This Week Lent began for Christians East & West. Personally, I’ve done a terrible job preparing any particular devotions, tho’ I have been pretty solid on avoiding public display of my mortifications. I am heartened this season especially by the number of agnostics and low-church Prots (who don’t typically observe “Lent”, not in the Bible, etc.) who’ve made fairly substantial spiritual commitments. Yes agnostics. Funny that. The Reactosphere is at least as busy a road into Rome as it is out of it. (Or Constantinople. Or both.)

Of course this was also the week of Parkland FL school shooting to become the latest political football. Because why let a good crisis go to waste and all that? I guess we were about due for one.

Over at American Greatness, Buskirk informs the largely normie-con base: Yes, The Ruling Class Hates You. You’d better hate them back, folks!

And VDH chimes in on Who’s Really Winning the North Korea Standoff? He thinks America just might be. Good news, I suppose.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton kicks off our week in the ‘Sphere with longer than usual (but not terribly long) Sunday Thoughts—Ode to the Western edition.

Alf is up early in the week with Baudet’s trials. Thierry Baudet is a Dutch politician bravely, and apparently successfully, promoting “Nexit”. Alf describes him as “the intellectual Geert Wilders”, which would be a big improvement on Wilders. Later in the week: Leftism brings balance to the force. Well, until they get dropped from helicopters at any rate. Also there: Answers for Imperial Energy.

Speaking of which… Imperial Energy looks back upon his first 100 posts—make that 101. And 102. The STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto continues with Part 10A: The STEEL Reset, in which he envisions a military interregnum more than an elected one.

Candide chimes in (after 2 1/2 years) with a cutting: Lev Navrozov explains Putin’s business policy.

Giovanni Dannato wonders: How Does the US Empire End? Our current editorial view is, of course, we hope it doesn’t. Tho’ we’d very much like to see a solider direction.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam discusses Regime Transplantation. Shockingly illiberal. We like that!

Today’s populism, which is primarily interested in order, stability and normalcy, and directs its resentments towards those who undermine all three, is a kind of faint image of what that might look like. Presumably, we have to imagine some deep crisis, with liberalism confronting problems it has no solution to and, perhaps, rivals it can no longer contend with—“we” are then prepared to be prepared to be the ones with solutions, the ones who can contend. A lot of people, at different levels of the social order, would have to have their minds very clear. And that’s really all we can do now—keep clarifying ou[r] minds.

Study power. Not noise:

The only reason to worry about being called a racist is because you can lose your job, get kicked off social media, be targeted by on and off-line mobs, and be permanently ostracized. And obviously the BLM people themselves have no means to do all that; the Left as a whole has not the means to do all that. Only corporations, foundations and other institutions (universities, media companies) have the power. So, the real question is, why does a corporation like Kellogg’s fund an organization like Black Lives Matter? And the answer is simple: anti-discrimination law.

Corporations want to make money. And the best way to make money today is to not paint a target on your back for the US Dept of Justice. So sacrifices to the Emperor it is. Helluva lot cheaper than being actually non-discriminatory. Laws of physics-n-all that. In this, Adam finds, a silver lining to our advantage: Someone must make the trains on time so to speak:

The elites who realize that things have gone too far and are in a position to do something about it will be aware of the discriminating guy—they will be heartened by his presence and know how to use him. (And he will know how to be used.) The discriminating guys will have acquired intimate knowledge of the enemy, and will be relieved to be able to deal with them ruthlessly. Entering the new regime, ensuring its transplantation with minimal disruption and immediately evident positive effects, will just be a continuation of what all these guys have been doing all along. They will be at the point where not only does talk of “non-discrimination” fill them with disgust, but where the stupidity of mass culture, mass propaganda, electoral politics, and elections themselves are becoming pretty clear.

I don’t know how much Adam has been reading our notes here, but he’s expressed our foundational strategy for Restoration pretty much to a Tee, which earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ this week.

Dividual chimes in with an Aha! Moment: Kind people vs. nice people. Kindness is a virtue. Niceness is not.

[T]here are thousand good reasons to behave with a minimal amount of polite respect with others, besides, you don’t even need a reason. People who are not afraid, will either have no reason (rather they think it is the other way around: no reason to be a jerk) or say one of the good ones like “that would be uncalled for”.

But when people say “oh I don’t want him/them to feel hurt” then it is very likely that they are actually afraid of a backlash and they simply rationalized their fear into fake kindness. I mean, okay, some people are genuinely fragile, small kids, elderly grandmas and suchlike. But these are the exceptions.

“Nice” comes from Middle English meaning “stupid” or “simple”. It deserves expungement from our vocabulary. Tho’ confess to saying “nice guy” about guys who are “good guys” more often than I should. If I’ve done that to you, I apologize. You’re not a nice guy. You’re a “solid guy”, or a “great guy”, but definitely not stupid. Dividual wonders is the polite language kindness (a strength, a virtue) or niceness (fear-stricken panic)…

[W]e really need to think about this: when white men want to be politically correct and avoid saying horribly hurtful offensive things, is it out of kindness or out of fear masked up as kindness, i.e. niceness? I mean, could there be a backlash to be afraid of?

Well, ask James Watson. Ask Lawrence Summers. Ask anyone who received a Twitterstorm with the usual threats and suchlike. For some reason hardly anyone who feels hit by what they perceive as a, say, sexist, comment, actually gets hurt in the sense of crying in a corner.

I believe the high-minded reactionary—one disposed to an Imperial Mindset—will instinctively communicate with kindness. At least at first. The worthy man bears no hatred for any human phenotype group. The truth, in most cases (e.g., “your phenotype group has disproportionately poor outcomes, terribly sorry”), can be spoken with kindness, which will, under our current regime, avail us nothing should we be found out. Dividuals earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his insights here.

Contingent, Not Arbitrary’s search continues with Phenomenology Versus Epistemology, With a Dash Of Ontology.

Our favorite Russian, Anatoly Karlin, looks at national IQ and mental sports performance. He is largely going over work by Emil Kirkegaard here, but it’s worthwhile. Long story short: performance on mental sports, such as Scrabble and various competitive computer games, correlates well with average national IQ, especially once you adjust for population size. Almost as if IQ was measuring a real thing.

Anatoly also looks at LDS and finds that Mormon fertility might be eugenic. I highly recommend clicking through to get a look at that graph; it will almost certainly shock you just how eugenic Mormon fertility looks to be.

Jacobite editor J. Arthur Bloom explains How to Destroy the Alt-Right. Bloom chronicles how the FBI and ADL have had inside access to right-wing movements in the U.S. for decades through the means of willing informants. Bloom suspects the Alt-Right will be neutralized in the same fashion. Humorous opener…

A good rule of thumb for hard-right, Nazi or Nazi-adjacent groups is that one-third of their members are petty criminals, one-third are gay, and one-third are informants.

Probably not far from the truth… give or take a little.

Malcolm Pollack has a few Chronicles of the Cold War. The one that supposed to have ended in 1991.

By way of Isegoria… Gwern’s insights, meta and otherwise, into on The Operations Evaluation Group—military operations that is; and Eye for an Eye; “Blue (Prog) Church” versus Digital Insurgency; and a 1969 interview with Frank Herbert.

Finally this week’s epistle at CWNY is all about Christian Leaven.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim opened the week with a special romantic Valentine’s Day reflection on punching women. That’s pretty provocative, so I’ll let Jim explain himself.

Many women deserve to be punched, and do not get punched, but punching a woman indicates loss of control and weakness. You should avoid getting into fights except where you can bring overwhelming supremacy to bear, and you should always be able to bring overwhelming supremacy to bear on a woman. If you have overwhelming supremacy, you can pin the opponent, and either put a painful submission hold on them, or whack him part of the body where it is safe to do so without likelihood of causing injury.

So cool your jets, guys, Jim is opposed to punching women. However, as is his usual practice, Jim is speaking to a broader issue beyond the quotidian point about punching women.

Jesus said “resist not evil”, but we cannot take this literally, because if evil smells that you are a soft target, evil will be on to you like a dingo on a baby. We have to interpret the sermon on the mount as Jesus anticipating crucifixion, and pointing at our inability to attain salvation by personal virtue in a fallen world. Literal application of the Sermon on the Mount would be suicidal in a fallen world. We apply it by always being willing to do what it takes to find the path that does not involve terrible and destructive combat. But it takes two to make peace, only one to make war, and to find the peaceful path requires the ability to dissuade your opponent from the path of combat.

White knights are evil men—a man who white knights another man’s woman is a man who will spread hateful lies about his friend behind his friend’s back to sow discord and anger between friends. A man who white knights another man’s woman also engages in every kind of depraved and cowardly evil. When you punch a woman, no matter how much she deserves it, you show weakness and loss of frame, and weakness attracts evil. Deal with a misbehaving woman with firmness and strength, you will have no problems. Deal with her from weakness, white knights will materialize like flies on rotting meat.

Jordan Peterson never tires of pointing out that in the Sermon on the Mount, “meekness” means something like “has the ability to use his sword, but keeps it sheathed”, and emphatically does not mean “weakness”. Jim concurs. In order for civilization to exist in this fallen world, there must be broad accord between men as to the distribution of women. Punching a woman, no matter how much she may deserve it, provides an excuse for white knight men to defect from the civilizational equilibrium. A civilized man will almost inevitably have occasion to correct and discipline his wife or daughter, but punching as a substitute for proper discipline undermines the civilizational bargain.

Next, Jim takes issue with Scott Alexander’s grab-bag of predictions for five more years. Some quick context: Scott Alexander’s famed Slate Star Codex blog, which I know has introduced more than one individual to NRx, celebrated its five year anniversary recently, and in addition to his usual predictions for the year, Scott went further out on a limb to make a set of predictions for the next five years. Jim is, quite rightly, critical of some of the predictions made. Scott’s predictions are half things-will-stay-the-course items that you’d expect, but the other half are evidence that he continues to lurch into Intellectual Yet Idiot territory.

To finish out the week, Jim discusses losing weight. He is now eighty-eight pounds below his maximum, and based on the last time I saw him, looks to be in fighting trim. He attributes this weight loss to three factors: testosterone, low carb paleo eating, and regular fasting. If you have a few extra pounds around the belly that your lifting regimen hasn’t eliminated (you are lifting, aren’t you?), then it behooves you to at least give the low carb eating and regular fasting a try. You probably do need testosterone too, but we will leave that to the conscience of the individual churchgoer… for now. And you are going to church too, right?

This Week in Social Matter

John Tucker makes his debut at Social Matter with strategies for Rolling Back Progress In Bermuda. Bermuda, it turns out, just repealed same-sex marriage—hitherto thought unpossible. Tucker looks underneath the machinery that made that reversal possible. And hopefully permanent. Twenty square miles of sanity is better than zero square miles. The Committee were pleased to bestow Tucker an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his unique and valuable insights.

Special guest James LaFond joins the Myth of the 20th Century gang for Episode 57: LA Riots—Racial Powderkeg.

And Poet Laureate of The Restoration, E. Antony Gray closes out the week with some fresh and compact verse: The Silver Day.

The Boss Man assures me that we have much in store for next week… which is, by now, this week. So check it out at the front page of Social Matter.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran offers a pithy and effective thought experiment: The hijab of ignorance. He thinks they’ve found an answer to the Plague of Frogs—turns out it’s the herpetologists themselves.

Evolutionist X has a pretty massive science piece on Testosterone metabolization, autism, male brain, and female identity, with interesting and often counter-intuitive results.

She dabbles in a bit of social psychology here: Apparently Most People Live in A Strange Time Warp Where Neither Past nor Future Actually Exist.

People are especially bad at projecting current trends into the future. In a conversation with a liberal friend, he dismissed the idea that there could be any problems with demographic trends or immigration with, “That won’t happen for a hundred years. I’ll be dead then. I don’t care.”

An anthropologist working with the Bushmen noticed that they had to walk a long way each day between the watering hole, where the only water was, and the nut trees, where the food was. “Why don’t you just plant a nut tree near the watering hole?” asked the anthropologist.

“Why bother?” replied a Bushman. “By the time the tree was grown, I’d be dead.”

I assume this was a bit tongue-in-cheek: Your Own, Personal, Immigrant. I wouldn’t know Depeche Mode from apple pie ala mode.

And Anthropology Friday gives way to Homeschooling Corner this week as Mrs. X discusses The Well-Trained Mind, by Susan Bauer and Jessie Wise.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Stephen Paul Foster starts the week off at our sister publication Thermidor with Liberalism’s Enemies Within. Focusing more on the formerly-crypto-communists at the helm of the Left, Foster describes how these conspirators are laying the groundwork for a permanent one-party dictatorship.

Translated into practical-political terms this means that racists are here for the duration, enemies, you might say, of a permanent nature. What punishment might be in store for them is a matter of grim speculation. Obama’s metaphor of the “cure”, clearly, is a euphemism that barely conceals the growing hostility and resentment for the heritage and traditions of white European America and the determination to erase them.

Next up Walter Devereux examines another “conservative wunderkind,” in editor P. T. Carlo’s phrase, Reihan Salam: Decolonizer of the American Right. Devereux considers Salam a more mentally adroit that Carlo’s bete noir Ross Douthat, but no more philosophically so.

Europa Weekly ascends to higher dimensions with 4D Horseshoe Theory.

Jake Bowyer this week gives us Peaceful Islam Exists (Just Somewhere Else). Bowyer reviews the history of Islam and its hostility toward infidels with special focus on a commonly forgotten Muslim state: Indonesia. Bowyer is not impressed by their “new-and-improved” brand of Islam.

Muslims around the world have no reason to secularize or to downplay their religion. Multiculturalism asks nothing of them because Godless societies do not believe in anything greater than Mammon, Eros, and the delicate flavor of lotuses. If the joys of state secularism and globohomo capitalism cannot keep “peaceful, tolerant” Indonesia from going full jihad, then what hope is there for anywhere else?

Finally, Doug Smythe offers some advice on Moving Towards a Post-Liberal Theory of Right. Smythe discusses this post-Liberal theory and the place of a “theory of right” in the social order.

[P]ost-Liberalism is a spiritual movement, and cannot possibly be realized as anything else. After all, it doesn’t have vast provinces anywhere or an army, and won’t ever be in a position to unless it can talk the propertied and governing classes into getting with the programme—so that kind of narrows it down.

Well, we don’t quite count the propertied and governing classes as a loss just yet, but point taken. An obstacle we face is the idea that

… man is a machine programmed for physical self-preservation by a play of unconscious biological processes and the non-thinking physical environment that takes place prior to, and beneath the threshold of, conscious awareness; that Man, pace Jeremy Bentham, has been placed under the jurisdiction of two Sovereign masters, pain and pleasure, and that the real motive force of all action is the satisfaction of physical appetite and the fear of physical punishment, with the moderating role of the soul dismissed as a ridiculous pre-scientific myth and the intellect accordingly deprecated as the mere slave of the passions where every other age, race, and civilization of Man said the exact opposite.

Men… with stomachs, but men without chests. Against this, the New Reaction must formulate a rigorous philosophy of “right”, Not “muh rights”, but of actual right.

The strong rule the weak—but the wise rule strong and weak alike. If no authentic spiritual authority is available then, we have said already, various hucksters and con-men rush in to take its place; human Nature abhors a spiritual vacuum.

Which is precisely what did happen in American History. Under the reign of liberalism…

The unity of the spiritual and the political that results from, e.g., the effort to give systematic rational order to the collected civil laws of a State and ground them in the law of Nature (as Blackstone did for the laws of England) makes the State into something that has the character of a Republic and a theocracy at once.

Authentic spiritual authority then is not merely desirable, but absolutely essential for a post-liberal (anti-liberal) regime—a Restoration if you will.

The true purpose and calling of the post-Liberal Right is to exercise its innate spiritual authority and produce and then propagate the philosophy of Right that will comprise the rational soul of the next great philosophical State in the West in the post-Liberal period.

More than that, Smythe does a lot of heavy-philosophical lifting in pursuit of the goal himself. This took home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

David Grant

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero has a meditation upon The Temptation of the Absolute.

According to Kristor, Libertarianism Presupposes the Absence of Any Common Cult.

In a society with a strong cult, individuals are more apparent, more meaningful, their idiosyncratic differences glorified by contrast with their basic agreements, and magnified in virtue of their basic agreements. In a society coordinated under the aegis of a strong cult, individuals then are more at liberty than they could have been in a disordered libertarian society.

Then he exhorts us with Happy Valentine’s Day! Now Get Over Yourself & On to a Holy Lent. Last, he considers The Autophagy of Falsehood, where false premises seem to always end up being self-contradictory.

J. M. Smith writes about The “Social Construction” Swindle, an academic postmodernist ploy to deconstruct society. Also, in Oh For a Far Horizon he roundly criticizes the new Obama portrait. I mean: what’s not to hate about it?

In Writing about Literature Revisited, Thomas F. Bertonneau gives us another peek, perhaps representative of students at large, into the writing and comprehension talents of his students when they are assigned a Coleridge poem to analyze.

Bonald asks, does Asian IQ present a new Yellow Peril? Also: Did you really think the Enlightenment would spare you, science?

Science is offensive to the Enlightenment for the same reason that religion is, because both are based on the conviction that mankind must conform itself to an external truth, which contradicts Enlightenment’s promise of total liberation. Even when science promises mastery of nature, she first demands the mind submit itself with full abasement to reality.

James Kalb writes about the dangers of Reducing religion to politics and making the former subordinate when it should subsume the latter. Then he asks, Is America a revolutionary ideological state? Of course it is. Why else would it have its own eponymous heresy?

Matt Briggs considers whether we are reaching The Limits Of Science. Case in point: Science Says It’s Better To Be Single. Also, racist statistics, haunted furniture, antisocial taste-buds, and low-t jazz fans, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXII.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale brings us not only a Sunday Sonnet this week, but, in a rare break from form, one for Saturday as well. Sadly, being red-pilled on women lends a sour taste to many of the old masters of poetry— I’d stick with Donne and Milton over Sydney and Spenser. He also writes Against Ugliness; beauty is its own argument.

Katherine McNamara, who’s apparently famous

Richard Carroll has a bone to pick with Burnham’s reading of Dante, which was once endorsed by Moldbug—a good excuse to go back and read Carroll’s own Commentary on Monarchia if you’re at all interested in, well… monarchy.

Activity picked up over at The Logos Club. Kaiter Enless has up an audiobook: Machinik Horryr (Parts I & II). And a two-part podcast on Geo-Strategy of Iran: Understanding Modern Iran; and here’s part II.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, a truly “Timeless Essay” on the Humanities as a Way of Knowing. Berlioz’s Roman Carnival. Angelo Codevilla on What U.S. Foreign Service Officers Should Know. An introduction to the underappreciated master poet Wallace Stevens. The age-old question: Is Rachmaninoff’s Music Too Schmaltzy?—Hint: no. And Joseph Pearce on Why Wardrobes Are for Grown-Ups Too

Finally this week in City Journal, Kay Hymowitz on the meta pathology of Family-Breakdown Denialists. Theodore Dalrymple on the Moral Hazard of teaching kids how to administer naloxone. Based Heather Mac Donald finds liberal bloviators Looking Away from Urban Crime, when it suits the Narrative™. And Dalrymple again on State Islam in France.

This Week in the Outer Left

A pretty boring week among the outer left, but The Baffler came through with another profile in absurdity, proclaiming temporary autonomous taco zones. The spur for this writing came from the recent phenomenon of people gathering to hold “haha, only serious” vigils at the closure of local fast food locations. You might think that I am going to use this as a springboard to mock this phenomenon, but rather I wish to mock the writer of this piece, Luke Cragg. Like so many of his leftist compatriots, he cannot let a thing go by without making it political. These vigils are absurd, and nothing more need be said, unless you’re a leftist.

Situationist luminary Guy Debord would probably be unsurprised by the present moment. In response to the hyper media-saturated unreality he saw being created by capitalism, he popularized the technique of détournement (“rerouting,” “hijacking”), in which the cultural expressions of capitalism are diverted to new, subversive uses….

Freckled girl with cigarette.

In the 1980s, anarchist writer Hakim Bey coined the term “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ) to describe the emancipatory project of capturing the freedom, creativity, and energy of popular uprisings without replicating the inevitable betrayals and violence that such revolutions provoke….

The mock vigils outside of shuttered fast food joints are patently ridiculous. In and of themselves, they will start no revolutions, they offer no obvious threat to the contemporary order. What they do is offer a glimmer of a synthesis of détournement and temporary autonomous zones that I am going to call “folk détournement.”

These mummeries have taken the idea of “brand loyalty” to its absurd conclusion—mourning the loss of a fast food outpost in an asphalt wasteland as one would mourn a beloved family member. They are a gleeful nose-thumbing at the overwrought solemnity of post-9/11 patriokitsch.

Rather than lurking in shadows as advocated by Bey, this kind of folk détournement understands that we’re already in the panopticon so we might as well invite the local news crew to the party. Instead of making futile attempts to negate mass media, it makes itself superficially irresistible to broadcasters. It carves out TAZs right in the sclerotic core of consumerism: fast food parking lots.

Folk détournement replaces the antagonism of its Situationist predecessor with the deliberately overly-agreeable “yes, and…” of comic improv. Folk détournement understands that people love curly fries and Baja Blast and they hate being shamed for loving those things. By not having any goals to fall short of, folk détournement cannot fail. As with folk magic and folk music, the practice of folk détournement will precede any theory. We make the path by dancing.

I am amused by people holding candlelight vigils for the closure of a fast food joint, because it is inherently ludicrous. I find it pathetic almost beyond belief that there are people, such as Luke Cragg, who cannot decide how to feel about such things without consulting the religious authority of Guy Debord and Hakim Bey, without making a curiosity into some kind of political act. How broken and shallow these people are that their whole lives revolve around the religion of politics. Get a life, man.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Steven Pinker, who is making the media rounds promoting his new book, argues in an interview with the Weekly Standard that identity politics is undermining reason and the Enlightenment.

Jordan Peterson interviews Dr. Iain McGilchrist on the structure of the brain and order, freedom, God, and being.

Heterodox Academy discusses whether it’s ever appropriate to use the n-word in an academic setting. It also outlines three strategies for navigating moral disagreement, which serve as decent guidelines for red-pilling normies.

Over at Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao responds to Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life and tells us to make our own rules. Very brave.

In response to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board’s ruling that James Damore’s Google manifesto constituted sexual harassment, Quillette muses on the power dynamics of the modern SJW-infested West:

Social justice advocates have created a portrayal of themselves as being outside the flow of power; everyone else is exerting power tor being oppressed by it, while they are simply observing it, and any power they do exert is selfless and unoppressive. Oppression is class-based, we’ve been conditioned to think, or based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. We therefore don’t see the power and oppression exerted by social justice advocates, because it’s based on none of those things; it’s based on values.

In a rather comical week at EconLog, Scott Sumner argues that non-whites are more libertarian than whites because they support more international trade, urban housing, and (drum roll, please) immigration. Also at EconLog, David Henderson discusses an immigration proposal which would allow ordinary Americans to enslave sponsor immigrant visas and command hire foreigners to walk their dogs, mow their lawns, and pick their cotton. Personally, I don’t see a better way to turn people against immigrants than making them responsible for them.

Burgess McGill

This Week… Elsewhere

Over at Faith & Heritage, Adam Grey looks at a future coming too fast for most people to see it coming: The City of God and the Sack of Rome, Redux. There is little doubt that the Anglo Empire is crumbling. We hope it doesn’t end in a final sacking. We endeavor to prevent it. Also there ruminations upon the excellent (IMO) series: The Man in the High Castle—spoilers warning. Grey thinks the show’s producers are going for: All you normal people are Nazis. But as Er ist wieder da poignantly illustrated, that gambit can pretty quickly turn into all you Nazis are normal people.

PA has some surprisingly well-composed on thoughts on religion, what it is, and especially what it ain’t: Apostasy. Also a lovely Hungarian video rejected by the EU for the crime “a propaganda film for a White and Christian Europe”. The Hungarians must be doing something right.

Sunshine Thiry finds another practical application for a ketogenic diet: Migraine mitigation.

Unorthodoxy quotes a very worthy tweet from Hueless Joe. I won’t spoil it for ye. We have big plans for Joe.

Al Fin discovers Jordan Peterson (perhaps not recently but this is the first I remember Al mentioning him), whose lectures he describes as: Like Taking Psychedelic Drugs Without the Drugs? Also: more on Falcon Heavy and what we hope it portends.

Zach Kraine has a vision of Our potential future. I’m not convinced it will go down that way (tho’ it could be far worse), but he makes an interesting enough case.

Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui forges ahead with his task of squaring the circle in his series “Libertarianism and Statecraft”: Part II: Property and Liability.

