream rightist publications—which should be interpreted as exceedingly high praise.

Finally, This Week in Cambria Will Not Yield… Mere Virtue Is Not Enough.

When a Tucker Carlson-type of conservative debates a feminist, a ‘black lives matter’ advocate, or a radical Moslem, he always wins the debate. He wins the debate if debates are won by who makes the best argument, but when there is no moral consensus between the debaters, the victor is always the amoral debater who understands that debates are only subterfuges for his satanic agenda. A Christian cannot debate a man or woman who wants to destroy every white Christian on the face of the earth.

As always CWNY is quite right, but I don’t think he and I are fully agreed on what constitutes “virtue”. Virtue will have to be enough, I think. But skill in debate—or psychology—is not necessarily virtue.

This Week in Jim Donald

Three pieces from Jim this week, so let’s get into it. First up was a fairly extended examination of cryptocurrency. Whether you are a cryptocurrency neophyte or expert, this one is definitely worth reading in full.

The successful altcoin will be genuinely decentralized, as bitcoin was designed to be, originally was, and to some extent still is. Most of the altcoins, possibly all of them except the Bitcoins and Ethereum, are furtively centralized.

It will use, or at least offer the option, of Zooko type wallet names, as Bitcoin and Ethereum do.

It will be scalable to enormous numbers of transactions with low transaction costs, as Steemit and Ripple are, but Bitcoin and Ethereum are not.

It will support sidechains, and exchanges will be sidechained.

It will be a blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is, and will be a decentralized blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is not.

Jim also keeps us up to date on certain current Trumpian events with an explanation of why the US government Massachusetts Empire is losing in Afghanistan.

To the immense disappointment of his base, and indeed the immense disappoint of the vast majority of American voters left and right, Trump, breaking his election promises, decided to continue war in Afghanistan, while making the war slightly less infested by lawyers, transexuals, and women’s rights activists.

Well, delawyering the war will certainly help, but lawyers are not the core of the problem.

The core of the problem is that the Afghans really really do not want their religion replaced with the state religion of Massachusetts, which involves young girls putting a condom on a banana as a sacrament. The Massachusetts Empire is perhaps equally stubborn in its insistence that the Afghans will adopt the Progressive faith.

And, despite his protestations to the contrary, Jim turns his blog into a kinda sorta PUA blog for a post on what women want. If you know Jim, you probably know what the tenor of this piece will be, but let’s take a little peek anyway.

The main thing I have learned is that women are incompetent and wicked at making sexual and romantic choices, and should never have been emancipated.

Also the concept of “consent” is not easily mapped onto the real life sexual and romantic behavior of women, and therefore should not be given legal or moral weight. Short of a full marriage ceremony where vows are made before God and man under parental guidance, it is really difficult to say whether a woman consented or not, and makes little practical difference.

Come for the red pill shock therapy, but stay for Jim discussing anime.

This Week in Social Matter

The Week at Social Matter gets kicked off in grand style with C. A. Shoultz’s The Great Green Earth—which thrusts environmental concerns into the Reactionary Spotlight. And this has been long overdue in these pages. (Parenthetically, it has kicked off an enormous among of discussion and analysis in the private gardens of neoreaction.)

The word ‘conservative’ is an excellent place to start, as that word’s root, the word ‘conserve,’ is also the root of that potent word, ‘conservation.’ A cursory glance at the history of reaction reveals a not-inconsiderable focus on the natural world, on the world in which men live and what their attitude towards that world should be. Consider the great reactionary J.R.R. Tolkien; his masterwork The Lord of the Rings depicts a reverence for the natural world, from the carefully tended gardens of the hobbits of the Shire to the mighty guardians of the great forests, the Ents of the deep woods. For Tolkien it is a grave sin, an evil thing, to needlessly destroy and ruin the natural world. We must remember that the Ents are roused, not merely by the destruction of their trees, but by the wantonness of it, the cutting and burning for no good reason.

On the other hand, believers in progress, despite their wishful thinking, bear much blame

It was the great original Modernists—Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza—who shifted the West’s view of the natural world, moving it from a seamless created order in which man participated to a base collection of material resources which man ought to exploit for his own benefit. It was their mechanistic thinking—their minds of metal and wheels—that paved the way for the industrialization that, while it has done several very good things, has caused great harm to the living world, as well.

The descendants of these thinkers have a similar idea in mind; they merely employ it with different intent. Not only do progressive, radical environmentalists deserve not to have the issue all to themselves; they might perhaps be said not to deserve a voice at all, given the nihilistic ends to which their discussions ultimately turn. Radical environmentalists view man as divorced from nature, just as their radical predecessors once did. Where the early Moderns saw this as license to dominate nature, however, the current Moderns take it as license to exterminate ourselves.

Shoultz hits upon a key idea here: viz., one error (radical separation of man from nature) leading to two ostensibly polar opposite deformities. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine work here.

Arthur Gordian returns with a real doozy: Transgenderism Is Propaganda Designed To Humiliate And Compel Submission—i.e., an not mere virtue signaling.

[C]onsider an additive hypothesis: the Cathedral elite know full well that transgender individuals are mentally ill and have chosen to embrace this cause for ulterior motives, as there is something inherent in the issue that provides them an advantage. Transgenderism is Type 1 Propaganda, and its primary targets are not loyal leftists, but individuals on the marginal Right capable of swinging either for or against the Cathedral.

And he makes his case. Well.

Weaver explains that this form of propaganda is aimed at demeaning, humiliating, and eroding the self-respect of those who oppose the regime. It is an expression of pure power, in that the propagandist can force the victim to repeat a doctrine that both people know is untrue. There is no potential gain for the propagandist except insofar his enemy is psychological broken and defeated. There is no intention for the “Big Lie” to have any effect outside the torture chamber. Whether or not transgender individuals are accepted by society is irrelevant to the exercise of power by the Cathedral elites over marginally right-wing individuals.

One of the best pieces you’ll read this year, I think. Which I hope you will do. In an otherwise strong week, this won the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ going away. Mr. Gordian really knows his stuff.

Remember how last week was real slow here at SM? Well, neither do I. This week was jam packed with good stuff. Luke Wesson makes a debut on Thursday with A Tutorial In How To Switch The Ruling Class—a topic of not a little interest in these parts. Wesson gets a lift in the lesson from the under-appreciated Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class. Mosca is the one to whom we owe appreciation for the oft-repeated neoreactionary formula: A coherent minority (the “ruling class”) always and everywhere rules over an incoherent majority. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

For those of you starving for Ryan Landry content, he joins the West Coast Guys™ for Myth Of The 20th Century: Episode 37: The Cambridge Five—King, Country, Class and Club.

And the multi-talented Michael Andreopoulos has some original verse to round out the week: The Passage.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First this week Porter takes some satisfaction in What is Best in Life. To crush your enemies, etc… But even better is seeing your enemies destroy themselves:

Before we get to the edifying example of that, consider the logical sand hole white leftists are burying themselves within. They serenely proselytize the gospel of evil whitey to quickly converted ìminoritiesî without ever seeming to wonder how those receptive minds might extrapolate the message.

Then, a little dissatisfaction (to put it lightly) on the recent DACA business in The Artlessness of the Deal. Much in the same vein as previous posts, the salient point being that the GOP, including Trump, has bent to the Left’s frame:

For instance, if I am in the market for a 1998 Nissan Sentra, I donít counter-offer $35,000 if the seller is asking $40,000. As a party of opposing interests, his assessment of value or propriety is not the basis of mine.

And finally, Porter takes a brief look at the financial costs of illegal immigration in The High Cost of Sharing. Who would have known that a society needs net producers in order to have nice things? And of course, don’t broken windows raise GDP?

A slug leaving its mucus trail across the wall can conceivably add a dollar to GDP. But that tells you nothing whatsoever of whether its presence represents an economic boost or burden to the host society. And that absence of actual insight is precisely why liberal economists find GDP so useful.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with an uncanny set of “coincidences”: Sam Worcester, Cherokee Missionary: Relative or Physiognomy?

Next a bit of a fisk on Tablet’s typically abysmal coverage: The Fault in our Tongues: Tablet, Spencer, and Political Deafness. Yes, journalists have a special charism from Jeezus to look into Alt-Right hearts and see whether what they say is genuine or a troll.

Courtesy Craig Hickman.

What does it mean to appropriate someone’s values? “You can’t be an environmentalist, only people whose ancestors were environmentalists are allowed to care about the environment?” “I’m sorry, but since Freedom of Speech was not originally enshrined in your country’s laws, you’re not allowed to want it.”

But if we read the paragraph again, it becomes clear that Tablet doesn’t really want to accuse Spencer of appropriating liberal values, (which it thinks he does not hold) but instead the logical arguments used to support liberal positions.

Sadly, Richard Spencer truly believes in liberal values. This really turned out to be a pretty solid analysis on Multi-zionism, as well as the disingenuity of Tablet reporters.

Rounding out the week another of Mrs. X’s invaluable Cathedral Round-Ups, #26: Philosophy—Poor Oppressed Minorities At Extremely Elite Schools Edition.

[P]erhaps people who get into top schools develop some form of survivor’s remorse? How do you reconcile a belief that “elitism” is bad, that intelligence isn’t genetic, that no one is “inherently” better than anyone else nor deserves to be “privileged” with the reality that you have been hand-selected to be part of a privileged, intellectual elite that enjoys opportunities we commoners can only dream of? Perhaps much of what passes for liberal signaling in college is just overcompensation for the privileges they have but can’t explicitly claim to deserve.

Blank-slate equalism is generally self-congratulatory: “Genetics didn’t give me success; I did it… through my own hard work.” (Ignore genetic predispositions toward hard work.) How most-favored minorities manage to spin this is anybody’s guess. I suspect it’s convenient to believe the “victim” bullshit. Hey, it pays the bills. The academic discipline of philosophy is looking as white and xy-chromosomal as ever, so the Ivies have much over which to beat their collective breast.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The week starts off at Thermidor with Gio Pennacchetti’s Content Minded: A Brief Reflection on the 2017 Content Emmys.

N. T. Carlsbad offers up The Comte de Montlosier’s Swansong for the Debased Nobleman. The eponymous Comte tried to combine both liberal and reactionary principles.

Montlosier was driven by one overarching principle: that the superior cannot be judged by the inferior. However, he did accept much of the Revolution up to about early 1790. This was not an unusual opinion among the Second Estate, as their cahiers de doleances of 1789 do show a lot of internalized “enlightened” principles. “From the right of personal liberty arises the right to write, to think, to print and to publish,” declare the nobility of Blois at the time. Not much else left for them to do except babble, anyway. They couldn’t even heed the advice of “enrichissez-vous” because engaging in commerce was an offense strictly worthy of d’Èrogeance (loss of nobility).

In the end, however, he wound up firmly on the reactionary side.

Montlosier’s De la Monarchie française, interestingly enough, was commissioned in 1804 by the Corsican mountebank Napoleon Buonaparte. It wasn’t finished until 1807. After the censors read it, its publication was delayed until the Restoration in 1814. It’s pretty obvious why—the sheer elitism of it is poison to any national-egalitarian unity. As it ought to be!

The Committee deemed Carlsbad’s an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Next up, Jake Bowyer provides some Latin American-inspired political theory with The Caudillo Principle. Neither liberal nor fascistic, …

…a truly ideal caudillo state would be one that is at once hierarchical, authoritarian, and anarchic. Picture this: the central state agrees that the home is ruled by the patriarch. The next level of power, the municipality, is ruled by the people, who in turn elect or somehow chose the best among them to wield power. The next highest level is the central state itself, which pledges to never interfere in either the home or the municipality so long all are loyal to the sovereign. Such a hierarchy contains enough decentralized power and guaranteed liberties that it meets the criterium of a libertarian state.

However, on a philosophical level, this state also agrees to the idea of patriarchy as being the most divine form of leadership, thereby stressing the reactionary ethos. Most importantly, this hypothetical system would recognize the importance of struggle for the health of social organism, and would, therefore, encourage the creation of militias and private protection societies in lieu of standardized police forces or a standing military.

Bowyer readily admits that such a state is unlikely to emerge out of the current political milieu—but that fact has never dissuaded true reactionaries. This too earned a nod for ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

M. Charles Stuart offers some commentary on the nature and significance of neoreaction in Whither Reaction? Stuart suggests we think of ourselves more as a debating society than as a “movement”.

If we stop thinking of ourselves as a “movement,” and instead think of ourselves as a debating society, or if you will, a series of private, volunteer think tanks, we will be focused above all on the project of establishing the truth or falsity of our central proposition about liberal democracy. Of course, this ambit provides much flexibility to explore a number of different topics from many different perspectives.

Stuart’s characterization of neoreaction is not wholly wrong but is outdated. Convincing people that liberal democracy is a bad idea is not our primary goal—we expect reality to do that for us more and more in the future. Rather, we are looking ahead to what comes after the coming collapse, preparing for that stage both as men and as intellectuals.

The week comes to a close with Childhood & Holiness, an essay by Romanian theologian Nichifor Crainic. The essay focuses on, well, childhood and holiness, but it also dwells on the nature of the state and its relationship to both of those things. RTWT.

This Week around The Orthosphere

Kristor distinguishes between The Truth That Founds the Error of Pantheism and actual God.

Richard Cocks gets The Trolley Problem Solved. All you have to do is find a scapegoat.

Alan Roebuck writes this Letter to My Son: What is Postmodernism?, leaving out certain key concepts such as deconstruction, but including the more important points like relativism.

Another strange consequence of postmodernism is this: A postmodernist, a person who believes in postmodernism, is not certain of postmodernism. And so if you tell him what postmodernism is, he’ll say you’re wrong.

Matt Briggs writes Glubb Glubb Glubb: The Noise A Drowning Civilization Makes, where he reviews Sir John Bagot Glubb’s essay describing parallels between historic and modern civilizations and their decline. Then the uncomfortable task of requesting readers to Give It Up to help support the author of one of the more excellent blogs out there. Lastly, degenerate Oscar nominees, pro-life hate speech, female firefighters, Englishmen going native, and college spaces safe from veterans, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update V.

And the incomparable Ianto Watt continues his project, A Clash Of Empires, Russia & USA Part II.

Now this brings up my little pet theory. Think with me here, Komrade. If the Soviet Union did really collapse in 1991, and all those state assets got sold off to the Oligarchs for pennies on the dollar, how was it that the Sukhoi Design Bureau never got sold? And the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) Design Bureau never got sold? And what about the Russian boat works? You know, the ones that produced the new Kazan-class boat this year that is state of the art for submarine warfare? Who kept producing those RD-180 rocket engines that we have to beg Moscow to sell us? Tell me again. Weíre the super power, right?

On the Catholic front, Bonald notes a San Diego bishop calls for purge of homophobia and Pope Francis clarifies: preservation of cultural and even religious identity is not an acceptable reason to limit Islamic colonization. Then, this fascinating Book review on absolute vs. relational theories of space and time.

It was a pleasure, for instance, to read about Newton entertaining the proper Aristotelian question of whether space is to be regarded as a substance or an accident. (He concludes it is neither, but a sort of necessary emanation of God.)

Mark Richardson bemoans A strange pathway to transsexualism, offers ridicule when A bank redefines marriage, and strikes an indignant tone when Breitbart confuses conservatism and liberalism regarding the legacy of the Hef.

And according to Dalrock, the elite plan for the poor is to Let them become elite through the miracle of birth control, delayed marriage, and student debt.

This Week in Arts & Letters

A Triumph of virtue made the rounds on facebook this week, and (from the sublime to the ridiculous) biz weighed up the merits of the latest celeb-endorsed ICO with typical exuberance. To file under the serendipity of networked information-aggregators, this splendid collision.

Evelyn Nesbit (1884–1967), American chorus girl and model

Over at City Journal, James Piereson investigates The Big Fix, a historic corruption scandal that sheds light on the current fiasco facing College Basketball. Judith Miller presciently forewarned of Storm Clouds in the heightened vigilance of security and intelligence agencies about the threat of terrorism. Dalrymple with another first-hand perspective on the shifting mores of the Arabic world, as it takes One Step Into Modernity. Stefan Kanfer meanwhile explores Hugh Hefner’s arrested development on his demise at the grand old age of 91. Nicole Gelinas rakes over the disastrous implications of bail-out economics in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s Maria Reckoning. Mark Pulliam surveys the formidable gauntlet the permanent state will have in store for pro-Texit AG, Ken Paxton of the Lone Star Chamber. Bob McManus pores over the ongoing trainwreck of Anthony Weiner’s political career as a man Consumed by Compulsions, "Hit send in haste, do hard time at leisure" indeed. McManus also takes on the grim account of a murder in a New York City high school that illustrates the Mayhem and Failure now endemic in the system. Kevin McCarthy praises the uniquely American fashion of Confronting Disaster. Steven Malanga suggests it’s about time the NFL should check its antitrust privilege. And Heather Mac Donald has a few delusion-puncturing words to say about BLM hyperbole in its disconnect from the FBI’s most recent crime stats Hard Data, Hollow Protests.

Chris Gale is against tolerating evil, prompted by sad news from the Gloriavale cult. His quote of the week addresses the perversion of natural law implied in the feminist HR push. He is also dismayed by the imminent retcon now that Disney owns Marvel; and yet celebrates the creation of a new Alt-Hero. He laments the influence of the new breed of political old cat lady, warning, Do Not Be Theresa May. Urging quietism and passivism where warranted, as Against State-sponsored worry. And enjoying two poems of Hulme, as well as the usual Sunday Sonnet.

All was quiet at the Logos Club this week. But Albion Awakening was fairly busy. Bruce Charlton was in strong and supple form, wrestling with the Difficulties of being strategically evil. A sort of steel-manning exploration of the moral reasoning required by the agents of the new global totalitarian society, and its ever-present adversary in Grace. Quite brilliant.

He was also tackling the contemporary Western perversion of metaphysics this week, in a trio of essays that also shone brightly. Firstly, on the defective compromise of modern metaphysical attitudes and the importance of making them explicit; then on the paradoxes entailing from and constituting the demonic spirituality that rules Albion, and then again on this rot as it has seeped into the very ethos of the modern Christian himself, What is wrong with (real) Christians? Finally, he caps off a journey around England with some direct observations on its moral character and mood, informing an appraisal of What can be done towards awakening Albion? I can’t pick just one, so go and RTWT, by which I mean, the whole blog!

Harper McAlpine Black returns with a customarily scintillating account of Don Mei and the Tea Revolution. Coffee-lovers proceed with caution, you may be triggered by some of the political implications of your hot beverage of choice herein disclosed! Though not personally a fan of gurning vloggers as harbingers of cultural change, if this does indeed lead to a greater availability of silver needle tips at the local vendors’, perhaps it will have been worth it after all.

Another one of Evelyn Nesbit, ca. 1905.

Richard Carroll is revisiting the Hyakunin Isshu and exploring its possible invocation as an Anglophone version. Its first fruit, this delightful comparison of Fujiwara no Masatsune with the celebrated imagism of Pound. Bravo Richard!

Fencing Bear has (a lot) more to say on the slings and arrows of outrageous flamewars with the Female of the Species, as well as the Power of Prayer to mitigate and dispel the sense of encroaching darkness.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Malvasi responds to Jospeh Pearce with an argument Toward Patriotism: An Alternative to Nationalism. Birzer remembers his first encounter with Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Gleaves Whitney’s ongoing series on Stephen Tonsor explores the civil war as The South & The American Iliad. T.Adams Upchurch is concerned by rampant Zuckerbergation or What Has Facebook Done to Political Discourse? Joseph Pearce celebrates, The Hobbit at Eighty and rejoices in its eternal orientation toward goodness, truth and beauty. Jacob Bruggeman delves deeper into the infernal machinations of those Relentless Rationalists: Creating Hell for Humanity, meanwhile Jacoby Sommer finds us at the Homeric Crossroads between justice and human nature, or what some of us have elsewhere framed, purity and GNoN. George W. Rutler on what happens When Colleges Betray Their Benefactors. Stephen Turley assays the problem with Misunderstanding Populism. Musical and poetic interludes, by way of Respighi and Blake. Louis Markos on Pope Francis and the Caring Society. And finally, Terez Rose conveys the fascinating mystery of Mozart’s youthful purloinment of Allegri’s Miserere, or The Day Mozart Stole Music From the Vatican.

This Week in the Outer Left

Quite a variety of material from the left this week, which is always nice as a change of pace from the same old tired talking points and omigodding.

Craig Hickman of Social Ecologies maintains his spot at the top of the left list, with a really fantastic meditation on the regeneration of the West. At stake here is the postmodern infection and destruction of the West’s universities. If he keeps it up with pieces like this, we might re-evaluate whether Social Ecologies will continue to be classified as a leftist blog.

The quite lovely Evelyn Nesbit

Their enemy is every aspect of Western Euro-American Culture and its intellectual and imaginative inheritance. To put it bluntly: they seek to wipe out the ancient the Greco-Roman and Jewish Hebraic Culture of Western Christendom without mercy. The hatred of every aspect of the past two-thousand years of Christian culture and thought is the enemy for this ultra-left vanguard of mercenary literati.

Sadly most universities have lent their ears to such non-sense and the humanities have been stripped, gutted, and slowly but surely turned to ashes over the past decades by academics that harbor the postmodern and progressive worldview that sees in traditional culture an enemy to be silenced, erased, and forgotten—its thought and intellectual inheritance, its imaginative literature and aesthetic worldview wiped from the face of the earth.

Not your Grandfather’s Intersectional Feminist Leftism, that’s for sure.

The Baffler makes another appearance this week, as yet another example of just how insane the left is getting. Siddhartha Deb pens a review of Mark Lilla’s recent book The Once and Future Liberal, tellingly calling Lilla yesterday’s liberal. It is only out of politeness that I call this a review, as Deb absolutely excoriates Lilla and deems the book full of wrongthink. Let this be piece of evidence #65876438 that you can be more left-wing than 99% of all humans who have ever lived (as Dr. Lilla likely is), but if you fall even one step behind as Cthulhu swims ever lefter, you will be cast out.

To my shock, there was actually a worthwhile piece at Jacobin of all places this week. Derek Davison does something that might even approach legitimate journalism is looking at monarchists and automobiles. At issue here is the news that Saudi Arabia will be allowing women to obtain driver’s licenses in the near future. Davison does himself credit by asking the important question “why?”, and his answer might even be the right one.