Although the word ‘statecraft’ directly refers to the state, there is no philosophical reason for why statecraft would disappear if there were no state. When we consider the implications of governance on the free market, the abolition of the state would lead to the largest amount of statecraft possible. To explain why this is so, it is necessary to formulate a theory of property.

I think the word “state” means something to Mr. Qui that I don’t quite comprehend. Perhaps a particularly statey sorta state… or something. Left unanswered thus far, however, is how does a world full of non-statey statecrafted states (which are, apparently, “good”), e.g., micro-ancap monarchies, prevent the evolution of a more centralized statey state (which are apparently “bad”) without a strong centralized statey state to begin with? To say nothing of whether centralized statey sorts of states may, for completely contingent reasons, simply be a more adaptively beneficial solution to coordination problems in the current year. If Mother Nature happens to favor highly centralized statey states, then all the libertarian love in the world for small non-statey states (plus $5) will buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. We look forward to the next installment next week (which psst is already up).

Ace is consistently living up to his New Year’s Resolution for weekly posting. This week’s kernel of wisdom: “When the night has come and the land is dark…”. Appreciate someone, he suggests, in writing (actual pen & paper with no auto-correct). You may just end up being as big a blessing to him as he was to you.

Arnold Kling finds an excellent rule for life: Give up a lot to be at a funeral. It’s the least you can do.

Knight of Númenor continues his Developing High Culture series, focusing on Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.

Lorenzo outdoes himself here in a bird’s-eye view of The dissident right and the race thing. But first the “social constructivist” thing…

Gratuitous pic of Ana de Armas

For those interested in historical patterns, the first great success of the women’s movement (women’s suffrage) was, in the US, followed by their next great success, Prohibition, the war against the (mostly male) demon drink (see an amusing essay here). In our time, the massive expansion in opportunities for women in recent decades (essentially, since the pill [pdf]) has been followed by the campaign against the (very male) demon domination (and who, unlike the demon drink, also has a race and a sexuality). As was the case with the war against the demon drink, the “cure” for the demon domination is proving to be much worse than the actual extent of the problem in Western societies.

Needless to say, analysing all human and social ills in terms of malign will and bad feelings is toxic to open debate, or even elementary civility.

Lorenzo parts company on the “race thing” which he believes pervades the Dissident Right. Not so sure it does. I doubt I’m any more “racist” than G. K. Chesterton. And a good deal less so than Woodrow Wilson.

From the C18th onwards, race was basically constructed within Western thought as a meta-ethnicity. The analytical trouble with that is, doing that takes us further away from actual causal factors. To the extent that white means anything analytically useful it means of European origin: referring to civilisational and ethnic traits, not racial ones. And, even there, it often makes a major difference which Europeans. To put it another way, even if the US was “lily-white”, it would be unavoidably diverse, and unavoidably ethnically diverse.

But wait! That’s NRx’s line!! And besides, Argentina is a good deal “whiter” than the US. And no one wants to be Argentina. In spite of the fact that he’s not well characterized the “Dissident Right”, Lorenzo’s article is a worth a read. He does real social science. And that remains rare. For now. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Meta-Nomad continues his film review series, TSPDT4. He has a lot to say about Battleship Potemkin and prefers Buster Keaton to Charlie Chaplin, as well he should.

Meta-Nomad also resumed his ongoing work of original fiction about a man and his intelligent, telepathic canine companion with Chem and Narax #2: Exit.

The idle Progville citizens began their vote. A chaos ensued complete with shouting, debating, crying, whining, screaming, kicking, more whining, gossip and the tiniest flickers of rationale, each and every voter attempting to hold-their-own opinion amongst the blithering of the crowd. Few had reason nor thought as to why they thought the way they did, the majority, like the stock markets of the old times, merely based their vote on whether or not it would favour them in relation to popularity; and thus, from afar one could watch as the Mexican-wave of opinion rolled throughout, one side barking ‘No!’ and the others a ‘Yes!’, the pendulum had been cast and now all there was to do was wait.

‘Seriously, Chem, look for a fucking exit!’

So… that’s all we had time fer. As always my crack staff of Official TWiR Minions were of inestimable worth this week: Burgess McGill, Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear, many thanks for all your hard work. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/02/18) appeared first on Social Matter.

If you were playing a drinking game where you had to take a shot every time some media pundit, or strangely articulate supposedly traumatized high schooler called for Moar Gun Control™… well, you’d have died from alcohol poisoning by now.

This past Sunday, our Monsignor, at the behest of our (more orthodox than average) Bishop, announced a website that all parishioners could go to read about the “bi-partisan legislation affecting DREAMers”. Bleckh! I think it’s time to think about the TLM a little bit more full-time. And besides, it’s a liturgical abuse to read announcements just before the final blessing…

25 year-old Russian Mixed-Doubles curler Anastasia Bryzgalova.

Over at American Affairs Journal, Adrian Vermeule has the first review (I’ve seen) of Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed entitled: Integration from Within. A very… woke (shall we say)… accounting, praising Deneen for his diagnosis, and gently shivving him for his prescription. Enlightenment rationalism is a terrible, terrible drug… “My name is Patrick Deneen… and I’m an Enlightenment Liberal”… “Hello, Patrick!”

Oh… and the US Men’s Curling Team Won Gold at the Olympics. So take that, you blimey Canucks!

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton kicks off the week with timely Sunday Thoughts—Japanese Have Pretty Good Aesthetics Edition.

Lulach the Simpler has a splendid essay, The Grim Joust: a Reply… to Ravikant—who advises that politics is quite literally The Mind-killer. Lulach basically agrees…

In a well-ordered polity, the average man would no more have an opinion about politics than he does about the content of dental amalgam.

Compared to politics…

Literally anything else we might spend our time doing would be time better spent: arts, sciences, coding, business or even intelligent conversation. There is just one problem, though, with the idea that we should spend our time and intellect on arts, science, coding, business, and conversation, and just forget about politics.

We can’t.

You may not be interested in politics—indeed you shouldn’t be—but that doesn’t stop it being interested in you. It’s short, but very good, and the Committee deigned to give it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

From the Dutch Outpost, Alfred Woenselaer links to Russell Brand’s interview with Jordan B. Peterson, whom he calls YouTube prophet. He also explains the success of leftism with Lying works. Cheating is only a successful strategy until eucivic rule-keepers coordinate to punish the cheaters.

Spandrell, who is always worth your time, has Tales from the patriarchy—Ninja Wives, Three Kingdoms Era Edition. His conclusion is as hilarious as it is plausible:

Sima Yi was a huge prick, unlike the mild gentle man he is in this [made for Chinese] TV show. In previous renditions he’s written more accurately. But hey, he founded a dynasty, he was the towering general and statesman of the most tumultuous and interesting era in 5000 years of China. Of course he was a prick.

Greatness usually comes at a price. And it’s generally worth it.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam discusses The Grammar of Technology. I confess to it being slightly above my philosophical pay-grade to understand very well. But he lays out his motives clearly:

[M]y goal is to develop a way of thinking that would really be a way of speaking and writing that would dismantle and reassemble the utterances in which it participates and would do so in the process of participating; while at the same time just talking. This implies the possibility of people who would want to train themselves and each other in this manner of discourse. Why? Because it would make it possible to apply more focused and concentrated force upon all the weak points of the reigning ontology and construct a solid one out of its ruins. Central to this project is an account of technology, and ultimately contemporary technology, in terms of originary grammar.

It’s the “originary grammar” bit that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

Imperial Energy has up the next installment of The STEEL-cameralist Manifesto: 10B The STEEL Reset: (Nuclear) Absolutism, Imperium in Imperio and (the) War (Against the Minotaur).

Contingent, Not Arbitrary claims Christianity Is The Schelling Point: “Restoring true Christianity is both necessary and sufficient for restoring civilization.” Necessary, yes. Sufficient? Not sure.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, looks at the ADL’s eleven statements of anti-Semitism so he can quantify the JQ and finds that… he is an anti-Semite. Welcome to the club, Anatoly! RTWT for yourself and see how much of an anti-Semite you are.

The editors of Jacobite deliver a declaration of principle with This Ain’t Open for Discussion, along with commentary on the state of modern media.

We’re not here to be the voice of anything. We’re interested in what happens in the ever-growing space where voice is irrelevant. Jacobite‘s purpose is to observe currents that are easy to miss because their existence doesnít rely on being announced through an activist’s megaphone. You’re invited to come along for the ride.

We, of course, beg to differ with our friends on the supposed proliferation in the number of sovereign states on the planet. Wishful thinking on their part we fear. There may have been only 50 sovereign states in 1945, but today there are only three: Russia, China, and The International Community.

Speaking of easily missed events, Niccolo Soldo details The Visegrad Group’s Exit from Liberal Democracy. Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia are each challenging the European Union and the liberal consensus and banding together in mutual support.

Malcolm Pollack notices Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Those Who Can See have something brewing. But what?

By way of Isegoria… Douthat on Two sweeping moral visions of guns, which don’t have much in common. Parallels between Dune and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Bryan Caplan taking up the basically correct position on higher education qua credentialing. And more of Caplan’s Case Against Education. Speaking of wasteful credentialing, I think this was pretty much non-ironic…

Modest proposal: replace college w/gym. Equal signaling value Conscientiousness/conformity/discounting; cheaper; objective; health benefits; progressive not regressive; real RCT transfer to IQ, not hollow; positive externality for looks; increasingly useful in newer environments.

— gwern (@gwern) February 26, 2018

Finally this week in CWNY, he compares The Folly of God to the “wisdom” of man.

This Week in Jim Donald

There have been any number of hot takes regarding the Parkland school shooting, ranging from the Official Narrative to bizarre conspiracy theories and everything in between. Jim, naturally, cuts through all the nonsense and gets right to the heart of the issue: school shot up because murdering white kids is OK. The individual in this case (unlike the MSM, it is TWiR policy to not glorify mass murderers by repeating their names) exhibited violent and sociopathic tendencies. He was a pathetic loser angry at his own life, at Being itself, at God, and he started listening to demons. It is a basic function of a sane society to identify losers who might act out their hatred of God and see that they are dealt with before they boil over. However, our clown world is so backwards that any white male who attempts to serve God’s will is harshly condemned, and any blacks or hispanics who start listening to demons are coddled and protected.

The Florida school shootings did not happen for lack of gun control. They happened because of refusal to enforce law and maintain order when blacks and hispanics attack white children.

…

Blacks attack kids to take lunch money and such, without much regard for race, religion, ethnicity or social class. They are dangerous to everyone near them, ingroup or outgroup. Education and culture has little effect. Harvard blacks almost as dangerous as ghetto blacks. Blacks are more responsive to effective law enforcement than whites, thus black misbehavior is always a symptom of refusal to enforce the law on blacks.

But in Mexico, killings are generally human sacrifices of outgroup members to the old gods. People say they are drug cartel related, but this is politically correct bullshit. War is good for business only if someone else is paying for it. War is bad for business if you are paying for it. If a black drug gang commits mass murder, it is because they are doing it for business reasons but are incompetent at business. If a Mexican drug cartel in Mexico commits mass murder, they are murdering members of a near outgroup because they hear the voices of the Old Gods. The black drug gang commits murders because too stupid to find a peaceful resolution of a business dispute. The Mexican drug gang commits mass murders because listening to demons.

And now the voices of old gods have been heard in Florida.

While we here at TWiR appreciate the usual conservative solutions that maybe teachers should be armed or public schools should be abolished to keep children safe, these solutions are ultimately cop-outs. So long as it is OK, and even high status, to murder white children, then losers who hear demons’ voices will murder white children to try grabbing the status they have convinced themselves they deserve.

Continuing on a theme, Jim responds to a piece by Victor Davis Hanson complaining about, but neglecting to name, the ruling underclass. Hanson’s own article is worth reading itself, so don’t hesitate to give it a click. While Hanson doesn’t name, and likely doesn’t fully understand the phenomenon, it is a solid on-the-ground description of anarcho-tyranny in action.

If the territories of two tribes overlap, one must necessarily rule, one must necessarily be ruled. It is that, or war.

He [Hanson] is ruled.

Humans are naturally fissiparous. During the filming of the “Planet of the Apes”, extras costumed as orangutans formed a tribe, extras costumed as chimps formed another tribe, and extras costumed as gorillas formed yet another a tribe.

But with improved communications and mobility, we don’t get physical separation between tribes. Which is a problem, because if tribal territories overlap, the natural outcome is that one tribe rules, and the other is ruled.

And because white males ruling has been deemed unacceptable, the inevitable outcome is that whites get ruled. Actually war and slow genocide, rather than rule, is the natural outcome, but if we are lucky, careful, and clever, we can avoid that and merely get one tribe ruling and one tribe ruled, though this arrangement is always fragile, unstable, and apt to tip into genocide, slow or swift, unless carefully managed from above.

Jim considers the traditional Peace of Westphalia solution, but finds it unworkable, so where does that leave us?

The concept of equality under the law should be inexpressible and incomprehensible. That we can speak such nonsense means that there is something wrong with our words, which fail to cut reality at the joints. Different tribes naturally have different laws. A member of tribe A in the microterritory of tribe A will of course be subject to different rules than a member of tribe B in the microterritory of tribe B. Equality should only be in that if a member of tribe A is in the microterritory of tribe B, he is under disabilities that are sometimes roughly similar to the disabilities of a member of tribe B in the microterritory of tribe A, though by no means exactly the same.

That sounds so reasonable, there is no way the current rulers would implement it. Guess we’ll just have to become worthy, accept power, and do it ourselves.

This Week in Social Matter

Hank Oslo proves to be an artist of the pen as well as the podcast, as he kicks off our week here with a crisp essay: Memes, Schelling Points, And The Right. He took the time to be brief.

If you hang out on firearms forums or gun stores for a few hours, you will hear someone say “I lost my guns in a tragic boating accident.” The expression is older than the internet can reliably ascertain, dating at least to the 1990s. The gist of the meaning is that should unknown parties come inquiring about your inventory of firearms, the best thing to do is to claim to no longer be in possession of them, possibly hide them, and under no circumstances subject them to evaluation/registration/confiscation. There is an entire supporting memeplex, in notable works of fiction and nonfiction, that details the reasoning behind this, most prominently the idea of registration and disarmament as a precursor to genocide.

How does this meme reify in coordinated action?

RTWT to find out. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Titus Cincinnatus returns to the pages of Social Matter with an explanation Why The Ethnie Is Important. He doesn’t conceive of ethnie principally as genetic. Nor is it simply cuisine…

Ethnicities center around “ethnic markers,” such as language, religion, morals, traditions and customs, patterns of daily living, and so forth. Often, ethnicity is delineated through the use of various “ideological” indicators (e.g. common mythology, common descent from an eponymous ancestor), the acceptance of which helps to determine group membership. While phenotype can be included in the set of markers, it is not usually a primary determinant and is most often not what principally defines an ethnie.

Perhaps ethnie is to society as DNA is to organism.

Those concerned with true social stability must work toward the establishment of rational ethnostructures that will facilitate, rather than hinder, collective solidarity. This implies a rejection of abstract civic nationalism and the “multicultural” state, as well as rejection of the sort of immigration policies and structural power-distributing institutions which would encourage multiculturalism.

An empire will, of course, be multicultural. But that doesn’t mean that one culture can’t be overwhelmingly dominant over others. On the contrary, one absolutely must be. Anyway, Cincinnatus has much more there. A highly recommended read and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ winner.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century is the most affecting one to date: Episode 58: Powerbrokers—Child Abuse & Betrayal—The Franklin Scandal, cementing its place as the premier podcast on the Dissident Right. It’s exceedingly rare for a podcast to take home an award (something we believe only Landry ever achieved). but the quality research behind and importance of this topic compelled The Committee to award it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Rounding out the week in Saturday’s Poetry and Prose, we have an economical bit of verse from Arthur Powell: Suburbia.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Over at West Hunter, Gregory Cochran is unimpressed with the anthropological claim that Neanderthals were #JustLikeUs because they could doodle on cave walls. He also marvels at Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill’s inability to acknowledge genetic links between character and talent.

Evolutionist X continues the series Your own, Personal, Immigrant (pt 2). It’s a full strength fisking of this piece of trash. Argued supremely well. And an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Next up, news to me: Logan Paul and the Algorithms of Outrage. Paul was apparently the guy that filmed the (long dead IIRc) victim of an apparent suicide and posted it to youtube. And then things wen t backsop.

Finally, for Anthropology Friday, Mrs. X cracks open The Scatalogic Rites of All Nations (1891), by John Bourke. Sadly, Bourke only achieved the rank of captain in the US Army. Had he achieved the rank of general, he might have been… ♪ ♫ the very a model of of a modern major-general/who understood the customs, the uric and scatalogical ♬.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Editor P. T. Carlo kicks off a busy week at Thermidor with a revival of the podcast: An Absurd Man.

N. T. Carlsbad pens a reply to Fritz Pendleton’s Social Matter commentary on the nature of government: The Prince, The People, and Fritz Pendleton in Between. As in their earlier exchange over Napoleon, Pendleton and Carlsbad don’t see eye to eye on many matters of theory. In particular, Carlsbad answers Pendleton’s arguments for the necessity of a parliament.

Representative government does not quelch passions, it inflames them. This is only unless the representation consists merely of summoning by writ pre-existing, well-defined corporate interests—and we can’t have that because those are signs of “scheming elites” or whatever. Else our beautiful national parliament becomes a hive of partyism and faction, of unstable coalitions and high-energy popular politics. Even if suffrage is limited, the spectacle will invite radical tendencies and opportunistic insiders willing to broaden the suffrage.

Richard Carroll offers more commentary on the Classics with Sallust and the Value of Classical History. As per the title, Carroll makes a strong case for reading these very old books with a particular focus on the works of Sallust.

All three of these aspects of ancient history tie together well in the work of Sallust, a historian of the late Roman Republic. He completed two fairly short works, Catiline’s Conspiracy and The Jugurthine War, and left a third, simply titled Histories, unfinished at his death. Focusing on the first two, both provide us with the basics of how these events unfolded, Sallust’s opinions of the moral lessons to draw from them, and how he thought they demonstrated the state of Roman society in his own day and how it got to that condition.

The Committee were pleased to bestow an b☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ upon Carroll’s work here.

From the land down under, Mark H. Christensen (not to be confused with our own Mark Christensen) makes his Thermidor debut with Trump, Jesus, and the Evangelicals, an analysis of exactly those things. Christensen isn’t terribly precise, but he argues that Trump’s bullheadedness is the key to his support among Evangelicals.

Europa Weekly this week: Hwhyte Hwhyte Huwest.

Andrej Sykora returns with directions
Towards a More Elite Populism. Sykora very carefully distinguishes between populism as a principle and populism as a tool.

Populism, when conceived of as an ideology, is always negative, but when conceived of as a tool, as a means, it is not necessarily so. It can be the given justification for the formation of a new elite to come. Perhaps we cannot afford to be too elitist when in truth, nobody of our persuasion actually forms part of the realpolitik elite. Let that come later.

Jake Bowyer summarizes the furor surrounding Marion Marechal-Le Pen’s speech at CPAC as a great Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth. The brouhaha revealed—once again—how American conservatism is not truly of the Right (nor, for that matter, Le Pen’s), but Bowyer hopes Le Pen’s speech might pull things just a little bit more in that direction.

Batting around this week, N. T. Carlsbad has a second piece Speaking Freely of Freely Speaking Sedition. Carlsbad reminds us that “freedom of speech” and “freedom of association” are not principles of the Right and reviews some more history to drive the point home.

To a continental conservative, these fixations appear very strange. “Freedom of association” reeks of bourgeois civil society and Lockean freeholder ethics. To some extent, the term is simply employed as a euphemism for the right to discriminate in hiring, recruiting, etc., but it still frames the subject around the idea that limitations of contractual obligations on basis of promoting interests of certain social classes are intrinsically illegitimate (which excludes all possibility of privileges and immunities, and thus presupposes equality before the law).

Needless to say, we completely agree here and thank Carlsbad for saying it so elegantly. The Committee thanks him with
☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Tho’ with a stern warning not to let it go to his head.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Empathologism reviews the “Christian” movie: “Same Kind of Different as Me”. He thought it was better than 99% of “Christian” movies, until he couldn’t stand it anymore and stopped watching. Three guesses and the first two don’t count…

Over at Faith & Heritage, Craft Beer Is for White People. Which is why you should drink it.

Kristor compares The Two Sorts of Boys. And he explains why Inequality Before the Law is Natural & Proper to Man.

Inequality is a fact of social life. Hierarchy of authority is a fact of social life. These facts then ought to be recognized in law. We ought not to be equal before the law. The law rather should reckon our real differences, and take account of them.

Then, it is apparent in The Scandalous Fascination of Latter Day Public Life in the West that politics after June 2016 have made Kristor optimistic. Also, he explores the relationship between Self-Hatred & Radical Autonomy.

Matt Briggs asks, skeptically, Did A Man Really Breastfeed A Baby? Despite sensational headlines, probably not. Then he urges, Don’t Grant Science More Jurisdiction than It Deserves.

There’s no need of meek acceptance of science’s superior ground. Science does not hold the hill. It is down in the valley boasting big. Christians need to recognize this. When a scientist starts waving his slide rule around in a menacing manner, the Christian should say “What is wrong with you people?”

Next he looks at a study suggesting Scientists Prove There Is Life After Death? It turns out the scientists cheated, as the subjects weren’t actually dead. Finally, the health benefits of cuckoldry, god-fearing atheists, and transexual dating discrimination, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXIII.

Also at Briggs’ place, the indefatigable Ianto Watt compares the Deep State to what he calls The Deepest State, which is a metaphor for the governance within Hell.

We are close to understanding the Deep State. Why? Because now we can understand The Deepest State. The word Deep has many meanings. But the one we must not forget is the physical meaning. Where would the Deepest State be located? Just short of 4,000 miles away from you, and me. And everyone on Earth. 4,000 miles straight down. Right at the center of the Earth. Which, if you are a geocentric believer, would put you at the absolute center of the universe. Which, of course, is where the Errant One wishes to be. At the center of everything. At the center of you.

Mark Richardson discusses The Harvard letter announcing a prohibition on students joining single-sex organizations. The 800 pound gorilla is, in Richardson’s terms, the “autonomy contradiction”, embedded within the reasoning of Harvard’s administration:

They want to get rid of single sex clubs as part of the larger liberal ideal of abolishing sex distinctions. On the other hand, they preach a mantra of autonomous choice, by which students should be allowed to choose according to their own subjective preferences.

And commenting on the idea of a “female” future, he posits that The future is….? Perhaps it is an opportunity for traditionalists to set themselves apart from the modern world.

From Nice and Charlie Hebdo to Vegas and Parkland, Dalrock chronicles The changing “thoughts and prayers” narrative from the left.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale has another poetry double-feature this week, with both Sunday and Saturday Sonnets. Reading Early Modern English untransliterated is good exercise for the brain. He also observes a Dying Industry: Newspapers. Which is probably a good thing. As the Cathedral moves online, it faces stiffer competition.

The Imaginative Conservative republishes, without commentary, an excerpt from Viktor Orban’s recent State of the Union address as Christianity: The Last Hope for Europe, which is inspirational to say the least. And autists, rejoice. George Stanciu has a helpful Primer on emotions, with special attention to Aristotle: you are (and feel) what you do. And David Middleton published an introduction to the contemporary poetry of Catherine Brosman. It’s worth a look; she writes as if she were one of us.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless offers up an amusing little look at how to completely miss the point (and bastardize your national heritage), in Fergie, the Anthem, and the Sensual Ego-Tripping of Celebrity. And Gio Pennacchietti fires off the nostalgia synapses of all his Millenial readers in Bedrooms of the Nation: A Brief Ontology of Youth Spaces, in which he marks the degeneration from the real-world “citadel of the self” of the 90’s, to the virtual manifestation of the same in Current Year. Definitely worth a read, even if you’re older. It never hurts to know what the kids are thinking.

Finally at City Journal, Claire Berlinsky warns of The Architectural Sacking of Paris. And Theodore Dalrymple Foresees Zuma’s Fall.

This Week in the Outer Left

Our coverage of the left continues to be diminished without The Awl to pick on, but other sites seem to be doing what they can to step up. Surprisingly, the outer left sites still hadn’t responded to the Florida shooting before the TWiR week cut-off. Perhaps next week. Perhaps it will not be a dreary monotony of stale gun control rhetoric. Perhaps.

Cyborg_nomade explores anarchist transcendental ontology in contrast to that of neoabsolutism. This is definitely a RTWT circumstance, and maybe more than once too. Deeply fascinating.

Jacobin had a profile of Shapurji Saklatvala, a Communist who was elected to the British Parliament with the full endorsement of the Labour Party in 1922. It’s a fairly interesting, if slavishly groveling, biography, but is of interest primarily for showing just how little things change.

Saklatvala did not fit the mold of a revolutionary in parliament. Like Tony Benn after him, he came from a wealthy family and attended an exclusive private school in Bombay. Living in a large house overlooking Parliament Hill Fields in Hampstead, he had little or no direct experience of working-class life or industrial militancy….

Being born into wealth and privilege, however, didn’t stop Saklatvala identifying with the historic mission and creative potential of the oppressed.

A wealthy, upper-middle to upper class minority who identifies with the underclass out of a seething hatred for the broad middle class? No, surely not! One is instantly reminded of the upper-middle class frizzy-haired mulattoes who cause so much trouble on college campuses today. Spandrell was right again, and no matter what transformations they make, with the left it’s bioleninism all the way down.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Media outlets continue to be gamed by our favorite illiberally classically liberal academics: analyzing Jordan Peterson, praising Steven Pinker’s reasoning, applauding Jonathan Haidt’s open-mindedness, and (a few weeks ago) covering Xavier Marquez’s arguments against democracy. People are listening. Intellect, character, and a dash of good ol’ white male charisma work.

Quillette asks whether democracy is doomed. The answer…may surprise you. Also there, a discussion of Portland State students’ recent protest of James Damore. (Remember, kids: Left-wing activism works because Lefties punch down.) Teresa Giménez Barbat makes a case for more evidence-based gender policy. Enjoy tumbling down that rabbit hole, Teresa…

EconLog examines Polands new Holocaust libel law and the trickiness of referring to “the people” as a single organism. Also at EconLog, David Henderson revisits William F. Buckley’s assessment of Donald Trump’s character. Scott Sumner asks, do defecits matter? Sumner also admits that European countries probably aren’t happier because of their welfare state but because of their “high trust” societies. What causes that whole high trust thing again?

Over at Medium, former BBC4 reporter and producer David Fuller has produced a high quality and relatively sympathetic documentary on Jordan B. Peterson: “A Glitch in the Matrix”—Jordan Peterson, the Intellectual Dark Web & the Mainstream Media.

Finally, Venkatesh Rao pens Ribbonfarm’s 2018 annual letter.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA has Just Some Ideas about White Nationalism. Few of them very positive. Not that he doesn’t sympathize. As do we. He’s looking for the “winning combination”. We think we have it. Tune in, in about 10-20 years.

AMK rambles a bit, but interestingly so, in what he is learning Today in Weimerica.

By way of Heartiste: “Exegeses are never sexy. Quips are sexy.” He also channels a bit of Lawrence Auster.

Insula Qui’s Sisyphean efforts continues in his treatise On Libertarianism and Statecraft, Part III: Governance, State, and Defense.

The logic supporting the division of labor still applies even where libertarians might not want it to apply.

Indeed.

Having a society means that there will be certain people who specialize in the management of property. There will be people whose job is to ensure that the burden of holding property is reduced.

Absolutely!

Even when there is no state, these people constitute a government.

B-b-but… what exactly are these “property management specialists” governing?

One must not conflate the government with the state.

Oops…

The state is an entity that monopolizes force, while government is simply the managerial entity in control of property. The state claims partial ownership over property, which gives it the ability to tax and legislate. It is difficult to conceive of a government that lacks a state, but this is simply due to a limited imagination.

Well, I can imagine a lot. But something that’s much easier for me to imagine is a Property Management Firm (government) deciding that having a monopoly on force is good for business—it’s own as well as it’s “subscribers”. Not least because it gives one “Firm” a competitive advantage over another. Which might be why it keeps happening. At any rate, Mr. Qui has much more there. We criticize only because we care.

Also at Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus takes up a formalist view and explains the hows and whys to Eliminate Government Shutdowns, whilst providing a detailed history of the phenomenon.

Ace checks in with “I don’t have to look at you to see it in your eyes…”. Wherein he has a pithy bit of advice that I believe has aged pretty well. (The thunder of which I don’t wish to steal.)

Al Fin takes note of the dissonance: You Say Wakanda; I See Zimbabwe. He also considers quite a few of the blows that have landed on the progressive elite over the past couple years.

Unorthodoxy points out a very sure way to establish a preference crypto-currencies: Put progs in charge of banking.

Meta-Nomad continues his film review series with TSPDT5 and also has a more involved entry on left and right accelerationism.

Well a slightly more abbreviated issue than usual. Only ~5000 words and ~110 links. We hope that can keep you busy for a while. Our Based TWiR Staff is Best Staff; Egon Maistre, Burgess McGill, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear: Many thanks!! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/02/25) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well… this week, NYT released its second “The Interpreter” episode: National Identity Is Made Up. While technically true, what they don’t say is far more interesting. The series is proving to be a cannula drilled into the stomach of the Cathedral. You can learn a lot from watching its digestive processes.

Over at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla explains The Benedict Predicament.

Economics is not the dividing line between left and right. Nor, in fact, is live-and-let-live.

Over on Medium (which is a pretty bad medium), Nassim N. Taleb—the ‘N’ stands for No BS—addresses The Controversy around Skin in the Game, with his inimitable forthrightness… and overdue bitch-slaps for journalists and journalism. Now I keep saying Medium is terrible, but it is getting less terrible, I think.

VDH plumbs The Labyrinth of Oppressions for American Greatness. Also from VDH: The Real Russian Disaster, the multitude of ways Putin has peeled USG like a boiled peanut. Hardly a disaster at all, we think.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Spandrell is herald of the good news: China doesn’t care about your opinion. He takes us behind the scenes (and Chinese psychology) as Xi Jinping becomes Dictator for Life (or at least one presumes “good behavior”).

Figured this would be a good spot for an Asian girl pic.

It should be no surprise that this drives Western politicians crazy. China is now fairly rich, it’s buying property and high-tech companies across the world. China has made Southeast Asia it’s diplomatic backyard, made a strong relationship with Russia against the US. It’s practically vassalized South Korea, and eaten up so much of Taiwan economy that it’s independence-minded government is limited to approving gaymarriage and bringing Muslim immigrants in order to beg for some Western sympathy.

All while internally the party’s rule is tighter than ever. The standard narrative of Western democracy is that a developing economy creates a middle class, who then agitates for political rights. That may or may not be an accurate representation of the European experience, the revolutions of 1848 and all that. But it most certainly doesn’t apply today. Today we have the internet. The internet creates monopolies by network effects. And governments just can’t help themselves from merging with these monopolies. In the West, Google, Twitter, Facebook, are all arms of the cathedral. They censor, control and gather data for it. In China, Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, are all arms of the Communist Party. The only difference is that in China, they are formally so.

Communist… with Chinese Characteristics. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week in Generative Anthropology… a whole lot of generative anthropology: First Words.

Free Northerner returns after a sizeable hiatus with an in-depth examination of The Young Man’s Dire Problem, and the ways aggregate statistic might not be capturing it.

Imperial Energy has A (Belated) Response to Gray Enlightenment on the Concept of a Crisis and the Nature of Political Judgment. This regards the extent to which Trump’s election represents a “defeat” of the Cathedral. And the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto soliders on to Part 10C: The System and Structure of STEEL.

At first, I thought Land Translator was a parody account. After reading this Exposition on Landian Accelerationism, that does not seem to be the case. Tho’ the “Verbiage be my God” thing seems also to be rather unironic. (HT: AMK.)

Arthur Richard Harrison checks in with thoughts On The Trad Blogosphere and the Prodigal Son, and one reason to actually not be mad at Pope Francis.

Sarah Perry admits to Luxuriating in Privacy. Atomised freedom does present certain advantages… for the select few who are not likely to be ruined by them.

Privacy is a component of well-being, a form of wealth, a luxury even, and the gains from supplying more privacy to a larger number of people must be weighed alongside alleged losses of social capital from atomization. What looks like a loneliness epidemic to a certain kind of observer may look like a golden age of privacy to another. Just as there are mental states that are only possible in crowds or with others, there are mental states that are only possible in privacy.

Alf wonders who can save…. A dying society.

Malcolm Pollack invokes James Burnham on South Africa’s latest “Land reform”.

By way of Isegoria… by way of Frank Herbert, A fountain pen is not a screwdriver. You can’t have Denmark without Danes. Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity. And Taleb: Belief is an instrument to do things.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, Reclaiming the Lost Children of Europe. An indictment of classical liberalism.

This Week in Jim Donald

A lighter week from Jim this time around, with only a single entry on Trumpian protectionism. As context here, Trump announced significant tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from our libertarian friends. Jim, however, reminds us of some relevant points.

Gratuitous pic of Ana de Armas would look good right about here.

Trump, in accordance with his campaign promises to the rust belt and flyover country, has just slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum.

If you look at the Nucor product catalog, you can see that the USA has ceded high end steel production to foreigners.

Ceding high end steel production to foreigners is militarily unwise.

Ceding the high end is also likely to have externalities. A network of skills unravels. If company A does something high tech, it cultivates employees, customers, and suppliers that make it substantially easier and cheaper for company B to do something high tech, and this benefit is not captured by company A, unless, as in South Korea during the dictatorship, the state gives company A substantial monopolistic privileges, something difficult to do in a democracy, particularly a democracy where covetousness is deemed the highest virtue and high status.

And if company A stops doing something high tech causing other companies to stop doing high tech stuff – you have the rust belt, which is the network of high skilled white males unravelling. You have smart white men deskilling, taking opiates, and committing suicide.

Two points here.

First, describing the Rust Belt as “the network of high skilled white males unraveling” is basically perfect.

Second, the standard libertarian analysis that free trade tends to, on net, deliver quality goods at lower prices is generally correct. It is also autistic. There are values beyond the economic which may be worth trading a certain amount of economic efficiency to achieve. Even the most ardent free traders, and I know because I am one, agrees that protectionist policies benefit some group of people in the country. If the costs of the steel and aluminum tariffs are borne by the Brahmin and their Dalit and Helot foot soldiers, and the benefits accrue to the Vaisya and white working class, then it constitutes a Good Thing. It matters not one whit to me if a policy harms the Helots particularly, because they are foreign invaders who ought not be here and so count for virtually nothing in the economic calculus.

This Week in Social Matter

Arthur Gordian kicks off our week around here with a controversial, but nuanced, essay on Second Amendment Passivism. Second Amendment rights are safe for normies. Normies believe in abstract “rights”. We don’t.

Collective action is an exercise of real power in the modern world. Individual action is the mark of a loser, a fool, or a romantic. Traditional guns rights activism, prepping, or gun collecting will not actually do anything to enhance a person’s survival. The winning bet is not to outshoot the police, but to outlast the Left’s bloody-minded hate. By not making oneself a target, one ensures a better chance at surviving a Red Terror, and the best way to avoid becoming a target is to practice passivism.

I don’t take Gordian to mean that we should not own guns and know how to use them. Nor do I even take him to mean that we should not be NRA members, which confers many advantages in quite a few jurisdiction. The NRA has some power, and no doubt we share enemies with them. But the NRA is not in charge. Our enemies are in charge. So, until we can defeat our enemies in one quick decisive blow, we’re better off not being a pest (at least in real life). Gordian earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his solid work here.

Henry Olson returns on Thursday with an explainer: Why Does The Left Hate The NRA?

[I]f leftists are so concerned about violence, then how can we explain their utter indifference to every Muslim terror attack in Europe? European bombings or truck attacks happen with roughly the same frequency as U.S. mass shootings, and involve similar numbers of victims. And invariably, the Left’s reactions are to screech about one, and ignore the other. In London mayor Sadiq Khan’s immortal words, terrorism is just “part and parcel of living in a big city.” It is certainly de rigueur that no progressive person would ever believe that these attacks should lead to thoughts about changing the EU’s immigration policy. On the other hand, every U.S. shooting necessitates an immediate overhaul of all existing gun laws, and if you disagree, the blood of the innocents will stain your soul.

So… the left is not really concerned about violence. If they actually were, that’d be totally racist! No. It’s something else. But I don’t want to steal Olson’s thunder. An under-appreciated article, we think, which earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast is Episode 59: Malcolm X—Separation Or Death.

Malcolm X was once asked by a white journalist what he thought of the efforts of Martin Luther King to help blacks get the right to sit anywhere on the bus. He responded, “Having an opportunity to ride on the front, back, or middle of someone else’s bus doesn’t dignify you. When you have your own bus—then you have dignity.”

Sadly, his vision of “civil rights” did not please the white masters as much as MLK’s.

And for Saturday Poetry & Prose, newcomer Sutton Coldfield poses A Riddle (For A., Wherever I May Find Him). It remains, as of this writing, unsolved.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Over at West Hunter, Gregory Cochran endorses a study that concludes men know more general knowledge than women. Cochran also discusses what makes a race and argues that European is a legitimate racial group. He closes out the week by kicking around the idea of reviewing movies that should’ve been made.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with How to Minimize “Emotional Labor” and “Mental Load”: A Guide for Frazzled Women. It kicks off with a debunking of an, apparently annoying article, but quickly looks at the science behind the state of relationships in Thee Current Year™. This snagged
an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. It turns out couples who share household chores are more likely to divorce….

Theory: well-adjusted people who love each other are happy to do what it takes to keep the household running and don’t waste time passive-aggressively trying to convince their spouse that he’s a bad person for not reading her mind.

Speaking of which, just as only Nixon could go to China (and just as only James T. Kirk could go to… whatever the Klingon homeworld is called), so too only Mrs. X could say this.

Men don't actually "mansplain." This a myth. The reality is that some women are really fucking dumb and can't handle people constantly pointing this out.

— EvolutionistX (@EvolutionistXX) March 3, 2018

which just might be the Tweet Storm of the Year thus far.

Next up, another installment of the invaluable Cathedral Round-up series #30: HLS’s Bicentennial Class. HLS, of course, is Harvard Law School for all you non-Ivy plebs. They used the august occasion to… what else?… celebrate diversity!, of course. Tho’ Harvard has a particularly privileged position when it comes to it’s “diversity”.

And for Anthropology Friday, the long, strange (and totally non-ironic) trip through the Scatalogic Rites of All Nations continues with a part 2.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at our sister publication Thermidor, Andrej Sykora pens An Open Letter to Jay Nordlinger. Sykora rebuts the same old accusations leveled against Putin and Russia and reminds Conservatism, Inc. that their influence is waning.

The core claims against Putin, that he’s evil, that he’s exceptionally corrupt, that he’s a Hitler in the making, all of these are as unbelievable to American conservatives as the phony “Russian hacking” scandal that your magazine continues to endorse. For a long time, you’ve gotten your way, telling voters that while their values and beliefs are important, the interests of world-police international liberalism inc. come first, which means a mandatory two minute hate every day against the Russian state until it returns to the Yeltsin era. I’m sorry to say it’s wearing thin.

Walter Devereux delivers his usual quality work with Driving Old Dixie Down: The Fragility of Nationhood. Devereux considers the vandalism of statues of Southern heroes and contrasts it with other attempts to erase old cultures: the Boers of South Africa and the English under the Tudors.

What we are witnessing, therefore, is an attempt to erase the South as an independent identity not because of its Whiteness, or because of its illiberality, or because of any other peripheral reason, but ultimately because it has been identified as an obstacle in the path of the nationhood that a certain portion of the identity-building elite have been trying to force into existence on this continent for over a century.

Devereaux is quickly becoming one of our favorite writers in the sphere, and this piece in particular quite impressed The Committee… to the tune of an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Congratulations, Walter!

Europa Weekly discusses The Non-Microaggression Principle.

Finally, Jake Bowyer rounds out the week with Zero Day for South Africa. With the National Assembly compounding general mismanagement by voting to seize White-owned land, prospects for South Africa grow grimmer by the day.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor, musing on the nature of the Noncontingent, writes The Form of Forms is Itself Formless.

Bonald points to some of the lesser known facts regarding Isaac Newton: Arian heretic, millenarian kook, scandal to the modern mind. Then he asks When is school most pernicious? Probably some time between middle-school and high-school.

[T]he Church is at a huge disadvantage in that we only get to do religious education up till confirmation, meaning middle school. Leftist indoctrination continues through graduate school, so it’s no wonder people come away with the idea that Christianity is intellectually a middle school-level belief system.

Matt Briggs presents The New Old University: The Outline, a manifesto which begins to outline plans for what he calls a “Realversity,” that which he suggests a real university should be. Also, Some Doctors Want More People Taking Antidepressants even though meta-analysis suggest these medicines may have low effectiveness. Then he pops “The Conservative Case for…” into the old Google and sees what comes up. Without fail, the result is ìThe Conservative Case For… Giving in to the Left. And finally, more fun with Google searches and demography in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXIV.

Mark Richardson writes of the origins of feminist individualism. It goes back some way:

Girl smoking.

For some generations, men have been encouraged to develop, as before, in relationship with others, but young women have been encouraged to see this as oppressive and to develop solo. It’s possible that this explains, in part, the reluctance of many women to see their husbands as making sacrifices on their behalf – perhaps women assume that men have the same outlook, of solo development, that they themselves have been brought up to believe in, or perhaps they even think it wrong for a person to develop in relationship with others rather than as a solo act (so they mentally refuse the idea that it is a good thing for their husband to make sacrifices for them).

This is one aspect of life in which a traditionalist community could very readily distinguish itself.

Richardson continues to analyze The solo mindset and its relation to atomized consumer culture.

Dalrock compiles some useful Links to posts for Christian husbands.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale starts off the week with a Pound poem about Pounds, and brings us part three of Sydney’s Astrophil and Stella for our Saturday Sonnet. I feel obligated to provide a little bit of context for our readers, and contrast Sydney’s courtly love with the fact that, contemporary to our poet, the middle and lower classes of England built elaborate contraptions that they used to dunk their bitchy wives in the local pond to cool their tempers. Indeed, both the carrot and the stick are necessary for raising good women. Not coincidentally, Anne Locke, another contemporary, displays more guilt in fourteen lines than I’ve seen from millennial women in my entire life in our Sunday Sonnet.

Stephen M. Klugewicz at the Imaginative Conservative illustrates The Decline of Western Civilization in 10 Pictures, a piece which could have come straight from our meme presses. As always, the road to reaction is aesthetics. And James Matthew Wilson republishes T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, which is a real titan of an essay on reactionary poet T.S. Eliot. RTWT, then pick up Eliot’s complete works and RTWT if you haven’t done it already. Modernism in general represents a last generation of traditionally-minded men staring right into the abyss and chronicling the spiritual horror, and is definitely worth the study.

Richard Carroll arrives at Socrates’ death this week in Plato’s Dialogues: Phaedo. Along the way Carroll draws some sharp, short lines between the philosophy of Socrates and what we now know as Christian doctrine. Remarkable. No wonder St. Paul was received so well on Mars Hill. An excellent bit of analysis which impressed The Committee, who give it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

At City Journal, Brian Allan has a retrospective on the life and work of photographer Peter Hujar in Shadow and Light. And Lance Morrow tackles our culture in The Age of Travesties.

John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening introduces Welsh author Arthur Machen and his novel The Great Return.

Logos Club was fairly quiet this week, with Kaiter Enless plugging away at The Iron Garden, picking up at Part 6. Here are part 7 and part 7. Also The Brass Rat, a (very) short story.

This Week in the Outer Left

The Baffler came through with a take on the recent school shooting, and whew boy, we got a live one here. Now, in order to present this piece in its proper context, I must first direct you to the photograph (below) of author Jay Baron Nicorvo. He looks like Pauly Shore reborn as soy. This is the person who dares to lecture us on violence, claiming boys do cry (and shoot). I could do a point by point takedown of this nonsense, but I will instead quote it at length and then drop my take.

Jay Baron Nicorvo: Physiognomy has perhaps never been so real.

Male fragility is a biological fact, encoded in our cells. This certainty has yet to work its way into our popular consciousness, but the body of evidence is now irrefutable. Each lone gunman—engaging, by the week, in blatant acts of domestic terrorism, eroding the safety of our schools, dance clubs, and churches—shows us the same damn thing. These killers of women and children, of teachers and deacons, are often white but not always, often young but not always, often certifiably sane but not always. But be he a Nikolas Cruz or a Stephen Paddock, a Dylann Roof or an Omar Mateen, the killer is always, always a man.

…

Boys are more sensitive than girls. Boys do cry more, are more anxious, have a harder time regulating emotion, care less about objects in their environment, are more likely to suffer developmental disorders and genetic defects, and are more susceptible to malnutrition and disease. For boys, parental unavailability and insensitivity have a greater effect on attachment to a caregiver.

…

Girls are—simply and truly—heartier than boys by just about every measure, and any self-respecting Darwinian—no longer exclusively a men’s club—would agree that women are the fitter sex.

…

The reason for greater female fitness is due to the discovery that women are less disposable.

I’m going to ignore the bad science being indulged in here, and just assume everything said is correct and take it at face value. The misandry that drips from every pore of Nicorvo’s being still doesn’t follow.

Male variance is greater than female variance on nearly every trait that has a heritable component, this must be said again and again. Which means, that while men dominate among the ranks of murderers, men also dominate among the ranks of heroic and badass pacifists. Men dominate among the ranks of dullards, and among geniuses. Male variance is greater than female variance, always has been, and always will be. These are facts rooted in biological differences between the sexes. Drawing a misandrist morality play out of these facts is completely inane and does nothing to advance the conversation about crime one bit, and is the exact opposite conclusion one ought to draw! Friend of Social Matter, Free Northerner, said it best: “patriarchy is essential to controlling male humans’ destructive impulses“.

Also at The Baffler, Zach Webb opines on a different tragedy of the Commons. He is discussing a new housing startup, called Common. There isn’t too much to say here, it’s another example of the bugman seeing the world he has created and shying away in horror. So, if that sort of schadenfreude is your thing… and c’mon, it is… definitely RTWT.

I will make one comment, I suppose. It is a commonplace that housing costs are skyrocketing. The mainstream conservative and libertarian response is “let more housing get built”, which is entirely correct, so far as it goes. What is missed is the greater context beyond government over-regulation that impedes building more housing. We are witness to a great hollowing out of America, away from the heartland and to the coasts. The number of metropolitan areas that offer numerous high quality jobs is going down, even as population climbs. The Rust Belt stands as the monument to this hollowing out. As more people crowd into, for example, the Bay Area, even the most permissive housing policies in the world would likely not keep up with demand. But if jobs are decentralized out among a greater number of urban centers, that makes it easier for any one area to cope with growth. But just look at the list of cities that have gone from centers of high quality jobs to death zones in just a few generations: Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Park MacDougald has a kind of meta-review of reviews of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed: Has the Operating System for the Western World Crashed? Curious analogy. Very curious.

Filmmaker and former BBC4 dude Dave Fuller’s First full documentary on Jordan Peterson is now up. About 50 minutes long, and surprisingly sympathetic. Very much worth a view. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also on Medium demographer Lyman Stone outlines The Rust-Belt Comeback, Cincinnati-Style, with a whole lotta data to parse.

Jordan Peterson answers questions on grief, religion, therapy, and more from his Patreon supporters.

Fashionably self-described “classical liberal” Steven Pinker goes on a Guardian podcast to talk about academia, the need to listen to “repulsive” ideas, and the folly of blank slate theory. In a case of possible irony, he also gets called out by Elon Musk for his ignorance of AI.

In a busy week for EconLog, Scott Sumner dreams of a world where people don’t know who the president is. If only there were political systems other than democracy! Sumner also discusses how nationalism is changing political fault lines and argues against Trump’s trade war. David Henderson shares his respect for Jordan Peterson. Bryan Caplan shares his opening statement from his recent Capitalism vs. Socialism debate. Finally, Richard McKenzie argues for the inherent rationality of consumers in the EconLog article of the month.

Quillette’s Nick Ottens examines how rural, blue-collar whites have been pulled far-right and how to bring them back in line to the center. David Johnson discusses the effect of pro-immigration bias on social sciences. Clinical social worker Lisa Marchiano defends a shocking study linking social influences to transgenderism among teens. Genevieve Weynerowski argues that the word ‘privilege’ has lost its usefulness.

Heterodox Academy’s Nick Phillips discusses the limits of viewpoint diversity.

This Week… Elsewhere

Education Realist provides commentary on Teachers and Smart Kids.

Zach Kraine marshals some key ammunition against Mandatory voting, most of which can be aimed at voting at all. Also: why Matriarchy is an absolutely terrible idea.

Ace is superb here as he muses on the phenomenon of talking good internet game: “He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine…”.

Al Fin dives into San Francisco’s (human) waste crisis—very brave man. Also: Take Time to Meet Your Overlords. You’re paying for ’em. In the Dangerous Children department, Al covers The Importance of Inoculating Against Groupthink.