But because the driving prohibition was so infamous, because it was the public symbol of Saudi reaction for so long, lifting it is Riyadh’s ultimate “what about” moment. The Saudis are betting that by making a big show of allowing women to get behind the wheel, they can bamboozle western liberals into ignoring the litany of Saudi abuses and heap praise on them for removing a legal restriction that never should have been put in place to begin with.

And, rounding out our survey of the left, was Brandon Adamson of Alt-Left making a case for Catalan independence. Interestingly, Adamson directly addresses the case against Catalan independence one usually sees from nationalist minded people on the right. You’ll have to RTWT to see his response, and, whether you ultimately agree with it or not, it is thought-provoking in its Machiavellian approach.

The right wing reactionary nationalists are opposed to independence movements when they are leftist in nature and/or the group seeking independence itself largely promotes open borders. This argument was used against supporting Scotland independence and (to a lesser degree) Brexit. It is now being used against Catalonia. Right wing nationalists point to supporters of Catalan independence as being “commies,” radical leftists or as being for open borders (I’m not even sure to what extent this assertion is actually accurate.) Therefore they must not be allowed to secede and must be crushed. They must be forced to remain part of Spain even if they don’t want to.

This Week… Elsewhere

TUJ is still reading Metternich. He thinks America is Still a Republic If You Look at the Details. Just a really, really, really big… “republic”.

PA presents Salutary Images of Violence. Salutary and probably a whole lot milder than the violence deserved.

American Dad explores both the possibility and the great need for A framework for red-pill “therapy”. This was quite good too: In four short years… the years in question being 1984 and 1988.

Al Fin explains How to Win the War on Drugs. Social Matter does not (yet) take a position on this issue, but we note that comparisons of America to other Western Nations are bound to be misleading because of America’s uniquely diverse makeup. Also a pretty cool video here: A Child’s First 12 Years in Less Than 3 Minutes.

Social Matter alumnus Benjamin Welton is back up over at Zeroth Position discussing Privatizing State Security—contradiction in terms intended. While we have no great love of “privatization” for its own sake here, Welton scores some excellent points as he describes more and less successful models of private force. The Committee gave this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Heartiste unleashes some Cato the Elder on toxic egalitarianism.

Unorthodoxy is firing on all cylinders here: Culture War: Trapped in Satan’s OODA Loop. Also a movie recommendation. And a thank you and a (welcome) plug for us truly.

Giovanni Dannato speculates on Fourth Generation Sovereignty. We have our doubts about that.

Zach Kraine has some intelligent remarks on National Symbols, Patriotism, and Use.

Well, that’s about all. It was quite a big week by the looks of things: 6100+ words and ~130 links. Well over half of those words were composed by my trusty and faithful staff: Alex Von Neumann, Aidan MacLear, David Grant, Egon Maistre, and Hans der Fiedler. They are simply superb and keep this operation running—relatively on time. I keep promising a Monday Night delivery, and one of these days it’s gonna happen. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/09/30) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this Monday was Columbus Day, which is always worth a couple of upticks in the Culture War Skirmish Occupation and Counter-Insurgency. History increasingly is wielded as blunt club for partisans—of one tribe at least. VDH opines, with his usual level-headed lucidity, on: Columbus Day: Melodrama or Tragedy? Our friends at Imaginative Conservative pull out some Wagner: Columbus Overture. Take that SJW Philistines!

Our pals up at Northern Dawn had something this week: Mark Christensen’s Thanksgiving: A Common Inheritance. Of course, the Canucks have their Thanksgiving earlier because… shorter growing seasons up there-n-all that.

Overall a quiet week around the sphere. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some good stuff.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton’s increasingly regular, but blissfully brief, Sunday Thoughts are becoming a great way to kick off the TWiR Week. This week a plea for the aesthetic.

Atavisionary explains that the so-called “gun problem” is really a “vibrancy” problem.

Outrage pron about Harvey Weinstein is tired. Theories about why the story was allowed to get out in the first place are wired. Atavisionary notes it was all An open secret.

Over at Imperial Energy, IE drops the next installment—a sizable one—of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 5C: The American Minotaur of War. And IE has a slow clap for Alf with Who/Whom? Merchants v. Priests.

Also at IE’s: an Interview With Reactionary Future Part 1. RF is less cantankerous in the interview format. This is definitely worth a read and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam dives deep into Alasdair MacIntyre and Centering. It’s long and complex, and defies simple summary, but very much worth your time This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Speaking of “vibrancy problems”… and speaking of Alf… he introduces Dutch Jon Stewart-wannabe: Arjen Lubach, or: how to kiss the ass of Power. The pattern of blaming white (usually cis-het Christian) males for vibrancy dysfunction is now so predictable that it ought to be monetizable. Of course doing so is much more humorlessly ham-fisted in the far-flung provinces of The Empire. Also at Alf’s, a stab at some short speculative fiction: The Orb of Covfefe, part I: Dark Clouds over the Flying Golden Palace. Well, with Landry off teh interwebz, someone has to do it. Might as well be Alf. Pretty funny, actually. Late in the week… here’s Part II: The Pick-Up. The Committee were sufficiently entertained to bestow an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. I certainly hope he doesn’t stop it here!

PA wonders whether Camille Paglia has been reading the Reactosphere®.

Thanks to Angry White Men (anti-fascist retards with “eyes” on the “Alt-Right”) for hosting two excellent videos of HHH over on the YouTube: here and here at the Libertarian Property & Freedom Society Conference in Turkey. I have no idea why the Antifa retards think these videos somehow damning. HHH is supremely reasonable, dispassionate, and well-informed.

Alrenous makes a stronger point here than many will be willing to countenance: Why I Am Not a Nationalist. He also carves out a somewhat contrarian position On Formalism.

Late in the week, Titus Cincinnatus, (whom I had the pleasure to meet IRL recently), Apostle to the Normiecons explains The West IS White Supremacist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Cover art for the Moody Blues epoch-making album Days of Future Past, recorded in stereo with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A monolith stereolith of implicit White Supremacy.

Let me begin by dispensing with the ridiculous civic nationalist notion that the West, while built by white Europeans and their descendants, could have been done by anyone. This is not at all the case. Whites – Europeans and their child stocks—are different people from others. The fundamental reality about human biodiversity as it relates to whites vis-à-vis everyone else is that they are generally higher IQ than most everyone except for the northeast Asians, and they are generally more aggressive and inventive than the northeast Asians. Whites combined these and other traits—intelligence, aggressiveness, individualism, inventiveness, speculativeness, and others—to develop a unique set of cultures (Western civilisation) which is really quite different from every other civilisation that this world has produced. Western civilisation, and by derivation the cultures of its various substituent clades and subclades, is the product of this broad genetic group of people whose inborn traits acted in synergy with their religion and culture and languages. It could only have been created by these unique combinations, and it cannot be maintained without any or all of the components of these same combinations.

Sounds about right. I suppose you could go even farther and say that America is Anglo Supremacist. Or to be quite precise East-Anglian Supremacist. Tho’ said supremacy has not gone unchallenged in American history.

[W]hen the professional PoCs talk about “fighting white supremacy,” what they really, actually, truly mean is “overturning Western civilisation,” since that civilisation was built by and for white Europeans and their kindred peoples who colonised major portions of the globe. Objectively speaking, Western civilisation is superior. Both in its underlying features and in its overt, empirical results, the West is more successful, more “fit” (in the biological sense of the term) and has brought the world a great deal of underappreciated good.

Very good stuff from Titus, an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

Anatoly Karlin brings us another translation of Russian national-conservative Egor Kholmogorov: socialism not dead. He is probably right, which just raises the question of what it takes to kill one of the worst ideas ever?

Karlin also examines our biorealistic future, arguing that the forces that have lowered the correlation between national average IQ and GDP per capita are diminishing, so we can expect the correlation to become much tighter in the near future. The full geopolitical ramifications of this fact are unlikely to be grasped for quite some time. Perhaps not before it is too late.

New (and rare) from Those Who Can See, Governments Are Us, in which is debunked David Brooks’ Nation of Immigrants Myth. A magisterial, almost book-length, tour of U. S. Immigration attitudes, politics, and policy throughout history. And an obvious ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

By way of Isegoria… What’s killing us?—it’s always the boring stuff; more gems from Techniques of System Analysis; What would this look like if it were easy?; and Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence

Finally, this Week in CWNY, surveying The Bitter Fruits of Diversity.

This Week in Jim Donald

First up from Jim is an update on Trump, with an observation that Trump is still not in power. Recall that Jim had predicted a Trump auto-coup in which Trump moves from merely ruling in name to ruling in fact. Suffice to say, this has not yet happened.

Trump is a deal maker. But now he is in a situation where deals are just not possible. He has to fight and possibly be utterly defeated, or fail to fight and quite certainly be utterly defeated, fail to fight and be a lame duck for his entire single term, and then ignominiously lose the election in a landslide.

On the Social Matter view, the biggest hurdle is that Trump doesn’t even have an army with which he could fight the Deep State. Perhaps if he had, oh… I don’t know… nine hundred (or eleven hundred) statesmen or something?

Next, Jim makes a point about the lack of good role models for romantic encounters in modern movies. It’s an important point, because our cultural products are crucial in establishing the framework in which we socially interact. Everybody knows this, which is why battles over who gets to control culture creation are so bitter.

When I look at old movies, the hero always does it right. When I w seeatch newer movies, the hero never does it right. It seems forced, artificial, and gratingly unnatural. Looks like robots carrying out a script to move the plot along. In real life, would never work, the hero would never score dealing with a woman in the way that men deal with women in modern movies.

And modern men just do not score approaching women in real life. In modern movies, action girl saves the lad in distress, and then for no apparent reason starts to like him. So it is like, “how do you meet a girl except you wait for action girl to rescue you?”

Suggestions for the modern man: lift, eat more meat, go to church, read James Bond novels, and just go ask the girl out. You know the one, the one who smiles just so. Go ask her out, like James Bond or Jim would.

And, coming in just before the deadline, Jim reminds us to never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake. The context here is the recent cascade against Harvey Weinstein. I don’t really know how to summarize it, so I’ll let Jim handle that.

The left, in its enthusiastic rush to ever greater holiness, has forgotten that its rules are only for the little people.

Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But Harvey Weinstein is my enemy, even though he is being devoured by my enemies.

It is great that Harvey Weinstein is getting the shaft, but these women are not victims. They are whores.

One of the takeaways is that the feminist insanity has gotten so pervasive that even a powerful Jew like Weinstein is not immune. What chance do you think you have if they come after you?

This Week in Social Matter

Michael Perilloux’s The Golden Age podcast is the new week-kicker-offer here at Social Matter. (And will be until we can get a new regular Sunday Column. It’s open to the aspirational.) This week Perilloux and Hank Oslo apply their “West Coast” accents and considerable analytic skills to Episode 2: Gun Policy.

Thursday is AtT Day (for the foreseeable future… which is not super far). This week it’s Anthony DeMarco with another Solo Climb: Solo Climb 6—Catholicism And Thedishness. In which he floats an idea for Americanite Catholicism, which will be the subject of next Thursday’s full-panel (jam packed) AtT.

And for Friday, Myth of the 20th Century dips shamelessly close to current events in Episode 39: Mandalay Bay—Radical Boomerism.

In Saturday Poetry & Prose, a befuddling (to me) bit of verse from Phileas Frogg: An Extraordinary Life.

Finally, Michael Andreopoulos, who’s becoming a welcome and semi-regular fixture around here, has another chapter in his (apparently autobiographical) Book About Afghanistan: Chapter Two, Mountains. Remarkably poetic prose which earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee this week.

This Week in Kakistocracy

A lighter than usual week in Kakistocracy this week, as Porter starts out with Every Payment is a Down Payment.

Western societies have fallen into a sort of perfunctory parasitism with their colonizing client groups. Take Puerto Rico, for example—or better yet, for good. As of the latest year I could find without doing much looking, that territory paid $3.7 billion into mainland coffers, while suctioning out $21.1 billion. That’s enough of a one-sided fiscal relationship to make Puerto Rico Our Second Greatest Ally.

Things are tough in Puerto Rico though… ye undeh-stan

Of course, having over half your working age men horizontal on hooch, and the other half selling ads for Telemundo is certainly an insufficient excuse to not enjoy first world living standards. After all, these are Americans we’re talking about. Think of them as family—that despises you.

PR Independence when?

And he takes on a subject near to the hearts (and pens) of many in our corner of the internet in Purpose Beyond a Pill and the subject’s gravity is matched by Porter’s hyper-sardonic wit:

Between cars and guns the equivalent of a small city is vaporized each year. But do you know what approximates the butcher’s bill for both those combined? Drugs. Last year 64,000+ people died from drug overdoses in America. That’s probably not enough for National Review’s Kevin Williamson, though there’s always old photos of Dresden to comfort him in the night. Yet despite its insufficiency for some, the number of drug overdose deaths remain very significant.

For years this was mostly a mystery to me. Why would people kill themselves over an idiot buzz? To be honest, I never really had much appreciation for narcotics. That is until I snapped a few bones some years ago, and found myself in more anguish than Seth Rogan watching the birth of a gentile baby. My attending quack prescribed a high-caliber analgesic and, after initially refusing to take it, I finally relented under misery’s counsel. The result was phenomenal.

Since the victims are increasingly white these days, no one is noticing too much…

Unlike much dumber and more flamboyantly pathological inner city blacks, left-flank whites do harm primarily to themselves. And no cities burn for their folly. As a result of this restraint, they find themselves utterly bereft of institutional support. While every “minority” enjoys a catalogue of advocacy organizations and pandering politicians, these forgotten people attract only apathy when they can’t attract scorn. There is no affirmative action, or Appalachian lives matter. They have no outlets of righteous outrage or stepladders into the middle class. Rather, living in their tiny houses and trailers, they are said to be privileged. As such, absolutely no one champions their culture, their struggles, their history, or ambitions. Their livelihoods are dissolved by outsourcing and immigration, and their protests are dismissed as supremacy. To call such modest people supremacists for taking pride in the few things they have to call their own requires a special kind of evil. The kind Hollywood and Washington produce in abundance.

Simply superb work from Porter here! And an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

This Week in Evolutionist X

It was somewhat quieter for Evolutionist X this week. She continues from last week’s Anthropology Friday with additional Thoughts on Quantrill, and (quite literally) “Bleeding” Kansas.

We moderns have this odd notion that “war” is an official thing which is officially declared by official governments (and what makes an official government? We could go in circles all day.) We believe that war has rules (or at least that it ought to): that it should be fought only by official soldiers on official battlefields, using officially approved weapons, and only targeting official targets. Anything not by the book, such as targeting women and children, using chemical weapons, hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings, or fighting on behalf of a group that doesn’t issue uniforms and pay cheques, just confuses us.

But I guarantee you that Genghis Khan did not conquer one of the biggest empires in history by refusing to slaughter women and children.

Similarly, ISIS is nothing but a bunch of outlaws who’ve conquered some territory, but in their case, they have an ideology that justifies their actions and encourages other people to come join them, boosting their numbers.

In the Jimian Formulation: Once roving bandits settle down and become stationary bandits, they’re the government.

This was interesting: Mrs. X discusses Navigation and the Wealth of Nations.

And for Anthropology Friday, she continues with The James-Younger Gang—that’s Jesse James FYI.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at our sister publication Thermidor, Europa Weekly kicks things off with The International Church of VoxGoonology.

Stephen Paul Foster explains Why The Left Hates Guns. Some reasons are obvious:

To begin with, guns are dangerous weapons, essential to the conduct of those human survival-occupations that were long in the exclusive domain of men—hunting, policing, war-making—activities that by their very nature involve violence and appeal to the most risk-seeking, masculine sorts of men.

The feminized, cult-Marx leftists who want little boys to be more like little girls and grow up to be latte-sipping pajama boys and metro-sexuals, instinctively recoil at just the thought of men with arms. They seem to think that violence is just an old fashion sort of thing that unliberated (non-gelded) men still enjoy and employ in order to affirm their atavistic masculinity, sustain their corrupt institutions, and threaten the “vulnerables” who populate the victim classes, e.g., young black males shot by racist white policemen.

Others are less so. Foster draws special attention to the cultural divide between gun-haters and gun-lovers.

Alessandra Bocchi is pretty cute and apparently not Jewish.

The animosity of the left for guns is also about the special kind of snobbery they indulge that relates to the work they do and the way they live.

They tend to work in the realm of ideas and at activities intended to influence the thinking and actions of others. They teach in schools and universities, run media outlets and newspapers, manage and administer NGOs, market and sell products, process paper in government offices. Some of them are “grievance specialists” at universities and other organizations, professional busybodies and scolds who operate under the rubric of “diversity”, a code word that permits them to hector and bully whomever they please. These types don’t change the oil in their own cars, fix things they own when they break down, make or grow anything they use or consume. They pay “other people” to do things like this, and they mostly look down on them. These “other people” tend to like guns.

Next up, editor P.T. Carlo sits down with journalist Alessandra Bocchi to discuss the similarities and differences between far-right movements in the U.S. and Europe in Generation Identity.

N. T. Carlsbad this week provides a survey of medieval and early modern political theory in Sir Robert Filmer Refuted. While Filmer understood a great deal about the eternal nature of political constitutions, Carlsbad argues that his model has no room for political dynamics.

Filmer’s model is so static that it’s an open question of how things like ethnogenesis, unification, and secession even work, except solely through Providence. And Filmer’s lack of any standards for royal succession (there’s always a successor out there, end of story) actually makes it difficult to know when we’re dealing with legitimate Providence or with illegitimate usurpation.

Wunderkinder Carlsbad again impresses the Committee and snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Once again, current events inspire two authors. Nathan Duffy comments on Harvey’s Hollywood. Duffy is happy to see chip’s in Hollywood gilded veneer, but he doubts the current scandal will amount to much in the long run.

There’s the rub. For the full scale of the problem to be revealed would undermine their conception of Hollywood as a shining beacon of light to the world, on the frontlines of the fight to deliver the planet from imminent doom, save Tibet, and punch Nazis in the face. Not because there is one powerful lecher in their ranks, but because they are all part of the problem and must face the truth: the right-wingers had their number all along.

And Stephen Paul Foster reexamines the old “liberal lion” Ted Kennedy in From Kennedy to Weinstein. Kennedy’s depravity was truly outstanding, and Foster provides a disheartening chronicle of his villainies.

July 19, 1969 photo shows U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s car being pulled from the water next to the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Edgartown, Mass. on Martha’s Vineyard.

Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician. The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man? A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in manslaughter from one of his countless alcohol-fueled, philandering escapades. He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up. She could have been rescued, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers and the more important task of concocting a story to evade the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned. As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

Finally, apropos of some current events which I’d not much noticed, Walter Deveraux is comprehensive, precise, historically literate, magisterial, and… wrong in Every Knee Shall Bow: Against The Cult Of Sport In America. But on the strength of sheer scholarship alone this article deserves your attention and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀. We urge our readers to decide for themselves, lest a decision be made for them.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cane Caldo really liked Blade Runner 2049. Many, whose opinions I trust, are saying the same thing.

Gay pseudogamy wouldn’t be quite so much a problem if marriage wasn’t so gay.

J. M. Smith invokes Shakespeare to warn young college girls, Lust has a “Headlong Fury”. Keeping with that theme, he writes on Weinstein and Indecent Proposals. Then, pontificating upon the parable from this Sunday’s Gospel, he considers What the Well-Dressed Wedding Guest is Wearing Nowadays.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the miracle at Fatima, the always amazing Ianto Watt writes this breathtakingly sprawling essay on the subject of Fatima, Russia & You Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV. According to Briggs, this is his greatest essay therein posted. Well worth your time to RWTW. Mr. Watt takes home an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.

According to the Cranky Professor, God Logically Implies A Block Universe Theory Of Time.

So the traditional Christian belief that God is timeless as held by Aquinas, Anselm and others, implies a block universe theory of time. You can be certain that a timeless God implies a block time theory whether you live in the matrix or not; it’s simple to know once you understand some basic concepts of time and immutability.

In Matt Briggs’s Insanity & Doom Update VII, white science man statue removal, neocons vs. realists, trans nudity on tv, government mandated Swedish weddings, satanic fashion shows at church, and a conservative case for sodomy.

James Kalb writes more about Identity politics and Church teaching:

It seems then that the Church views ties and some degree of loyalty based on common descent, history, culture, and language as a good and necessary thing. But what do we do with that today? Inherited loyalties don’t help us when we work for an insurance company, get our food from McDonalds or Whole Foods, surf the web, or send our kids to a school with children and staff from everywhere. More and more people think they just gum things up.

Then Mark Richardson posts A photo for James Kalb. The photo depicts a mother declaring she would be equally proud if her daughter grew up to be a doctor or a slut. Or both, I suppose.

Donal Graeme warns of Der Kommissar and the dreaded coming watermelon purge. Word of advice: delete any and all pictures of watermelons from your social media accounts.

And according to Dalrock, church-sponsored “man up” programs are basically Gotta ask the boss, Christian edition. No thanks.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale offers Two poems, one poetess, viz., Hilda Doolittle. And a few pics from Berlin where Gale was attending a professional conference.

German violinist Julia Fischer

At Imaginative Conservative, Russell Kirk’s 1969 essential essay: The University & Revolution: An Insane Conjunction. Next best thing to being there. Actually it’s better. Also A Perfect Moment: Listening to the Saint-Saëns Violin Concerto—the analysis and the piece itself. The violinist is also quite beautiful.

Also there, another blast from the past, Bradford’s A Fire Bell in the Night: The Southern Conservative View. It’s from 1973, but the erudition makes it sound like it’s from 1873. And Michael De Sapio explains The Moral Imagination of “Leave It to Beaver”, which also seems as distant as 1873. Finally, a primer on Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Over at Albion Awakening, John Fitzgerald takes note of the feast day of Saint Edward the Confessor.

Man of letters (and tech) Richard Carroll contemplates John Donne, “Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud”. And he offers an analysis and review of Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus—the novel, not the movie(s).

And at City Journal, Yarbrough arranges a meeting between Trump and Tocqueville. Bob McManus espies the Cathedral in The Weinstein Silence: “Liberal entertainers laud themselves for ‘speaking truth to power’—so long as the targets are safe”. Sad story about “anti-gentrification activists” (unironic apparently): Destroying the Neighborhood to Save It. Heather Mac Donald eviscerates “implicit bias” studies here: Are We All Unconscious Racists? Dalrymple pours some well-deserved scorn on Hillary’s “Memoirs”.

This Week in the Outer Left

The left seems to have been in a bit of hibernation this week, but what was lacking in quantity was made up for in quality mentioning neoreaction. Yes! That’s right, a leftist site deigned to take notice of us this week.