Heartiste delves into Leftoid Cognitive Biases: Negative Transference And Psychological Projection. Also a crucial HateStat Of The Day.

Over at Zeroth Position finds himself Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Anti-Discrimination Laws. He suggests: Agree and amplify.

PA discusses styles of Propaganda for different styles of ideology.

Fred Reed speculates on The Future of the Jews.

Speaking of which, Rebbe presents @FrameGames: evidence he’s LARPing as a Jewish Lawyer. I really don’t have a dog in that fight. I follow them both. Also there: an ambitious outline of The Jewish Question Rebutted. And The Truth about Islamic Immigration, in which he presents a pretty strong history lesson in American Politics.

Unorthodoxy seems to be well within his wheelhouse when it comes to discussing Why Tariffs. Exploding the WTO is only part of the fun…

America’s enemies operate through a web of multinational institutions. Those institutions were designed for America to dominate the world and defeat the Russians in the Cold War (the U.S. banned trade with the U.S.S.R. and it didn’t end well for the U.S.S.R.). Those institutions have now become a noose hanging the American people and a tool for oppression of anti-globalists around the world. The institutions are riddled with globalists. They are riddled with people who believe free trade theory and open borders.

That’s about all we had time for. A slightly lighter week than usual. Hope you are all having a blessed Lent. Cannot thank my Based TWiR Staff enough. Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and (new guy) Burgess McGill: You guys keep the lights on! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/04) appeared first on Social Matter.

Nassim Taleb explains what he Means by Skin in the Game.

Skin in the game—as a filter—is the central pillar for the organic functioning of systems, whether humans or natural. Unless consequential decisions are taken by people who pay for the consequences, the world would vulnerable to total systemic collapse. And if you wonder why there is a current riot against a certain class of self-congratulatory “experts”, skin the game will provide a clear answer: the public has viscerally detected that some “educated” but cosmetic experts have no skin in the game and will never learn from their mistakes, whether individually or, more dangerously, collectively.

I love it when he’s grumpy! Arnold Kling takes note.

VDH takes note of multiple Trump Syndromes. As well as The Rapid ‘Progress’ of Progressivism.

And American Greatness pays attention to electoral politics so you don’t have to: Russian Scapegoats at the Ready for 2018.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Imperial Energy’s STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto makes it up to Part 11: The Grand Strategy of the American Empire. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to write a short epistle. Also there: this week’s Imperial Circular.

Over at GA Blog, Adam goes Within Language. As usual, very “meta”. And ultimately, he shows, you can’t really escape from language—at least and still have anything to say about it.

Access to a metalanguage gives one power over those without one: the history of civilization can be, to a great extent, be summed up in this observation. But having one’s power rely on possession of a metalanguage leaves one vulnerable in important ways. It becomes important to maintain a monopoly on the metalanguage, and therefore to restrict access to it and, more importantly, to make the metalanguage immune to appropriation by those it is meant to exclude—this involves distancing the metalanguage from reality in the interest of maintaining its own coherence.

A case in point, obscure to the general public, but well-known to readers here…

Let’s take, for example, Moldbug’s claim that any territory is ruled by an absolute sovereign, and that therefore anything that happens in that territory is permitted by the sovereign. We can see right away this is not really an empirical claim—it can’t be proved or disproved. Point to some junkie shooting himself up in an alley, or a couple of thugs pummeling an old woman in the slums. Does the sovereign really permit these things? Well, in the sense that the sovereign issued a writ of mainlining to the junkie, and one of assault to the thugs, or that he gave orders from the top that went down through the ranks until some local precinct officer whispered to the junkie and thug to do their thing, no, of course not. But in the sense that the sovereign has set priorities, delegated powers, distributed resources and signaled intentions, and has done so in such a way as leave the junkie and thugs on the fringes of his calculations, or on the calculations he has his subordinates do, yes, he has permitted it.

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

Spandrell explains how Mistakes happen for a reason. The mistake in question is how the Anglo punditocracy, even the venerable Pat Buchanan, “got China wrong”.

China was dirt-poor in 1980. Really, really poor. It would have likely remained quite poor if USG hadn’t decided to open trade relations with China, having them join WTO and all that. The theory, now stated openly, was that economic growth would eventually lead to the formation of a middle class, and that middle class would then agitate for democracy; a democratic China would naturally be a jolly good thing, aligned with USG’s interests (also known as “Western values”).

Mysteriously, China grew rich, and didn’t really end up caring too much for “Western values”. And the CCP’s recent constitutional change is a nice fat exclamation point to that.

William Scott updates his about page, which is really now more a synopsis of what his site’s about.

Anatoly Karlin, reviews Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, and finds it lacking. He gave it 1/10, but you’ll never guess why! His scoring system may revolutionize book reviewing.

I was probably going to give the book something like 6/10. So why did it end up plunging to absolute zero?

Because a thief snatched the cell phone on which I was reading it in the center of one of the world’s great metropolises (London). Hilariously, I was on Chapter 12: Safety.

Unreasonable n=1 projection? Sure. Vindictive? Probably. Justified? I believe so.

Because it makes a powerful meta point. Low probability but catastrophic events can, and—if the Many Worlds theory is correct, in some timelines will—completely overturn Pinker’s nice, upwardly trending curves.

Up at Northern Dawn, Constantin de Mestre completes his excellent 3-part series on the Canadian military with Strong and Free: Proposals on the Canadian Armed Forces

By way of Isegoria… Tyler Cowen picks Robin Hanson’s brain. The tragic (T-related?) reduction in what you can expect police to do. Sesame Street is about as effective as Head Start, at a fraction of the price—a very very small fraction. An effortless way to improve your memory—provided you remember to do it. And Why some people become sudden geniuses.

Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield an epistle on The Tragedy of Scientized Superficiality

This Week in Jim Donald

Continuing from where he left off last week, Jim is still considering the angles of Trump’s tariff on steel and aluminum. This week Jim considers the externalities. Definitely RTWT on this one, but I will quote Jim at length here because of just how completely correct his analysis is.

Ana de Armas is 5′ 6″

Tariffs tend to have bad consequences, because they tend to reflect corruption and special favors. What happens is that there is a high tariff on goods imported by regular folks, and someone who is cozy with the government gets a special permit, a recategorization, or some such, and he gets to import stuff without a tariff, and mark it up.

But the biggest indignation against Trump’s tariff is that he taxing specialty steels, taxing steel that you just cannot buy in America, which tax is not a gift of free money to existing steel producers, but a demand that they get their act together and an opportunity for them to do so.

And, if they do so, they create high skill, high pay jobs for white males in flyover country, jobs for Trump voters in electorates where their votes make a difference.

Never forget who whom. Be mindful of who are your friends, and who are your enemies. The Democrats do not attempt to follow an economically optimal policy, but a policy that harms its enemies economically, even if it causes some lesser harm to their friends. They have been aggressively destroying jobs in flyover country to force the great centralization, so as to get the most voter power out of the people they have been importing to live on crime, welfare, and voting Democrat.

“Who, whom?” is likely the most important question in contemporary American politics, and it very well may be the only question.

This Week in Social Matter

Ever erudite, Arthur Gordian kicks off the week at Social Matter explaining The Structure Of The Elite. It is extraordinarily well-organized and written. He first defines what it means to be an “elite”…

The elite are defined by two fundamental traits: they maintain effective (not absolute) control of the distribution of resources in society, and in doing so receive preferential treatment. Keep in mind that control does not necessarily mean ownership. Certainly, there is a significant advantage to separating these two functions, namely that the person who controls a resource but does not own it will not suffer as greatly from the depletion of that resource. Think of the phrase, “privatizing the profits, socializing the losses” as an example of this distinction. Also keep in mind that there are resources in society other than money; influence, authority, and status are also valuable resources.

The hired hand generally has less incentive than the owner for the long-term profitability of a resource. A glitch in the ordinarily beneficent division of labor. And then Gordian goes on to explain the threats to elite power, and what they must control in order to hold onto power. All of which pretty much describes behavior of the Cathedral we see. Magisterial work and the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Alex Sadler returns Thursday with an essay on Winning The Argument Frame: Leftism As A Defect Button. He explores several frames, of the right and left, that fail even when they are technically true. E.g., “Democrats are racist”. He suggests:

One of the strongest frames I keep in mind when looking at the world is to view the Left’s entire lack of respect for money, power, the meaning of words, and even body language signals as a single push towards destroying the capacity for any agreement at all.

A destruction brought about not merely by ambiguity of language—which is bad—but by capricious and selective enforcement of language norms. The best way to win that game is not play; an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century is Episode 60: The Syndicate—American Underworld—Part 1. A rare two-parter it looks like.

And the multi-talented Michael Andreopoulos rounds out the week with some freshly minted verse Saturday’s Poetry & Prose column: Prophet Of The Decline.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

West Hunter’s Gregory Cochran takes time to debunk common arguments claiming genetic differences between groups are nominal. He also discusses the pathology of sickle-cell and its subtleties. Cochran closes out the week by discussing the genetic closeness of Southeast Asians and Andamanese.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with a look at North Africa in Genetics and History. I certainly learned a few things. Like…

[F]rom time to time, global weather patterns change and the Sahara becomes a garden: the Green Sahara. The last time we had a Green Sahara was about 9-7,000 years ago; during this time, people lived, hunted, fished, herded and perhaps farmed throughout areas that are today nearly uninhabited wastes.

Which affected the migration, separation, and selection of peoples. And thus their DNA.

Mrs. X talks about the perennial problem of Trying to be Smart: on bringing up extremely rare exceptions to prove forests don’t exist, only trees. The problem is using rare exceptions to disprove a rule.

[U]nlike large gametes and small gametes, XXY isn’t part of a biological reproduction strategy. Like trisomy 21, it’s just an unfortunate accident in cell division.

Social contructivism of gender identity gets BTFOed. And pretty much any other kind of identity too. Except maybe for stamp collecting.

While we’re at it, I suspect most Chinese people have Chinese values, most Australians have Australian values, most Brazilians hold Brazilian values, and most people from Vatican City have Catholic values.

Well… I wouldn’t go that far!

Finally for Anthropology Friday: the conclusion of Scatalogic Rites of All Nations, again non-ironic coverage of non-ironic history.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Nathan Turner has a sweeping article up at Thermidor on his own homeland: The Seven Heads Of Antichrist: Ethiopian History As A Microcosm Of Global Affairs.

Every time you look at porn, you invite the spirit of Antichrist. Every time you neglect family, you salute the Beast. Every time you eschew marriage, you prepare the way for his kingdom. Antichrist is the herald of the gates of hell on earth, and as such, his spirit must eradicate tradition, belief, love, and justice. Ethiopia has been fighting this battle for 3,000 years.

The Committee were impressed with Turner’s work here and bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Nigel T. Carlsbad offers Vaublanc’s Specula Principum for the Modern Age—“mirror for princes”.

The Europa Weekly podcast covers March of the Gondola, A History of the Finnish Race.

Jake Bowyer considers the outcome of the Italian elections and contemplates whether Italy—and other countries in a similar predicament—might be Slouching Towards Fascism. Not if the Anglo Empire has anything to say about it, of course.

And finally, Carlo talks with the lovely Alessandra Bocchi to discuss Italian election results in Podcast Episode 26.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Roger Devlin makes an appearance at Sydney Trads, with a commanding scientific and philosophical synopsis of The Sexes: Complementary, Not “Equal”. This was also an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Thomas F. Bertonneau describes how Sensitivity and Survival relate to an overly aggressive and unwanted interloper in his classroom.

Bonald writes More on the yellow peril of Asian superiority in quantitive reasoning.

Matt Briggs countersignals Against Moldbug’s Reservationist Epistemology: Reason Alone Is Not Reasonable. Instead, he argues for an epistemology which accounts for inspiration and intuition. Imperial Energy offers a reply.

Also there, Briggs warns Don’t Look To The Market To Protect Your True Rights, in which he gives examples of market-driven societal decline. He provides a workable solution to the question,
Do Some Men Have A Uterus? Depends what you mean by “man.” Finally, sibling marriage bans, toxic space masculinity, and abortuary blessings, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXV.

And guest posting for Briggs, The Cranky Professor makes an argument for The Existence of Ideal Entities.

[T]he understanding that content is something timeless and outside the mind enables meanings to be part of the fabric of external reality. It is only in this external reality where everything can be described in terms of these intelligible concepts and propositions. Why? Because those contents are not something that are just trapped inside the individual mind.

Mark Richardson discovers what happens when hiring panels do a blind trial: More men are hired. I guess The trial backfired. Also, the mainstream right has a cultural answer to the identity left. Unfortunately, It’s no alternative.

The Sydney Trads publish a fine academic article by Roger Devlin about biological differences between The Sexes: Complementary, Not ìEqualî.

William Wildblood reminds us that True Awakening Demands Deep Penitence and continues in the same vein with Miserere Nostri.

Finally, Empathologist has an interesting bit with Its gonna take some time, in which he finds #MeToo as a sort of wire-heading for attention.

This Week in Arts & Letters

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless delivers Part 9 and Part 10 of his novel The Iron Garden.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Horvat has a review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed… and Can’t Be Fixed. Christine Norvell looks at the Hedonism in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”. Bradley Birzer examines Edmund Burke & the French Revolutionaries. A timeless 1963 essay from Richard Weaver on C. S. Lewis’ Studies in Words (1960). And finally, in view of opening day, the immortal Joe Sobran on The Republic of Baseball (1990).

In City Journal, Andrew Klavan has A conversation on race, with William Shakespeare—that should go well. Joel Kotkin explains Left and Lefter in California. And Tierney has a more credulous review of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress than Karlin’s.

Richard Carroll introduces his Ninth Friend: Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name”.

Finally, PA turns from Polish poetry to Serbo-croatian in Songs From Yugoslavia.

This Week in the Outer Left

A pretty active week from the lefties this time around, so let’s get into it. The Baffler had two entries of some interest this week. The first continues a theme that has been cropping up more and more regularly from that particular publication: the bugman sees the world he’s made and turns away in disgust. This time, Kyle Paoletta is disgusted by the condo-maximum. I’d definitely say RTWT on this one, because there aren’t any particular quotes I can extract that capture the vibe of the thing. There’s total dissatisfaction with the aesthetics of new developments, combined with resignation that cheap building has to happen to accomodate all the people moving to cities, with more than a hint of hipster I-was-here-before-it-was-coolism. Hey, Kyle, it’d relieve a lot of stress on the cities’ stocks of housing if we just build the wall and deport them all.

Also at The Baffler, Barbara Ehrenreich considers what she dubs body work. That’s what she calls working out. If you are a guy who lifts–and you damn well better be if you’re reading this–then this is a definite RTWT for you. The funhouse mirror version of working out that you’ll see here is, frankly, laughable. Her first mistake is that she lumps together all manner of disparate phenomena, lifting, aerobics classes, CrossFit, all under this same category of ‘fitness culture’. And it gets worse from there. Check this out:

Icelander Hafþór Björnsson sets world record deadlift at 2018 Arnolds @ 1041lbs.

Working out very much resembles work, or a curious blend of physical labor and office work. Members not only lift weights, for example; they often carry clipboards on which to record the number of reps and sets and the amount of weight lifted for each workout, like a supervisor monitoring a factory worker’s performance….

The major interaction that goes on in gyms is not between members or between members and staff, but between the fitness devotee and his or her body. The body must be trained, disciplined, and put to ever more demanding tests, all administered and evaluated by the devotee’s conscious mind…. The major interaction that goes on in gyms is not between members or between members and staff, but between the fitness devotee and his or her body. The body must be trained, disciplined, and put to ever more demanding tests, all administered and evaluated by the devotee’s conscious mind.

Literally what? I don’t know about the rest of you, but that bears no relationship to what my lifting experience is like. Maybe I’ll lose cred for this, but if I didn’t enjoy lifting, I wouldn’t do it. It’s the furthest thing from work that I do, save for sleeping. Like I said, funhouse mirror. Give it a click if you want to see how she manages to get even more bizarre.

Now that the GOP is in power, the Left can take a “principled” look at the question: Is America’s Future Federalist? Of courshe!!

And rounding out the left this week is Jacobin showing a surprising amount of insight and even something like honesty in discussing what Orban knows and his enemies don’t. What I found particularly good about this piece was the extreme irony at its center. The authors of this essay on what Orban knows and his enemies do not themselves miss what it is that Orban knows! What Orban knows, and so many people seem to miss, is that there are values beyond the economic. There are political, spiritual, heroic, and organic values to be considered. Contrary to the assertions at Jacobin, economic liberalization has not “failed” large numbers of Hungarians, rather it must be melded with consideration for non-economic values to more completely serve the Hungarian people and their growth as a people. Orban understands this, or, at least, behaves as if he does. His enemies, whether in the Hungarian opposition parties or at Jacobin, have not grasped the lesson.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Democracy is rule by algorithm. Obviously, algorithms need tweaking. Behold the latest tweak: Liquid Democracy. It’s an inch wide, but 1000 miles deep.

TIME Magazine interviews Jordan B. Peterson on gun control, the #MeToo movement, and women in the workplace. (In other JBP news, a woman was arrested during a rally outside a Peterson lecture at Queens University.)

Bret Weinstein joins free speech podcast So to Speak to discuss his transition from a Bernie Bro and Occupy Wall Street supporter to Literally Hitlor.

The New York Times’ Katherine Mangu-Ward pens a surprisingly fair piece on the increasingly puerile nature of partisan politics.

Heterodox Academy’s Nick Phillips criticizes a University of Oxford study which found seventy-eight right-leaning publications guilty of fake news in comparison to just three left-leaning publications. Perhaps the word Oxford is looking for instead of “fake news” is “heresy”… Also at HA, Professor James Lemoine lies to his students to strengthen their defenses against false information and Madeleine Kearns discusses presumption and self-censorship on campus.

Over at EconLog, Scott Sumner looks at the effects of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent scandal on monetary policy. He also makes the case that you don’t know you’re in the Golden Age until it’s over. David Henderson points out a logical fallacy in a recent MIT article suggesting that wealth comes mainly from luck. In light of the recent steel tariffs, Pierre Lemieux suggests that Adam Smith was too trustful of the state when he conceded the prudence of protectionist policies in industries related to national defense.

Over at Quillette, Saloni Dattani addresses Steven Pinker’s critics, Matthew Blackwellexplores the psychology of progressive hostility, and Kirio Banks explores the groundless claim that diversity strengthens companies with an almost-Mencian sci-fi thought experiment.

Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Vanketesh Rao provides a field guide to surviving the ongoing culture wars.

This Week… Elsewhere

The Rebbe is on point here with The Truth about Islamic Immigration. He rewinds the story to the first use in America of immigration as a political tool: The Irish.

A fatal flaw in the Constitution was that it allowed newly naturalized citizens to vote, turning immigration into a ballot-stuffing technique; Just import huge numbers of an ethnicity that overwhelmingly votes in one direction and you can implement a one-party state (what the Democrats did it in California). The Know Nothings saw Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall exploiting Irish immigration as a ballot-stuffing scheme and proposed delaying naturalization twenty-one years to solve the problem.

Interestingly the Know-Nothings—who opposed the Irish ballot-stuffing—was led by Lewis Charles Levin. Leave it to Rebbe to point out such features. Anyway, there is a whole lot there. This is a highly recommended read and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Insula Qui’s herculean task of formulating a libertarian statecraft continues with Part IV: Libertarian Governance. He makes a fantastic—arguably reactionary—case for governance, but continues to separate it, by Jedi Mind Tricks™ from the ordinary operation of the state, and thereby preserve libertarian principles. For example:

Pregnant lady.

When people give their voluntary consent, they do so because all parties expect to benefit from a contractual association. However, no one intrinsically benefits from plain non-violence, insofar as that person is not on the perpetual receiving end of violence. However, if we imagined a non-violent society in which each person would be relegated to a life in a forest without any access to water or electricity, we would certainly see a drop in the living standards despite the non-violence. Society is ultimately necessary for any personal benefit. Non-aggression is the best way to organize a society, but it necessitates that a society be useful for individuals. There is a theoretical possibility that aggression could result in greater social wealth, but this is only true if aggression creates society. This should be the foremost faulty conception that libertarians dispute.

Yes, except almost no one voluntarily consents to being in society. And almost no one has enough power to just up an leave society whenever he happens to prefer another. If the world were chock full of libertarian patches—withheld from eating each other by the Invisible Hand of Non-coercion (or maybe nukes)—then they’d guard their borders pretty strictly I s’pect. And disgruntled Leavers would seem particularly suspect demographic, no?

An aristocratic monarchy is the natural form of a libertarian social order, just as each well-managed business has similar organizational principles. The libertarian monarch could just as well be called the CEO, and the natural aristocracy could be called the shareholders. Both the classical and corporate allegory are fit for the form of governance that would emerge within a libertarian society. However, as each man is the sovereign of his own property and yet has this greater sovereign over them, how can the interests be harmonized into a cohesive political system without excessive conflict? This may seem contradictory to the entire notion of sovereignty, but the sovereigns are divided in their capacity. The individual sovereigns become only sovereign over themselves while the sovereignty of the government only extends to the structure of that governance. This results in successfully dividing sovereignty to create the perfect confederation, thus squaring the proverbial circle.

An interesting construction. Yet the most effective CEO has unlimited (or at least quite broad) power to hire, fire, and reassign at will, slash whole departments, start new ones. Whatever “sovereignty” his employees may have plus $5 should be worth about a cup of organic fair-trade coffee… The circle seems far from squared. Anyway this is all a very noble attempt at trying to shoe-horn authoritarian government (good!) into the assumptions of libertarianism (many of which are quite questionable). I encourage all the political theory folks to give it a gander.

A brief but poignant quote over at Habsburg Restorationist on When Nobility Is More Than Just Passé.

Al Fin has a comprehensive look at how Sex Hormones Determine Male and Female Brain Differences. This is a pretty black-pilled prophecy: Once and Coming Age of Slavery—all too plausible if the dysgenic spiral is not thwarted. And in the Dangerous Children category: teaching (and integrating) Waiting, Watching, Thinking, which hits at least 2 of the 4 cardinal virtues I think. Maybe 3.

Second week in a row that Ace dips well past the 80s for a musical illustration: “Well, no one told me about her; how many people cried…”

Over at Faith & Heritage, Adam Grey takes some liberties with The Virgin Alienist vs. the Chad Nationalist meme.

A little too Buddhist for my tastes, but AMK is not far from the mark with Version One of his Pure Anti Thesis. Also Reasons to work out that have nothing to do with women, sex, or losing weight. He still needs to do deadlifts doe.

Roman Dmowski peeks behind the veil of massaged stats and official propaganda Unpunished Criminals to More Crime Pipeline.

Demographer Lyman Stone has a data packed and not very brief Very Brief History of American Lutheranism. For demography geeks, Stone is your pusher.

Heartiste calls this the Photo Of The Century. Hard to think of a more appropriate one. The jackboots of diversity, stepping on the neck of natural relationships everywhere.

Unorthodoxy is pretty clear-eyed in noting Tariffs (are) Much Bigger Than the Economy —i.e., are about much more than just the economy. Also: “When everybody plays identity politics, it is not democracy. It is international relations.”

Meta-Nomad continues his film review series with TSPDT6, focusing on two absolute classics: Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Whale’s Frankenstein. Makes me want to give ’em a re-watch, it’s been many a year for both. He also includes an extra discussion of something called Xenobuddhism, which I am going to need some time to digest, but I like the Alien movies and think Buddhism is interesting, so should be fun.

Welp, that’s all folks. Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Burgess McGill helped out a lot this week. David Grant had the week off, and Aidan MacLear still hadn’t gotten his power back on by the time of writing. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/11) appeared first on Social Matter.

Theranos was back in the news. The bad news that is. And speaking of diversity: This week brought us the Diversity Bridge Collapse at FIU.

This week in American Greatness, Victor David Hanson finds Swamp Things in the Russia Investigation. Mueller and Comey are the probable tip of the iceberg. Swamp iceberg that is. And VDH does what he does best: history, in Lessons from Germany’s ‘Spring Offensive,’ 100 Years Later.

Oh, an the Great School Walkout of 2018 happened. Which no one will remember, by Fourth of July. Unless Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young write a song about it.

Last Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day. Or as we call it here: The Octave of St. Patrick. Paleo Mexicano offers a list of his Favorite Irish writers and books, and a few of his not-so-favorites.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton helpfully kicks off our week with his Sunday Thoughts—Lessons China is NOT Taking From the West Edition.

Giovanni Dannato finds it “impossible to ignore the politics” of The Shape of Water: Del Toro’s Final Descent into PC. But he tried.