Corey Pein, writing for The Baffler, treats us to another breathless vision of neoreaction dangerously close to the levers of power with the Moldbug variations. As an aside, what is up with naming your article like it is a second-rate Robert Ludlum novel? In any case, reading this piece reminds me of the old joke about a Jew reading the Nazi party newspaper because it casts the Jews as being in charge of everything. If NRx were half as powerful as Pein paints it, the Western world would be many times better off. Just look at this:

The good news is that many millions of people remain determined that Yarvin and Thiel and Trump won’t succeed in remaking the world in accordance with their whims. But insofar as they’ve set out to permanently alter the direction of the political right, they have already won. The kids, as they say, are alt-right. Feudalism is the new conservatism. The ideological assumptions of the capitalist elite, the Christian right, and the living remnants of the old European aristocracy have reverted from postwar neoliberalism to the premodern ancien régime. Armed with all the influence, tastemaking prowess and cash that comes with a power base among an aggrieved and endlessly indulged Silicon Valley power elite, the high priests of digital innovation have built a bridge to the thirteenth century.

After the Restoration, Corey Pein will be well cared-for in a (restored!!!) Institution of Psychiatric Care. Incapable of meaningful communication, he’ll spend his days, between games of Bingo, sauntering up and down the halls muttering, “I tried to warn them… I tried to warn them…” Medicinal nicotine will provide occasional relief.

Also at The Baffler, known idiot Laurie Penny asks women to agree to a non-compete clause. If you decide to read this one, go through it slowly, and, after each paragraph, tell yourself “this is what feminists really believe”. I promise you will find the results illuminating… or at least hilarious.

So don’t compete with other women. Just don’t do it. If you must compete, compete with men first. It’s a risky strategy, because nobody likes a woman who competes directly with men rather than with other women for men’s approval—but it is also unexpected enough that you can get quite far before anyone catches on. Take the fight to the men instead. It’ll scare the shit out of them.

This is what feminists really believe. Cool story Laurie.

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin runs through some very depressing statistics here: Can Millennials Grow Up Before They Grow Old? Even as I don’t blame boomers, as much as I blame mal-incentives, neither do I blame millennials. Some, by heroic virtue, will persevere. And this Week in Dangerous Children: A Playful Foundation of Music, Movement, Pattern, and Language.

AMK discovers Comrade Detective—which looks purdy darn funny. Also there a primer on Scientology syntax, and ummm… not.

Zach Kraine is pretty good here: The fragmentation of a nation:

When you have millionaires and corporations promoting Karl Marx that should be a red flag. You have wealthy musicians and documentary filmmakers promoting revolutionary ideology. But they’ll keep the privileges of bourgeois life.

Victim-mongering is a great idea… until you run out of other people to blame.

Unorthodoxy has the heartwarming story (and pics): Poles Put Christian Nationalism Into Action. And some pretty solid commentary here: Toyota Camry: The Esperanto of Automobiles.

Interesting thoughts from Giovanni Dannato: “Average Is Over” Is A Destructive Mindset. He gets a lot right. But unexplored is the question of just how much “average” has decayed.

Thrasymachus on Why the Left Shouldn’t Attack Confederate Monuments.

The historical policy of the US towards the South since the Civil War has been to leave it alone as much as possible, and this has avoided large scale social conflict. The smart thing to do would be to keep it this way, but for better or worse the people in charge have been getting dumber and more childish for some time now.

Indeed.

Over on his home blog, Nigel T. Carlsbad goes on a documentary deep dive into Communalists and constitutionalists. A must read for the Pol Theory specialists in our midst.

Nishiki Prestige makes another appearance this week with a combination story of a sociopath and guide on how to find a wife. If you’ve read your Jim, you’ll already know that the two are related.

Your future wife is going to appear one day. You will fuck it up and die alone.

You never get practice, so you won’t know how to speak to her. It’s not like in the animes. She isn’t coming over. People need to be coerced.

There Are Horny Singles Available In Your Area—but you are disinterested. They are too homely. They don’t listen to cloud rap or read Evola.

You are waiting for The One, but you’ll mess it up again.

From there, Nishiki goes into his time interacting with a sociopathic NEET and turns that sociopathy into an actionable plan for you, yes you, to get a wife. RTWT, several times, digest it, and most importantly, go do it.

Greg Cochran ponders Biopolitics—specifically what good might be done if people were permitted to believe their lying eyes.

That’s all we had time for this week. As always, many thanks to the TWiR Staff for their gracious help: Egon Maistre (whom I also got to meet IRL recently), David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Eric Mayflower, and Aidan MacLear. If yer ever near NYC, just drop a note and we’ll get some artisanal drinks. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/10/15) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this past week the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs. They weren’t supposed to be there anyway, so I’m not too broke up over it. Good luck, Astros. You’re due.

The Mandalay Bay attack is newsworthily un-newsworthy. Heartiste takes note: Witnesses Go Missing Or Dead After The Mandalay Bay Massacre.

Over at American Greatness, Kimball outlines the ways in which Yes, Trump is Winning. We certainly hope so. VDH analyzes The Method to Trump’s ‘Madness’. Related.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Alfred Woensalaer kicks off the week with musings upon Man’s limitations. And woman’s.

As white men, we have lost ownership over our women. Unfortunately, this is entirely our own fault, for we are our own worst enemy. It was white men who pushed progressivism, white men who pushed feminism, white men who pushed women into the workplace. Emancipation was a tactic for some white men to gain the upper hand over other white men. It was very successful.

Things looks bad. To change this, Alf proposes we need the right apex Dunbar Number. How to get that is an exercise for the reader… no really. “If Trump can’t do it, I doubt you can.”

Also from Alf, the next installment of his speculative (and humorous) fiction series: The Orb of Covfefe part III: Liftoff. Just keeps you wanting more! The Committee gave this one a ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ just to make sure we could keep the story going. And this too: an inside baseball look at the New Dutch Government: par for the course.

Nick Land helpfully points to Hoppe’s full address at the Property & Freedom Society Conference this year.

In case you missed it last week, Those Who Can See has up a splendid new article: Governments Are Us. TWCS doesn’t post often, but when it does, it’s always magisterial. This one drives a 3-pound axe to the forehead of “Proposition Nation” mythology.

Imperial Energy helpfully provides The STEEL-cameralist Manifesto: Summary of the Story So Far.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam’s epistle is on Power and Digital Order. “Digital order” in at least two senses of the term. So cudos for that. Herein Adam dives deeper into the thought of Eric Gans, the very founder of GA. Also a more meta than usual look at GA itself…

Country Music Singer, Danielle Bradbery.

GA, of course, has never had a particularly warm reception in the academy, and its emergence almost simultaneously with victimary thinking offers as good an explanation as any. GA is interested not primarily in labeling a particular social or cultural form good or bad, but in understanding it as modeled, however distantly, on an originary scene (the prototype of prototypes) defined by the deferral of collective violence. The implications of such an approach for making sense of inter-group and inter-sex relationships are simply too triggering—GA suppresses altogether the incredibly pleasurable retroactive accusation and self-congratulation that has driven most thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences for quite a while. But it also, as Gans points out in the excerpt above, resists the supposedly more sophisticated and objective data-driven approaches to social order, because they can never ask the question, why is there social order (and therefore “data”) in the first place? The practitioners of such approaches cannot understand the paradoxical question, what must language be in order to be what it is?

I continue to believe that GA is underexplored area for the New Social Science which neoreaction purports to be. Another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Adam’s always fine work here.

A new friend, Paul Roemerspacher (@ideal_nrx), is working on NRx Aesthetics as well as translating reactionary works of interest into A+ French. This week I was honored with his translation of Code de conduite à l’attention des néo-réactionnaires. Tout sonne mieux en Français!! Please give M. Roemerspacher a visit, and, if you are degenerate enough to be on Twitter, a follow.

We haven’t said much here on Catalonian separatism, but Titus Quintius at Fifth Political Theory has a very thorough rundown in Catalonia and the Problem of Separatist Nationalism. Of particular interest is Quintius’ treatment of “The Relationship of Nationalism to Leftism”.

Julius Evola, in a larger defense of the imperial principle in his work Men Among the Ruins, gives a thorough summary of how something we often associate in present contexts with ‘the right’ is actually a product of leftist involution. Nationalism begins with a revolt against imperium, often at the urging of not an aristocracy but a bourgeoisie. From a traditionalist orientation then it becomes quite clear why Catalans, Scots, and the Irish are such leftists despite being known for their nationalistic politics…

This is a poorly understood case on the so-called “nationalist” so-called right. And there is much much more on offer here at 5PT. He ultimately comes down in favor of Catalan independence, but only from a tactical perspective. Quintius earned the coveted ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for the excellent research and analysis here.

Chris Morgan, of Black Ribbon Award, has some history and analysis of Twitter absurdist @dril: @dril Versus The Volcano.

Anatoly Karlin brings us his trademark Russian nationalism, examining a Reuters poll of ‘experts’, which found that Moscow is the safest megacity for women. Whether this has anything at all to do with Moscow being the last megacity where Europeans form a very solid majority is left as an exercise for the reader.

He also looks at data for a possible trajectory towards a world of 1,000 nations. Definitely RTWT, because there is every chance that this is precisely the world we will see, and maybe sooner than we think.

Last up from Karlin is the state of the altsphere, which looks at site visits for a number of alternative media websites, including Social Matter. Purely interesting data, and a good bit of perspective, as even the most popular alternative media sites are absolutely dwarfed by the MSM sites by two orders of magnitude. We appreciate him including us. We’re small. But mighty.

C. Neville-Annesly has a brief note on God as the Perfect Sovereign.

Malcolm Pollack offers an ‘A’ For Effort to our present diversitocracy.

By way of Isegoria… Razib Khan: Secularization is a thin culturally conditioned dusting atop a religious cognitive substrate—not like that’s a good thing either; achievements of the Seasteading Institute; DNA from both wolves and dogs brings big advantages; and more from Techniques of Systems Analysis here, here, and there.

Finally, this week’s missive from Cambria Will Not Yield: The Day Is Far Spent.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim took some well-deserved rest this week.

This Week in Social Matter

Michael Perilloux’s Golden Age kicks off the week at Social Matter. He interviews the very impressive and thoughtful Canadian Mark Christensen in Episode 3: Northern Dawn And Canadian Reaction.

In time for the centennial of the Miracle of Fátima, Wolfgang Adler presents another lesson on Portuguese History, Fátima, And The Necessity Of Church-State Unity. A very different sort of Social Matter article, but a welcome one. Acutely, Adler sees Fátima as a sort of French Counter-Revolution. He concludes that the mandate Our Lady gave to the Church has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been. Adler earns another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent research and analysis.

Then in the first Full Panel Ascending the Tower podcast in… well a coon’s age… DeMarco, Gray, and I are joined by Nathan Duffy and Michael Pascal Episode XVIII, Part 1—“St. Augustine Is Whiter Than I Am”. It was a great discussion. You can tell this by how little Anthony and I got to talk.

For Friday, the West Coast Guys on Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 40: Uncle Ted’s Cabin. That’s Ted Kacyznski, of course… who saw the Cathedral very early and accurately.

Finally, poetry for Saturday Poetry & Prose: from newcomer Richard Taylor, Sellasia (I, Cleomenes).

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this week, Porter has a few words of congratulations for Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s new chancellor, in The Stand. And what a stand it is, the advocates of European life against the great necropoles of the EU and its “values”:

Europe is probably not going to peacefully coexist with two diametrically opposed philosophies living cheek to jowl. You don’t negotiate anodyne trade treaties while still struggling over which people will occupy your home. That’s the fight that matters. I’m glad to have young Mr. Kurz join it.

He also pens a piece in defense of outrage porn: The Joy of Desolation. Rebutting a reader who was eager for some advice on keeping positive and seeing purpose in life beyond despair at the decline, he writes:

For me, good habits have always blossomed from negative concerns. That’s why I keep a stack of outrage porn always close. I have a greater ambition for me, my children, and my civilization than to be someone else’s meal pellets. While working against that bleak possibility isn’t always fun, you do get in excellent shape from the effort. And that’s about the most positive thing I can think to say.

Indeed. There’s a difference between finding the closure of catharsis in lament and letting it motivate you to other ends.

Next up, Porter describes leftist ideology in a way familiar to many of us in A Painful Passcode. That is, as a religion that requires one to hold absurd beliefs as a badge of status and test of loyalty. As Spandrell would say, “point deer make horse” . But Porter doesn’t fail to bring up the human costs incurred by the denial of reality:

This theory of subjectivity in our physical sex is all an act of ridiculous pretense. One that is probably intentionally insulting so as to filter the right-wingers who can’t bear to feign belief in it. And though the premise is pompously absurd, that doesn’t mean many credulous imbeciles won’t be badly harmed in its embrace…

What follows below is someone else’s screen capture and concluding comments of one of these accounts. It is of a man who mutilates himself in the expectation of becoming a woman, but is dismayed to learn he is instead merely a mutilated man…

…it speaks, with unintentional sincerity, to the wretched creatures caught in the liberal security fence. The ones who actually believe the lies they are required to repeat. Just remember, some of these lies end up requiring thrice-daily dilations. And those are the kind you never forget.

Lastly, Porter comes back to the topic as he so often does, of immigrants and work in No Steel Unscrubbed:

Another example, perhaps as much counter-intuitive as contradictory, is the premise that the hardest working people come exclusively from the most destitute societies…

I’m starting to wonder if “hardest working” isn’t perhaps a designation society can only reach in its rubble.

We could say that a good work ethic is necessary but not sufficient for civilization. Hunting and gathering takes a tremendous amount of hard work; left unmentioned by the establishment are the qualities of creativity, innovation, and striving for telos. Those are the sole property of Silicon Valley and climate change scientists.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Speaking of canids, Evolutionist X starts off with Peak Dog vs. Degenerate Dog? Her case-in-point: Huskies. At least they look very different. There are many, many breeds that have degenerated over the last century. Some cannot be born without veterinary intervention. (Interveterination?)

Speaking of Free Speech: Free Speech is Downstream from Territory—which is tantamount to power. And since freedom is (and only is) power, this makes perfect sense.

Black girl decolonizing the space around the president of Evergreen State College (without irony apparently)

You get Free Speech when you control a space.

Let’s take a look at this video: Black girl decolonizing the space around the president—Evergreen State College. Normally, the president of a college owns that space. But as you can see, this black student has decided to claim his space, and there is nothing he is willing to do to stop her. He has relinquished his space. He has surrendered.

The world “decolonize” is specifically chosen to signify the removal of white people, who own the land Evergreen State is built on by virtue of having conquered it.

And anyway physically preventing black girls from “de-colonizing” is rayciss. Mrs. X snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for her fine socio-political analysis here.

For the indispensable Anthropology Friday, it’s Outlaws on Horseback: The Starr Clan, Bill Cook, and Cherokee Bill

Finally in Mrs. X’s Homeschooling Corner series: Math Philosophy.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Another very busy week over at our sister publication Thermidor. Jake Bowyer starts the week off strong with A New Strongman in Brazil and America’s Future? Bowyer introduces Jair Bolsonaro, rising Right-wing politician in Brazil and harbinger of things to come in America.

Bolsonaro proves that Brazil is far from lost, and furthermore, Bolsonaro’s success could be seen as a ray of hope for those nationalists who stay up at night worrying about America’s coming demographic apocalypse. However, the story of Brazil should be a napalm bomb to the Republican Party and all those “conservatives” who value the constitution and their fly-by-night principles. The constitution will not save America (it certainly hasn’t preserved our liberties), and promising tax cuts and limited government will certainly not save America. Future conservatives in this country will look more like Jair Bolsonaro than Ted Cruz
or Rand Paul.

K. R. Bolton is up next with The Murder of Tradition. Bolton surveys a number of figures critical of the idea of “Progress” including Carl Jung, Alexis Carrel, and Konrad Lorenz.

Giambattista Vico, a precursor to Spengler, tried to warn about this superficiality of intellectualization and its rejection of tradition—including religion—at the time of the Renaissance, the much-lauded beginning of the epoch of the West’s decay. Ibn Khalud attempted the same when there was still something left of the Islamic civilization, on the verge of becoming fellaheen, as Spengler called such spent civilisations, or historically pass&eacute.
We can say the same about Cato, and many others faced by the “progressives” of their own civilization when entering upon the epoch of decay. “Progress” is one of the great illusions of our time, just as it was in the analogous epochs of other civilization over the course of thousands of years. If Jeremiah or Cato or Herodotus were to be transported to this time in the West, they might laugh or sneer at the banal slogans of our “progressives” and “moderns”, and reply: “I’ve seen it all before… and it does not end well”.

A back-to-back double-header for Reactionary Wunderkinder® N. T. Carlsbad this week. First up comes Communalists and Constitutionalists, a contrast between, well… communalists and constitutionalists, using Luxembourg and the Swiss Confederation as exemplary cases.

Such communalism thus represented a community of armed proprietors, combining individual management of one’s stock while being subject and participant of a collective control over the means of production as a whole. One’s personal status began to decline in importance relative to one’s amount of land, allowing a patrician class to emerge. Above all, communal association was natural and holistic, not a product of volition or individual contract.

The Committee deigned to declare this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Carlsbad next adopts a more acerbic tone to critique Right-wing free speech-absolutists in The Communist Origins Of Modern American Free Speech. Carlsbad reviews how the Left has ever advocated “freedom of speech” merely as an instrument to achieve its own goals.

Rather than whining about anti-white shitlibs trying to take away your racial heritage embodied in the law (which it turns out was actually an invention of radicals, often Jewish ones too) of spewing bile without consequence —the suppression of which is simply government doing its necessary work of enforcing orthodoxy, how about you instead #MakeMcCarthyismGreatAgain? While you still can, of course.

He is, of course, quite right about free speech. But loses points here for being a smartass.

Europa Weekly talks about Peter Hitchens on The Peculiar Case Of Mr. H. The Obituarist.

Jake Bowyer rounds out the week with California Burns, in which he discusses the decline of the Golden State over the past 50 years and pays special attention to the appropriately named politician Scott Wiener.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero has a deep and fruitful discussion on Justification and Postmortem States.

The new issue of the always beautifuly Regina Magazine is out. This month: Epic Ireland.

William Wildblood criticizes the notion that Jesus Was Left Wing

At The Orthosphere proper, in Sybarites, Scholars, and the Buffoon Who Got Himself Taken Seriously, J. M. Smith lays out a small sample of people throughout history for whom the decay of civilization was a concern.

Bonald writes a four-part essay sympathetic to common criticisms of “Western Distinctiveness” as rapists of nature, dogmatic, fundamentalist zealots, hypocritical puritans, and enemies of democracy. This is all Bonald at his best—chock full of bon mots. I plucked this from the second:

Identifying a scapegoat is the only kind of causal analysis of interest to the social mind. A few weeks ago, walking through campus, I saw an advertisement for a public lecture, something along the lines of “Extreme weather: who is to blame?” To which my first thought was “Witches!” I’m sure it wouldn’t occur to any of my more enlightened peers that to phrase meteorological questions in this way is the mark of a primitive, superstitious mind.

If the Catholic Church is ever to pull itself out of its current degradation, she will have to purge herself of all sentimentality, and she will have to do so mercilessly.

The vignettes are comparatively short (i.e., in a sphere where Moldbug is paradigmatic); taken together, a Chesterton-like masterpiece. And the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

Responding to some facile critique of free will, Briggs writes the seductively titled Do Not Read This Article On Why You Don’t Have Free Will

“We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions.” It is well to hold Frith responsible for writing this. Or would he like his paycheck be sent to another?

Reporting from the academic front, Briggs also warns of SJWs Coming For Mathematics. Well, to be fair, its just Math Education, not actual Math. Yet. Then, Hollywood scientism, FBI neo-nazos, doctors ascertaining gayness, and a trans history triggering, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update VIII.

Also at Briggs: We Are Not The Government—Guest Post by Kevin Groenhagen.

Mark Richardson writes about the importance of Building up our houses by passing life virtue lessons from the elder women to the young girls.

Men are brought up to think that failure or success depends on their own efforts, their character, their strength. But the fate of some marriages is decided not by the actions of the husband, but within the mind and soul of the wife. The marriage rests on her ability to manage her thoughts and emotions, so that she does not dwell on the negatives, or hold on to grievances, or seek to belittle, or slide between a sensitivity to being patronised and a feeling of superiority.

Then Richardson documents Another step in the descent of liberal culture which includes horned drag queens reading books to children and homoerotic public service messages in public subways.

Richard Cocks writes the following essay for the Sydney Trads regarding Aesthetic Knowledge and why beauty is objective. An excellent essay and an important read.

Dalrock reveals a modern method of theological discernment in He had to check his theology with the boss.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Richard Carroll remains the sphere’s most dedicated reader and commentator on the Western Canon. This week it’s Plato’s Dialogues: Greater Hippias, largely setting upon the question of beauty and how to measure it. Definitely worth your time as it is an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also at Everything is Oll Korrect!, expert commentary on (Protestant) John Milton’s Sonnet XIX: “When I Consider How my Light is Spent”.

At Imaginative Conservative, a timeless essay on The Conservatism of John Quincy Adams—the almost unwilling revolutionary; a Chesterton Fence if there ever was one: Why Were Confederate Monuments Built? And, filed under Musical Archeology: How Should Beethoven’s Fifth Be Played?

Chris Gale has the Who?-Whom? on Silence in the church. More poetry from Hilda Doolittle” “Helen”; and from Thomas Hardy: “The Ruined Maid”. As well as the obligatory Sunday Sonnet, by way of Hilaire Belloc.

Heather Mac Donald out of the gate first at City Journal with Standing on the Shoulders of Diversocrats and whom that’s gonna harm. Tierney goes inside air traffic control football in Well-Heeled Fliers Against Air-Traffic Reform—a study in perverse incentives. A War on Poverty That Would Work which begins with the idea to not reward it. For the 10 Blocks podcast some major debunkage with The “Science” Behind Implicit Bias. And a critique of Ken Burns’ recent (and much hyped) Vietnam War series, which Mark Moyar characterizes as A Warped Mirror.

This Week in the Outer Left

A lot of the focus from the left this week was on the recent Austrian election, so let’s talk about it. For those with better things to do than pay attention to elections, the ÖVP (center-right) came in first, with the big center-left party, SPÖ, getting one of its worst results ever. To the horror of the left, the actually right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) came in a very, very close third, and will likely be the junior coalition party with the ÖVP. That should offer some nice context for all the oy veying from the leftists.