Parallax Optics has well-placed thoughts on Exit Accelerationism.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam introduces a political position of Centerism, which bears an unfortunate lexical nearness to centrism, “which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for ‘stupid.'” Centerism refers to “donating your resentment to the center”. If you’re like me, you’ll need an example:

To be a centerist is to seek out the more sustainable center, and do your part to make it even more sustainable. For the criminal, that might mean abandoning the co-conspirator/friend and finding in the legal process that now frames him examples and signs of significance to which he can convert; or, it might mean sticking with his friend and sacrificing himself in the name of a friendship that now means something more than it did previously. Even in the latter case, assuming the two survive, the fact that a new center has been found might open both of them to yet other centers, centers that it’s no longer so easy to dismiss as relevant only to the less lucky, brave, or skilled. Maybe the two friends can now encourage each other in self-reformation projects. Their resentment toward law, or order, or civilization, or respectability, or whatever it was, must now be donated toward that center in order to make it more capable of ordering such self-reformation projects.

As Adam’s explanation continues, “centerism” seems to be the persistent advocacy of transcendent goods. Which even liberals cannot avoid displaying, despite their ideological commitments otherwise, i.e., to the transcendent good of having no transcendent goods:

[W]hat center are you defending, and what is the center of that center? They will be with you in the opening—I’m defending basic human dignity! Human rights! Or, even, the Constitution! But what then? If we argue about what constitutes human dignity or human rights, what guides our arguments—what makes one way of understanding “human dignity” or “human rights” more plausible, sustainable, or legitimate than any other? They will drop out quickly, and implicitly concede they are just trashers (I’m defending human dignity against…!), but any terms regarding human goods of any kind whatsoever assume reference to a disciplinary center and a sovereign center: this is the kind of thinking that has converged on this question or category, and here is where I am within that kind of thinking; here is the kind of sovereign I imagine enforcing or protecting “rights” or “dignity” and here is the kind of order that makes such a sovereign imaginable.

Adam scores another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Imperial Energy has up the next installment of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 12: A Reactionary Vision of World Order.

Those Who Can See have up a new one: The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa. As always, it is copiously researched and magisterial in both content and tone. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Alfred Woenselaer conducts a thought experiment with The internet as a religious superorganism. Not that the internet itself is a religion, but that it is religious. With it’s own codex prohibitorum and everything.

The Streisand effect did not show that censorship fails, because we know censorship works. Instead, the Streisand effect showed the inability of the deep state to effectively censor the internet.

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

Anatoly Karlin considers Great Britain’s priorities to be backwards. 1,000 girls raped by subhuman savages? Meh. Lauren Southern tries to visit the country? REEEEE! Kipling assured us that eventually the Saxon will begin to hate. Any time now would be great, guys… guys?

Anatoly also provides a very systematic review of Russia’s technological backwardness. RTWT, but I can sum it up in three words: it ain’t good. Russia in general, and Putin in particular, gets a lot of praise in our sphere, but Karlin is unstinting in his assessment and does not spare Putin at all.

Nicolas Hausdorf at Jacobite reviews Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One and offers general commentary upon the Ending of the Long 20th Century.

Things were down over at Malcolm Pollack’s last week. Hosting troubles, not related to Malcolm’s politics we hope. He’s always a gentleman in spite of his dissident viewpoints. Or rather because of them. Not that google will care. This week: “These are teenagers, folks!” You only pretend to listen to them! And he follows Andrew McCarthy’s excellent exposition of the Mueller probe.

By way of Isegoria… The culture will simply be that which is best at reproducing itself. Those wanting to ban guns better be careful what they wish for. The Elephant in the Brain. A prototype proton battery. How psychopaths see the world. And… Yudkowski on What’s a fire alarm for.

This week’s missive from CWNY: Our Faith Is Our Destiny.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim favored us with but a single entry this week, observing as China passes the US. In view of Anatoly’s entry on Russian technology above, one might quibble with Jim’s assessment of Russian military technology vis-à-vis the United States. However, there is no denying that China has, in many ways, surpassed the US and is well on its way to becoming the pre-eminent power on the planet. But China is not a danger to the average American, the danger is already inside the house, as the horror movies teach us.

China’s total GDP has passed the US, though the US official statistics are in denial. Per capita GDP remains well below that of the US, but the gap is rapidly shrinking, with increasing numbers of westerners seeking Chinese jobs. Technologically, China has focused on buying, stealing, and copying US civilian technology and Russian military technology. But in civilian technology, the pupil has surpassed the master. All Chinese CPUs are based on the Arm design that they purchased from the US long ago, but they are now improving on this design in ways that arguably leave the US behind. They are at least equal in CPU design and fabbing, arguably superior. They are still copying, but are less reliant on copying.

Meanwhile US academia focuses on combating masculinity and raising female self esteem by showering them with unearned credentials.

To the average individual American, especially one of the “let’s just leave the rest of the world alone” bent, becoming number 2 in some statistics likely doesn’t matter one whit when stacked against pressing needs of family, community, and faith. But to the hardcore Cathedralite, it matters because it is the substitute for all three of those normal concerns.

It is difficult for us on the right to understand just how much Cathedralites insist that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice” and actively care about making it so. China doesn’t even understand that diversity is our strength, they simply can’t win! Remember the shocked and angry disbelief when Trump beat Hillary? Amp that up a couple orders of magnitude and that will be the reaction when an ordered, sovereign state that doesn’t embrace the Cathedral’s religion becomes the most significant country. In that blinding anger, the Cathedral is likely to be very dangerous indeed.

This Week in Social Matter

At Social Matter, the week kicks off with Benjamin Welton’s micro-history: Military Adventurer Raymond Westerling On How To Defeat An Insurgency.

Westerling is often pilloried as the embodiment of evil—a throwback to the bad, old days of swashbuckling adventurers promoting white supremacy at the point of the bayonet. There is certainly some truth to this, for Westerling achieved his successes through harsh methods.

Sounds like our sort of guy! Fast on the heels of WW2, while the world was weary of war and with the Dutch liberated from domination (and collaboration with) the German Wehrmacht, Netherlands had their own empire to defend. In Indonesia.

Because of the haphazard nature of Dutch deployments between 1945 and 1946, Amsterdam’s attempt to reclaim the world’s largest Muslim nation proved to be an uphill battle to say the least. Westerling tried to correct the deficiencies in the field by creating a network of local informants. By September 1945, Westerling and his KNIL unit controlled the restive island of North Sumatra thanks to the “Westerling Method.” This method included three prongs: 1) the 570-man strong DST (Depot Speciale Troepen), a commando unit skilled in low-intensity warfare, 2) the use of informal spies drawn from the local population, and 3) very public acts of violence.

Game of Thrones-Style in some cases. And he proved successful again in the ever more challenging environment of South Sulawesi. You’ll have to RWTW for the details. The Committee deemed this one worthy of the ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

And it’s great to see Mark Christiansen writing more again. On Tuesday, he delivers a masterpiece in Bourgeois Revolution: Restoration And The Problem Of Capital. There are too many keys here to count, but this is a central one:

We live in a world where the reigning ideology is liberalism, which became accepted among segments of the aristocracy and middle classes. Its adherents destroyed European Christendom in a long arc of coups and revolutionary violence. It begins with 1688 in Great Britain, 1776 in America, 1789 in France, and culminates in the final collapse of Christian monarchy in Europe after World War I. Since then, a global order centered on American power has woven liberalism into politics, culture, and the very consciousness of billions of people.

It has been common on the Right to critique this process on the philosophical level. From de Maistre to Richard Weaver, erudite work has been done on everything from nominalism to secularism. But this has often blinded the Right to an essential truth: an idea which gains influence does so due to the actions of power. This is not invoke relativism: ideas are true or false, better or worse. Power can be in error. However, the relations between power and ideas are immensely predictive and therefore useful. Liberalism must be analyzed by the Patron Theory of Politics. In the case of liberalism, the patrons were the rising bourgeoisie. Though the definition of this term shifts between political traditions, it generally refers to the classes who gained wealth and power through non-agrarian property. They were urban, less rooted, and not tied to the aristocratic social classes. Any attempt to understand liberalism must understand it as an ideology born in and formed by this class, and serving its interests.

Christensen then turns to critiques of liberalism… from it’s own left: Lenin. There’s no way I can excerpt this piece with justice. Douglas Smythe comments that this is one of the more important recent works in the Reactosphere. A must-read, and a runaway ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

The Myth of the 20th Century podcast picks up where it left off last week with Episode 61: The Syndicate—American Underworld—Part 2

This Week in Human Biodiversity

At West Hunter, Gregory Cochran looks at adaptations that allow certain groups to survive in their unique climates, and laments intellectuals’ tendency not only to reject racial IQ differences but also to preach that everyone else must reject them, too.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with some audience participation: Your Favorite Songs (or Bands). She doesn’t wanna end up like those moms who are “preoccupied with 19… 19… 1985“. You definitely don’t want that!

Next an interesting bit of analysis on “Cultural Collapse”—the supposed one versus the actual one. The Tablet thinks the election of Trump reflects one kind of cultural collapse.

Berman is insightful until he blames cultural collapse on the educational system (those dastardly teachers just decided not to teach about George Washington, I guess.)

We can’t blame education. Very few people had many years of formal education of any sort back in 1776 or 1810–even in 1900, far fewer people completed highschool than do today. The idea that highschool civics class was more effectively teaching future voters what to look for in a president in 1815 than today therefore seems unlikely.

But there’s a cultural collapse all right. And Trump getting elected is at least as much a desperate a response to it, as it is an effect.

Today, technology has completely transformed our lives. When we want to talk to someone or hear their opinion, we can just pick up the phone, visit facebook, or flip on the TV. We have daily commutes that would have taken our ancestors a week to walk. People expect to travel thousands of miles for college and jobs.

The effect is a curious inversion: In a world where you can talk to anyone, why talk to your neighbors? Personally, I spend more time talking to people in Britain than the folks next door, (and I like my neighbors.)

I don’t wanna steal Mrs. X’s thunder—her parting shot is superb. In her inimitable style, she gracefully pulls in data (¡Science!) from diverse resources to paint a coherent a picture. This is a very fine piece worth your attention and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

A brief, and I think deserved, eulogy for Professor Hawking (RIP). All the hatred flowing on The Twitter for him this past week was embarrassing.

Finally, breaking open a new text for Anthropology Friday: James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910).

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at Thermidor, M. Charles Stuart continues to critique Reaction with What If Everything Neoreaction Knows About Monarchy is Wrong? The title is hyperbolic, but the content is a solid review of medieval—in deliberate contrast to early-modern—political theory and practice.

Thirteenth century French society was actually organized through networks of consilium et auxilium, “counsel and aid,” which were networks of friends, chief among these being the friendship between King Louis and Pope Clement. Rather than struggle over power, the King and the Pope were actually working together to achieve the same ends.

Stuart proposes that medieval arrangements offer a superior model for Church-State relations than do the early modern ones preferred by Moldbug. A debatable proposition, but one well worth debating.

Next up, Richard Greenhorn offers supplementary material to David Hines’s analysis of the Right’s organizational failings in The Spirit of a Spiritless Situation: On the Right’s Failure to Organize. Whereas Hines focuses on the Right’s lack of an institutional base, Greenhorn identifies as a more crippling weakness the Right’s lack of a coherent, unifying principle.

Men are not motivated by proposals or policies, they are motivated by creeds. And the right lacks any unifying idea but for the belief that the left is, in various ways, shapes, and forms, bad. Anti-leftism is a principle for twitter rants and other online bloviating, but it is not a principle for action. Why does the right tend to attract so many madmen? Because madmen attach meaning to things that have none. To organize requires a sense of purpose. The collective right could have a million people on call, dedicated leaders, overflowing coffers, and yet they would still fail because they lack a purpose.

The Committee, stingy by nature, were impressed with Greenhorn’s work and gave it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Europa Weekly this week: Evropa Total War40k—Rape Island DLC.

C. A. Shoultz suggests another alternative to monarchy in In Defense of Republicanism. Shoultz makes a reasonable case for aristocratic republics, especially considering the examples of Venice and Rome. Still, a republic is only a good system “if,” as Benjamin Franklin said, “you can keep it”. And that is harder, we think, than Shoultz makes it out to be.

Finally, sneaking in just before the deadline, N. T. Carlsbad provides another of his trademark historical reviews in Lally-Tollendal’s Defense of the Royalist Emigres. This time, Carlsbad focuses on the complicated history between European governments and foreign nationals.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Over at Gornahoor, we learn of Cologero’s deteriorating health and a A Necessary Interruption

Kristor writes Moloch is But a Vassal of Our True Enemy, rebuking the demons of nominalism and liberty.

Thomas F. Bertonneau covers Count Gobineau on Race and Civilization, examining some classic, currently forbidden anthropology texts.

Objectively, Gobineau sought only to articulate a scientific racial theory or a scientific theory of race. The term “master-race” moreover is foreign to Gobineau’s text; and “Aryan,” as Gobineau properly uses it, is an ancient tribal self-designation. Had someone accused Gobineau of racism, or of being a racist, the term would have baffled him entirely.

Bonald has up Aristotle’s Physics: a review which is long overdue. Then he follows up on the same topic with Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and their followers on self-motion and the generation of new substantial forms.

Matt Briggs reports on a California judge who is Courting Climate Comedy by ordering an in-court climate change tutorial. Also, Richard Dawkins’ Cannibalism Suggestion is Hard to Digest and other consequentialist inevitabilities. Then he chronicles the coup of the administration over faculty at the academy, helpfully suggesting The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Administrators. Finally, fun with fake academic articles, relaxed army standards, and a $17,850 urine test, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXVI.

Mark Richardson transcribes some highlights of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s great speech.

Dalrock explains Why Game is a threat to our values—perverted, gyno-centric values, that is.

The threat that Game poses is not that large groups of men will learn how to put it into effective practice (although many have and will). The threat comes from its assault on young men’s belief that chivalry is sexy and therefore chivalry is virtuous. Even worse, a young man doesn’t even have to ever hear the word “Game” or directly study its theories to be at risk of concluding that chivalry isn’t sexy. This is a message that is slowly making its way through the culture.

Game is so corrosive to our moral order because the normal methods to return to course only make the corrosion worse. Lectures on the importance of chivalry will be met with ridicule, since chivalry is unsexy.

Christians should rightly be appalled… At the enthronement of Romantic Luv—aka., tingles—as the sine qua non of Christian marriage. Game remains a strategy for navigating the devastation wrought by the former error.

This Week in Arts & Letters

PA provides apposite points on Torture, dehumanization, and the possibility of transcendence. And a translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s (Polish I think) poem: The Interrogation of an Angel (1969).

Chris Gale returns with more Locke and Sydney for our Saturday and Sunday Sonnets.

In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald and Frank Furedi discuss The Campus Victim Cult. Emmett Hare gives voice to what everyone in NYC can smell: the city’s Downward trajectory, literally since the moment Comrade Deblasio took over. And related: “Equity” Before Security.

Brad Birzer at the Imaginative Conservative Reflects on Burke’s “Reflections”. Not, of course, that we here at Social Matter endorse Burke’s proto-cuckservatism. To cleanse the palate, we have John Mark Reynolds with The Shattered Image of the Thirteenth Century, a great place to start if you’re interested in the pre-renaissance thought and culture of Europe—and you should be.

Richard Carroll brings us a little poetry straight from the mouth (allegedly) of an English monarch, and also reviews, with reasonable confidence now that he’s brushed up on the subject, A Confucian Notebook.

John Fitzgerald, at Albion Awakening, reviews the undeservedly obscure Mark of the Horse Lord.

Fencing Bear manages to avoid slobbering over Milo just long enough to comment on The Trolls of Academe, from deep inside the safe (and very white) space of Medieval Academy of America.

Finally, over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless releases part 11 of The Iron Garden. And Part 12.

This Week in the Outer Left

There was a lot going on with the left this week, so let’s get right into it. See what I did there? To start the week off on a bizarre note, Josh Fruhlinger penned a short story for The Baffler entitled The Man Who Knew Nothing At All. And I do mean bizarre. I am including it in this week’s round-up because it is amusing and has a few moments of unintentional honesty, but to quote some of our alt-right friends… I’m not sure who’s jewing who anymore. I get this is supposed to be satire, but of what? and why? Say one thing about a previous generation of leftoids, say they could at least write well enough that you got the point.

Continuing at The Baffler, Tim Shorrock provocatively wonders about peace as armageddon. If you RTWT on this one, and I recommend you do, it’s probably best to have a bowl of popcorn at hand for all the bashing of liberal talking heads. Thoroughly entertaining, and also frustrating, as Shorrock gets so close to uttering the whole truth, but can’t get past a partial one. Let’s roll the tape.

…liberals tend to see Korea only through Cold War blinders that twist North Korea into a permanent enemy that should be confronted with permanent war, and South Korea as a slavish ally without a mind of its own.

…

The real story here is that too many liberals and too many journalists simply can’t accept the idea that the two Koreas may have accomplished this feat on their own, without the sober adult guidance of the American intelligensia. An independent Korea? A South Korean president driving American foreign policy? As the past several news cycles have shown in embarrassing detail, such things are simply unthinkable to the wised-up U.S. pundit caste.

He’s so close! Why can’t the journalists accept that the Koreas acted without the “guidance of the American intelligentsia”? Regular readers of Social Matter certainly know the answer, but, alas, it eludes this particular member of the American intelligentsia.

And rounding out the offerings from The Baffler, Corey Pein urges us to blame the computer. This is a long one, but a must read if you’re one of the technophilic geeks who found his way to neoreaction. As might be expected, there are layers here. On the surface, it’s a screed against the computer itself and the computer science departments in universities that teach the esoterica thereof. But if you’re astute, your attention should have perked up the moment you saw the word “universities”, because that is what this is really about. Pein is not at all happy that computer science majors don’t have to take lots of ethics classes, nor is he happy at the status that accrues to people particularly skilled at computer usage. But even deeper below this is a recognition that it is thanks to a system of networked computers that the first cracks have started to appear in the seemingly impenetrable facade of the Cathedral, and it is that which is so terrifying.

Sometimes people are so stupid, it’s actually noteworthy. Ostensible Baltimore school-teacher Ms. Willis may be one such example.

cyborg_nomade closes out the batting order with a post on proudhonian cosmopolitanism. While I recommend reading this one, do so with caution, as he liberally sprinkles in links to Nick Land blog posts from 2011, and that’s a rabbit hole that will consume anyone’s day.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson delivers three podcasts this week: a discussion of biology and psychology’s capitulation to the Left with Quillette founder and editor Claire Lehmann; a reading of a chapter from his latest book about psychological diagnoses of mass shooters and possible correctives; and a Q&A with his Patreon supporters.

Steven Pinker continues his lecture tour promoting his new book Apocalypse Enlightenment Now.

Over at Heterodox Academy, Christian Gonzalez notices that the Left encourages minority groups to feel oppressed, and the Half Hour of Heterodoxy podcast brings Musa Al-Gharbi on to discuss the current political climate at Columbia.

In an interesting week for Quillette, Ben Sixsmith shines a light on the relationship between race and grooming gangs in the UK as well as on the cuckoldry of British politicians. Coltan Scrivner explores the inevitable tension between diversity and freedom of speech: When given the freedom, people tend to take a pass on the diversity…. John Faithful Hamer describes the ongoing civil war between wizards (who wish to stay the present course) and prophets (who see disaster looming on the horizon). Most interestingly, Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas argue that the Alt-Right gets Jews wrong and that Jews’ high average IQ explains their overrepresentation in various Leftist causes. But since they acknowledge that many Jews feel threatened by (Gentile) nationalism and push for multiculturalism as an alternative, their take on the JQ may not be as different as they think…

Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Carlos Bueno examines how hard it is to get AI to explain its decisions.

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin has a nice bit of analysis here: Nihilists and Doomers Come Cheap and Stupid; Competent Optimists Have to Know Something. “The Human Future Could Be Grand if We Would Let it Be.” We fully agree. Related: Machine Paradox: Master/Slave vs Symbiosis. The take-away, the barriers to human advancement are primarily moral, social, and psychological, and not really technological. The industrial revolution and it’s consequences have indeed been a disaster for the human race, but not on account of the industry itself.

Insula Qui’s backbreaking task of formulating a libertarian statecraft continues at Zeroth Position with Part V: Aristocracy, Republicanism, and State. Qui admits from the get-go:

To concede that individual sovereignty is invalid would effectively defeat all libertarian values. To concede that central sovereignty is invalid would defeat the purpose and role of statecraft. To resolve this, one must look to the nature of contracts.

But isn’t a contract only as good as its enforcement mechanism? And what is contract enforcer but a “central sovereign”? And this is setting aside entirely the compulsion of unwritten, un-volunteered-for, and even un-articulable duties that most humans inherit most of the time. He avers that

First, in a low-trust society, contracts ensure that the society is not in perpetual chaos, as they channel conflict into production. Second, it means that when people are already prone to collaboration, contracts become mostly redundant because interests are already synthesized.

I think this is neither empirically observable nor intuitively obvious. In a low-trust society, contracts are correspondingly meaningless. It is more a race to the good graces of the contract enforcer (or contract ignorer, as the case may be). On the contrary, I think contracts are a social technology built upon an extant base of high social trust—or at least mutual high trust of an impartial contract enforcer. I strongly suspect contracts are most useful in a society “already prone to collaboration”. Contracts, by my reckoning, are an undoubtedly valuable cart pulled only by the strong horse of implicit social trust.

And Mr. Qui makes another interesting concession:

We can have low-trust monarchic individualism or high-trust republican communalism. There is no sustainable option for a stateless society that is both individualistic and republican.

I don’t exactly agree with that. But it certainly explodes some sacred libertarian myths. As always, I urge my political theory-minded readers to head over there and give this treatise some quality feedback and critique that I am not really capable of giving myself.

Also at Zeroth Position this week, Nullus Maximus makes an appearance with a pretty in-depth book review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus (2015). He doesn’t seem to have liked it too much, so maybe the review is all you’ll need. Interestingly, Harari does traipse awfully close to some of the ground covered by Moldbug. And this too was quite good: Ten Observations on Right-Wing Activist Bans in the UK. We find much to agree with there. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Zach Kraine provides a nice list of How to win: A guide for new movements. An omission: “Dress better than the competition”.

Heartiste notices some mainstream coverage of The Empathy Gene—or gene complex as the case may be. HBD-ers can chime in with some expertise, but I have to agree 10% of variation due to genetics seems awfully low. I’m not sure any psychological trait is that low.

Roman Dmowski explains why Trump’s Victory and Success Have Been Entirely Predictable (But Rarely Predicted).

Ace stays in the 70s for this week’s illustrative selection: “She’s got a smile that heals me…” TIL: Billy Joel was making records as early as 1971. I sorta thought his career began with The Stranger 1977. Who knew? 80-Proof Oinomancy new.

The Rebbe has been working on a refutation of Culture of Critique: The Jewish Question, Answered is a work in progress. Deserves a read.

Hapsburg Restorationist tackles The Paradox of Metternich.

Thrasymachus brings up the strange, and rarely noticed, case of The Thomas Wales Killing.

Brandon Adamson, at Alt-Left, dives into Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and has Governor Breck Reconsidered.

Anti-Puritan requests your help to find out if people would sell their right to vote.

And Meta-Nomad has a lengthy meditation on the function of the Academy. He focuses on the relationship between philosophy and the Academy, with other fields left as an exercise for the reader. So, RTWT and figure out the function of the Academy as it operates in your field.

That’s all folks. Many thanks to my staff for their excellent contributions. Everyone was in place this week: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill: I quite literally couldn’t do it without you! Happy Spring, everyone! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/18) appeared first on Social Matter.

Hope you all had a beautiful Palm Sunday—the strangest liturgy of the year, I think, from an affective standpoint. From shouting “Hosannah!” to shouting “Crucify Him!!” in 3.7 liturgical seconds. Chalk it up to Perfidious Jews if ya want, but there’s a lesson in there for all of us…

Well, Nick Szabo has kicked off what appears to be a new series: The many traditions of non-governmental money (part i). If you’re not reading Nick Szabo, you’re probably not qualified to talk about money. Szabo doesn’t need our accolades but the Committee was arrogant enough to name this an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ anyway.

VDH has a dozen Scandal Questions Never Asked, Much Less Answered. As well, he surveys Our Long History of Misjudging North Korea.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton had time to write a short letter this week: Sunday Thoughts—Brilliant Aphorism Edition.

We have another tasting of GA Blog’s unique blend of political philosophy aged linguistic oak casks in Declarative Culture and Imperium in Imperio.