The Awl invites us to meet Sebastian Kurz. Getting the basic biographical fact out of the way, Austria’s new chancellor is 31 years old. This gets repeated at great length by all of these leftist sites. This piece presents Kurz as an opportunist, taking Freedom Party talking points as a path to power, but not actually believing in them. That is likely the case, if we’re being honest. There is a certain amount of hand-wringing over a youth vote for the right-wing, which I find quite entertaining. Check this out:

Whether any of Kurz’s more extreme campaign promises come to fruition depend once again on the efficacy of a parliamentary democracy distinguished largely by its ability to gridlock itself. What is certain, however, is the depressing current in European (and, yes, worldwide) politics. In more and more countries, in order to be electable, the shrewd politician today must appeal to the powerful far-right Millennial male demographic—a sentence that makes me nauseous to even type.

“Powerful far-right Millenial male demographic” Hey! Some of us resemble that remark!

Jacobin also addressed Austria’s right turn, but with some actual numbers about how well the rightish parties did among young voters.

Authoritarian right-wing populism has now become a truly hegemonic, cross-class project. 74 percent of blue-collar workers voted for one of the two right-wing parties, as did 64 percent of entrepreneurs. Shockingly, the FPÖ won among voters 16 to 29 years old with 30 percent of the vote. Add Kurz’s 28 percent, and you have a 58 percent majority for authoritarian right-wing populism among young people. The only demographic that liked the Social Democrats were pensioners. This is what deep, right-wing hegemony looks like.

Look, we here at Social Matter regard voting as a bad habit, at best. That being said, I still get a cheap thrill from seeing that 30% of Austrian voters 29 and under supported a party of, to quote all the verklempt lefties, “actual ex-Nazis”. Maybe, just maybe, the kids are al(t)right.

Getting away from the vulgarity of voting booths in Österreich, we follow The Baffler down into the gutter of internet culture war and New Atheism’s idiot heirs. This one is so rambling and conspiracy-red-string-connecting-the-dots-on-a-bulletin-board that I cannot effectively quote from it at all. RTWT, but for the really appropriate context for it, check out an old piece from Scott Alexander called I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, and it should be readily apparent that this piece is pure Blue Tribe attack against the Grey Tribe. How dare those… nerds *spit* endanger the Blue Tribe’s project of cultural hegemony, when it is so close to finishing off the last remnants of the Red Tribe?

This Week… Elsewhere

Zach Kraine has some very perceptive thoughts about Playing their economic game. Dissidents are out in the cold economically as well as intellectually and morally: The solution an exit in place:

What’s needed is a sort union or co-operative syndicate for small businesses. It’s well known that multinational corporations have a hold on the market. Which leaves the small businessman out in the cold. But with a union, the chances of being a valid contender increase.

We agree. But keeping such a syndicate in “submarine mode” is absolutely imperative.

A new (to me) blog: The Universal Dissenter. I have no idea how I stumbled upon this guy, but he’s pretty good this week On Orthodoxy and Religion. God isn’t so much “infinitely complex” as infinitely simple, however. But that’s a debate for those better acquainted with Aquinas than me. This bit was particularly inspired:

The good man will value his own civilization, culture, and religion above that of all other groups and their respective practices and systems. This is not because one’s civilization, culture, or religion is objectively superior to that of others. Rather, it is objectively right (healthy) that a man should believe that his people and their respective structures are superior to that of all others. The evolutionary dialectic of meta-history and the religious models that man projects onto the true God will determine who is objectively correct in religious dogma. In other words, religion itself is selected in an evolutionary process which will determine who is most correct in belief. This strongest spiritual race and religion will outlast and survive all others as the objectively correct structure of belief. In this way, all people have an obligation to uphold the dignity and consistency of their respective religious practices and to fight for the future of their religion and spiritual race.

Heartiste links a pretty spectacular bit of pro-European propaganda.

AMK is all over the place as usual here in Christian patriarchy, Islamic patriarchy, and “predatarchy”. But his predictions of the selection effects of abortion, birth control, and porn ring quite plausibly true. Also there: China is even poorer than Mexico.

American Dad has a great post on the Real Circle of Life. Complete with a photo. Of Bambi.

Dannato was really good here on The Scarcity of Social Capital in Western Societies:

The irony of a mass commercial society is its scarcity of social capital on all levels of human relations.

It earned a nod from The Committee: an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. RTWT!

Benjamin Welton is back up over at Zeroth Position with The Case For Judicial Corporal Punishment. He takes aim—well-deserved—at the Prison Industrial Complex, which is just about the only real beneficiary of America’s obscene incarceration rates. We’ve made the case before around the sphere, but never this well or completely. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also at Zeroth Position a welcome and highly relevant book review: The Art Of Invisibility.

Unorthodoxy gets a lift from some old Spandrell and discusses some of late iterations (and iterators) in the de-reification of names.

This Week in Meaningness, David Chapman considers Fake Insights like walking on coals and math puzzles.

This Week in the Next Level: Al Fin explains how to Mind the Brain.

Blessed Karl of Austria makes an appearance in The Queen and the Emperor: 1917.

Well folks, that about all we had time for. A slightly slower week than usual. We’re under 5k words and have a little over 100 links. Plenty of good stuff to be readin’. Many thanks to TWiR Staff stalwarts: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler for their hard work and invaluable contributions. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/10/22) appeared first on Social Matter.

Happy All Hallows’ Eve, everyone. Remember that for Latin Rite Catholics, All Saints Day is a Holy Day of Obligation. Get yer ass to mass. Some supremely high quality articles in an around the sphere this week. We’ll get to that in a sec.

The Editors of American Greatness explain How the State Department is Undermining Trump’s Agenda. There are, of course, two empires. Trump has taken over at most only one. Here’s an excerpt from VDH’s new book—deliciously entitled The Second World Wars—measuring The Deadly Cost of Mutual Misunderstanding. More here.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Spandrell kicks off the NRx Week with an olio of sorts: The Money is in Religion—religion Jordan Peterson style. Not that he holds a candle to Harvard, mind you. Also, the CCP is getting mighty undiverse.

Imperial Energy has up the Part Two of his Interview With Reactionary Future, wherein RF levels the accusation of nominalism at Hestia Society by quoting American Affairs Journal. The rest of the interview is excellent. Also from IE the next drop on the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Manifesto Part Six: The State of STEEL.

Neovictorian doesn’t post often, but when he does it’s a must read. We’ve been sniffing around the heels of Scientology for a while in these parts. Neovic pulls it all together: How Scientology Could School the Neoreaction.

Half Mason, half Mormon, half Scientology.

— The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) October 23, 2017

Oh… and half Opus Dei.

— The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) October 23, 2017

This was unexpected. And quite helpful: Free Northerner actually bothers to give an answer to Abortion, Tomlinson, and Moral Midgets. Tomlinson, of course, doesn’t deserve an answer; but for those confused by run-away train ethics, FN’s yer guy.

Morality can not be removed from its circumstances. This is why Tomlinson made up that whole story to put the argument in specific moral context and circumstances to best elicit the moral response that bolstered his argument. Once he elicited that moral response, he then strips the moral context away and introduces a cold utilitarian calculus. You did not save the embryos, therefore they must be of less value.

Nobody sees this magic trick because he pulled it off deftly and we’ve been conditioned through countless abstract moral problems involving switches, trolleys, and lying to axe murderers to view morality as inhuman, contextless, calculations of utilitarian value.

Exactly. The proper response to Trolley Problems are probably something like, “I don’t know what I’d do in that situation, but it certainly has no bearing on the moral liceity of whatever you’re arguing for.”

This week Generative Anthropology, Adam discusses Mimetic Theory and High-Low v the Middle.

I forget where this is from, but it is striking.

[I]n one of the commemorations I’ve read recently for the just deceased science fiction and military writer Jerry Pournelle, I’ve heard attributed to Pournelle the observation that in every institution there are those who are concerned with the primary function of the institution, and those concerned with the maintenance of the institution itself. Anyone who has ever worked in any institution knows how true this is, with the exception that plenty of institutions don’t even have anyone concerned with (or cognizant of) its primary function any more. Those concerned with the primary function should be making the most important decisions, but it will be those interested in institutional maintenance who will be most focused on and skilled at getting into the decision making positions. But someone has to be concerned with the maintenance of the institution—those absorbed in its primary function consider much of the work necessary for that maintenance tedious and compromising.

He relates this to the HLvM Problem: fundamental to modernity, and possibly fundamental to human psychology, and earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also there, Autocracy Stalks the End of History. It’s about Eric Gans own reconsiderations on “liberal democracy”. Since no natural social system ever runs on liberal democracy—indeed, the very phrase may be seen as a contradiction in terms—you can’t very well consider yourself an open-minded professor, if you’re not willing to at least entertain the idea that it might be false. Gans seems to be getting a red-pill somewhere, even if it is going down slowly.

Alf’s Orb of Covfefe series continues in the much anticipated Part IV: Under Attack. Leaves ya thirstin’ for Part V…

Over at Neo-Ciceronian Times, Titus Q. Cincinnatus made the most of his sabbatical from Twitter and published Social Permeability, Egalitarianism, and Immigration. As always, Cincinnatus is precise yet digestible, even for “normies”.

[T]he political arm of the Cathedral sees immigrants as a source of political capital—one voter is as good as another, and if a new set of voters can be imported who will vote the way the Cathedral wants versus recalcitrant natives who insist upon voting for their own interests, then all the better. It wouldn’t be the first time in recent history that this has happened. The corporate arm of the Cathedral sees immigrants in much the same way—as replacement labourers for natives who are too expensive and have a fractious insistence upon earning a fair wage.

Meanwhile the useful idiot arm of the Cathedral advocates open borders because Jeezus-ness. That said, a case can (and should) be made for mild “permeability”.

These [pre-1965] assimilation efforts succeeded better because those earlier movements saw greater attempts at integrating immigrants into patronage systems which reinforced existing hierarchical social structures. Everyone knew their place, and the descendants of immigrants could rise in rank as they “proved their worth,” so to speak, becoming fully acculturated members of their adopted society. These are all things that are notably absent from current western approaches to immigration.

Statistics such as these remind us that underperforming minorities ARE civilizable, provided they are properly oppressed.

— The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) October 30, 2017

Malcolm Pollack discovers an enormous chasm on the Road to Equality™: ¡Math Is Hard! Math is also racist, and a million other ways “oppressive”. LOL.

By way of Isegoria… More gems from Techniques of Systems Analysis here, here and here; Dogs are not super-cooperative wolves and pulling back the curtain on the macabre horror of Bolshevism: Barely imaginable self-righteousness, pedantry, dynamism, and horror.

Over at Jacobite, S. C. Gruget critiques the idea of “libertarian paternalism” espoused by recent Nobel Memorial Prize laureate Richard Thaler in Who Nudges the Nudgers? Gruget highlights just how airy academic theorizing fails to adequately comprehend the complexity of gritty reality.

The mistake at the heart of the nudging mindset is the view that abstract knowledge is sufficient to govern, and that pure, detached rational deliberation is capable of producing such knowledge. This idea has a long and distinguished philosophical pedigree—and to do it full justice would require a lengthy exegesis of centuries of intellectual history of the sort I will not provide here—but ultimately, it’s false. Governments are made of people. People have their own biases and motivations. Without the proper incentives, people will behave in ways that are not aligned with their supposed goal.

This too won an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Just in time for an imminent and ignominious 500 year anniversary, Athrelon revisits Martin Luther—The Original Cyberpunk Antihero.

Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: This Will Ever Be the European Story, fairy tales and the eternal Christian truths they convey.

This Week in Jim Donald

A light week over at Jim’s. First up, one of his trademark updates on Trump, another day, another scalp.

Trump is not alt right, but the alt right is Trumpist. Jeff Flake was a cuckservative enemy of Trump, and went out denouncing Trump. The alt right is successfully nailing Trump’s enemies.

Mencius Moldbug interpreted the Democrats as the inner party, and Republicans as the outer party, as subservient to the Democrats. Which accurately describes and predicts their inability to build a wall, halt race replacement, or repeal Obamacare.

But Trump, whatever his faults, is not part of the Outer Party, is manifestly an enemy of the inner party.

At this point, one can really only counsel a wait and see approach along with the usual advice to keep doing what you know you ought to be doing anyway: lifting, going to church, getting married, and starting a family. Ya know, really edgy stuff like that.

Jim also puts together a twofer on the subject of Google: Google is evil and Stormfront is a honeypot. In both, Jim takes issue with Google Analytics, advising that one avoid them as best one can and giving a handy guide for doing so.

Does your business use Google Analytics on its website?

Then Google will use the information that it so generously generates and analyzes for you to show ads for competing businesses to your customers. While you are analyzing the information to see how you can improve your business, they are analyzing the information to see how they can destroy your business.

This Week in Social Matter

As is becoming a regular occurrence, the SM week kicks off with Michael Perilloux’s juggernaut podcast The Golden Age: Episode 4: Software Freedom, wherein Perilloux is joined by free software, open software matter expert Luke Smith.

Newcomer Alfred Peterson examines a strange story of apparent rectitude: A Light in the Dark: A Review Of The National Rifle Association. A very fine overview of the NRA’s particular strategic and demographic strengths. I’d quibble that “Second Amendment Freedoms” are more key plank of classical liberalism than any sort of real rightist movement. But the persistence and indeed late expansion of gun rights is a boon to the Vaisiya/Amerikaner caste, which is on virtually every other issue thrown under the bus by the Progressive establishment.

The role of the NRA becomes clearer now. They are in the wrong tribe, a group that doesn’t bow down to the Mass Administrative State, and that that doesn’t believe in the perfectibility of man through centralized, credentialed managerial control. Furthermore, firearms offer the possibility of not only resisting the Mass Administrative State, but potentially overthrowing it. To an elite journalist, ownership of a firearm is a symbol of not just incipient physical rebellion, but an in-progress rebellion in the metapolitical realm. For a person whose entire social worth comes from their profession as a manipulator of symbolic logic for the Cathedral, this is high treason.

Liberalism eats itself. Once deployed to keep Kings in check, “gun rights” now keep the regicides in check. I like the NRA… principally because they drive my enemies crazy. The Committee gave Peterson a nod for his work here by an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Another new (to us) name: Costin Alamariu debuts with Gaddafi And The West’s Senile Elite. First, snapshot of pervasive senility…

America’s Protestant establishment ran the country before World War II, as well. They won that war. They built the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Empire State building in less than two years at the height of the Depression. After the war, they took the country to the moon. It’s hard to see how websites like Google—or other “innovations” like collateralized loan obligations—can compare, glorious though these may be in their own way. Our current ruling class, with all its computing power, human resources “synergies,” and vibrant diversity, took seven years to build an on-ramp to that same Golden Gate Bridge.

And when speaking of senility, David Brooks should never be far from your mind:

Brooks makes no mention of the fact that the West hasn’t really had a meritocratic elite anyway, for at least a generation. The nepotism of our time, affirmative action, is in many ways much worse than the milder type practiced by the pre-1960s WASP establishment. That nepotism at least selected for men with good manners who came from families with long experiences in public life, with independent bases of support, and with identities outside of state control.

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom bemoans the fact that so few or none of his students came from families with long traditions of devotion to the republic. That is, there’s a value to having a hereditary patrician class that not even a true meritocracy could approximate. America, with its selection by race and gender, is in many ways that much worse off. The dimwits elevated by affirmative action are without doubt much stupider than the WASP old boys Brooks maligns.

The late—better remembered than ever thought possible—Gaddafi makes an appearance as well. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Hubert Collins returns on Thursday with a deep dive into How To Waste A Million Dollars: Californians For Population Stabilization. CAPS is an immigration restrictionist environmental organization. It seems like somebody thought that would be a great wedge issue to drive a few open-minded progressives into the everlovin’ arms of the paleo-right. And was willing to waste $1 million per year on it.

We dropped the second part of our last Ascending the Tower podcast: Episode XVIII, Part 2—“You Have to Baptize Cowboys”. For the record, I was neither holding or clicking a pen. I remain guilty of Rickety Office Chair, which has now (apparently) become a meme, and so I’m wondering whether even to remedy the problem.

And on Friday, the West Coast Guys are up with Myth Of The 20th Century, Episode 41: Euromissile Crisis—Last Battle Of The Cold War. The research these guys do is simply amazing. And their production quality continues to improve.

Yet another newcomer for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose: Conner Alexander with some original verse: The Twilight Angel.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this past week, Porter explains the liberal binary of Blood or Anal. That is, the false dichotomy that two different cultures must either kill each other or… you get the idea. It seems that some leftists are dumbfounded about the ability of nationalists of different stripes to get along with each other:

Similarly, nationalists can not feasibly have international allies because if you are 1) a bad person, you 2) do not want aliens to take over your home, which means 3) that you hate people who are different, and 4) will try to kill them if they call you on the phone. As such, nationalists—who are very bad people indeed—can not have friendly foreign relations, QE fucking D.

As a result, we learn that the diplomatic meeting shown below between Chinese and Nigerian ministers ended either in torrents of blood, or a 100 million man population transfer accompanied by mass orgies of interracial anal sex.

Then, spurred on by Catalonia, Porter muses a bit on the history of secession movements in Breakin Up is Hard to Do. Instead of trying to drop a “we need to talk”, why not try acting up until they decide to dump you?

…there actually is an example of a wealthy, revenue-generating, enclave who made themselves into such a thorn that their erstwhile countrymen simply said GTFO without a shot being fired. That’s independence done prudently.

Porter’s Malaysian example is interesting, however, because Rahman was a real nationalist. Kicking Singapore out made his program easier; the same can’t necessarily be said for Spain and the EU.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Never a dull moment over at Evolutionist X’s. She starts off looking into Zoroastrian (Parsi) DNA. Freddie Mercury was a Parsi, which doesn’t mean they’re all great singers or flamboyant homosexuals. But it doesn’t mean they’re not either.

More on that here: Parsis, Travellers, and Human Niches, along with some more cogitation:

It appears that Ireland did not have enough Gypsies of Indian extraction and so had to invent its own.

And though I originally thought that only in jest, why not? Gypsies occupy a particular niche, and if there are Gypsies around, I doubt anyone else is going to out-compete them for that niche. But if there aren’t any, then surely someone else could.

If we had no gypsies, it seems Nature herself would have to invent them. Well, perhaps it is still worth a try. And don’t miss the rather obvious eugenic trends among Sherpas… Mrs. X snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Rounding out the Week, yet another installment of Cathedral Round-Up: #27: Critical Criminology—a way of framing crime and criminals hitherto never thought possible. Very worth the read, of course. A small taste:

How are crimes “available” to anyone? Are crimes like Pokemon, where you have to go to the Pokemon center to get your first starter crime, but if you sleep in the rich take all of the good crimes like insider training and you get stuck with some random Pikachu from the back, and it turns out to be a home invasion?

And if the rich are running the whole show, why don’t they make it so none of the laws apply to them? Why don’t they rape and murder poor people at the same rate as the poor rape and murder each other?

Criminals can always be counted on to vote Leftist, however. That is, when they actually bother to vote.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Doug Smythe starts things off at our sister publication Thermidor this week with a meditation upon Change—specifically as understood, rather fetishized, by Modernity.

People today, then, change if they know what’s good for them. And they do in fact change, constantly, and in just about every aspect of their individual and social being. They strive to change their inner lives with psychotherapy and self-help books, and their bodies with fad diets, exercise machines, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetic surgery. In stark contrast with traditional society, they frequently change employers, occupations, places of residence, and marital partners and/or status. They conspicuously and continuously change the things they consume and produce.

Marx and, especially, Hegel get rounded up for much of the blame. But could they even have imagined the monster they created?

Cultural Marxism, unlike the Socialisms that preceded it, is not a Utopian ideology. Both Marx and Hegel before him were bogged down in quasi-biological conceptions of change as analogous to a process of organic growth in which change works towards nothing else than the realization of a final mature form of Reason, the State, or the mode of production at the end of History; this teleological conception, since it subordinates change to purpose and assigns limits to the set of possible or desirable change, is an intolerable fetter on change as far as the change-fetish is concerned.

This explains why Cultural Marxism, distinctly unlike the Socialisms, offers no concrete plans or vision for the just and Progressive future beyond proclaiming that it will be more just and Progressive than the present, nor any definite road-map for getting there, beyond asserting that more change is needed. Its imagined arc of History bends towards justice on an infinite curve.

So what we need is a new social science, or rather a science of society that never really existed (at least under that name)…

From the point of view of social technology and the new social science, the old, blank-slate social science that went hand-in-hand with “social engineering” can be no more than pseudo-science—since epistemologically speaking, it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a science whose own object is, in itself, indeterminate (randomness is not a positive phenomenon) and so, lacking any integrity or consistency of its own, varies lawlessly and haphazardly according to the capricious operation of extraneous forces. The old social science, in the final analysis, was little more than a survey instrument that furnished, for Power, an inventory of all those people and activities yet to be aufgehoben by remaking them according to a suitably Progressive spec-sheet….

The enormity of why he proposes here lies largely hidden under particular and technical language. I leave it’s full-throated exposition as an exercise to the reader. I can’t quotation my way to an adequate summary here. Smythe is tremendous, and this one is no exception: The ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

Next up, editor P. T. Carlo comments on Revolution and Pussy: The Sam Kriss Story. Carlo examines the “Dirtbag Left”, a curiously masculine branch of the Left with predictable interests and goals:

A big part of the “charm” of the Dirtbags has always been their magical ability to combine impressive vulgarity with quick-witted humor and relatively intellectually honest, Left-wing political analysis. But this strange brew, oddly enough, seems to bring with it a certain kind of left-wing Machismo. Or at least this seems to be the image they, consciously or not, wish to project. Thus, the overall impression one gets of the Dirtbag brand is of a group of individuals who are dedicated to self-consciously cultivating an image of revolutionary machismo. The ultimate goal of which is the same as most other male endeavors: the eager spreading of female legs.

Only one choice for Sam Kriss: Come out as gay, repressed for all these years. Then he’ll be a hero. Though The Committee is rather allergic to “trending” stories such as this—they had to read it in Hazmat Suits—they believe Carlo has stumbled upon a real phenomenon here, among men, so-called, of the left. Chalk it up to easy-believism perhaps: Say the right words and you’re one of us, irrespective of past (and habitual) behavior. Sole Fide, right?! At any rate, Carlo earns a coveted ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his hard and timely work here.

In The Devil is in the Details, Walter Devereux implores the Dissident Right to embrace Christianity. I would have thought the advocacy for Christianity in most of the Dissident Right (and certainly within neoreaction) was well advertised.