Neocolonial checks in with bullet points on Moral Transposition. Among them:

Good and Evil inherently reference the in-group, and seek its growth in absolute capability and glory. Love and Hate inherently reference the out-group, and seek its relative growth in capability and privilege.

But do RTWT. It’s short, and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Alrenous provides some commentary on Political Formula(e).

Friend of this blog, Anatoly Karlin, provided extensive commentary on Russia’s presidential election (1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). A must read if you’re into Russian presidential elections. Anatoly also claims that the alt right is dead. Which raises the question, was the Alt-Right ever really alive to start with? Worth considering.

The recent outrage provides an occasion for Malcolm Pollack to reflect on The Second Amendment, and the Third Law. That’s Robert Conquest’s Third Law, of course. Which you have memorized, of course. Also this was a very funny (and true) aphorism: Empty calories.

By way of Isegoria… We could never have prepped what happened in Venezuela. Jordan Peterson is trying to save the Western civilization by devising a post-Christian system of ethics. Imagining An alternative universe in which golf courses are a prime subject for intellectualizing—beware NYT editors bearing under-hyped minorities to hype. They’re already vastly over-hyped. Mass killings are rare, and mass public shootings are even rarer—of course. Related: Any study of gun violence should include how guns save lives.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, Like Unto That of a Little Child. He thinks James A. Fitzpatrick’s “Voice of the Globe” short documentaries are going to have to be memory-holed.

James Fitzpatrick of “Travelogue fame” onboard RMS CARONIA Feb 1951

What is glaringly apparent when we view the Fitzpatrick vignettes is that diversity does not work. It is unnatural to expect birds of different feather to flock together, and it is also, more importantly, un-Christian to destroy the Christ-bearing race by colorizing their civilization. There is no one with a heart that still lives who could prefer modern Europe to the Europe we see in the Fitzpatrick travelogues. And yet somebody did prefer a diverse Europe to a non-diverse Europe, because that is the Europe we now have.

The Europe that Fitzpatrick presents is a Europe about to crumble, but the accumulated Christian capital still present in those European nations is on glorious display in all of the shorts. South Africa is shown as a bastion of civilization in the Dark Continent. Australia is depicted as a shining testimonial to the white race. And the scenes of rural England, Denmark, Holland, and the rest of the European nations provide us with a wonderful view of non-diverse Europe. Is it paradise? No, of course not; only in comparison to modern, diverse Europe was old Europe paradise.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim opened up the week making the claim that there are no utilitarians. Since Scott Alexander actually exists, Jim had some ‘splaining to do.

Red haired girl.

Whosoever claims to be a utilitarian is lying. Whosoever lies, is lying because he is defecting on those he lies to, seeks to harm, or is harming, those he lies to. In the case of utilitarianism, the lie is the claim to care about far, in order to cover actions or intentions harmful to near.

…

But the ingroup are our direct competitors for status, power, and wealth – they occupy, and threaten, our own ecological niche. Thus the evil man always seeks to ally with far in order to destroy those closest to him. Hence leftism. Thus the evil man always loudly claims to love the outgroup.

Well, there you go, makes sense, sounds real. RTWT, and don’t neglect to get into the comments too. Alrenous and Jim have a nice back and forth with Alrenous claiming everyone is a utilitarian. My natural contrarianism tempts me to wade in and stake out the moderate position that some people are utilitarians and some aren’t, but grappling with both Jim and Alrenous at once is well beyond my limited abilities.

And a rare post from Jim that is a bit of a downer as he counsels don’t vote. Voting is, of course, the sort of vice that a reactionary would never engage in… or if he did, he wouldn’t admit it and would wash his hands afterwards. Jim is reacting to the recent Trump capitulation on the omnibus spending bill, and is right to be a bit down about it. Most people had already thrown in the towel on Trump being the beginning of a turnaround, but Jim had largely maintained his optimism.

Electing Trump has made a big difference. But he has has not made a big enough difference to prevent the government from electing a new people.

…

But all these things are pretty small potatoes compared to illegal immigration. Trump can’t even send back the DACA illegals.

The new people are still being elected. The great erasure continues.

The Official Position of TWiR has been, is, and will likely continue to be for the foreseeable future: Trump buys us some time, nothing more, nothing less. He was never going to be the God-Emperor, he might be able to ram through a few marginal improvements by sheer force of will, but that’s it. He is just one man, and, in a sense, he arrived too early because the thousand statesmen who could’ve been put in to break the Cathedral are not ready yet.

This Week in Social Matter

Costin Alamariu kicks off our week here explaining why Matthew Rose Is Wrong About The ‘Alt-Right’. It is a thoroughgoing rebuttal of this attempt by First Things to be hip and relevant. Worthwhile is his analysis of the inability of mainstream pundits to wrap their heads around the edgelords. And funny:

People like Rick Wilson, among many others, who never really recovered from this assault on their egos, concluded that these could by no means have been Americans: “AnimePepe who asked what I have conserved as a conservative, and who knows all this history and about all these recent genetic studies, this is un-American. This has to be Russian intel.”

Indirectly, this is also how this very enterprising and impish part of the American youth contributed to Trump’s victory in a small way. By driving the solipsistic journalist class mad with teasing, Hillary Clinton was led into giving the disastrous “alt-right” speech (very likely written for her by Rick Wilson, Evan McMullin, or someone with connections to the “conservative” Straussian school). The effect of this speech on people who didn’t know about what was happening on Twitter—the vast majority of Americans—was to make Hillary look completely insane. She sounded like she was talking about them, about Americans at large, and was connecting them with this made-up “alt-right,” a Putinist global conspiracy, and cartoon frogs.

Don’t miss the “Parents, Beware!” PSA he has up. Gnon has a way or reasserting itself when and where you least expect it! Alamriu garners an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent efforts here.

Hubert Collins is here Tuesday with An Immodest Proposal For Ending The Opioid Crisis. I don’t recall seeing the data on this crisis presented quite so clearly. Death rates have gone vertical since about 2014. And the lion’s share of the drugs in question are manufactured legally. He wants to stop heroin from entry, of course, but he wants the government to go after Big Pharma too:

The idea would be to introduce to the pharmaceutical industry what libertarian economic historian Robert Higgs calls “regime uncertainty.” As defined by the Mises Wiki, regime uncertainty is: “a pervasive lack of confidence among investors in their ability to foresee the extent to which future government actions will alter their private-property rights.” Normally, this is meant to describe the kind of economic slump a country can enter in when every major industry is fearful that it may be next in line to get nationalized, so risky innovation, infrastructure maintenance, and investment plummet. That is certainly a bad thing; but when an entire industry is playing and profiting with drugs that are the leading cause of death in a nation, it is a good thing. Those companies should be fearful that some day the state’s hammer will fall.

Leading cause of untimely death, at any rate. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Collins spends some ink dealing with the question of whether nationalization of industries is “legal”. Raison d’État sounds good to me. Speaking of which, don’t the neoliberals over at New America realize that the phrase “Opioid Epidemic” is a white supremacist dogwhistle?!!

New-comer Jérôme Bernard Grenouille is up on Thursday with The Principle Of Loss: A Reactionary’s Introduction To Georges Bataille, little known on the right or the left.

Jean-Paul Sartre condemned his “mysticism”. His enemies within the Left accused him of Surfascisme (Overfascism). His background, ideas, and unapologetic Nietzscheanism render Bataille wholly toxic to the Left. For an intellectual family which leaves less and less space for nuance, the Left has little use of Bataille.

But Grenouille thinks that maybe the Right does. According to Bataille:

[T]he purity of poetry is the purity of the sacral, but by extension all useless expenditure is one way or another a human attempt at creating the divine. All loss is worship. This notion is very familiar the reactionary mind, scoffing at the state of his world: if cut off from religion and God, the singular man will worship athletes and celebrities.

Or sometimes university professors. Sacrifice needs to be expensive, whereas both “sides” of the political divide are in their own ways mired in utilitarianism. This leaves the reactionary with some pretty explosive ammunition:

The bourgeois class, the ruling class, whether liberal or conservative, is cut from the same cloth and Bataille understood that the ruling class is unfit to rule. In his essay, he makes makes a prescription using the principle of loss on the right to rule: since the ruling classes have generally been the ones with the greatest wealth, they were historically the ones in charge of making the most significant expenditures on behalf of the whole of society. One may think back to the public games organised the Roman rulers or to the magnificent cathedrals of the middle ages. Bataille notes something singular about our ruling class, which is obsessed and governed by the principle of utility: its refusal to make that expenditure. That is, the current ruling class loses all legitimacy because it is unwilling to engage in all “production of sacred things”. This refusal of the moneyed classes are the most apparent in the aesthetic debauchery of its art and architecture and its naive materialism.

Ammunition, once we figure out how to deploy it, at any rate… There’s much more here. Congratulations to Grenouille for ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. On his rookie debut, no less.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast is slightly lighter fare than usual: Episode 62: Coup d’Clown—The Plot To Seize The White House, and features an excellent discussion of why it is that America has gone so long without a serious coup threat.

Finally, for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose column, E. Antony Gray has some of his own verse on offer: The Poet To His Mother.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Audacious Epigone has some admiration for The Han Hundred. And he runs some numbers on the Great Sub-saharan African Migration (to the United States): Slowly at first, then all at once.

Gregory Cochran announces a forthcoming review of David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here, and ponders the fact that the US has only successfully decoded 2% of intercepted Soviet messages.

Cochran also looks at some of the ways in which ¡Science! isn’t always “self-correcting”. Three guesses and the first two don’t count. A sample:

Eric Turkheimer seems to think that the possibility of racial IQ differences is refuted by an “ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair”. That’s an odd argument. Does it work with Downs and Fragile X? I doubt if he has ever used it for any other issue. Should I use it to deny the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, or smallpox epidemics, or asteroid strikes? If he thought that there just weren’t any such differences, he wouldn’t need special new ‘logical’ principles to prevent them from existing—would he?

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Further thoughts on the end of America, replete with folksy meme. She starts with children’s history written in the first half of the 20th Century, which is of course implicitly white supremacist as you know what. By the 90s history had become herstory too.

She has some notes and observations on Nootropics and Gender.

Rounding out the week for Anthropology Friday, more from Totemism and Exogamy pt 2/3: Plagues, Polyandry, and Infanticide. This is from 1910, which makes it delightfully politically incorrect.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at Thermidor, we kick off the week with Gio Pennacchietti’s indictment: Reprobate Hollywood, From Ancient to Modern. We all agree that it’s a cesspit. He looks at the why.

I would argue that the soul and character of Hollywood is a certain way because, in this time of manufactured spectacle, such an institution has always attracted people of a certain disposition. What do actors deal with primarily? Illusions, not in the way a painting is an illusion. Paintings share a broken or interpretive character with reality—an idealized or abstracted reality, whereas acting takes another step towards “realism” or the illusion of realism by mimesis. It is the uses and abuses of mimesis that the ancients were most concerned about when developing their discourses on art and aesthetics.

While Pennacchietti draws some ammunition from some unexpected sources—Horkheimer and Adorno—he adopts the motif of “Culture Industry” and it’s takeover by Hollywood. Cultures are not supposed to be manufactured things in the first place, right?

[T]he truth of the Cathedral-entertainment-industrial complex, is precisely the truth of the “battle for the mind of North America”. An ongoing info-war, one in which our cultural masters schizophrenically sway between panicking over their waning influence in the Internet age, and being triumphalist in their ability to continually subdue the mental landscape of the masses. The issue at hand is the metaphysical disposition of our current hyper-information age and the penumbra cast by Hollywood upon it, and for this, we must highlight a basic artistic inversion present within the modern world.

The by now all too familiar inversion of high and low, beauty and ugly, skillful and shoddy. Anyway, there’s much more there there in this must read essay. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ winner.

This week’s Europa Weekly podcast covers Trailer Park Goys.

Richard Carroll provides a wonderful guide on How to Read the Iliad. In a shocking reversal of what I would usually recommend, I prefer the newer translations. They tend to capture the stark brutality of the original Greek; our old poets did a real hackjob trying to fit The Iliad into English meter. Reading Homer is a journey into the primeval barbarism that coalesced into western civilization; more Beowulf than Paradise Lost. (If we were actually literate, and not what passes for it nowadays, we would read the original, and the debate would be pointless.)

Jake Bowyer avers There is No End, i.e., no end goal (telos) of left agitation, and that probably explains why we never see an end of it.

Finally, Nigel T. Carlsbad explains looks at The Imperial Presidency That Never Comes. America has done a fantastic job at insulating itself against the excesses of democracy, no doubt.

The paradox here is that the strengthening of the executive branch doesn’t have any straightforward effect on the chief executive himself. More often than not, he is weakened. The ones who profit off the dismantling of federalism are the myriad of agencies regulated in some way by the Administrative Procedure Act.

Carlsbad takes a (relatively) high view of Harding as well as old-school political machines. Heckuva lot more honest than the shenanigans we’ve got going on these says. We approve! An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero presents notes on The Moral Universe. Also a fine exposition on The Primacy of Will in “esoteric psychology”.

Cane Caldo doesn’t like what the opposite of “liberal” is… but he is it anyway. Grasp the nettle, friends! Moar on the topic.

Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s Mark of the Sacred, which paints Globalism as Sacrificial Crisis.

James Kalb writes The Darkness Gathers: Why public discussion has become increasingly irrational, pinning the blame on giant, politically interested institutions controlling the discourse. For example:

The Supreme Court’s grand project of human liberation thus reduces to the right to make career, hobby, lifestyle, and consumption choices that can easily be accommodated within a global regulated economic order that programmatically loosens personal connections. “Each of us defines his own moral reality” turns out, when reduced to a workable system, to mean “the strongest define moral reality.”

Matt Briggs reviews The Case for Miracles, where its author Lee Strobel Asks, “Are Miracles Real & Still Happening?” His empirically determined conclusion: Yes, indeed they are. Then he examines Why Christians Supported, And Still Support, Trump. Maybe it’s just because Trump is nice to them. Also, Prairie Fire in the Classroom: Bill Ayers’s Bloodless Revolution—Guest Post by Kevin Groenhagen chronicles the Marxist creep in elementary education. Then Briggs revels in the (Hot) Air Let Out of California’s Climate Change Lawsuit when not one but two judge-ordered climate change amici briefs both agree that the data do not conclusively demonstrate whether climate change is man-made. Finally, incarcerating homeschoolers, university-awarded happiness badges, and rich white men pushing the transgender agenda, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXVII.

Bonald pens a brief but salient note: People will have existential crises on command. For a while, Alienation was the New Black. All the popular kids were doing it, then…

[T]he Left-wing cultural establishment decided that alienation was no longer high status–now only losers and fascists want to feel at home in the world and crave an organic connection to a people and place.

Mark Richardson provides an example through Hungary of what a national identity, which is greater than any individual of that nation and encompasses them all, can provide a people When There is Something There.

William Wildblood explains how England Led the World Into Materialism.

England was probably the first country to adopt the mindset that led to the materialisation of consciousness and the present-day attitudes in which God has no place. It was a pioneer in many areas that formed the contemporary world. You can’t trace this back to any single formational event or time but Protestantism was certainly one step towards the separation of the natural and supernatural worlds, and then the English Civil War was another. One religious, the other political. The fact that both of these things may have had positive elements to them is beside the point. The basic truth is that they opened up a gap between the spiritual and the material which, once opened, could be expanded exponentially until the point was reached at which the spiritual was so far removed it no longer existed in any real sense and could just be denied reality. That is now.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale has more Sydney for our Saturday Sonnet, and another Ann Locke for Sunday. And in a moment of levity, The Aunteater.

At City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple has some commentary on a recent Dangerous Development in Cape Town; one that certainly did not escape our notice.

Glenn Arbery at the Imaginative Conservative has some well-intentioned ideas on Remaking the Culture. But culture is downstream of power; in fact, it’s almost like a waterfall. Which is much more fitting for the timeframe we’re working with.

John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening introduces us to Aidan Hart, modern iconographer.

Finally, Harper takes an in-depth look at the maritime art of Kenneth Denton Shoesmith. Beautiful.

This Week in the Outer Left

Jennifer Schaffer has a review of three books with interchangeable plots up at The Baffler. I do not recall the titles or the authors as I write this up, because the review is not the point, the closing paragraphs are the point, so I will quote them at length.

My own coming of age took a similar form to these characters’. I had just turned twenty, he was thirty-one. At the time, I was in a long-term relationship with an undergraduate engineer so straightforward in his needs that I spent days of my life tracing the pattern of his personality, over and over, feeling for the snag. I was, indisputably, the dominant force between us: if I hadn’t been, our days would have consisted of video games, takeout, and watching viral clips in bed. The relationship offered me these genuinely simple pleasures, which is what I needed, or thought I needed, at the time.

Then I met a man, let’s call him Jack, and at first it felt like going from Go Fish to high-stakes poker. Jack was observant and condescending, domineering and erudite. We met in a writing group, and he read my work with an acuity it had never been read with before. So much of our relationship consisted of Jack describing me to myself: the way I held a wine glass, the way I wrote, the way my body felt, the way I looked while I was reading. Over time, it grew clear to me that Jack—and maybe all the grown-up boys I had known, or would know—derived much of his power from my willingness to listen, to absorb, to watch, to reflect back to him what he told me he was seeing. If my energy and my attention, my enthusiasm and my youth, were deep wells from which men drew their power, what would I be left with in due course? Jack wanted to a be a professor, and often made me into his classroom of one, but what I learned from him—so central to who I am now—never came from his lessons. The payout is never enough.

If I didn’t know otherwise, I would swear this was an illustrative story made up by Heartiste. It’s just too perfect, it’s all here: alpha fux, beta bux, alpha widowhood, the hamster.

And, in somewhat more serious fare, Yasha Levina covers the Cambridge Analytica con for The Baffler. The con of the title does not refer to any actions taken by Cambridge Analytica, but rather refers to the mainstream coverage thereof. Levine fundamentally gets it right that there is no meaningful difference between Cambridge Analytica and the daily operations of Facebook, Google, and similar platforms. He gets it wrong in calling for them to be subject to “democratic oversight”, which just means rendering them safe for leftism and inherently hostile to the right. However, on the whole, this one is a definite RTWT, and a bit of a long one at that, so I’m going to just leave you with this one nugget and say go read the rest.

The truth is that the internet has never been about egalitarianism or democracy.

This is the truth, but Levine takes it to be a valid criticism of the internet, rather than a significant point in its favor.

And our friend Craig Hickman returned this week from a hiatus to favor us with a new poem, for the darkness within…

We hope, come The Restoration, that only a few will need to be show-trialed and executed. Professional “Anti-racist” Time Wise is probably among those few.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

For the second week in a row, the JQ got attention outside the Dissident Right, this time from Jordan Peterson. Unsurprisingly, Peterson concludes that the Alt-Right’s take on the JQ is nothing but a conspiracy theory and that Jewish success can be explained by high IQ alone. He then riffs off the JQ to argue against identity politics:

First, psychologically speaking: why do the reactionary conspiracy theorists even bother? This is a straightforward matter. If you’re misguided enough to play identity politics, whether on the left or the right, then you require a victim (in the right-wing case, European culture or some variant) and a perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can’t play the game.

There’s a kernel of truth here: Even when you actually are a victim, Victim Mindset is not Imperial Mindset—a lesson some dissidents would do well to remember. (Moldbug: “Whining is the act either of a slave, or a b*tch.”) But of course, it’s possible to have a non-PC but nuanced take on the JQ without playing identity politics; indeed, it’s possible to have such a take on the JQ without playing politics at all…

Another red-haired girl.

This week also found Peterson caught twice in the Cathedral’s crosshairs, despite his persistent efforts to punch right and thereby distance himself from racists and identitarians. The New York Review of Books accuses Peterson of “fascist mysticism”, while the Walrus accuses him of using his connections to the Kwakwaka’wakw people to deflect charges of racism. Peterson, who (unlike Elizabeth Warren) is not a “Fauxcoum”, did not like this.

Steven Pinker talks to Reason’s Nick Gillespie about Pope Francis, environmentalists, and unwarranted fear of economic regulations.

Jon Haidt and Sean Stevens of Heterodox Academy argue that free speech on campus is starting to trend in the right direction. BTW, I noticed that HxA has up a fairly interesting (possibly even useful) Guide to Colleges.

Over at EconLog, David Henderson posts a back-and-forth of his with fellow economist Jack Tatom on our supposed “right to our bodies” in view of the recent student walkouts. He also briefly discusses the history of proposals for a guaranteed annual income in the US. Scott Sumner asks, “What if Trump wins the China IP dispute?”And in the wake of Trump’s trade war, Pierre Lemieux explains whom he thinks protectionist measures hurt.

At Quillette, Jonny Anomaly contends that the Alt-Right and the Regressive Left are one and the same. (Stay tuned to find out whether “Regressive Leftists are the real identitarians!” works out better than “Democrats are the real racists!”) Gideon Scopes complains that American democracy isn’t working because the Left has turned it into an oligarchy—perhaps a clue that democratic systems have serious design flaws. Finally, Alexander Blum suggests (somewhat out of left field) that Jordan Peterson’s ideas are compatible with Marxism.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA produces an affecting montage on The Enemy Of England. Also he ranks The Five Best Geopolitical Events Of My Lifetime.

This week in 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace considers when the problem is you and what to do about it: “I just don’t understand how you can smile with all those tears in your eyes…”. Feature video from Everclear is a must-listen. I suppose the problem is always you in some sense.

Arnold Kling notices a distinct odor in the March for Our Lives™ Brand protests: Not your 1960s protests. They were performance art then; they are performance art for the short bus today.

Al Fin takes note of some Russian Exports We Could Do Without—one in particular. Also: Why is Latin America So Violent?

Zach Kraine notes: “Left wing rebellion has become a capitalist commodity”. The red-revolution isn’t coming because… it’s already here. And like all revolutions, it was carried out by the bourgeoisie.

By way of Unorthodoxy: David Brooks “Speaking as a white male”. You can’t make this shit up.

Hapsburg Restorationist takes a very Catholic look into the question Is the De Facto Power Always Legitimate Authority?

This week in Zeroth Position, Insula Qui continues his treatise On Libertarianism and Statecraft: Part VI: Authority and Liberty. He makes the (somewhat strange) case that authoritarianism is perfectly compatible with libertarianism—indeed optimal. While this is good to know, the libertarian bit of the equation leaks out in ways that are not intelligible to garden variety authoritarians such as myself: “Whenever authorities refrain from coercing anyone, they are perfectly libertarian.” Is not the entire purpose of authority to coerce people? He brings up Moldbug’s ol’ favorite: Market governance. Now a government who works with, instead of against, market realities is bound to be more effective, just as a government who works with, and not against, gravity and meteorology will be. But that doesn’t mean there’s a free and open market for government. Neighbors Alice and Bob can’t “buy” different governments, for whoever resolves inevitable disputes between them will be the true government. So why not eliminate the middle-men in the first place? There’s only room for Alice’s government or Bob’s. And if Alice was the buyer, she should I think add the option of transferring all of Bob’s property over to her.

Welp, that’s all we had time for. Hope you got your fix of News you can Use. Special thanks to the excellent TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, Burgess MacLear, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear helped immensely in drawing this all together. David Grant was off this week, and assuredly his absence was felt. He should be back next week. Have a blessed Holy Week, everyone, and a Happy Easter! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/25) 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.

Well this past week was Thanksgiving here in USG. And despite the holiday’s ignominious beginnings, it remains one of the least sullied ones. We hope you found much to be grateful for. Even in Clown World®. Anthony DeMarco hosts a Thanksgiving Edition of Solo Climb. More on that below. Nullus Maximus kicks off the Official Christmas Shopping Season with The Economic Fallacies of Black Friday: 2017 Edition.

Thanksgiving was undoubtedly the cause for the lighter than usual week around the sphere. And that’s all well and good, because spending time with friends and family in the real world—even if they’re intolerable progs—is more important than blogging in the virtual one.

This week in American Greatness… VDH says Never Mind ‘Trumpism’: What is ‘Deplorablism’?

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Our good friend Carlos Esteban Cataluña y el fin de la historia. His writing is riveting… even in the Chrome translation. Also there, a guest post: Por qué no soy feminista. And no, it’s not about soy. But in a way, I suppose it kinda is.

In the Netherlands, Alf reports: Sinterklaas bleeding, but not dead. Attempting to ban Christmas—in its local dialect—is mean in any century.

Shylock Holmes reflects On the thorniness of historical counterfactuals. He looks at the consequences of the widely derided British partition of India, and counterfactual consequences of heeding the Great Saint Ghandi and not doing so.

Imperial Energy expounds upon The Miracle of Michael Travers. “Miracle” that is. Also there he has some answers to AMK’s criticisms last week.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam considers Originary Grammar and Political Grammar. He defines the concept of “political imaginary” and compares two: the absolutist and anarchist. The only two, really. As usual, Adam defies simple summary. And also as usual, he’s a fascinating read, with particular application to memeology… This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Giovanni Dannato explains The Augustus Principle… in which… “There never was a precise moment Augustus(played by Brian Blessed) came out on stage and said, ‘Ho, ho I’m the emperor of the Roman Empire!'” Dannato thinks he notices a sea-change recently:

If we apply the more fluid way of history to our own time, we realize the neo-liberal cultural revolution that took hold in the 1960s effectively ended forever in 2016 and we have entered a new historical period. Even those who desperately want to restore the old social order do so with a tribal sort of viciousness in stark contrast to the harmonious star trek utopia they had envisioned for mankind barely one year ago. Even as they yearn to go back, they are unable to appreciate the irony of how their fanaticism only fuels the formation of faultlines that will define a new age.

We hope he’s right, and also hope that the decay will not collapse the system too quickly. The Restoration still needs time. Also there, Dannato explains how The 21st Century Leans Toward Aristocracy.

Billy Pratt pulls together a lot cinematic history—as well as a good bit of the pre-cinematic—to create a clever montage: Celia Shits: Portraits of Men and Women Through the Ages. It’s sort of a history of the red pill, before it was red.

While the internet certainly provides a forum for discussion, the basics of what we know as the red pill have been spread in hushed whispers and over chilled ale at men’s clubs throughout the course of western civilization. And while there was certainly a higher tolerance for discussing the reality of the world the way it really is, as opposed to our hilariously heavy-handed modern tropes painting women as brilliant warriors and benevolent scientists, it still wasn’t considered polite conversation. Even if you were treating women like children in the Eighteenth Century, you probably still wanted to pretend like you weren’t.

What would we have done without the internet? Jonathan Swift already told us pretty much all we needed to know. Pratt snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.

By way of Isegoria… A whole lotta love for Spandrell. A heckuva lot. Some light pol theory reading: Through the lens of state-formation (and more). Although they’re not synonyms, Some aspects of prodigy and autism do overlap. San Francisco has become a perverted Bizarro world. And… Handle and Arnold Kling find a lot to agree on.

Malcolm Pollack wonders why the Las Vegas shooting seems to have dropped through the memory hole.

Nick Land pops over to Jacobite to discuss North Korea in Independence Games. Land foresees exponential nuclear proliferation coming soon.

Toothpaste doesn’t return to the tube just because it makes a mess. Once it is out, inconvenience has ceased to be any kind of argument against it. The dangers of a world in which ubiquitous deterrence capacity reigns are both obvious and immense. This is nevertheless the world we are entering. The trends driving it, from both the geopolitical and the techno-economic sides, are by any realistic estimation irresistible. Cheaper and more diverse nightmare weaponry is becoming available within an increasingly disintegrated international order. A variety of self-reinforcing dynamics—including but not restricted to those of the arms-race type—are further stimulating the process. Cascading acceleration is all but inevitable.

The Committee were pleased to bestow Professor Land with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his work here.

Also at Jacobite, Londoner Jacob Philips chronicles how his home neighborhood has experiences material improvement but communal disintegration in Fecundity And Forgetting.

Anatoly Karlin has a post looking into a possible Pinkerian effect in corruption. Data seems to show an overall decrease in governmental corruption globally, interesting if true.

Finally, this week in CWNY: When We Remember Europe—i.e., as our Zion.

How can a whole race of people be held captive, estranged from their God and themselves, without even knowing it? It wasn’t easy, but the devil knew what he wanted. He wanted the European people, the Christ-bearing people, to see existence through the eyes of a scientist. Where is God in the natural world? Where is the scientific evidence that skin pigmentation is anything but skin pigmentation? Who dares say that white skin connotes a distinct people with spiritual attributes different from people without white skins? Once the Europeans’ God became a propositional God, the European people became a propositional people. Faith in an intellectual concept of God is not the same as a faith in the living God nor is a universal love for humanity the same as a love for one’s own people, one’s kith and kin.

This Week in Jim Donald

Another single post week from Jim, but that one post is another of his patented harsh red pills, known to burn all the way down and cause strange visions that may actually be suppressed truths. This particular pill is labeled women like sexual coercion. Did I say red pill? This may be a red suppository. Definitely hard to argue with the sales figures of Fifty Shades of Grey.

This Week in Social Matter

Our week around here kicks off on Sunday with Myths for a New Tomorrow, expertly narrated by Marcus Wolfe. This week a Bohemian tale: Long, Broad, And Sharpsight.

Mark Christensen brings a sharp, riveting style to his review: Collaborator: Reflections On Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. And, as always, copious research. It’s a review and analysis of a couple of La Rochelle’s works, who was a much more complex puzzle than his collaboration with the German occupation would suggest.

Reading Drieu La Rochelle has an eerie character to it, intensified by the introspective and frenetic nature of his journal. In his personal reading, he names authors familiar to many of us. In one entry, he reflects on the work of Rene Guenon. In another, he recounts Bertrand de Jouvenel. Yet given the absence of these figures from any daily interaction, he may as well be invoking the memories of men from another time. It might just as easily be a diary not from the past, but from some future of our own timeline—slipped by mysterious hands into a little bookstore in a bustling city center. The recorded ultimate fate of some nameless young man in the rightist circles of today, sent backward like a ripple from a yet-unforeseen conclusion. By what means and to what end, none can say.

Christensen doesn’t usually write like this. I think he was inspired.

“This could be us but you gettin’ a masters degree.”

Throughout its long reign—from the Great War onward—liberalism has never truly been able to grapple with alienation. The men of the trenches stood in absolute contradiction to the bourgeois liberalism of the individual. These were comrades of blood and struggle and machine. Authority and comradery; the leader and the collective; fascism and socialism. The ideological worlds born from the trenches were those which had to be born after such an event.

Our day has not yet had its equivalent event. Though the alienation and dislocation has become ever more intense, neither Right nor Left appear to have the will they once had. The pink-haired, nagging red guards of our universities pale compared to the communist partisans of Drieu’s day, with their Spartan determination. The technological transformation of society is fueled not by politics, but by entertainment. And yet, we have men of intellect and men of action. The street battles are with us again, a century later. So, too, are the debates, the radical paths which promise to lead us to something more meaningful. Meaning—not economic comfort—is what drives men of action into the streets, and men of intellect into real thought. We can be sure that there are Drieu La Rochelle’s. There are men torn between action and thought, men for whom death is a viable solution to the contradictions which our era multiplies.

Christensen reminds us just how much we learn by reading history’s losers, who being losers have much less incentive to lie. A strong recommendation to RTWT! This won the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

The West Coast Guyz™ are in place Friday with the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 45: Bush v. Gore—Recount. As always, their subject is handled with a great deal of perspicacity and irreverence.

Also on Friday, Anthony DeMarco drops a very poignant Solo Climb podcast: On Gratitude. He gets more personal than… evah, and reveals some of the tragedies in life that have shaped him—which he apparently thought were common knowledge but weren’t. I didn’t know that Anthony. Geesh. But ya made it!

This Week in Kakistocracy

Huge week from Porter this week. He kicks it off with a look at a certain sector of black nationalists in Brotha Hotep. For the uninitiated, “Hotep” describes a species of black separatist notable for seeking the empowerment of African man through his own abilities, discipline, and personal morality. Often with certain… revisionist (not to mention highly memeable) ideas about African history. Porter sympathizes, but is correctly cynical about their ability to gain much cultural ground:

And while I would certainly prefer a Hotep black zeitgeist over its whining, violent, and entitled opposition, there’s little hope it will find much purchase. That’s because from the black perspective, self-reliance is low-yield ordnance. It’s working all summer to grow radishes when the freezer is being filled with steaks

For those of us who believe that culture is downstream of power, however, the pessimism is unnecessary. Give these people status, make Coates a janitor, and the black zeitgeist will flip faster than you can say “We wuz kangs”. And I mean that with a fraternal amity only possible between two men who aren’t actively eying each other’s stuff.

Then, Porter aims a little ire at the way the Trump Administration is spending its political capital in Tax Reform with Purpose.

I guess it’s nice to enjoy such a leisurely perspective. Fooling with tax rates during a rare and brief political moment when National Questions could actually be nudged in favor of the right reminds me much of the admonishment from an old sky diving instructor: Take your time, you’ve got the rest of your life to get that parachute open.

He’ll be back on the topic in more depth, but he takes an aside to spit on the political aspirations of a certain class of bugmen in HP Replenishes Gyno Poly Pipeline. Featuring certain bugwomen, but the following applies universally to the type:

People like Meg Whitman helped create a society that will never again elect people like Meg Whitman. By treating their nation like a flea market they have cultivated political consumers who are only interested in bargains for themselves. Family members worry about the health of the family. Shoppers never worry about the health of a business.

Next, its back to the topic of tax cuts in Why a Profligate Society Needs High Taxes. Short, sweet, and to the point:

I’m writing this glibly, but the concept is critical to absorb. A society needs to feel the pain of its pieties in order to remain healthy. Tax cuts mitigate that pain and create the illusion of health and (even worse) infinite resources. When was the last time you heard a politician make this eminently reasonable statement: That’s a valid initiative, but we have finite resources and higher priorities, so we will not be funding it at this time. It’s laughable to imagine, and yet that should be the rational response to most proposals for government action.

I’m reminded of medieval England, where taxes would rise by an order of magnitude during wartime—and settle back to miniscule rates during times of peace. The Cathedral is constantly at war, in more ways than the merely military sense. It has largely been able to insulate its elite from the actual costs.

And lastly, Porter takes the opportunity of Black Friday to reflect on The Best Holiday Deals. Cheesily enough, they’re not the ones that get marked 50% off for Christmas shopping sprees. And he feels confident that his fellow reactionaries will understand that:

Whether it is finding beauty, adventure, love, or simply enjoying the lamentations of your enemies’ women, there is little sold at Walmart for which the human heart is truly thankful. It isn’t as much about having as it is experiencing; for in the end the memory of life’s experiences will be one of your most cherished items.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with a comprehensive dive into When Did Black People Evolve?

She pulls out the EvoX WordPress editor chair for “SFC Ton” who has a guest post on The Motorcycle Mindset.

And continuing on the theme of Biker Anthropology, a finale to No Angel by Jay Dobyns.

[O]ne of the mysteries the book touches on repeatedly is that this “criminal” organization receives nigh unwavering support from the general public. When they go to clubs, they’re given an introduction over the loudspeaker (“Everyone, the Hells Angels are partying with us tonight!”) Women are thrown at them. (Dobyns, who is married, has to get another undercover police officer to fake being his girlfriend to explain why he isn’t having sex with any of the women throwing themselves at him.) All of the motorcycle clubs in the area, even the totally mundane ones, respect the HAs; there are HA “support” clubs scattered around the nation.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Doug Smythe starts things off at our sister publication Thermidor this week with Political Organizing And The Right: Towards A New Leninism. Smythe observes the same disparity in organization between the Left and the Right as David Hines, and he deepens Hines’ analysis with a discussion of the peculiar requirements of Right-wing organization.

Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter, was married to Nick Lowe from 1979-1990.

It is a first principle of the new Reaction that the social change it strives towards—inter alia, the abolition of democracy and the separation of powers, the revival of indivisible personal rule, the restoration of the rights and social honour of the Church and the patriarchal family, and the suppression of globalist big business and the Cathedral—is structural change that will involve refounding the State on new juridico-political foundations, and otherwise reconfiguring the whole kit and caboodle of existing social relations. This general and foundational restructuring of State and society obviously cannot be carried out on a piecework basis by a swarm of specialized single-issue advocacy groups, nor above all through the existing conventional means of democratic participation, lobbying, and interest-group politics.

Smythe snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his outstanding work here.

Next up, Europa Weekly podcast has U N D E R C O V E R J O U R N A L I S M.

Jake Bowyer discusses The Roots Of D’Souza’s Dementia. Dinesh D’Souza’s got a new book out about how the Democrats aren’t really the liberals they claim to be. After all, Republicans freed the slaves, and the KKK was founded by Democrats.

D’Souza is one of those guys who talks about black voters in America being consigned to a Democratic “plantation.” This would only be true if one sincerely believes that black Americans are all legally retarded. Despite what DíSouza wants us to believe, the modern Democrats only trace their cultural politics back to the 1990s, not the 1860s. Intersectionality and a tribal hatred of white men drives modern progressive ideas, not some secret desire to maintain white elite hegemony over America’s brown, black, and yellow people. Today’s Democrats have far more in common with the African National Congress than the Democrats of the 19th or early 20th century.

The Clintons obdurately refuse to go away, but Stephen Paul Foster considers the possibility in Weinstein And The Fall Of The House of Clinton.

So, while it was Donald Trump who denied the Clintons a second stay over at the White House, it now appears that the Hollywood Big Enchilada, Harvey Weinstein, will, of all people, be the man responsible for making them, finally, go away and leave us in peace. Weinstein’s precipitous fall from highest ranks of celebrity Democrats is a spectacular a crash and burn that until recently, would have been unimaginable.

Finally, N. T. Carlsbad recounts the history of the once free city of Liège in Smash the Liègoisie. Carlsbad passes from the first charter issued by the prince-bishop in 1066 to the destruction of Saint Lambert’s Cathedral in 1794.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero has a nice primer on The Metaphysics of Non-being.

Kristor makes an argument as to why Orthodoxy Is Inevitable.

To control for heterodoxy, a society must understand its orthodoxy quite well. So must there be always an established dogma regarding First Things, pervasive inculcation of its doctrines in the young, ritual repetitions of its logic, rehearsals of the sacred texts that encode it, a canon of law to enforce its moral ukases, and in its immunological defense something like the Inquisition. If the Inquisition can’t nip heresy in the bud, it will flourish like a weed, grow powerful, and spread. Things will get more and more out of hand, and harder to control. In the limit, social survival will depend upon costly, dangerous moves such as the Albigensian Crusade or the American Civil War.

J. M. Smith writes about why audiences shouldn’t clap at performances in Ressentiment or Catharsis?

Matt Briggs lists some funny reasons he might say “I Am A Climate Denier.” Then he gives us this very important reminder: Don’t Be A Conservative: Be a Reactionary.

As can be gleaned from examples like those above, not all, but a good many conservatives are persons who believe today what progressives believed yesterday. Conservatives of this stripe aren’t averse to following behind progressives in the Grand March forward, they only wish the pace wasn’t so quick. The death of this word is why, if you believe Truth is a constant and cannot undergo revision, it is best to be a reactionary and not a conservative. If there is a better word for those who hold to and seek the timeless, I do not know it.

Then, a black Apple VP apologises for suggesting white people can be diverse, bureaucracies within bureaucracies, more bishops making gay couples feel welcome, preachers defending abortion, and the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill alarmingly warns of imminent end times, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XIII.

Also at Briggs, a helpful comparison between necessary and contingent truths and their implications regarding The Static Theory of Time and Free Will (Guest Post by The Cranky Professor).

In Breaking the right way, Mark Richardson notices among the young alt-right spokeswomen a trend away from civic nationalism. (“SpokesTHOTs”, we like to call ’em.)

As the old spots are taken over by the materialists, Bruce Charlton suggests we make a new Pilgrimage in search of sacred places.

John Fitzgerald reviews some work of Kathleen Raine—Poet, Platonist, Prophet.

Dalrock notices an AutoZone commercial marketing to that Aging lonely feminist humor demographic. The Spanish version uses the Same advertising message, different culture. Also, when dinner is made according to traditional gender roles, It tastes better that way.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Parallax Optics suggests a two-pronged attack to establish Restorationist Aesthetics, one of which relies On Iconoclasm.

The pre-eminent examples of a Neo-Dada aesthetic are to be found in the #Frogtwitter and 4/8 Chan constellation, frieze framed / calcified by the LD50 718222666 exhibition, which was funded by money from betting on Trump to win the presidency. The protests that followed in its wake were an example of CAW antibodies reacting to the presence of an invading virus. The SDLD50 organisers were catalysed by the existential status threat / moral entrepreneurship, virtue signalling opportunity, presented by an exhibition of heretical imagery / anti-progressive symbology, in their own Hackney backyard. The status threat was activated by Trump winning the Presidency and attempting to put some of his policies into action. Since progressives generally believe in the fiction that the leavers of power terminate with the President, the presence of Trump – an enemy – in the White House fundamentally threatened their status-economy.

Neo-Dada vandalism emerges spontaneously. You can’t top down manage the process, only catalyse it. Hestia Society and other Restoration + institutions don’t need to sully themselves with it. But they do need to recognise that it’s useful and a necessary phase of transition from one aesthetic paradigm to another.

Indeed, Hestia Society has always appreciated this fact. Parallax Optics impressed The Committee to the tune of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Gio Pennacchietti has a monumental series over at Logos Club this week entitled “The Mission Of Art Is The Care Of The Soul”: Part 1: On The Online Right’s lack of a new aesthetics, Part 2: Italian Futurism as negative model, and Part 3: For Vision and Nature. From the part 1…

Art has degenerated into a social engineering project, hence why the CIA for years used the New York School of abstract expressionism as a covert psychological operation against the Soviets (and the American public). Despite what the mission brief states, the CIA’s promotion of abstract expressionism was never meant to spread some romantic idea of American artistic freedom to the Soviets, but rather to weaponize chaos and absurdity.

So how’s that been working out? For Cathedral Art World (CAW) artists…

…art has no higher metaphysical purpose beyond the political and the bodily. It thus becomes utilitarian, lacking any significant power or intrinsic virtue despite those supposed qualities of art the average sociology major pays lip service to. You hear cheap slogans thrown about by art school hipsters, like “art can change the world”, or “art is power, art is resistance” – but how could they possibly venerate and pay homage to any artistic ideal from their deeply dug trenches of crass apathy, festooned piecemeal with the materialist appropriation of trends and cultures not their own? Those who make art the slave of politics are simply missing the point.

Anyway, the whole series is great food for thought concerning Restorationist Aesthetics and beyond. The series is a very obvious ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Interpreted scene from Exotica, Gio Pennacchietti (2015).

Also at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless has two part ones: in American Empire: Embrace & Reformation and Reflections. In the former, Enless gets a whole lot right about the observable fact that USG is an empire and it probably isn’t a good idea to tear it down. I’d quibble about it being the Military Industrial Complex that holds the satellites together. The Empire is more a Blue Empire creation than a Red one.

Over at City Journal, a review of Dianne Lake’s autobiographical Member of the Family: My Life Story of Charles Manson, Life Inside His Cult, and the Darkness That Ended the Sixties. Creepy as all get out. And oh yeah, Charles Manson died last week. Tho’ it seems unlikely, we hope he rests in peace. Also why Why America Can’t Lower Child-Poverty Rates—three guesses and the first two don’t count. Theodore Dalrymple has a couple of pieces up: Mugabism Without Mugabe and The Shakespeareologists.

Also there, Seth Barron has the skinny on British Rockers getting pretty fashy (Nick Cave, Morrissey, Roger Waters, for example). And speaking of some top shelf aesthetics: the Maestro of Mar-a-Lago.

Chris Gale has a kipple in combination with The death spiral of the clerk. Also a hopeful peek at Generation Zyklon and the Church—well “Christianity” at any rate. A tribute to the great Johnny Cash in Let the wormtounges lie. Psychopathic black woman disappeared from twitter—hopefully from her job (but I seriously doubt it… the soft bigotry of low expectations-n-all that). And Hilaire Belloc once again for a Sunday Sonnet.

Richard Carroll is reading (Really) Old Books™. He has another in his series on Plato’s Dialogues: Lesser Hippias. And in honor of Thanksgiving Day a bit of history and commentary on James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, “On Himself, upon Hearing What was his Sentence”.

And over at Imaginative Conservative, this was a blast from the past: Skyjack: The Mystery of D.B. Cooper’s Thanksgiving Eve Jump. Growing up in Portland, the story of D. B. Cooper was a mainstay of the public consciousness. A Thanksgiving Reflection on The Human Longing for Gratitude. A note from Wyoming (actually) Catholic College: Are they the Smartest Students in America? Well, they don’t have their heads stuck in their smartphones at least.

This Week in the Outer Left

Not much going on with the left this past week. Presumably they were too busy coming up with ways to be annoying at Thanksgiving dinner and didn’t get around to writing as much.

Still, the folks at The Baffler put up something that made me go “hmmm” and stroke my chin a bit. Commenting on the professional friends of YouTube, Kaila Philo makes a case for the interesting part of the “youtube star” phenomenon being—of course—political. This misses the point. Fundamentally, this is a story about our present state of alienation, and if I may be forgiven for the pretension, anomie. My thoughts on all this are somewhat unclear to me, but still, RTWT.

Among the most popular of these professional friends, and an exemplar of teendom in the new economy, is nineteen-year-old Tana Mongeau, whose success isn’t all that surprising. Hair dyed cool blonde, nails sharpened and polished to kill, young enough to stay hip but old enough to exude sex appeal, Mongeau is recognizable as the most popular girl at your high school…. She’s graced with a specific kind of charisma that’s shameless in a way that benefits her: she holds little back, posting (in)famous stories about being fucked with a toothbrush or getting arrested at Coachella, offering just enough intimacy to make anyone feel welcome to—maybe even honored by—her friendship. Watching a Tana Mongeau video often feels like you’re sitting at the cool table, learning the juiciest drama from your own private It Girl.

Firing up YouTube videos to passively hang out with women we don’t know giving us the girlfriend experience and men we don’t know giving us the the bro friend experience… very Current Year.

S. Craig Hickman of Social Ecologies favored us with an original poem this week, entitled visions and revisions. It is short enough that I could just quote the whole thing, but I want him to get the clicks he’s earned, so head over and read it for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA has some useful pointers on Everyday Rhetoric—the kind you’ll need to interact with normies IRL.

Heartiste explains what happens When An Uppity Feminist Meets An Impervious POC. My own take on it…

Expecting black men on subways to live up to white norms of behavior is racist. She deserved it. https://t.co/em0cyMKRW0

— ♔ The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) November 17, 2017

Zach Kraine sets monarchy and democracy respectively within The Philosophies of Pain and Hubris. Also, a thought experiment: Political Epicureanism.

Al Fin rates Trump The Most Effective US President Since Reagan.

Greg Cochran laments the difficulty to maintain The Index of national capabilities, when it’s your job not to be racist.

Reluctant Reactionary has some praise for Spandrell and proposes an example of A Functioning Patchwork—Maine’s lobstermen.

Nishiki Prestige had an explosion of output this week with five entries, including what appears to be a final missive. (And I feel we’ve only just recently met.) He started with a personal story and observation on the super-stimuli that we are all awash in all the time in bad vibes, moved on to relationships and marriage with real love is empty love, dynamics of the Cathedral in the Cathedral has cancer, and meditated on death before finishing up with the end. I won’t excerpt from them, as you all know Nishiki’s trippy style by now, but you should read all of them start to finish, and probably more than once, as this may be the last content we get from our friend. And please join me in pressing F to pay respects.

The original intention was to get other people to start writing. To make it look easy. That is failing. But something might come along to fix that. Support people who write. It takes time and effort. A blog scene can be something very special. I was hoping to rekindle it. YOU might be able to do better. Please do. Will read

Anyone want to answer Nishiki’s call?

Meta-Nomad tugged at my heart-strings with disintegrating nostalgia: an obituary for the United Kingdom.

Tough to let a loved one go, tougher is the acceptance of never knowing what you had. A task to be sure, beloved dies and a mourning begins. Yet how does one begin to mourn the death of a country? Especially one that is supposedly still alive, a frail corpse of a nation selling itself to whichever liberal fad will pay for its supports. To watch the slow internal destruction of your home from within. Having to assimilate one’s views amongst progressives and liberals resulting in incessant intellectual nausea. A bidding farewell to the final remnants of a life lived yet still in movement. A final attempt at dragging my nostalgic British memories from their forbidden tomb and having them bear all for need of a comparison. I give my sincerest apologies to my memories, for they will have to meet their future.

“I give my sincerest apologies to my memories, for they will have to meet their future.” Bracing stuff.

Strong civilizations, like the one Britain used to be, can accept a modest flow of foreigners with the confidence that they will be assimilated—that the distinctive strengths of other peoples can be added to those of the dominant group to service them. But when the civilization turns weak, that flow is an assimilation force, even under similar accidental appearances. If you’re teaching “the foreigner’s beliefs as a means for easier assimilation,” just who is assimilating whom? The Committee deigned to award Meta Nomad wins the prestigious ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for this piece (tho’ they did have see an opthamologist for precautionary screening after reading the site for a few minutes).