Jake Bowyer offers an update on the Uranium One scandal currently wracking Clintondom in Storming the Rubicon.

Finally, N. T. Carlsbad revisits another forgotten element of Americana in Electoral Violence in America, or: Why Your Country Had to Be Pozzed. Contrary to popular mythology, violence has quite frequently supplemented numbers at the ballot box. Carlsbad also examines statistics and traces out the lines of ethnic conflict. Another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Nigel’s burgeoning trophy case.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Bonald concludes his Agree & Amplify series on Western Distinctiveness on the topic of Fascists.

Since everyone seems to find our culture the most unloveable, who better to teach that great lesson about love, that it doesn’t need, and cannot have, a reason?

Kristor meditates on the nature of time in Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Eternity and on the nonbinary nature of truth in Apoplogetical Weapons: The Included Middle.

Alan Roebuck coins a new word for the “forced legitimization of sexual perversion and confusion” with this Proposed Necessary Nomenclature: “Sexpervism”.

Briggs examines How Suspicious Is It To Win The Lottery Multiple Times? Then he continues his exploration of SJW infiltration into traditionally masculine academic spaces with More On SJWs & STEM. He has an in depth analysis of the political divide in Pew: Partisan Divides Over Political Values Widen:
Part I and Part II. Surprise twist: the dividing line isn’t really between Democrats and Republicans. Finally, students rate faculty on diversity, Catholic malthusianism, and the nazification of Christians, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update IX

James Kalb, writing for Chronicles Magazine, describes how gentrification is making New York City Worse at What It Is.

As Mark Richardson muses on what is happening When the world turns, he concludes that the turn away from Orthodoxy is a turn toward hubristic, self-anointed “godhood.” Then he reports as Cardinal Sarah defends homelands and cultures. Cardinal Sarah for Pope! Richardson also posts a couple of must-see videos, one of Joep Beving, an actual, honest to God modern tonal composer who is achieving some limited mainstream success, and the pre-eminent Jordan Peterson – the path is narrow.

William Wildblood details his journey through Prayer and Meditation, from generic hippy variety to good Christian contemplation.

Dalrock’s Ministry of humor recounts the punchline failure in a Ford commercial where parental roles are reversed. Humor is unexpected, so this punchline fails precisely because is not. Then he rehabilitates the example of the tampon fairy with Why Dave is sexy (language warning).

This Week in Arts & Letters

If you haven’t been reading Parallax Optics, you should be. This week he pits CAW vs. KWA—CAW being Contemporary Art-World and KWA being… well “Ameri-Kwa”. A deep meditation on the state of the arts, or more like the state of artsy-ness being bound up with the mechanisms of progressive state. There’s a ton of good stuff here. Like:

The CAW openly despises art as such, in favor of a simulacrum of “artistic practice” made to order for deployment as a political and social weapon. CAW artists are either financial services providers contributing to money-laundering schemes, or flacks serving Party-State agendas. This structural reality is masked, ironically, through systematic transposition into revolutionary Marxist rhetoric designed to stigmatize independence of activity and thought in order to enforce command compliance.

And this too: HYP leadership of academia mirrored perfectly in the arts:

Metropolitan museums, like the MoMA, or the Tate Modern, the New Museum or the Whitney, conceived as tourist institutions, frame and disseminate the global message. Regional museums serving as satellites and franchises transmit the message to the provinces.

The spectacle extends across an archipelago of art schools. For their students, the calculation is admission to a system, like the Mafia, in which the key criteria isn’t good or bad, but In or Out.

As for the KWA part, you’ll just hafta RTWT. Parallax Optics garners an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for this one. And there’s more where that came from (with a lift from Jim): Contemporary Art: A Special Aesthetic Case of the Left Singularity.

Chris Gale visits St. John Henry Newman (by way of Anthony Esolen) in The corrosion of the culture. Donning his psychiatrist hat: Adult ADHD is (probably) something else. The poetry of Ezra Pound and Two Sunday Sonnets. Finally, John C. Wright mashed up with the Book of Revelation in Ragnarok or the Return of the King.

At Imaginative Conservative, the poetry of John Keats and E. Allan Poe. A Timeless Essay from Tom Woods on American Conservatism & the Old Republic. Attarian dives into Edmund Burke: Champion of Ordered Liberty.

Richard Carroll, always a high-quality read, has two up this week: Brief Thoughts on Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why. And speaking of Poe… Edgar Allan Poe and Engineering Poetry. Probably why all the best poets are, in fact, engineers.

And over at City Journal, Steven Malanga looks into Amazon’s Utopian Criteria. And Myron Magnet on how Public Order Makes City Life Possible—order which NYC is lately and rapidly squandering IMO.

This Week in the Outer Left

A comparatively quiet week from the left, there was really only one piece worth presenting, but oh, what a piece it is. The Baffler gets the honor this week of serving up one of the most Current Year things I have ever read in my life. Hannah Gais pens a masterpiece on juggalos, nevertheless persisting. The very title is almost too much in itself, but you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

Although, as Jack Smith IV pointed out at Mic prior to the march, juggalos “didn’t ask to be held up as shock troops against the far right… their anti-racist and anti-elitist reputation set them up as natural antagonists to Trump-style nativist xenophobia.” Still, most juggalos are quick to point out that—rhetorical overlap with parts of the left aside—they’re not a political movement. Nevertheless, there are those, such as the Struggalo Circus, who have worked to transform these points of overlap into a viable strategy for organizing. Founded by several Bay Area activists—all of whom are juggalos themselves—the Struggalo Circus describes itself as a “ragtag and messy coalition between radicals and juggalos” and has proven instrumental in building bridges between juggalos and socialist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and Industrial Workers of the World, as well as drawing in support from more disparate anarchist groups.

If you ever thought you would read such a paragraph as that, you belong in a mental institution. And yet, this is the reality in which we find ourselves. The world has gone, for lack of a better term, insane. Here it is, on full display so that no man may give other than his assent to the proposition. Every sentence reads as the punch line to some joke in poor taste, but this, readers, is factual journalism in the eternal Year Zero.

This Week… Elsewhere

Filed under Do Not Try This At Home: Al Fin looks at Electrical Brain Stimulation and Enhanced Learning. He’s also bearish on China: China’s Growth is 100% Debt Driven. In the Dangerous Children department: What Kind of Pathetic Wimps are We Raising?

Unorthodoxy engages in a bit of “s/PATTERN1/PATTERN2/g” The Meat of the Declaration. Heckuva lot truer today than it was in 1776. And… speaking of Scientology (and the recent TWCS encyclopedia entry), Unorthodoxy identifies Thetan Hunters of the West .

TUJ is claiming a prediction victory: Campaign Comey 2020 Puts On Its Presidential Running Shoes.

AMK has a pretty funny clip up: They’re Made Out of Meat.

Nullus Maximus makes the surprising—but very formalist—case to Eliminate The Debt Ceiling. The editors of Social Matter would tend to agree. Not least:

Second, eliminating the debt ceiling would signal that the federal government has no interest in paying off its creditors. It should be obvious enough that an entity which increases its debt burden every year for 60 years does not have fiscal responsibility as an objective, but the Treasury seems to have no shortage of lenders, especially because the Federal Reserve serves as a lender of last resort.

David Hines is back up over at Status 451 with another installment of his Radical Book Club: the Centralized Left. It’s huge. Hines reads a lot… and he can type.

The Rebbe has a few pointed Questions for the Alt Right.

Nishiki Prestige returns this week on a characteristically cheery note, declaring Capitalism is alive and will grind your bones into dust. RTWT as few are as talented as Nishiki at condensing accelerationism down into tiny red pills that burn all the more for going down so quickly.

Every day, things are getting worse. Your town, eaten alive. You choose to rot at the screen or move to the city.

Billydean Jessup and Tamal Afrika X are out of work. The Asians will do it for less. Marriages dissolve. Children head off to prison or chase an early death.

In the cities, white socialists stake out the few brown neighborhoods worth living in. The yuppies are eyeing property. The hipsters have fertilized the soil—an atomized forest will bloom here soon. May a thousand Amazon Prime boxes sit safely upon these doorsteps.

Capitalism discovers our happy inefficiencies and corrects them viciously.

Greg Cochran Behavioral genetics and the judicial system, or how enforcing things like laws can have an accidentally eugenic effect. Especially, if the punishments handed out are severe enough. Also, another possible “accident”, the salutary effects of Fish on Friday.

That’s all folks. Special thanks to Superstar TWiR Staff members: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler for their immense help in pulling this all together. Reasonably on time.Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/10/29) appeared first on Social Matter.

This Week the brilliant memesters of 4-chan invented “It’s Okay To Be White” and then sat back with a tub of popcorn and watched. “So it’s… not okay to be white???” PA explains. A guy on Medium (of all places) had a pretty nice play by play too. Also Chris Gale’s worthwhile commentary.

Well, it was Halloween. Hope everyone got some nice beef jerky.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton serves the sphere doubly by kicking off our week with a few well put Sunday Thoughts on the moral of any story.

Parallax Optics shifts from first into second with The Positive Prescription. Brief, but supremely well-put. E.g.,

While we’ve presented our thoughts as analysis, diagnosis and argument, on another level it’s all just complaint—the eternal recourse of the disempowered child.

We’ve complained that the system is unfair, we’ve complained that our opponents are zealots, we’ve complained that everything is going to shit…

Now it’s time to build.

Don’t wanna steal any more of his thunder. Please RTWT. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Handle, of Legend, awakens from blog slumbers with Some Comments on Yuval Levin. Quite a few comments actually. A good ones too. Like a perspective on Cthulu Swimming Left…

Have you ever taken your kid bowling with the “bumpers” on over the gutters? If you see the right bumper bounce back the bowling ball, but the left bumper isn’t up, and the bowling ball only bounces back from that direction when it’s thrown so incredibly hard to the left that it bounces off the edge of the gutter itself, then you ought not to conclude, “No worries, we’re guaranteed to knock down at least some pins.” One only need look at the score, see some zeros despite those reliable bounce-backs from the right bumper, and conclude, “Hm, it seems that the guardrails aren’t working.”

Much of it was about the Flight 93 Essay—or rather the spirit thereof:

Mothers carry the most precious cargo.

XXII.YL: “To look upon our country in our time as a society so degraded and depraved that almost nothing could be worse than its present condition is to allow despondency or partisanship to cloud our judgment. And to think that a presidential election victory—indeed that a loss for the left, almost regardless of the person who would win—could by itself set us back on the right course is vastly to overvalue electoral politics as a means of renewal and strength.”

XXII.H: Again (again), no one was claiming imminent zombie apocalypse, and no one was claiming the election of Trump would set it all right again. Anton argued that Clinton’s election would provide a certain, irreversible, and significant deterioration for the prospects of Constitutional conservatism in America, in the manner of the New Deal, not that it would mean Venezuelan bread lines a month after her inauguration. The “charging the cockpit” metaphor doesn’t mean a promise to set the place back on course and land safely, it means it’s the only chance you’ve got, and even if you yourself are doomed, you may end up saving some things you care about currently in the sights of your enemy. As for overvaluing electoral politics as a mean of renewal and strength, it’s obviously possible to undervalue it as well, which I’m afraid TCM has been doing for a generation.

It is quite long, but we hear from Handle so rarely, that it is certainly worth the read. It was also an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam searches for The Single Source of Moral and Intellectual Innovation. Which is all hard for me grasp, even set down in pixels on an html and css template. Along the way some interesting digressions on stereotyping and scapegoating.

Neocolonial is back after a long break. As always, he is terse, and shockingly on point: Deconflation: Right-wing. He throws the right wing-left wing spectrum under the bus. In it’s place:

• Using loyal and seditious also allows a much clearer rendering of Conquests Second Law:

“Any organisation not explicitly loyal to the Crown sooner or later becomes seditious.”

Shylock Holmes contemplates how we’ve gotten very adept at insulating ourselves from death and all its evidences, and makes a case for a renewal of the memento mori in The Imperfect Vision of the Past. The past is a foreign country. And in many ways more foreign than we’ve been given to imagine. Holmes snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ here.

Alf has a post-mortem on Poor Eminem. And the speculative saga of Barron Trump continues in The Orb of Covfefe, Part V: a new plan.

Spandrell chides American Soldiers, quite rightly I think for the reasons given. Nevertheless, it’s good to see a demographic in which Trump is so beloved.

At Jacobite, Razib Khan gives a survey of American entho-political history in America’s Demographic Deliberalization. Khan argues that the reemergence of ethno-nationalist politics could have been foreseen, and he is in agreement with Neoreaction as to its prospects.

[T]he reality is that demagogues cannot turn back time. They can only delay the inevitable. Sans mass ethnic cleansing, accommodations between peoples must occur. And when these accommodations come they will operate as understandings between elites of disparate peoples, and the political units which emerge to foster stability will resemble the ramshackle oligarchies and monarchies. When the people are too many dissonant voices, conductors must come on stage and enforce harmony and suppress individuality. In an age of diversity there will come the oligarchy.

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Nigel T. Carlsbad is reading Old Books, friends. This week he covers Charles Reemelin’s Critical review of American Politics (1881). Reemelin doesn’t fit preconceived categories well, at times sounding positively monarchist and at times utterly progressive. Even so, he sounds orders of magnitudes more sane than any pundit today:

Mothers are building cathedrals designed to last for eternity.

Reemelin declares: “The best status of mankind in morals, laws, and wealth can be reached only in a society, which measures its present wants by the standards of experience recorded in books and learning of all kinds, but which also lifts itself out of the old ruts by the help of progressive science.” For this, the Rechtsstaat. The inchoate politics of America are its opposite, a mere counting of heads or arbitrary wills. A true government of law requires the cooperation of society with culture through universities (!), deliberative assemblies, independent judiciaries, and free executives, “in the formation and execution of an intelligent, virtuous, wise, collective will.”

The more one tried to avoid this for the, what he calls, “fallacy of the hope to escape corruption and despotism by having a minimum of government, and it neglected and unwatched,” the more public robbery and avarice one would observe.

Reemelin also spotted The Cathedral. It was, of course, much smaller in those days. Little did he expect his beloved Universities and endorsed permanent bureaucracies to become capstones of it. The Committee tagged Carlsbad this week with the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

By way of Isegoria… He’s built up a remarkable repertoire of postings http://www.isegoria.net/2017/10/all-hallows-eve/; yet more from Techniques of Systems Analysis here, here, here, and here; The greatest trick the advertisers ever pulled; and The fascist that Germany’s baby boomers loathed was a loyal servant of Communism.

Malcolm Pollack has some brief comments on the Islamic Truck Attack in lower Manhattan. And he explains why Transgendered is the new Sacred.

Finally this week in CWNY, The Institutionalized Tragedy of Liberalism, with leisurely stops at The Bard and Tennyson.

Every regime, even a satanic regime, has its jesters. But a satanic regime uses jesters to ensure that there is no high humor, humor that elevates the soul. There must only be mocking, jeering humor that is supportive of the almighty satanic state. One must either face the fact that one lives in a kingdom of tragedy where “humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters from the deep,” or else a man must take the opiates of modernity and proclaim that he loves the modern negroid states of Europe and is a very happy man. If we face the reality of modernity, we will not be dancing in the streets, we will have no kindly fools to ease the pain of existence, because institutionalized liberalism is institutionalized tragedy that kills the good fools, but we will still have souls. If we take the path of spiritual anesthesia, we might be superficially happier than the non-anesthetized, but we will lose our souls.

This Week in Jim Donald

Only one entry from Jim this week: his usual update on the weird world of Trump. Drawing on Chinese history, Jim explains that Mueller points deer, makes horse. Point deer, make horse is one of those neat Chinese phrases that is bound up in awesome Chinese political history. It’s a brief piece from Jim, so I won’t bother excerpting, just go RTWT and you will be fully caught up on the latest in Trump.

This Week in Social Matter

Social Matter’s week gets its kick in the pants from Michael Perilloux’s The Golden Age podcast: Episode 5: Mission Command And Romantic Heroism with guest Rafael Xavier—a deep dive into military history and strategy.

The West Coast Guys™ celebrate acknowledge the Reformation in Myth of the 20th 16th Century podcast: Episode 42: The Protestant Revolution—500 Years of Division. They are joined by Free Northerner—one of my very favorite Protestants—from whom we haven’t heard in a while.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter more or less took the week off this time, stopping only to headline a comment on the previous post about secessionism in Secession Expanded.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week by tackling a question that I (Thee NBS) had pontificated about on the twitter: Are “Nerds” Just a Hollywood Stereotype? Mrs. X is a glutton for punishment I suppose. But truly I am honored by it. And she does a whole lotta diggin. My point was mostly validated, but it’s always a plus to see an intuition gilt in the bright light of SCIENCE!!

In most smart people, high-IQ doesn’t seem to be a random fluke, a genetic error, nor fitness reducing: in a genetic study of children with exceptionally high IQs, researchers failed to find many genes that specifically endowed the children with genius, but found instead a fortuitous absence of deleterious genes that knock a few points off the rest of us. The same genes that have a negative effect on the nerves and proteins in your brain probably also have a deleterious effect on the nerves and proteins throughout the rest of your body.

If athleticism-correlates-with-intelligence seems non-intuitive to you, perhaps you should read up on sample bias. Mrs. X snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for her excellent research and analysis here.

Next up: a Note on Ethnonyms and how (mostly white) people seem to want to change them every fifteen minutes so as not to offend anyone.

The term “Eskimo” is not even pejorative; according to Wikipedia, it means “a person who laces a snowshoe.” Snowshoes are very clever and useful inventions and there is no shame in being able to lace one properly. I mean, I’m an “American”, what’s that, a corruption of an Italian guy’s signature that got mistaken for a map label?

This turns out to be a bit more than “just a note”. But it is quite entertaining.

Finally for the indispensable Anthropology Friday, she’s reading Outlaws on Horseback: Henry Starr, Gentleman Bandit. Among quite a few others.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at our sister publication Thermidor, C. A. Shoultz starts the week off with Deutschland Über Alles, an analysis of the rising nationalism in German politics. Shoultz argues that, contrary to popular belief, Angela Merkel has been ruthlessly pursuing national aggrandizement rather than implementing a principled globalist program.

None of these observations are made to chastise Ms. Merkel or her nation. Quite the contrary: many of those who deride “globalists” might turn from haters to champions of Germany when its commitment to sovereignty is fully considered. These observations, rather, are made to illustrate a broader point: since the dawn of the 21st century, and certainly during Ms. Merkel’s time in power, Germany has not been globalist at all. Rather, Germany has been pointedly nationalist, at every turn making decisions with its own self-interest in mind, over and against the lofty ideals of European identity or human rights. Its projections of shame and humility are a façade, behind which lurks a ruthless opportunist that will take every advantage and game every system while doing its best to avoid any negative consequences for its actions.

Viewed in this light, the “rise of nationalism” is nothing more than an intensification and reorientation of long-standing German policy. Shoultz gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for piquing the Committee’s interest here.

Moving from central to western Europe, Stephen Paul Foster asks Has the Spanish Civil War Ended? Foster explains how the current, popular narrative on the Spanish Civil War came to be:

Mother Nature looks after her own.

[T]he Spanish Civil War is, perhaps, unique in the 20th century as a political rebellion where the forces of reaction prevailed against a well-organized, highly energized far-left terrorism supported by and aligned with the liberal and left-wing elites in politics, the universities and haute culture. Also unique is that the narrative of the Spanish Civil War that eventually triumphed was produced and widely promulgated not by the winners (Francoists) but by the losers (the left). Its success was due in large part to its simplicity as a tragic, but inspirational morality play. The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported and defended by the International Brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini.

Next up, Nathan Duffy breaks down reactions to another Hollywood scandal in Kevin Spacey and Homosexual Pedophiles. All and sundry, it seems, are at pains to separate Spacey’s behavior from his “orientation.”

This is something all the mocking responses of his statement have tended to miss. Most of them insinuate or state plainly that his homosexuality is completely irrelevant, and the tone of the reactions has verged on the hysterical. While some of the hysteria is justified (due to Spacey’s attempt to obfuscate and misdirect), at least some of it is because the LGBT lobby knows that raising homosexuality in this context will counter the propaganda they like to push on the matter. Namely that gay men are not sexual deviants, but normal and decent and good in every way. Spacey should be blamed for his cowardice but not for connecting homosexuality with adult sex with male-minors. It is the elephant in the room and not mentioning it would have been negligent.

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Europa Weekly 49 this week: I’m Not Racist Mom, I’m Just a Gamer.

Another week, another pair of response articles, this time to a friendly Uzbek sharing the blessings of diversity with New York City. Jake Bowyer discusses American immigration policy and Uzbeki politics in Reverse Lottery.

Although merit-based immigration has its problems (it will lead to increases in East and South Asian immigration and a further increase economic disparity in America), it is preferable to some moronic lottery system that sacrifices Americans at the altar of the ever-hungry Moloch dressed in rainbow denim.

Stephen Paul Foster takes note of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s slippery language in Fake Pronouns and Muslim Immigrants. Cuomo plays the pronoun game, much to Foster’s annoyance.

You’re only fertile once. #YOFO

[W]e need to decipher “Don’t let them change us,” one last slippery pronoun in this verbal smog to ponder as we twist the ring. Who does this man think he is talking to? Eight people, very much alive on a bike trail having a nice outing have already been permanently changed—into corpses by an angry Muslim in a rental truck. “Change” doesn’t get more profound and irreversible than this, and, as noted above, somebody, obviously, let this happen to us, somebody who should have grasped the obvious: that fewer angry Muslims in the U.S. means safer sidewalks and bike paths and, for those who care, less Islamophobia. How do we make sense of what seems to be apparent nonsense straight from the Governor’s mouth?

Finally, Fritz Pendleton rounds out the week with The Wild Socialism of Oscar Wilde. Pendleton reads The Soul of Man Under Socialism
so you don’t have to, and gives important context to the famous wit’s epigrams:

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

This is a seemingly brilliant sentence. It is timeless wisdom and speaks to those of us who try to have some special perception beyond just the everyday surface level understanding of things. When placed in its proper context, however, this quote is not so profound at all.

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Mr. Pendleton earns himself a nice ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his work here.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J.M. Smith recounts A Curious Prophesy from 1683 by Sir Thomas Brown, eerily predicting the modern political climate in the Americas. Then he makes the case that, although rape victims should usually not be legally faulted, they should nonetheless socially be Faulted as a Fool. Relatedly, he whimsically muses that a simple magic “no” is all it should take to still The Antic Dance of Folly and Desire.

As Kristor observes, Materialist Reduction *Just Is* Elimination. Didn’t Aristotle categorically settle this a few millenia ago?

In The Narcissism Test: Reality. Who Needs It?, Richard Cocks argues that knowingly taking the blue pill is a reliable indicator of narcissism.

The foundation of morality is this lack of separation—making not caring about other people irrational. All are an emanation of the same divine Spirit. Separation is not ultimate. To see and feel through this illusion represents enlightenment and salvation.

Matt Briggs writes about Soloviev’s inspiring prophecy regarding The Antichrist and The Coming Christian Unity. Then he describes the very popular power of
The Offence Fallacy. (British spellyng relevant.)

The Offence Fallacy is a particularly effeminate fallacy, because it contains the implicit premise that whatever “outrages” a (usually) woman, that thing cannot therefore be spoken of. The premise is also fallacious and self-defeating, because that premise itself is outrageous.

Also, pregnant “men” in Denmark and the UK, Christian persecution at University, Satanists moving up in the courts, and Catholic priests endorsing relativism, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update X.

Bonald also writes about pregnant “men” and how such definitions are merely A matter of language.

Cute girl on swing

Even when not pregnant, they differ in important ways from other men and women. For convenience, we could have a word for these people; let us call them “uterines”. Only uterines can become pregnant. This is not hateful; it is tautological. We can have another word for the other medically important category of men and women born with penises who at some point in life might impregnate a uterine—call these people “seminists”. Which category a given person belongs to could be called its “procreaclass”.

That would be totally ironclad against all denotative drift, right?!!

At least, according to Mark Richardson, there are pockets of Feminists losing the terf war. (A TERF is somebody who thinks only women can get pregnant. It’s usually intended as an insult). Then he writes this brief but bold essay Sketching manhood.

William Wildblood writes a bit about The British Myth of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, particularly in regard to its call to holiness.

This Week in Arts & Letters

At Imaginative Conservative, the poetry of late Southern Agrarian Allen Tate: “Stranger”. A thorough review of the celebration of Halloween down through the ages. Deep poetry analysis here: The Language of Neurosis: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Casey Chalk has a very nice overview of The Wisdom of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King. A very well-done video interpretation of Poe’s “Ligeia—actor looks hella lot like Edgar Allan Poe.

Beauty is fitness ordered toward telos.

Also there, the music of Vivaldi Beatus Vir. Michael Connolly tackles Orestes Brownson’s New England and the Unwritten Constitution. Brad Birzer looks at Cosmopolitanism and the Hellenistic World. Finally the poetry of G. K. Chesterton, “Gold Leaves”; and John Donne, “The Apparition”.

Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga focuses on Risky Revenues—i.e., from legalized gambling, which is becoming a race between states for increasingly limited shares of market that no one really wants to get too large anyway. Beston has an expansive history of how professional boxers (more than others) have long been Champions of Place. On the 10 Blocks podcast, Judith Miller and Seth Barron discuss the recent Islamist Terror in Manhattan; and, related, Miller considers the potential dangers of a collapsing ISIS in Caliphate of the Mind.

Chris Gale takes inspiration from Christ’s teaching on What is important? As far as self-improvement goes: Streaks matter—for good and ill I think. And the poetry of Hilaire Belloc as a Sunday Sonnet.

Richard Carroll has a brief piece in his Friends Series: Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”.

And Logos Club got back in business this week with Kaiter Enless’ Məhshinēk Horryr, Prt.2: The Scourge of Neo-Luddism—or how inanimate objects do not have a will and cannot make you do something or turn you into something. You do those things to yourself.

Consciously or not, this move (internet agency attribution) is one which absolves oneself of agency in near totality (that is to say, to think outside of and beyond genetic propensities – to think in realms of pure fate, designs without cause). The Machine then becomes conceptualized as a agent who functions counter to it’s silver-screen cliche—whereas Hollywood machines are oft lumbering or digitally deft and invasive monstrosities of twisted, malicious steel—the machine here is a scapegoat for personal failing.

Enless earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine effort here.

I enjoyed Craig Hickman’s expansive musings on Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy as Pagan Myth. As well as his feature art, which is always top-notch. Even if sometimes a bit creepy.

This Week in the Outer Left

After last week’s mind-searing piece on juggalos, one would think anything this week would be a let down, but the left has actually come up with things that are… not completely without intelligence. So, let’s talk about it.

The Baffler makes its regular appearance in these grounds with some advice for its readers: don’t troll, organize. I’m not sure we have anything particularly to learn here, but it’s interesting seeing the other side have frustrations with certain kinds of juvenile activism too.

They [protests] are, rather, an all-too-familiar example of the aggrieved liberal superego simply advertising itself as aggrieved. Under this grand insular dispensation, stressed-out, privileged college students and disenchanted liberals alike can retreat to their own preferred sanctums of privilege to vent, as the rest of the world continues going to hell.

And in the realm of “a bit late, and missing the point”, Jacobin has a review of Blade Runner 2049, claiming that it shows no future at all. It almost goes without saying that the things I most enjoyed about the film were the things that most triggered Jacobin, but it shows the full lack of imagination on the part of the left that if a movie isn’t all about climate change and race politics then it cannot possibly be a genuine story of the future. So high on their own supply they can’t even enjoy good cultural products anymore.

Yet despite all its futuristic trappings, Blade Runner 2049 offers a conservative response to these collective fears, calling for a return to an imagined past of whiteness and traditional gender norms.

Holographic waifus aren’t traditional, no matter how much communists tell you otherwise.

The main character has a holographic waifu (played by the lovely Ana de Armas), but it’s calling for a return to traditional gender norms. Yeah… sure it is. Ya know, this is how techno-libertarians get pushed towards us. They get told that everything short of queer communism is a “return to traditional gender norms” and they start to wonder about those traditional gender norms, and why they existed in the first place, what problems they were intended to solve… and now look, you’ve gone and turned techno-libertarians who just did not care what consenting adults did with each other into sex traditionalists. Many such cases!

Over at Status 451, Samuel takes a cringingly centrist (and nominalist) approach to The Current Year’s Political Compass in I See Trad People. He takes it pretty deep though.

It’s nice to see lefties concerned about declining religious observance, and not even for all the wrong reasons. But extra street lighting and “third places” are an abject (and verbose) refusal to deal with the real issue: diversity + proximity = declining civic engagement. Among other things.

Finally, filed under Stupid Shit Shitlibs say… “Why is the UK government so desperate to get rid of foreigners?” Desperate… to “get rid”… of foreigners. Ya see, the British government is really Nazis; just really, really, really incompetent Nazis. Or something. More shit: “Please Don’t Procreate”. We said “pleeeeeze”.

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin considers A Mind Forever Young, and the manifold ways in which modern institutions (*cough* mainstream schooling *cough*) conspire to kill it. As well, some more Sino-bearishness. Also some well-deserved abuse of Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson: No Fool Like a Green Fool.

Ana de Armas, because you don’t need a reason to have pics of Ana de Armas.

Speaking of China… TUJ examines China Policy From The Perspective of Hamiltonian Regionalism.

This week in Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, porcine lipstick is applied to seasteading. It must not be seen as Colonialism 2.0, Chdeist insists. Call this Seasteading+. Hey! There was nothing wrong with Colonialism 1.0, but for the loss of will to keep it going forever.

PA wonders Whom Does This Political Ad Help? A disgusting ad that might very well continue to radicalize normie GOPers. Heartise comments on same. PA cobbles together a nice playlist for thoughts of home.

Speaking of Heartiste, this was a solid bit of analysis: Social Media, Dating Apps, And The Decline In Millennial Sex.

It think this bit On Consumerism, Corporatism, Time Preference, and Modernity scores some good points. I don’t go much for the Capitalism Has Never Been Tried tack, but author Insula Qui is certainly correct that the excesses of modernity have little to do with Double-Entry Accounting per se.

Xavier Marquez takes a valuable and expansive look into the first decade or two of the Bolshevik age in Utopia and Revolution that will be of interest to true students of the 20th Century. Iconoclasm, check. Science fiction narrative, check. Pseudo-religiosity, check. Ideologically driven degeneracy, check.

AMK has some scattered but occasionally quite poignant Thoughts on a couple of subjects. Like:

The shorter people’s interactions with each other are, the worse their behavior.

The shorter people’s relationships are, the less they invest in each other. <—This is the most important thing.

The more diversity, the less trust.

People behave badly because they know they can get away with it. They know they can get away with it because they change jobs frequently, lose friendships often, move constantly, and interact with strangers on a regular basis. Cities facilitate all of this in abundance.

Also there, more on Scientology, training routines, and the post-rationalization of abuse. The Committee ranked Marquez’s work an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

The Rebbe is a perennial (and, I think, salutary) thorn in the side of white identitarian politics. This week he notes that Since the 90s, the Ideology of the Left has been Intersectionality. And along the way explains how Jewish Privilege isn’t keeping Jews—at least of a certain variety—from getting flattened under the anti-“white” steamroller.

Buzzfeed had some of its “male” correspondents get their testosterone checked. What’s amazing is that they published it anyway. Heartiste has full coverage.

Unorthodoxy attends to the St. Louis Fed: Good Case for QE Being Detrimental. Now they tell us? Could the tide be shifting??

Giovanni Dannato does a nice job here of Unraveling Civil War Moral Hysteria in light of the recent General Kelly brouhaha. Yes. Slavery was the formal cause of the Civil War. But that doesn’t mean what modern propagandists want it to mean…

Anita Ekberg smoking.

The problem with their virtuous narrative is that slavery causing the war didn’t mean anyone actually cared about Blacks. The truth is, nobody really did except for a tiny handful of abolitionists who nobody liked. Slavery causing the war doesn’t mean what they think it means.

The more important thing to understand about slavery is that it was an incompatible economic system with the wage-driven industrializing North. I suspect the moment Lincoln was forever set against slavery is when the institution arrived in Kentucky and depressed the local economy, playing a role in his family moving to Illinois. To really understand what slavery meant to average white people back then, you need only reflect on how average workers feel now about the onslaught of tens of millions of 3rd world immigrants.

Slavery was incompatible because free labor was toxic to the wage economy. If anything, many people who opposed slavery would have despised the Black slaves, a seeming contradiction to revisionist moralizers.

Dannatto gets a nod from the Committee with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Nishiki Prestige is back with a tale of Los Angeles, or rather, horror and disappointment. He really comes up with the cheeriest titles, doesn’t he, folks? The cheeriest, bigly. Anyway, RTWT and get uncomfortable when parts of it hit a little too close to home… I did.

There’s a big TV in every room, and they’re all on. You’re high on benzos and weed. You dream about the day you make it big. It’s gonna happen.

There’s always traffic, even at 2:00 AM. You can hear it from the back yard.

You only leave the house to spend money. For miles: endless strip malls. You can drive an hour and still be in it. “What else do I need?”

The restaurants are all chains. You have your favorites. You think Japanese food is rice, chicken, and teriyaki sauce. You don’t eat fish, because of the texture. They started giving you Ritalin at 8.

Greg Cochran has a brief (and darkly humorous) note on Orcas. Then a full form piece examining Augustin Fuentes’ claim “I am not a Moron”. Well, if ya need to say it…

Welp… that’s all we had time for. An interesting week jam packed with high quality articles. Many thanks to my tireless staff: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, Egon Maistre, and Hans der Fiedler, you guys basically keep the lights on here. Keep November NoFAP! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/11/05) appeared first on Social Matter.

A new week, another terrorist attack. A small church in tiny Sutherland Springs was the target this week. This time it was a militant atheist doing the shooting instead of a Muslim. But when you get right down to it, is there really much of a difference?

A new week, another pile Hollywood celebrities get accused of being… Hollywood celebrities. Harvard might be salvageable. Hollywood will need to be nuked.

VDH looks at Crossing the Trump Rubicon.

[W]arts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.

We agree. Also, on California, the Rhetoric of Illegal Immigration, and the Perils of Ignoring Thucydides’s Warning. Also from American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla has Reflections on Terrorism, Dumb and Smart. 9-11 was smart. Most of the rest, quite dumb. But that doesn’t mean we should be welcoming dumb terrorists with open arms. That would be dumber.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam considers Felicity, or lack thereof, of “performative speech acts”. A very deep dive into actual generative anthropology—the nuts and bolts of human cognition and communication—and thus less about political theory itself.

Lulach the Simpler is Reading Old Books™ and offers a very capable (except apparently for the spelling) review of Plunkett [sic] of Tammany Hall with observations. George W. Plunkitt was “shameless” in his graft, but kept it honest… As did Tammany Hall, which so enraged puritanical reformers of the era:

Tammany wasn’t simply a racket to enrich a bunch of sleazebags. Sleaze there was aplenty, but there was some genuine idealism mixed in there. For instance, Plunkett is fervently patriotic and immensely proud of the splendor of Tammany’s Fourth of July celebrations. And while Tammany men certainly expected to do well for themselves, they were expected to do well by doing good.

When roving bandits become stationery, they tend to do pretty well—for themselves and their constituency. Lulach snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts (and good reading habits) here.

Reluctant Reactionary offers A Cleaner Shirt–Passivism revisited, which is a pretty solid take on theory and practice. Also, build your houses out of stone, not Chip Board Boxes.

Alf steps up with a principled defense of Jim on the subject of 10-year old girls. RTWT. It’s not very long.

Social Pathologist checks in with a (relatively) brief missive on Postmodernism—the “thought that destroys all thinking”. Not the thought that destroys all THOTs. That would actually be useful.

Neocolonial is Reading Old Books™ and jots down some notes on Tasmania—Past and Present. But especially the past.

Legendarily “Bad” Billy Pratt is back with another socio-cultural mashup and trip down memory lane: The Entitled Boomer and “Vacation” (1983).

There was more at stake with the trip than family time. For Clark, the vacation was about validating his identity as a father, and his identity as a man.

Clark wanted to feel like the true patriarch of his family- a feeling that had almost certainly evaded him to that point. Clark wanted to be the kind of man who drove his family cross-country; captain of the ship and architect of memories. He wanted to bask in the glory of bringing the ideal vacation to life on the highways of America. Clark was searching for his masculine identity; a feeling which Clark felt entitled to having.

You see, Clark—the Chevy Chase character, I suppose having never seen the movie—was a “boomer”, a fact Pratt draws endless attention to. But I don’t want to steal his punchline. So click on over and read. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Imperial Energy has a round-up list mostly orthogonal to my own: Imperial Circular 11/11/2017: Deconstruction.

Nishiki Prestige checks in this week with The Pozeidon Adventure. A definite Ran Prieur influence here methinks, but, ya know, filtered through neoreactionary pessimism.

The sea is dying, the land is dead, the Pope is gay, and they’re importing the same people they dropped bombs on last week. The news was never real, but now we know it. The internet has shown us exactly how poor and deprived we are. Every reaction is commodified. Socially and politically. I am Neo. I am Tyler Durden. Get a house. Find a wife. Trainspotting 2 is on BlueRay for $35. They remade Blade Runner for me. I listen to ironically downtuned 80s cocaine-pop rehashed by suicidal NEETs, who are cooler than me. A gay rapist pedophile played your dad in the acclaimed film “American Beauty”—but the Nazi (you) was actually the gay guy in that story. One drove a car into another lost child in Virginia. This week an atheist shot up a church, apolitically. A Boomer did it in Las Vegas, which was surprising. Autotune in country music is a crime against humanity.

Anatoly Karlin, long standing friend of Social Matter always has something to say about how communism sucks and Russia would have been so much better off without it because communism really sucks. But this week he was really on fire, analyzing the roots of Russian redstalgia, calling out Lenin as the traitor, parasite, and failure that he was, and translating Egor Kholmogorov on 12 myths of the Bolshevik Revolution. Lots of tasty anti-communist Russian nationalism for the whole family.

By way of Isegoria… Americans have never eaten much fruit, and that’s probably a good thing; speaking of Anatoly Karlin, he thinks Runaway national fragmentation is inevitable; an hypothesis that http://www.isegoria.net/2017/11/bacterial-fats-deserve-the-blame-for-heart-disease/; False-flag operations plainly exist—and if they didn’t, we’d have to invent them; and a bit on Larry David and the lately (and suddenly) rare faux pas of Jewish self-criticism in front of gentiles.

Finally from Cambria Will Not Yield: In the Heart Dwelleth the Soul. As usual, he pulls no punches:

It has been my contention—and it remains my contention—that the Word of God, which is the Gospel of Christ crucified, Christ risen, sank deep into the hearts of the European people, so deeply that it became part of their blood. They could only be divested of that faith by a long, painful process that drains the lifeblood from a man. That process is called liberalism. It starts with an intellectual premise that the real man, the advanced man, is pure intellect. From that premise the deblooding process begins.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim starts off this week with something that ought to be obvious, but that we all need reminding of from time to time: women and gays ruin everything. Fact check: true.

Be a mom, not a cubicle drone.

If you have women in your organization, they need to stick to making coffee and such. The smarter ones can do a decent job at database organization and some kinds of database programming, and there are plenty of good female content creators, though the top ones are always male. But women are maladapted to large group dynamics. They are better than men at one on one social dynamics, for example superior ability to read people, but though this impressive in family scale groups, women fail disastrously at functioning larger groups, and if you give women leadership roles in such a group, the group will not accomplish its goals. Gays similarly, although the way they fail is different from the way women fail.

You might be wondering “so how do gays fail?” And Jim has you covered in the comments:

Gays show up for work infrequently, drunk, and stoned, steal the petty cash and office equipment, commit acts of violence against co-workers. If a high socioeconomic status male commits a crime typical of low socioeconomic status males, he is probably gay. Women are more conscientious than men, gays considerably less conscientious than straights. If a lawyer swindles his client, probably Jewish. If he flat out robs his client with a knife, probably gay.

Sounds about right. (NAJLALT and NAGLALT of course.)

And Jim covers a little dust-up betwixt Vox Day and John Derbyshire and how it plays into the rectification of names.

Our rulers are systematically changing the meaning of words in order to obliterate reality and make it difficult for people to think, creating words that link unlike things together, make distinctions without real difference, obliterating the meanings of old words that make meaningful distinctions, and giving old words new nonsense meanings, meanings intended to make males, whites, and straights weak, frightened, and ashamed.

Be sure to RTWT to see how Jim deconstructs “pedophile”… and I suppose for all the important points he makes about science, if you’re into that sort of thing.

This Week in Social Matter

A very full week at Social Matter this week kicks off with some rare Sunday poetry: Connor Alexander’s The Age Enslaved.

For Tuesday, Arthur Gordian returns with the next installment in his epoch-making Propaganda Series: Type III Propaganda Is How The Media Denies Left-Wing Terror In The West. Type III propaganda is simply false definition, which is so widely deployed as to be ubiquitous, but so ubiquitous as to be unwieldy from a scholarly standpoint. Gordian zeros in on left-wing terrorism, and the systematic way the media refuses to recognize its existence. Along the way a fantastic analysis of power, courtesy of James Burnham and Sam Francis.

Moms are beautiful. That’s usually how they get to be moms.

Class II “lion” elites are identified by their strong in-group solidarity, group-interest orientation, and high levels of classical leadership virtue. Their weaknesses, however, mirror their strength. Solidarity prevents them from acknowledging subversion from self-interested and cunning Class I “fox” elites within their midst. These elites govern through cut-throat competition, self-interest, and indirect exercise of power. When an elite class are mixed, the “foxes” eventually predominate due to their tactics being superior within a high-trust organization. Unfortunately for them, however, the “foxes” overpopulate at the expense of the lions and erode the organization from within. At that point, a rival elite of “lions” has the capacity to seize power by overturning the regime and expelling the “fox” elite. This cycle relies on the rival elite recognizing the “foxes” for what they are: an enemy force in power.

“Foxes” are the sort of people who rely false definitions, as well as laws that forbid honorable lethal challenges to those who do so.

The thing to remember about this form of propaganda is that it is the cause of last resort for the Left. This kind of radical demonization is a form of scorched earth, and its prevalence in this day and age does not demonstrate the strength of the Left but its weakness. Since the Left is a “fox” elite, its primary tactic is to avoid confrontation, not provoke it, and so it is better to isolate and ignore an enemy than provoke a fight. The strength of the Left in the 50s and early 60s shows the ability to marginalize opponents like the John Birch Society and anti-Communists without resorting to censorship, speech-codes, or other forms of modern violent repression. Absolute control of the media, domination of both political parties, puppet ideological leadership, and other features of mid-20th century leftism made it possible to laugh away the enemy. When it is necessary to mobilize violent rioters, tap the police, use coercion in higher education, and so forth, it shows that the cultural hegemony of the Left is slipping.

And there’s much more there, including prescriptions on what to do. Gordian takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for this outstanding contribution to the state of our art.

Then on Thursday, Benjamin Welton returns with an in-depth look at the Weimar era and The Tragedy Of German Conservatism. A key:

Karl Liebknechthaus in Berlin am Bülowplatz
Das frühere Karl-Liebknecht-Haus in Berlin am Bülowplatz, war Sitz der KPD-Führung.
Wir sehen es anlässlich einer Reichstagswahl im Propagandaschmuck.

Co-existent with this social degradation was a far more metapolitical revolution. The men of the trenches, who had adapted to a life of sacrifice and violence, wanted to keep the war going out of their hatred for the tedium of the bourgeois lifestyle. Many of these men gravitated towards right-wing politics, but very few became reactionaries. Most sought direct action revolution for that promised the most action.

In Germany, the situation was especially grim. The relative weakness of the Social Democrats, a mainstream party in Weimar that had to rely on right-wing death squads for their very survival between 1919 and 1923, along with the thoroughly reactionary character of the German conservatives and monarchist parties, allowed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) to chart a middle course that appealed to both conservative nationalists and radical socialists.

This too provided a rare glimpse into the era:

While the Stahlhelm mostly appealed to more reactionary, pro-monarchist forces in Germany, the SA and the RFB appealed to Weimar’s disenchanted and radicalized youth. Although it is verboten to say so in today’s modern political discourse, the early Nazis and the communists often traded personnel between themselves and even cosponsored labor strikes together. As historian Robert G.L. Waite notes in his book Vanguard of Nazism, communism and national socialism appealed to the nihilistic, thuggish mentality of the Freebooters and the generation that followed them[.]

By the time Hitler took power, one revolutionary movement looked just about as good as any other revolutionary movement to many far-left Freicorps. Welton has much more and I encourage you to RTWT! This was the runner-up in The Committee’s voting and snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Anthony DeMarco has up a Solo Climb™ podcast: In Praise of LARPing. Of various kinds.