Again, hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving, and best wishes for a Blessed Advent. As always, I thank the TWiR Staff—David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear—for being the Best Damn Reactionary Aggregator Staff Out There. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/11/26) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week an illegal alien was acquitted of Kate Steinle’s murder. Creating a fair amount of teeth gnashing on twitter. Heather Mac Donald has a thorough review of San Francisco’s Shame over at City Journal. Malcolm Pollack provides heaps of commentary. Irrespective of the facts of the case, it remains an outrage. Because what part of “illegal” do you not understand? Murderers or not, beautiful victims or not, they’ll all have to go.

At American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla reviews Power, Sex, and Politics, which have become closely interrelated. Once again. Related: Ned Ryun writes In Defense of Masculinity…

While there is delicious irony in seeing those individuals who treated traditional culture like their personal scratching posts run out of town on rails, there remain in their places those who share these hateful views about the “rest of us” and who are seizing upon this time as an excuse to launch a modern day Salem witch hunt. Hate of all things male has been rallying cry of the left over the last 100 years on behalf of the equality movement. The movement for women’s equality under law was and remains a good and just endeavor. And it should also be acknowledged that there remains much to be done, due in no small part to the actions of the Weinsteins and Frankens of the world who clearly did not practice what they preached.

How did we get here?

A loss of virtue, he says. We agree. Virtues have been replaced with “values”. “Women’s Liberation” is yet another synonym. Also related: VDH with The Case for Sexual Deterrence. It was Sex Week at American Greatness.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Imperial Energy kicks his week off with the Imperial Circular: Rex the Wrecker—or why the US State Department keeps failing.

Neocolonial springs off Jim’s monumental essay (more on that below) with a nuanced synopsis: Throne, Altar, and Externalities. He coins the term “flowhold” to rescue “freehold” from the ever-voracious jaws of Imperium in Imperio. The Committee deemed this an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam takes a deep dive into Semiotic Engineering. His aim?

What I propose engineering is a tissue of discourse with built-in immunities to anarchist ontology and the anarchist imaginary. The aim would be to engineer ways of speaking, writing and thinking that make it possible to infiltrate liberal spaces (almost all spaces today), dissolve liberal chains of command and naming practices, and create out of the ruins an absolutist imaginary.

I can’t quite make out what this would entail, but the very idea is delicious…

The absolutist anarchist-resistant discourse seeks to increase the likelihood that its utterances will issue in ceremonies of naming, with practices and orders that follow. Even […] discourses that take their mission to be slicing and dicing liberal BS should do this. To the liberal presupposing an anarchist sovereign imaginary we counter-presuppose sovereign naming. All liberal concepts can be chased back into their lairs, where we will discover their founding in some constitutive distraction, some imperative to break the real chain of naming and replace it with a fantasized origin of another chain.

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

Something completely different from Alfred Woensalaer: Immortal gene, mortal man—well, not completely different, but you know what I mean.

Giovanni Dannato notes: Sexual Harassment Hysteria Seriously Undermines the Establishment. And boy, don’t they
deserve it!

Motherhood looks good on you.

The larger significance of this development is that it represents a critical rupture in the alliance that has created and sustained feminism as a cultural force since the late 19th century. Women have grown so accustomed to the easy exercise of power in society that they have forgotten that they are helpless without the backing of powerful male sponsors.

Feminism has freed women from the clutches of drab provider males for a few generations now and so the memory of where they came from has faded. They now think when the bill comes due, they can free themselves from their more undesirable sponsors as well and perhaps even seize control themselves. Alas, they will discover to their dismay that is not how the world works.

Pass the popcorn… of course. But unless feminism can be excised from the Western Soul, we’re in social free-fall. All the way to barbarism. Whereupon feminism will no longer be a major concern.

Devin Helton doesn’t post often. But when he does, it’s almost always an instant classic. This week is no exception as he looks at What caused the dramatic rise of crime and blight in American cities from 1950 to 2000? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. He meets the conventional—politically acceptable—wisdom head with a mountain of historical data. And it isn’t as though anyone’s celebrating black social dysfunction. But it’s not a problem anyone’s going to be able to fix by lying about it. Helton is encyclopedic in scope here in laying making his case that evil white racist policies were not the cause of urban blight. Indeed, ostensibly pro-black policies bear far closer scrutiny. This won an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for its quality and scope.

Neovictorian sets about Steelmanning Liberalism. He tackles the proposition: “Liberalism prevents or makes very unlikely destructive war between nation-states”. Because, presumably, “the people” never want war. But of course we know, “the people” want whatever they are told to want.

Let it never be said that N. T. Carlsbad is not reading old books: Royalist and Rousseauist all the same—in the case of Antoine Joseph de Barruel-Beauvert at least. Also there, a clarification: Hegelianism is not Prussianism. And The transition from Prussian conservatism to German nationalism.

Anatoly Karlin, Friend of This Blog, takes some time to go through and provide an analysis of Zhirinovsky’s program. For those who don’t know, Zhirinovsky is the leader of the Russian nationalist party, LDPR, and is currently polling in a very distant second place for Russia’s 2018 presidential election. The program looks like a weird grab-bag of socialist, liberal, conservative, and reactionary positions.

The first thing one notices is that it is something of a mess; an idiosyncratic collection of populist, authoritarian, populist, statist, democratic, and even genuinely liberal proposals. It’s like they locked a cryptoanarchist, an Alt Rightist, and a /pol/tard in a room and forced them to come up with something without bothering to even edit the final product.

Amusing that Karlin thinks a cryptoanarchist, an Alt Rightist, and a /pol/tard would be more than one person. Still, there are some genuinely interesting ideas in the program, and others that just make me scratch my head.

Gratuitous pic of Ana de Armas would look great right here.

And Anatoly also looks at some recent projections of Muslim migration for an Eurabia update. Long story short: it is bad. Even if all migration stopped today, the Muslim share of population is projected to substantially increase by 2050. There is one very attractive solution: they have to go back, all of them, and as soon as physically possible.

Speaking of podcasts, I’ve recently been introduced to two that I really like, tho’ I am far from being a completist on either. Borzoi‘s The Poz Button is thus far excellent cultural commentary without descending into inane verbal shitposting. Then just this past week Men With Chests reached out to me. They run a very Catholic, NRx-friendly, and also pretty funny show here. With any luck, I should be on there in a few weeks.

Malcolm Pollack has an omnibus of links largely orthogonal to my own. And also: one whale of a beautiful sunset.

By way of Isegoria… Overanalysis can be far worse than laziness. Intellectual indoor plumbing and toxic ideas that spread like wildfire. Quoting Scott Alexander: “Once your culture has a weird superstition, it can get plugged into various social needs to become a load-bearing part of the community structure.”. Why Bulletproofing magic works, strategically speaking at least. An interview with VDH about The Second World Wars. And a foray into England’s rather ancap past.

Finally, this week’s epistle from Cambria Will Not Yield: Of Europe, the Seven Thousand, and Elijah.

Miracle on 34th St, like all the great European fairy tales, allows us, the European people, to take a moral holiday. We see evil punished and the good rewarded. But in order to take pleasure in a movie such as A Miracle on 34th St, one must have a moral vision of life that is in line with the moral vision of the European people of ancient times who believed the hope of the world was born in a stable in Bethlehem.

Everything was in place in the citadels of power in 1947—church, state, academia, and press—to bring down the curtain on white Christian Europe, but the average white person at that time had more in common with the Europe of 1117 than the Europe of 2017.

My gut tells me that’s probably true.

This Week in Jim Donald

A strong week from Jim, tackling some important theory and the Kate Steinle murder verdict. First came Jim’s latest contribution to monarchist theory, throne, altar, and freehold. Positively magisterial! There is a lot going on in this one, so give it a careful read. We all know throne and altar is great, but Jim argues it is incomplete.

But throne and altar has been tried, and has failed. How did it fail? The answer is, failed because of loss of freehold.

Freehold means that the peasant in his hovel possesses Kingly power under his hovel’s roof, which Kingly power the King has no right to mess with, even if the peasant abuses it.

Jim continues with an explanation of precisely why excessive absolutism leads to insecure power and anarcho-tyranny.

Obviously a stationary bandit is better than a mobile bandit, and one might well conclude from this that the more absolute the King the better, that if he owns everything and everyone, he will have correct incentives. But the trouble with this solution is that no one rules alone. If he attempts to own everything and everyone, he claims more power than mortal man can exercise, and the power will slide through his fingers into the hands of a faceless horde of bureaucrats around the throne, who say “Yes your highness” while actually getting their own way, who endanger him and his heirs, and you get anarcho tyranny.

Too much power results in paralyzing complexity, resulting in insecure power. Hence anarcho tyranny.

Even a King must yield before the divinely ordained patriarchal power the meanest peasant has over his wife and children. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. It is for the King’s own good to be reminded of that now and again, so if a King tries to mess around with a peasant’s wife or daughter, a backside full of buckshot seems only appropriate divine retribution. An instant classic from Jim and winner of the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

And, in current events, Jim looks into the Kate Steinle murder verdict and does not like what he sees. Nor should he. What he sees, and what a surprising number of normies I have spoken to see, is invader justice for invaders. Take it away, Jim.

Recently saw picture of the invader jury that acquitted the invader who whimsically and casually murdered a white woman. They were very pleased with themselves. They were delighted. They were extremely proud of themselves.

The problem is that for some time, Democrats have been manufacturing a unitary and cohesive invader identity that is hostile to whites, and now we are getting invader justice—one immigrant from one country is apt to back another immigrant of a different ethnicity and religion who commits a crime against a white, because they are both invaders.

And the more anti white and anti native you are, the holier you are, thus Mexicans are holier than Asians, mestizos are holier than whitish Mexicans, indios are even holier, and Muslims are the holiest of all.

And acquitting an invader who murdered a white chick for laughs pleasingly raises one’s holiness status, hence the pride and joy of the jury.

The official institutional systems have been hacked so they need to be rebooted with a few new patches to make future attacks harder. Adding throne, altar, and freehold to the OS seems like a good start.

This Week in Social Matter

The Myths for a New Tomorrow series was on hiatus this week, so the Social Matter week begins (with the exception of yours truly) with the return of Luke Wesson and The New Redemption Of Ham. His feature image paints a thousand words… which are all but unintelligible today. Short, but very powerful commentary… and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

In the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 46: Underground—The Tokyo Gas Attack and Japanese Psyche.

This Week in Kakistocracy

A painful urological analogy is woven into Porter’s analysis of Moon River—because some urological features are best accessed via… well you get the picture.

He notes, with tongue not entirely planted in cheek: North Korean Nukes No Panacea. I.e., they’re probably not accurate enough to hit Washington DC directly, thus endangering the lives of innocent Americans, none of whom live in DC.

Finally, Porter observes that Tradition Dies Hard, at least when it comes to deciding Who gets to shit on Whom.

Rep. John Conyers

[I]f you think swimming in the changing currents of social fashion is hard for you, try doing so as an antique African autocrat. Such is precisely the sort of graceless lumbering that’s been on display over the past 24 hours from congressional ghetto regents John Conyers and Jim Clyburn. Conyers, you will recall, is the latest erection-empowering leftist to be accused of molesting unwilling women. Following the allegations, he announced he will not seek re-election in 2018, thus depriving his constituents of a 53rd year of his representation. This may be even more galling to twerk-philosophers such as Tennessee Coates, given that Rep. Conyers has introduced a black reparations bill every congress since 1989. And by the way, all of his alleged sexual victims are white women.

Looks like the soft-bigotry of low expectations is not gonna be much help anymore. If you have a penis.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X has another installment of her invaluable Cathedral Round-Ups: The Forgotten History of Progressive Eugenics. Like Stanford’s first president: David Starr Jordan… for whom the Harvard Crimson had much praise. In 1910. We’re not big fans of eugenics around here, and happy to hang it around progressive necks whenever possible. But we oppose dysgenics even more.

And the study of criminal subcultures continues on Anthropology Friday: The Way of the Wiseguy, by Donnie Brasco pt 1. Brasco was an FBI agent who penetrated the mob and lived to tell about it.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

It was a light week over at our sister publication Thermidor. Jake Bowyer starts off by marking the death of Charles Manson in Filth and the Final Judgment. Inspired by a personal experience, Bowyer reviews Manson’s life and influences.

L: Charles Manson; R: his biological son who found who his father was around age 25.

Manson, a self-centered psycho who legitimized his love for drugs, death, and pussy by espousing half-cocked occultism, is the photo negative of the entire Boomer generation. Boomers flocked to him because Manson fought the “System”—a hatable [sic] phantasmagoria that can be anything and everything.

For non-murdering Boomers, the “System” became their families, white men, the Christian faith of America, and middle-class culture. The Boomer lust for escapism dragged an entire country down, and today’s left-wing politics in America can be seen as the run-off, the garbage leachate of the Boomers’ holy trinity of extreme individualism, therapeutic politics, and godless moralizing.

Next up, Europa Weekly has All Hail Bike Cuck the Great!.

C. A. Schoultz returns with Out of the Vales of Har: Towards a Future Beyond Nostalgia. He is intrigued about the electoral victory of Democratic Socialist Lee Carter in Virginia and meditates on what this development might foreshadow.

Stephen Paul Foster ponders Identity Politics: Where Compassion Meets Criminality. Foster identifies identity politics as a highly sophisticated extortion racket.

Identity politics as an extortion system works because the snake oil of collective victimhood and guilt has been peddled for so long by the cultural Marxists that it is now inextricably embedded in American meta-politics. Resistance to it nearly impossible. The slander carried out by the mainstream media against Trump (before and into his presidency) and his supporters, and Hillary Clinton’s infamous reduction of Trump supporters to “Untermenschen” (that “basket of deplorables” who are “unredeemable”) signals an endgame for traditional American politics.

Of course, we know all politics is identity politics. Therefore end politics… so far as it is possible.

Jake Bowyer rounds out the week with Cyanide and Myth-Making. Bowyer revisits the Bosnian conflict of the 90s and challenges the standing narrative.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Cologero, expansive as usual, is very interesting on The Misuse of Intelligence—that of the current crop of “elites” and beyond.

American Dad has an interesting retrospective on The Courtship Pledge. Along the way, this gem:

Most people pine for the aesthetic of days gone by, but not the actual values that the aesthetic was based on.

That’s Conservatism in a nutshell. A hollow, empty nutshell.

J. M. Smith presents, for the purposes of what he calls “historical demonology,” a prophetic anecdote written in 1648 England which Smith entitles “Putting Out the Lights”: A Scrap from the Ashes. Then he makes peace with his biblical namesake in The Fate of a Jonathan.

Bonald calls for the Church to, once again, begin Engaging the world by picking unpopular fights, such as the defense of patriarchy.

Kristor passes the popcorn as The Sexual Left Devours Itself.

Matt Briggs, reporting from the academic front, asks Can We Contain The Contagion At Universities? His conclusion: We are doomed. Then on the political front, Politico Wants To Know If Trump Supporters Regret Their Choice. Briggs sure doesn’t. And of course, George Washington’s church takes down George Washington memorabilia, teachers are forced out of C of E schools for teaching about sin, computer scientists struggle to keep AI from turning racist, and Biden makes Jewish folk uncomfortable by crediting them with advancing the homosexual agenda, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XIV.

Also at Briggs, Kent Clizbe guest-posts this realpolitik counterpoint to Ianto Watt’s spiritual history of Russia in Russia, America & Influence—the Tsar, the Church, 7th Century Conspiracy?

Mark Richardson, in Accepting our monstrosity?, examines the recent shift in sexual mores on the left.

William Wildblood posts this excellent exploration of The Esoteric and the Spiritual in relation to Christianity.

Some had psychic powers. But how many were really motivated by love of God? Indeed, how many truly acknowledged him? The answer seems to me to be not that many. But, as I was informed by my teachers, “it is not necessary to chase after the many mysteries of existence. Live simply in the heart and all mysteries will in time become known to you.” This is not an injunction to give up any attempt at understanding life but a matter of putting things in context and not being distracted from the essential, the essential being love of God.

Bruce Charlton asks, Is Albion a woman? To which Wildblood replies, Is Albion an Angel?

Dalrock notices how Cross dressing snuck up in our blind spot. In fact, it is kind of weird how nobody noticed it becoming impossible for a woman to crossdress as a man.

Donal Graeme decides to focus on examples of Toxic Femininity. He’s making a list.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Professor Thomas Bertonneau is over at Sydney Trads this week with a scholarly historical and intellectual survey of Vincent d’Indy, le Wagnerisme, & Tradition.

Over at Dark Brightness, Chris Gale reviews the correlation between suicide and hormonal contraception—and we’re hearing about this NOW??!! It makes perfect back of the envelope sense tho’ → female hormone levels are almost entirely the result of million years of primate/hominid selection: Play with them, for the sake of “our modern lifestyle”, at your own risk. The acquittal of Kate Steinle’s killer prompts musings on The death of justice. Love is a marathon—that you don’t need to carbo-load for. There are… No new sins. And the obligatory Sunday Sonnet by Hilaire Belloc.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless continues his Reflections: Part II, wherein the anti-concept of “racism” is debunked, and rational prejudice duly defended. He speaks out against The Hamfisted Propaganda Of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. I guess that’s a game or something. But hey, if you’re gonna do propaganda, then hamfisted is not the way to go. They have inaugural episode of Radio Enless.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Ralph Ancil has an expansive essay on the Limits of Political Discourse: Lessons from Art & History. Havel’s Green Grocer makes an appearance as Kee presents Romano Guardini’s Diagnosis of the Modern World. Related: a pre-print of Guardini’s essay: The End of the Modern World.

They also have a review of a collection of C. S. Lewis essays of which I was unaware: Present Concerns. Terneus ruminates upon Cervantes’ Don Quixote in Pursuit of the Beautiful. A musical presentation and analysis on Humperdinck’s “Evening Prayer” of Fourteen Angels (Not that Englebert Humperdinck. This one.). Finally, Birzer’s Quick and Dirty Guide to the Middle Ages.

Richard Carroll is reading—and commentating on—the oldest books this week: Olympic Level Poetry: Pindar’s Odes. Probably dates back to the “bicameral mind” days of human history.

PA has a translation (and quite beautiful embedded music) of Zbigniew Herbert’s Elegy Of Fortinbras.

Finally, over at City Journal… Joel Kotkin—whom I believe coined the phrase “new clerisy—and Wendell Cox analyze Playgrounds for Elites: It’s HLvM all the way down. Remarks on the passing of baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Theodore Dalrymple takes issue with Homeless Sanctimony, as sanctioned by the BBC and elsewhere. And Ryan Fazio commemorates the recently ended Blood-Red Century. The century that is. Not necessarily the bloodshed.

This Week in the Outer Left

A couple of interesting things from the Outer Left this week, so let’s dive right in.

Over at The Baffler, Jesse Crispin’s book review of The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve is surprisingly illuminating, but certainly not in the way she intended. According to Miss Crispin, the author is “a secularist who believes in progress”, and she finds much fault in his interpretation of the Adam and Eve story. Bear with me on this one, because I think it is worth exploring in some detail.

It’s a bit like the overly optimistic section of the left that believes all we need to solve the world’s imbalances and evils is to recreate the Garden. They believe it is injustice and scarcity, as opposed to the individuals who enforce those conditions, that cause violence and crime. Simply design a utopia of equality and lack of want and we can all live in harmony together.

That does indeed sound a lot like the usual thing one hears from the utopian left. But Miss Crispin is having none of it.

Much like Adam and Eve, the concept of original sin can be interpreted in a million different ways to justify all sorts of worldviews. That interpretation will change over time, based on the specific morality and cultural context of each particular era. We live in an era in the Western world where we believe our behavior should not be restricted by anything. Not religion, not a social contract. We should be able to consume what we like, say what we like, fuck what we like. So, of course, in our era we interpret the idea of sin as old-fashioned and outdated and useless. In our era, we find scientific and evolutionary justifications for our behavior, but those are stories just like any other. We have sexual urges because of our biological imperative to spread our genes, and so on. That is a story that grants us permission to do what we like, and so we prefer it over the story of original sin.

Many traditionalists are no doubt saying “yeah, where’s the lie?” But check this out:

But, as the philosopher John Gray has noted, original sin can be useful to us, taken out of its religious context. There is, in fact, something broken deep at the heart of human beings. No other species is as uselessly violent, as destructive to the habitat that should sustain us, as set on domination and control….

The violence originates in us. Religious concepts like original sin help us understand this about ourselves, and offer suggestions on what to do about it. If, then, we place original sin outside of its Christian context, we can still use it to understand this brokenness, this illness that exists in us. There is no amount of external maneuvering that can wash us clean of this inborn stain. We can only acknowledge it, try to reckon with it, and then struggle to choose to behave differently.

And there, I believe, is where any sane gentleman must part ways with Miss Crispin. The sheer breathtaking sickness of the above is genuinely shocking to me. To offer original sin on the one hand, but deny the possibility of being washed clean on the other… I just fail to see how anyone can see the universe as being so actively malevolent. Nick Land and other atheists of his persuasion believe in a cold, uncaring universe and embrace that prospect, but Miss Crispin—and there are others like her—wish to erect a religion around original, unwashable sin because we are insufficiently environmentalist. Even a utopian leftist secularist of the “fully automated luxury space communism” breed seems preferable, at least to me.

And over at The Awl, Kyle Brazzel has an experience with TV for the nostalgic narcissist. Definitely RTWT on this one, because no excerpt would do it justice. I am not entirely sure what is going on here, but it really looks like a bugman has found something so empty, so, well, bugmannish that his vestigial instincts for substance are kicking in, but are too weak to scream and so can only pitifully whimper as they are drowned in reruns of 1970s television and listicles about nostalgia for superficial consumer goods (“12 Fast Food Sandwiches You Will Never Eat Again”). Reflect for a moment: we are almost certainly not yet at Peak Bugman. Reflect and shudder.

This Week… Elsewhere

AMK has a video of what he thinks an NRx prison looks like. I don’t think the NRx thinks prisons will be necessary. Also a fairly stout, secular defense of inherited tradition in The vestigial organ fallacy.

Also from the Anti-Puritan: The case for informalism. As a tactic to confound enemies and seize power, he’s basically correct. And if you don’t your work to be flushed down the toilet in the future, then you formalize.

Al Fin looks at how Renewable Energy Skyrockets, and Other Little Heard News—unfit to print obviously. He notes:

For over 200 years, humans have been trying to wean themselves from archaic, inefficient, and unreliable forms of energy production. As a result, people have become more prosperous, healthier, better fed, and experience far more leisure time than their ancestors dreamed of. But politicians and politically corrupt opportunists never let a faux crisis go to waste, and so the “climate apocalypse scare” has led to a massive green welfare scheme to profit already obscenely wealthy political insiders—usually on the left end of the spectrum.

Also there, a note that Elite Flight Out of Russia Worse than Thought.

By way of Arnold Kling: Health spending negatively correlated with health outcomes. The causal arrow, however, is difficult to tease out. Not a welcome finding in polite society either way.

Unorthodoxy bids Adios White Male Democrats. Is it Adios Black Male Democrats Too?

Fred Reed has a superb diatribe on an Absolute, Obvious, Unacknowledged Disaster: A Racial Snapshot of America. I keep saying things were a lot better for blacks in America when they had to ride in the back of the bus.

It is hard to decide whether these revelations are astonishing or boring. Accustomed to such numbers by long exposure, we forget that scholastic catastrophe of this magnitude would be unthinkable in any other civilized society. Can you imagine a Baltimore in Japan? Finland? South Korea? Germany before African immigration? Ah, but Baltimore is getting rid of those oppressive statues. That will fix things.

That… and a few more Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevards oughta do it.

Over at Faith & Heritage, an edifying retrospective on Jan Smuts on the Racial Policy of the Union of South Africa.

Food for thought, and definitely not without controversial hot sauce, The Rebbe offers a Summary of Benefits from the Alliance with Israel.

Heartiste catches de Tocqueville predicting Current Year America.

TUJ looks how that hows and whys of Keeping the Collusion Hallucination Alive.

Over on Medium (which is generally quite abysmal) an intriguing question on just who wrote the lyrics on Back in Black? Which I hadn’t considered before. But now… it really makes ya think. This too: an interesting look at What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today—not all that bad actually. Considering.

Finally at Medium: Lyman Stone is quite alarmist in The Great Baby Bust of 2017, and appears to have the data to justify it. Either way, the future still belongs to those who show up for it.

Welp… that’s about all we had time for. Many thanks to the excellent David Grant, Egon Maistre, and Hans der Fiedler for al their help this week. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/04) appeared first on Social Matter.

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 nonchalance) 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 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☀.