And for the Myth of the 20th Century podcast it’s Episode 43: The Blood Libel Of Leo Frank.

Finally, for Saturday Poetry & Prose, Michael Andreopoulos returns with some fresh new verse: The Saxon’s Quest.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter starts off quite a productive week with some commentary on mass shootings, and the double standards in the coverage thereof, in You Have to Know Before You Know. Despite the subject matter, many laughs are to be had:

For instance, it is quite unsportsmanlike for a white leftist to say “Whites are terrorists who ruin the world!” And to then prove the point by committing a mass shooting so that his surviving peers can bang on Twitter like chimpanzees: “We told you whites were terrorists!”

Porter also takes a moment to notice something else that leftists have ass-backwards: the Strange Disposition to consider the future fixed and immutable, while the past is constantly under scrutiny.

I personally donít spend a moment wondering whether my outlook will align with the social conventions of someone whose parents haven’t yet been born. That will be his concern, if he’s stupid. Because everyone lives in someone else’s past. I just don’t want my children living in someone else’s future.

Then, Porter stops to pick apart a recent opinion poll conducted in the American South in Dixie Drove Down. Goodbye Dixie! The results are disheartening, but unsurprising. With a few exceptions:

In contrast, “White supremacists” earned only a 7% approval rate among whites, compared to an 8% figure among blacks! We have become so CUBAR (cucked beyond all recognition) that the blacks who hate us hate us less than we do.

Next, Porter implores the white left to Do Look Down. Not that they’ll listen.

Because the diversities they’re presently riding to electoral victory will eventually (and with increasing promptness) begin to ask why on Earth they need a honky on their back—even one that has conspicuous homosex. One of the classic examples of this dynamic is from Minnesota, where the ancient, liberal, and trailblazing Jewish lawmaker, Phyllis Kahn, carefully cultivated Somali votes for years. That is until Somalis realized they actually had very little use for trailblazing Jewish lawmakers, and so dumped her for a trailblazing Somali. What if it’s actually the giraffe that’s using the midget?

Au contraire, any good liberal politician should be thrilled to be defeated by a more diverse candidate. In fact, we recommend that all white leftists immediately step aside, and give their offices to the more deserving oppressed.

Finally, Porter also has a few words in defense of Roy Moore, in Big Wheels Keep on Turning:

Wouldn’t there exist a moral duty to warn the public? Well, not before the left needs to win a Senate election 40 years later, there isn’t. And besides, a young woman doesn’t just come right out and accuse a man until she’s had time to gather her thoughts and her grandchildren.

He does express a bit of reserved disgust, should the accusation about the 14-year-old prove credible. Which I feel is mistaken. Anything that has become haram in the West in the past hundred years is probably a lie perpetrated by the Left. 14-year-old girls aren’t fantasizing over their hairbrushes about their fellow high school classmates, after all.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Light week over at Evolutionist X’s place. First A Digression about the Creek Freedmen. Who exactly counts as a Creek is a very interesting question… when there’s gibsmedat at stake.

And for Anthropology Friday, Mrs. X turns her attention to No Angel by Jay Dobyns (Part 1).

Motherhood looks good on you.

I began this project thinking of criminals as aberrations, people in whom something had gone wrong or who had decided to abandon normal social norms. Now that I am at the end (typing up my notes,) I realize that many criminals as respected, integrated members of their societies whose behavior could be, under different circumstances, not only normal but beneficial. What is the difference, after all, between a criminal who sells illegal drugs and an honest business man who sells alcohol and tobacco? Between a gang member who kills a rival gangster for invading his turf and a soldier who kills an invading enemy?

Gang behavior would seem to be a species of clan behavior, which has obvious adaptive advantages within clans. But for civilization—i.e., many clans united under a sort of empire—gang behavior is a drag on overall achievement. But let an Outlaw Bike Gang grow big enough… well… their “bad deeds” become exercises of executive (and judicial) will.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Our sister publication Thermidor starts the week off with a reprint of N. T. Carlsbad’s award-winning piece on Charles Reemelin. If you missed it last week, be sure to give it a read.

Next is Europa Weekly, this time on The Art Of Not Being Sorry.

Sebastian Lucan offers up Contemporary Art: A Special Aesthetic Case of the Left Singularity. Lucan argues that contemporary art is no long truly concerned with the “art” itself, but rather with the “discourse’ surrounding it.

Modern art, even more than the art forms and arts ecology which preceded it, was fundamentally elitist in nature. The viewer required a higher degree of specialist, esoteric knowledge in order to access its meaning, in a way that was structurally different to (and a therefore also a departure from) the more direct and symbolic forms of aesthetic representation which had preceded it.

This shift created the space for a new priestly class to emerge, comprised of the artists themselves, but also critics and curators, who served to delineate the meaning of the work, increasingly shifting the location of the “art” from the object itself to the critical discourse which surrounded (and thereby transformed) it.

Naturally, as “artists” have grown less concerned with creating works of beauty, their skill at doing so has correspondingly atrophied.

This could be us but you be gettin worthless psych degree.

At art school, tutors typically discuss the concepts and contexts of artworks with students. In general, they avoid teaching practical skills and making processes, which they delegate to lower-status technical staff (technicians) when they are still taught at all. On a generational timescale, the privileging of concept > skill has created a ratchet effect, whereby the artworks considered high-status in the contemporary art world are frequently post-skills based. This situation further legitimises downgrading the importance of teaching skills at art school. Repeat the feedback circuit for long enough and it’s not only that tutors don’t want to teach skills at art school—they no longer possess sufficient knowledge to teach them even if they wanted to.

Lucan earned himself an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this outstanding contribution to the project of Reactionary Aesthetics.

Jake Bowyer is swiftly becoming Thermidor‘s go-to man for commentary on current events tells us about The Dweeb Menace. Apropos of Devan Patrick Kelley’s rampage in Texas, Bowyer describes his character as well as various other, similar, murderous characters.

Now, you might ask, what makes someone a “dweeb.” In brief, a dweeb is a young male completely lacking in masculinity. He is usually fat and in love with the fedora, or skinny and a bit of a swish. Dweebs are also SSRI-dependent, close to their mothers, and spend far too much time in the atomized world of the internet. These are not NEETs; these are dangerous individuals who can be characterized by their severe self-obsession.

The definition could perhaps do with some more specification, but Bowyer definitely has identified a peculiar class of killer in the modern world.

Leslie Cuff, in Re-Imaging First Principles, provides a meditation on Carl Schmitt’s observation that, “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”

Finally, N. T. Carlsbad rounds out the week, once again shining a light on a poorly-remembered piece of history in The Old New Left: Student Radicalism in the 1930s. Yes, even during the depths of the Great Depression, college students found the time to engage in Leftist agitation. And Cthulhu had not swum quite so far Left in those days.

The traditional doctrine of student rights was that the university acted in loco parentis, that the university was not a space for free expression, and that the research prerogatives and administrative duties of instructors and faculty put them on a privileged plane above students. The university was not some soapbox for whatever pie-in-the-sky ideals of social reconstruction were in vogue at the moment.

Now, of course, only a few benighted souls cling to these outmoded ideals.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Filed under It’s Degeneracy All the Way Down, Seriouslypleasedropit notices A Disturbing Decline in Catcall Quality.

Ana de Armas is simply sublime.

At The Orthosphere proper, Tom Bertonneau points out how much the Texas Atheist Mass Murderer actually looked like a jihadi.

J.M. Smith writes on The Power of the Eunuchs and the cursed fate of a civilazition who taps into that power.

Kristor suggests what The Razor Ockham *Should* Have Proposed and in the process briefly clarifies the one he actually did propose.

Jim Kalb explains What “Hate” and “Bigotry” Mean Today and the evolution of the terms. Apparently, a bigot used to be somebody who couldn’t have a polite dinner with people of opposing viewpoints. Now, it just means anybody you don’t want to have dinner with.

Matt Briggs reports on a lecture by Fr. Barron, who asked Do Nones Really Have No Religion? and answered with a five-point method of evangelization. He demonstrates No, The Size of the Universe Doe Not Prove God Doesn’t Exist. Sorry, atheists. And in this week’s installment of the Insanity & Doom Update XI, we get anti-science scientism, Hotep evangelization, wrath of God in form of jihad, and satanic rituals in the NFL.

Also at Briggs, Ianto Watt writes about The True Power Behind Russia & The Coming Church, Part I and the difference between autonomy and autocephaly.

Mark Richardson shares this disturbing DC comic excerpt depicting what happens When Wonder Woman goes SJW. Then he lists some of the best arguments for male-only spaces in Girls & Gridiron:

The loss of male spaces has had a significant effect on society. When you put boys together in schools, or sporting clubs, or cadets, then some of the distinctively male moral instincts begin to emerge, such as loyalty, courage, strength and honour. Society is impoverished when these are no longer generated within male spaces and so wither away.

Also from Richardson, a liberal feminist professor’s rant against masculinity provides A rich vein of insight into the liberal mind.

Bruce Charlton asks What is The Spiritual? and reminds us of Rudolf Steiner’s challenge to recognize the spiritual, somehow, and in some manner similar in societal impact to how modern physics has recognized the material.

William Wildblood writes on the reconciliation of Mysticism, Monism, and Theism:

Which is greater, to reject the self or to sanctify it? To exclude or to include the fruits of creation? I would say that the latter is not just better but truer to God’s intention for us. Why otherwise create us?

Dalrock reports, More bad news for marriage is baked in to the statistics presented here in handy charts. Following up on these statistics, there emerges a Marriage strike paradox where the men in their 30s who might want to get married are nonetheless financially unprepared.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Literati Squadristi has an worthy and in-depth look at Gatsby and the American Dream-Myth.

The English language may not be up to the task of describing Ana de Armas.

[D]espite his fabulous wealth, what does Gatsby do with it? Does he give to the needy, build homes for the homeless, does he do anything at all for the downtrodden of society? Does he even think about embracing the noblesse oblige that used to be common among the well-to-do?

No, of course not, and there’s nothing to say he does do any of that. By any reasonable standard, Gatsby is there to ‘get dough and a ho’. And before I hear anything like, “Well that’s not true!” Just stop and think about what the “voice of money” quote means. It’s not a throw-away line, but a clear indicator that Gatsby views Daisy as a status symbol, a stepping-stone to the top of the social pyramid he feels he’s owed by society at large.

A status not merited by work, or birth, but by simple narcissism.

Squadristi sees The Great Gastby as a prophecy—a particularly prescient one regarding our present day ruling elites.

Filed under: Get ‘Em While They’re Young… The Secret History of Cricket Magazine, the ‘New Yorker for Children’.

Richard Carroll introduces a Sixth Friend: Vachel Lindsay, Factory Windows are Always Broken.

Kaiter Enless checks in at Logos Club with an eye toward current events in The Great Hollywood Implosion & “Blaming The Victim”. I think one can blame the victim in many such cases, but obviously blame the perpetrator, and moreover the systematic silence about such behavior, far more.

And Enless offers the quite provocatively entitled note on The Inevitability of Technocentrism. I think he gets the framing of it exactly right: Technocentrist because anthropocentrist—a problem utterly untouched by merely banning technological progress.

From Chris Gale Harvard is a wasteland—where some “It’s okay to be white” flyers mysteriously showed up last week. Evil white supreeemists so close to sacred ground. He also has a shout out to me in Flee Babylon—for which I’m grateful. Donning Psychiatrist Hat, Gale looks at the knotty question of psychotropics and homicide: It is not the drugs fault? More on that here.

Also there: The Frontlash is a lie—there’s that word again. And it wouldn’t be Sunday without Gale’s Sunday Sonnet, courtesy of Hilaire Belloc.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, an inspiring look at The Obvious Secret of Education. Freehoff explains How Robert E. Lee Got His Citizenship Back. An analysis of Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony. A timeless essay from Gordon Wood: Finding the Real John Adams. Birzer outlines The Ciceronian Republic. And, in case you were wondering, What Does Mozart’s Music Sound Like on His Own Piano?

Finally, at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald examines the shards of NYC’s communist mayor de Blasio’s Broken Narrative. An interesting review of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century, by Robert W. Merry. And a Minnesota attorney looks the Clown World that Minneapolis has become.

This Week in the Outer Left

Certainly worthy of your attention, David Hines is back at Status 451 with another installment in the Radical Book Club series: What Righties Can Do. Hines is erudite as ever, and certainly worthy of your attention. But still, we think, he is too much beholden to the morality plays of power than the thing itself.

Some Righties argue that we don’t need to learn from Lefties, because Righties are just better. You’ve heard it, I’m sure: “Lefties are weak, Lefties are cowardly, Lefties are afraid of work.” But absolutely none of that is true. Lefties are tough. Lefties are brave. Lefties are smart. Lefties are the hardest workers you’ll ever see.

Well, yes and no. Certainly, Lefties were once brave. Then they took over, and everyone is falling over herself to ape lefty orthodoxy with the utmost fervor to gain diminishing moral status points. Most lefties today are weak tea, and thoroughly worthy of derision. The actual hard working ones are mostly dead, their fait accompli having been carried out under the aegis of FDR. The much vaunted—now sacralized—Civil Rights Movement? Amazing what one can accomplish when Harvard, Hollywood, the Media Establishment, and… oh… Ike, JFK, and LBJ all have your back. Bull Connor played for the Washington Generals, just like Joe McCarthy did.

The only area where grassroots Righties have had actual measurable success in the last couple of decades is gun rights. And there’s a reason for that…

… because gun rights is not meaningfully a right wing issue? Notice the presence of that fnord “rights”. Gives it away, most of the time. Homeschoolers “rights” have also advanced over the past 50 years, too, BTW. For pretty much the same reason. Hines needs a much more thorough rebuttal than I have time and space for here. (RF probably wouldn’t bother. Imperial Energy?) He gets much right—his analysis of left-wing activism is top shelf—but there remain critical points at which he misunderstands or misconstrues reactionary—i.e., actual right wing—thought. Crucially, he fails to see HLvM when it’s staring straight at him, muttering inchoate Cultural Marxist slogans. But at any rate Hines got the nod from The Committee with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his important work here.

The Baffler has a surprisingly frank piece up about the recent allegations against Kevin Spacey, the usual suspects. I admit to being more than a little surprised by this one, just check this out:

In the 20th C, topic of adult male homosexual grooming of boys considered humorous.

Well, this all goes to the heart of the ambiguity particular to what we used to call “the gay community,” a sense of some kind of tolerable ephebophilia, an under-thought and over-believed cliché about adolescent sexual awakening at the hands of older men, as if we were some kind of unbroken continuum of desire from Plato diddling his students on an olive-shaded hillside in Ancient Greece through Isherwood first glimpsing Don Bachardy on a California beach to coke-and-vodka Hollywood Hills bacchanals where wannabe models and actors are plied into getting naked in the hot tub before getting tossed out the back of the truck and ending up as twinks in the SoCal porn grinder. But while we rightly look back on the days of heterosexual grab-assery, Mad Men chasing their secretaries around the desk, with disdain and embarrassment (and lament it where it continues to rear its pocked, Weinstein-shaped head), there is a certain gay nostalgia for the bad old days, when closeted young men were initiated into the erotic community by the figure of the more experienced, more cultured older man.

Is… is that really a leftist publication frankly admitting that adult men raping children and adolescents is at the heart of faggotry? A surprising admission indeed.

And taking home the award in “disgusting bullshit” is Jacobin with Sayfullo Saipov’s miserable job. Words can scarcely express the anger I felt upon reading this piece. A Muslim runs people over in New York City, what could have possibly motivated such an act? Maybe he had a crappy job. The whole thing is an exercise in “we’re not saying he killed people because his job sucked, but we’re going to heavily imply it”. Absolutely disgusting. Lots of people have to do crappy thing to survive, that’s called life you leeches, but most people grit their teeth and bear it, because that’s the non-terrorist thing to do. Folks, just look at this:

If we had a large union movement that could improve the truckers’ working conditions, would Sayfullo Saipov have led an obscure but reasonably happy life? Would his eight victims have gone on with their lives?

We will never know.

We do know that Saipov worked in an industry designed to keep its employees dependent on their bosses. From the old-fashioned trucking companies to the start-ups like Uber, drivers earn less and work harder now than they did just forty years ago.

I can’t help but wonder if Saipov was more like the perpetrators of workplace violence—who have characterized this country since the Reagan presidency—than like an Islamist terrorist.

So… Islamic extremists don’t kill people, suboptimal working conditions do. Or something.

This Week… Elsewhere

Nullus Maximus has a Review of Libertarian Reaction—a collection of essays which may of some assistance to those of our readers—and we know there are many—still struggling with the profound disability of libertarianism.

Greg Cochran relates the strange case of the Skoptsys, whose practices will not be completely unfamiliar to moderns.

Giovanni Dannato is quite perceptive here: The Class Divide in the Alt Right. Not least in this:

It takes a lot of guts and a disagreeable nature for anyone to actively go against what the rest of society is telling them to do, to reject false received wisdom, and seek out truth. When you get a bunch of people like this in a room, you can’t expect any organization they form to run like a corporate department. It’s only natural that it’s a bumpy ride and knees will get scraped.

On the whole, Dannato is liking what he’s seeing as Dissident Right groups gather momentum in the right places. And this too: Some ideas why the University Industrial Complex hasn’t gone belly-up… Scarcity of Social Capital Sustains Institutions.

The backbone of a society is not jobs, an economy, or even armed men. The central structures of society are ladders and funnels leading to high quality social capital like lifelong friends, stable social roles, family, marriage, or even just the bare minimum status to be seen as eligible in one’s dating pool. In a hunter gatherer band or a traditional agrarian village there are rites of initiation to test for eligibility and connect cooperators with the social capital they need to flourish. The nation-state institutionalized these networks on a mass scale of millions. The industrial revolution did not just lead to the mass production of goods, but also of culture and social status.

An “assembly line of souls” Dannato calls it. Brilliantly. And what can be used for great good can also be turned toward great evil. He snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Zach Kraine proposes Red Neoreaction, which, tho’ laudable in many respects, puts an economic cart in front of the sovereign horse, failing to understand Neoreaction as a science principally of power and power structures.

Universal Dissenter ruminates, quite elegantly I think, On Mortal Sin and Deals with the Devil.

American Dad has an appreciation for the brilliance of the, apparently Sailerian term, “Frontlash”.

This was pretty interesting Blade Runner 2049, Eve, and the Garden of Eden, despite its reductionism and various sci-fi induced heresies.

Al Fin explains Sweden Needs Robots! Lots of Robots! Of course, the trouble for Sweden is that robots are extremely racist. Also another bearish look at China.

If “Thoughts and Prayers” won’t solve gun violence, the neither will “Candlelight vigils” solve Moslem violence. Also from Heartiste, astute thoughts on the subject of Daughter Guarding.

As well, a magnificent pictorial for the One Year Anniversary Of The Trumpening—aka., “The Biggest Fuck You in Human History”.

Thrasymachus writes candidly on the recent death of his father, up-close and personal, in An Oncologist Stops By……… Our deepest condolences. Also there: Who Can You Trust?

Roman Dmowski takes stock of Trump’s First Year.

Real Gary speculates on a possible, and intriguing, Calm Before The Storm.

Welp… that’s all folks. Many thanks to Based TWiR Staff regulars for invaluable contributions this week: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans def Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear, you guyz are the best. Don’t be degnerate. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/11/12) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week we were introduced to the #MakeApp. Heartiste has a run down. Taylor Swift still looks purdy good in the “after” pic though…

This week in American Greatness… VDH notices the increasingly Salem-like atmosphere as America bounces From One Frenzy to the Next. “Brown Scare” anyone?

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton has gotten pretty regular at kicking off our week around here with Sunday Thoughts. Always brief and well composed. This week it’s libertarians… on the therapist’s couch.

When Spandrell is good, he’s very very good. As he is here in: Biological Leninism. He sees the emergency of the modern state largely as a tradeoff of ingrained loyalty in exchange for liberal efficiency. In the long run, we’re all dead after all…

With all the scientific advances of the last centuries, the 18th and 19th century intellectuals were just brimming with excitement with all the things they could get done. All those plans of social engineering. Utopia on earth! It just seemed so feasible. And yet they could never pull it off through the political process. They just couldn’t pull it off. The politicians and bureaucrats just weren’t loyal enough. Constant factionalism and infighting made any real reform impossible.

Until Leninism, that is.

Spandrell notes that what we call “Leninism” was mostly instituted by Stalin. But by any name, the Soviet Union—i.e., it’s ruling class—managed to get things done. A lot of things. And pretty efficiently.

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn’t get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dredges of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

He sees Western progressivism as a variation on this script. Search “class struggle” and replace with “oppressed losers” of the gene pool… Biological Leninism. Putting the bought and paid for in charge, Lords of Misrule. Do RTWT! This earned the rare ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Neocolonial has a continuation of his study of Tasmania—Past and Present. He features generous quotations from Sir Charles du Cane, the Governor of Tasmania from 1869-74. He also notes:

Interestingly the rate of emigration to Tasmania dropped from about 2% of the local population a year to about 1% at the time of Federation, and from there to about 0.5% after the Second World War. The upshot of which is that we still retain a population that is 95% European origin, with all the advantages that confers.

Wink wink.

“Motherhood looks beautiful on you.” #YOFO

Alf has a new chapter out in The Orb of Covfefe: Part VI—An unexpected turn. Nigel Farage makes a significant appearance. And we are left yet again on the very edge of our squeaky desk chairs. Also there, some sharp social commentary: #metoo is societal meltdown. #MeToo is cultural insanity, of course. But since its victims are mostly those with actual power, and none of my friends have actual power, we might as well cheer it on… or at least grab some popcorn.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam has some (actual) generative anthropology: Declarative Imaginary.

Something completely somewhat different from Imperial Energy this week: A discourse On Truth. With Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris making appearances. And the STEEL-cameralist Manifesto continues with Part 6A: STEEL-Reaction. This may be part “6A”, but it serves as an excellent primer to Neoreactionary history and philosophy and earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee.

Sarah Perry is back with an interesting tour of (the little examined, and blithely unselfaware academic underbelly of) Folk Concepts. Folk concepts tend to be unscientific, and aside from driving some scientists made, this really ought not count against them.

Bartlett does not claim that folk concepts in botany are perfect or ideal. He merely argues that they are quite good for their purpose, including human linguistic and cognitive limitations, and that they remained more accurate and precise than the scientific state of the art for a long time.

Science, according to scientists, needs more precision than folk ideas can lend. But too much of a good thing is…

The technological success story is common in hard science domains that are more in contact with the material world than the human social world. They are rare, however, in psychology and other social sciences. It’s rare that a psychological theory has cashed out technologically (and no, advertising is not a particularly strong example). Rather, ideas in psychology and the social sciences have achieved success in social reality: narrative success. Some psychological ideas, often paired with a memorable study or experiment, have become popular “folk concepts.” They successfully reproduce themselves, not in technological application, but in conversation: non-specialists use them to describe, explain, and predict the behavior and emotions of other people (and ourselves).

Ooh that’s an ice cold shiv, Mrs. Perry. Freud remains hugely influential everywhere… except in psychology. Because “folk concepts”. She snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for her masterful work here. (Is that mistressful?)

Giovanni Dannato has another excellent bit of analysis this week: Lebanon Predicts the Future USA. Of course, we’ve been saying The USA Cannot Balkanize for quite a while around here. The case of Lebanon, perched as it were upon the tripod of Christians, Sunnis, and Shiites, provides yet another example.

Hezbollah gives us a model of what the neo-tribal state might look like as the power of nation-states recedes. They are the de facto government in southern Lebanon while seemingly content to operate within the framework of a formally recognized nation-state. They get to have their own territory while still participating in a larger economic zone. They effectively carry out their own foreign policy as they maintain their special relationship with Iran while still participating in the national politics. Hezbollah gets to enjoy all the privileges of being a nation without the strategic liabilities of nationhood. They get the best of all worlds.

Late in the week, Billy Pratt offers a window into recent social history: Looks Blue, Tastes Red: Marilyn Manson and “Antichrist Superstar” (1996).

Right Scholarship returns with a brief note on his translation project: Listen to what the Chancellor has to say!

Some authors at Current Affairs take issue with the Trolley Problem, and Oliver Traldi takes issue with them over at Jacobite. In Trolleyer-Than-Thou, Traldi picks apart their arguments.

“Spend your 20s actually changing the world.” #YOFO

One of the strangest ideas in the essay is that ethics is easy but that the trolley problem is intended—as part of some weird neoliberal conspiracy of philosophers—to make it seem difficult. But what the authors actually say is that almost everybody in an introductory ethics class will agree on the right course of action in the trolley problem, and their examples of “easy” questions are in fact questions on which there is substantial disagreement—things like: “Are there any justifiable reasons for the existence of borders? Does capitalism unfairly exploit workers?” (Pleonasms like “justifiable reasons” and “unfairly exploit” really piss me off.) Of course, ethicists do spend plenty of time debating questions like these, coming up with arguments and objections and so forth. But why would a college course on ethical theory spend time on easy questions in ethics? Do college courses on number theory spend time adding two and two together? What is Current Affairs trying to turn philosophy into?

Our authors, of course, want philosophers to stop trying to understand the world and instead to focus on changing it in their preferred fashions. Traldi earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his outstanding contribution here.

Nathan Duffy slips over to Jacobite as well to discuss The Asymmetric Meme Warfare Of “It’s Okay To Be White.” Duffy talks about meme warfare in general and one of the more brilliant memes in recent times.

And there it is: a massive coup in the meme wars. The only winning defense strategy available here would have been to ignore the provocation, but these sorts are pathological and can’t help themselves. And the meme warriors knew this. What distinguishes this meme campaign, and other successful ones like it, from those that fall flat, is the precise insight into the enemy’s psychology and the ability to exploit it.

Our friend, Alrenous offers some brief, but well aimed, thoughts on Rhetoric vs. Peasants.

Our other friend, Anatoly Karlin digs into some polling data on American attitudes toward Russia and finds… pretty much exactly what you would expect. Republicans are much more Russia friendly than Democrats, but not many people particularly like Putin personally.

Malcolm Pollack makes a case for Dangerous Game—very profitable game, if managed responsibly. Which is a lot easier to do if you’re making a profit.

By way of Isegoria… Good guys with guns saving lives; Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity, contrary to popular opinion; and more on the bicameral mind: Consciousness began when the gods stopped speaking.

Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield… The Moral Vision.

This Week in Jim Donald

An abbreviated week from Jim with only one post, but it is on an important subject for us all: how to lose weight. Definitly RTWT on this one, as there’s a recipe for gravy that made my mouth water a good bit.

Real men eat meat and fat, and salt the hell out of it.

…

Fat makes you full. Carbs make you hungry.

It is not calories in calories out that makes you fat. It is insulin that makes you fat, causes heart attacks, high blood pressure, etc. Type one diabetics don’t get fat except that they take insulin. Snacking, and especially snacking food containing carbs, keeps your insulin continually high, and causes you to become addicted to high insulin.

There is more to it than that, of course, but not as much more as you might think. Commenter Zach helpfully added another piece of the puzzle:

Do not underestimate the simple egg. Go bonkers.

Eat meat, fat, and eggs instead of carbs and you are well on your way to dropping the excess pounds. Add in lifting with some explosive cardio (sprinting is good) and you are going to be more physically capable than 99% of soy boys right there. For further guidance, see the wonderful site set up by Michael Goldstein, just eat meat.

This Week in Social Matter

The Myth series has moved (permanently I think) to Sunday at Social Matter. And it’s taken on a new name: “Myths for a New Tomorrow”. And… it’s taken on narration from the vocally talented (and Erse pronunciation expert) Marcus Wolfe—skills on display in this week’s Bricriu’s Feast And The War Of Words Of The Women Of Ulster.

For Monday, Luke Wesson returns with an excellent historical survey on The Role Of Asabiyyah And ‘Place’ In The Rise And Fall Of The Safavid Empire. He notes:

Long lost are the mechanisms that make these groups not only rule over ashes, but build empires. What is forgotten is that to build a successful order, a männerbund and founding myth are necessary, but not sufficient. All important nodes within the network must also be aware and recognize the use of the myth, as well as their place within the network.

The key to Savafid success was not a personality cult, which of necessity dies with the founder, but a cult built up around the founding myth:

The strength of this Order and its myth was tested by the deaths of three consecutive leaders. The deaths in combat did not even slow the movement down, as by this point the propaganda of the head of the Order had shifted to making him almost a living god. The key to this movement’s vitality was an inner circle of seven Sufi Safavids known as the ahl-I ikhtisas. Historian Vladimir Minorsky described the Safavids as the single party of a totalitarian state; these specific men were akin to Lenin’s Politburo. Asabiyyah was so strong in the qizilbash that prior to their ascension to power, other local warlords would take advantage of their fighting elan in a mercenary capacity.

These were the men who kept the dream alive when the Safavids were stuck with just a seven-year-old as the coming leader. The future Shah Ismail bode his time and wrote inspirational poems and letters to the qizilbash, only to emerge at the young age of 12 in 1499 to take his kingdom. He would be crowned in 1501 at 14. Any adult with a seven-year-old son knows that a seven-year-old is not writing inspirational letters to grown men to bring them to a fever pitch for killing and dying. Any adult knows that a twelve-year-old, even a physically mature twelve-year-old, is not the main physical reason for victory.

Ismail was a Schelling point.

And there’s much, much more. Excellent work again from Mr. Wesson. The Committee thanks him with the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast is Episode 44: Cycles In History—The Fourth Turning. Mesmerizing, if unfalsifiable, theory. Even more mesmerizing historical literacy from The Panel.

Finally, this week for Saturday Poetry & Prose, Richard Taylor is here for the second time in as many months with some newly minted verse: Therycion (The Last Spartan).

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this week, Porter contrasts the attitudes of two European nations in Paddies and Poles. Sadly, cuckoldry has been an Irish tradition since Joyce. And the Polish are making a good show of (populist) resistance. But there’s always another interested power:

The death bloc simply can not have a pro-European union on its border. The conflicts and contradictions become too obvious to paper over with customary threats and platitudes…

…That’s why Visegrad/Three Seas are going to experience ever increasing hostility unless and until they succumb…

…And when all those don’t work, tanks usually do—as Czechs and Hungarians can both bitterly attest.

Then, a little more on Ex Post Facto Morality, featuring AL Franken:

Unfortunately, not even the smarmiest jews can see how the future will indict yesterday’s behavior tomorrow. And thus the liberal trawling net that was intended to catch and drown conservatives, has instead brought this bug-eyed creature leering into the flashbulbs.

When that photo was taken, Franken probably imagined it would paint him positively as a virile sexually mischievous rake… But previous standards are irrelevant for previous behavior. We judge yesterday by the rules of today. That’s why Robert E. Lee became evil about a year ago. But tomorrow will have new mores again, so perhaps the general will reform his conduct going forward.

Finally, Porter channels the spirit of Gnon, arguing that Low Delusion is the Highest IQ. Simply put, it doesn’t matter how smart or capable you are if you deny reality in a maladaptive way…

From a raw capability standpoint, white America could have taken Mexico’s most choice real estate like a Baja Peninsula from a baby. Instead it is the once-paradise of California (and everywhere to its east) that is rapidly changing hands. Never has relative incompetence been so formidable.

The point has, of course, been made before, but The Committee were forced to bestow ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for the sheer force and style of his rhetoric.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X has pared back her output to two usually scheduled posts per week. Motherhood and wifing take precedence I presume. For Monday, she kicks off the week with Two Exciting Papers on African Genetics. It’s high on genetics geekery, of course, but Africa is a genetically interesting—i.e., diverse in the real sense of the term—continent.

And for Anthropology Friday™, a sociological study of Outlaw Biker Gangs proceeds apace with excerpts from No Angel by Jay Dobyns.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Opening the week at our sister publication Thermidor, Walter Devereux combs through the recently declassified files on Martin Luther King, Jr. Not all of the accusations leveled against Mr. King are well-supported, and those which are were known before the documents were released, but details are always valuable.

Nathan Duffy, THOT Patroller, examines contemporary sexual ethics in Sola Consensio and Elizabeth Bruenig. Ms. Bruening plays word games to disguise her embrace of liberated sexuality.

Yeah. Well… repentant ones.

Meanwhile, she coyly leaves herself room to claim she is still within the bounds of Christian sexual orthodoxy. She might, for instance, claim that the only times the conditions of both “consent” and “good for the other person” are ever met is in the context of marriage. But, in playing hide-the-ball with the specific, concrete solution of Christian marriage, and exchanging it for people’s own fallen guesstimates of what constitutes “good”, she effectively gives the culture a scorpion when it asked for (or at least needs) a fish. Desiring to engage in a hot topic of conversation among her lively Beltway interlocutors, and fearful that “lol go to (and get married in) church” would be seen as dogmatic, regressive or—heaven forbid—fundamentalist, she avoids these heinous accusations by not even mentioning the elephant in the room.

This week, the Europa Weekly podcast covers Faust and the Overmen.

Jake Bowyer says Bye-Bye, Bobby Mugabe. Bowyer revisits the fall of Rhodesia and Mugabeís achievements as president of Zimbabwe.

Mugabe has managed to maintain power for so long despite this egregious corruption simply by employing the oldest trick in post-colonial Africa: spewing anti-white invectives. In 2000, Mugabe attempted to purge all white farmers from Zimbabwe by directing thugs to beat them up or murder them. Mugabe claimed that his government was merely taking back what had been “stolen” by Europeans in the 19th century. Mugabe then doubled down by saying that his government would exonerate all those black Zimbabweans found guilty of murdering white farmers. While this proved disastrous for Zimbabwe’s economy (Mugabe’s government even had to ask some white farmers to return), other Afro-Marxist nations, most notably South Africa, have copied it with shocking alacrity.

Mugabe was apparently fond of travel: we wish him a speedy trip to the infernal reaches.

Alex Nicholson points out the obvious—and therefore scrupulously ignored in the West—reality in I For One Welcome Our Han Overlords.

China’s population is something like 1.3 billion, maybe as high as 1.5 billion. The nation is about 90% Han Chinese, with various other East Asian minorities, Tibetans and a smattering of Uighurs to fill out the remaining 10%. The Han themselves are hardly monolithic but they are an ethnic group of deep patriotism, and when provoked, menacing chauvinism. The Han are also a talented people—you can look up the HBD numbers—with a record of achievement stretching back into the bronze age. A good way to conceptualize the antiquity of the Chinese race is to imagine that Hellenic civilization survived in a populous and geographically dispersed form into the present day. That’s how old and rooted they are.

The Middle Kingdom is rising while the West goes under. Not our preferred state of affairs, but one with which we must grapple nonetheless. Nicholson earns a first (IIRC) ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Finally, Richard Carroll offers an introduction to the Eighth Sage of Greece, Sappho.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

American Dad has an interesting olio of Stuff I have learned blogging in the manosphere. We’ll charitably assume that his suspicion of anonymity is rooted entirely in the fact that he hasn’t become unemployable because some journalist made national news out of some unfashionable thing he might have said. If you’re a dad, you stay employed. It’s what you do.

Kristor reveals another of the Philosophical Skeleton Keys: The Logical & Ontological Priority of Wholes to Their Parts. Relatedly, he poses Marriage as an Ontological Real.

As wholes are ontologically prior to their parts, so is a marriage ontologically prior to the husband and wife who together constitute it.

Richard Cocks reviews The Gift—(by) Marcel Mauss and René Girard, which studies the ethics of reciprocity in giftgiving. Then he eviscerates materialism in The Sacred is Indispensable—An Argument for the Existence of God.

J. M. Smith writes about loyalty to the Logos, or Patriotic Cosmopolitanism. Then he asks, Is Peer Review Mostly Butt Sniffing? The very question implies a certain answer.

Bonald considers whether barbarism is superior to civilization when Civilization means saying no to the poor. Of course, the poor will always be with us, even if we tried to give them all the wealth of the world. They’d just spend it all on Newports and Schlitz Malt Liquor.

Matt Briggs reviews a book by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Short answer: Men speak and animals make noise. Then, reporting on the Military front, Army Recruits Bipolars, the Depressed, Druggies & Self-Mutilators. And of course, egalitarianism of sin, journal editors resigning over colonialism, journal articles being withdrawn over threats of violence, and the end of radio (for real this time), all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XII.

Also at Briggs, Ianto Watt continues his wonderfully informative new project, The True Power Behind Russia & The Coming Church, Part II.

Jim Kalb poignantly asks, Does Catholic political idealism make sense? In a word, well…

None of the proposals seem practically workable, and their progression suggests that the effort to propose Catholic solutions to social problems has steadily lost seriousness. People who want politics to be Catholic look at our public life, notice how anti-Catholic it has become, and either redefine Catholicism out of recognition or take refuge in fantasy.

Mark Richardson shares a speech delivered by the Inspirational Orbán, which is literally about making Europe and Hungary Great Again.

Bruce Charlton laments The insanity of Blake as co-opted by radical Leftist atheists!

William Wildblood ponders the geographical significance of Albion Set Apart.

Sometimes when I have travelled in certain parts of Britain I have felt this connection to the otherworld. This is particularly the case in the West Country and the Highlands of Scotland though I am not saying it is restricted to those places. That is just my experience. Nor am I saying it is restricted to Great Britain. Of course it’s not. Everywhere has places like that. But when we talk of Albion this is what we mean. A connection to higher dimensions of being within the country. And it is by aligning ourselves with the spirit behind these places that we can help to bring Albion back into the outer world. Reawaken the sleeping Arthur you might say.

Dalrock touches on some of Disney’s more effective brainwashing techniques in its movie Frozen, noting that for certain adult viewers Missing the point is hard work.

Donal Graeme responds to Dalrock, in a clarifying manner, by asking How Hard Is It To Miss The Point?

As an adult Mr. Wax is picking up the (apparent) deeper message of the story. Namely that “letting go” is a disaster of an idea. This deeper message is not surface level—it requires analysis. Maybe not a lot, but analysis nonetheless. And it also requires a certain level of critical viewing skill as well. Guess what kids don’t have? Yeah, that. The problem is that the toxic message is surface level. This is what children are picking up—especially through the music.

This Week in Arts & Letters

At City Journal, Anne Hendershott looks at how they’re Taking the Catholic Out of Catholic Universities—except for a handful of them. Mark Krikorian and Jason Richwine collaborate on Taking English Seriously. A fair skeptical review of former NPR exec and Clinton 96 campaign worker Ken Stern’s Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. Just enough love morally signal “good liberal” apparently. “Ideological tourism” indeed. And Claire Berlinski reports on Paris’ success with car-free pedestrian zones—they’re not too bad in NYC either, only too few.

Speaking of NYC, City Journal also has up a review of Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1918, which were the first 20 years after consolidation of the megacity.

On the home blog, Richard Carroll continues with Plato’s Dialogues: Gorgias. Also, from the (perhaps hypothetical) reader mailbag: Which Translation of The Analects Should I Read?

Chris Gale explains Why I left Auckland… degentrification of course. He alerts us to a worthy-sounding movie project The Fall—Live Kickstarter. Inspired, apparently by a few of our links last week, Gale notes how Babylon is the Thot of this day. Inspiring: Deus Vult. A couple of poems from Edward Taylor. And the obligatory Sunday Sonnet from the pen of Hilaire Belloc.

Over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless makes the case for Christopher Cantwell: Political Prisoner. whether you agree with Cantwell or not, that is what it is. As well from Enless, an original music composition: That Man Is Dangerous.

Finally at Imaginative Conservative, there’s a Richard Weaver essay: Up From Liberalism. A review of Crime and Punishment, which Goodman calls A Timeless Psychological Masterpiece. Brad Birzer on The Mysterious Origins of the Roman Republic. Related: The Sons of Remus and the Question of Western Identity.

Also there, analysis (and embedded media) of Robert Schumann’s Enigmatic Violin Concerto. Hey, well at least it wasn’t viola. Dean Abbott praises The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores—while supplies last of course. And Jacoby Sommer chronicles The Mystery of the Sea Peoples: A Warning for the West.

This Week in the Outer Left

A lot of interesting material this week in the Outer Left, and not so much outrage porn. All things considered, a pretty comfy week.

As per usual, The Baffler makes an appearance in the “sorta right, but for all the wrong reasons” column, explaining how education reform ate the Democratic party. Apparently, education reform of the charter schools variety is pretty popular among a particular set of techie and hedge fund billionaires who donate to the Democrats. The Baffler is having none of that, alleging that charter schools don’t really help kids, but mostly they just want to protect the teachers’ unions.

So now, as America ponders the mounting economic disequlibriums that gave rise to the Trump insurgency, concerned plutocrats can all agree on one key article of faith: what is holding back the poor and minority children who figure so prominently in the glossy brochures of charter school advocates is not the legacy of racist housing policy or mass incarceration or a tax system that hoovers up an ever growing share of income into the pockets of the wealthy, but schoolteachers and their unions.

So close, and yet… so far. Somewhat right, schooling gimmicks aren’t going to drastically change outcomes for populations that tend to have lower average IQs, but that’s because of, ya know, the lower average IQs. Official Social Matter policy, however, is that teacher unions must be treated as an armed outpost of the Cathedral and smashed accordingly.

Craig Hickman has much to be mad at in his Dark Sayings Among the Dead. As do we. He takes it with an elegant stride, as do we. And he has superb aesthetics.

Over at Jacobin they have an interview with Estonian director, Terje Toomistu, about her recent documentary, Soviet Hippies. As is their wont, Jacobin goes fishing for the particular political implications they want to find in everything, but come up with very little. RTWT for a peek into a subculture on the other side of the Iron Curtain that sounds like it was strictly superior to hippies in the West.

Ideologically speaking, there was certainly this idealization of the West as the “free world,” and to a lesser degree, an idealization of the free market…. because they associated the market with good music and good jeans. It wasn’t that they were in favor of capitalism per se, they just had an idealized notion of freedom of consumption.

This is the story of a blue most common, and most beloved. A blue that Thoreau thought needed to be Americanized, like Freedom fries. It’s the color of waves and stamps and too many paintings to count. It’s an accidental pigment, a happenstance color, and an antidote for heavy metal poisoning. Meet my sweetheart, Prussian blue.

This Week… Elsewhere

Reluctant Reactionary takes a look at Pre-Globalism of populism of William Jennings Bryan. Also there, a look behind the scenes at decaying white towns: A purpose beyond race and identity. The plight of Amerikaners has been ushered in by forces quite beyond the usual scapegoats suspects. This Committee really like this piece and gave it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

TUJ keeps abreast Nork developments: A North Korean Defector Indirectly Confirms a Coup is Possible. Imperial Energy has a (classic Menciian) response: Rulers Only Become Tyrants When They Do Not Have Enough Power.

AMK’s coincidence detector goes off yet again. Also there: a worthwhile critique on absolutism.

Over at Zeroth Position, an interesting case study of Liberty in Minecraft. And then Nullus Maximus goes there: Should Libertarians Support Ethnic Nationalism? But you always knew those libertarians were natzees deep down inside, didn’t you? But seriously, it’s a fine—if scrupulously libertarian—piece. The answer, of course, is that true believers in private property must defend the right of private owners to band together in culturally and ethnically homogeneous patches, and to employ a sheriff to squelch speech they don’t approve of. And build a church at their collective expense who will symbolically crown the absolute monarch whom they’ll hire to defend their patch with lethal (non-aggressive) violence. Joking aside, this article earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Capable discussion of the theism faultline in the Dissident Right over at Faith & Heritage: The Alt Right Won’t Win with Atheism. It’s probably not a stretch to say that America’s founders already tried that.

Zach Kraine has some pretty astute commentary on The liberal “socialist”, with which I cannot find much to disagree. He concludes, “This is liberalism’s winter, and let’s hope that spring delivers a new paradigm for Western Civilization.” A new paradigm other than savannah-dwelling barbarism, that is. May it be so!

Al Fin looks at Russian Demographics in How Long Does It Take to Grow a 20 Year Old in Russia? Russia’s current baby bust seems to be an artifact of the last one.

Unorthodoxy applauds the (political) wisdom of Eliminating SALT Deductions. As a New Jersey resident, all I can say is, “Ouch!” Also, Unorthodoxy reads David Brooks so.. You Don’t Have To.

Nishiki Prestige brings us what is cybernetics: a gentile introduction as his offering this week. It gets… trippy real fast, just the way we like it.

If you have ever wondered “what is a bugman?”, Meta-Nomad has you covered. I could not possibly do it justice with a mere exceprt, so RTWT.

That’s all we had time for, folks. Many thanks to you stopping by. As always, heartfelt gratitude for my based TWiR staff: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Aidan MacLear, and Hans def Fiedler, you guys are the best! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/11/19) appeared first on Social Matter.