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.

A Happy (Western) Easter to everyone this past Sunday. And a happy Easter to the Orthodox on the Sunday up-coming.

This week in American Greatness, Matthew Peterson picks up where Codevilla left off and analyzes out Total Political War. We agree of course, but find it surprising that anyone finds it surprising. This is pretty sensible too: Economic Nationalism Helps Workers and Strengthens the Nation. Dat Productivity Graph!!

VDH explores: Where Are the Left’s Modern Muckrakers? They’re still around, they’ve just been employed to rake mud in the opposite direction.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf offers The best content on the internet—hypnosis edition. Self and otherwise I think. Also there: So. Who challenges Jim?

Jim says it best. Apologies if I sound like a broken record fanboy, but you gotta respect the king. Which does not mean no one else can take aim at the king and take his place, but so far, no one. His model is the best around, and might be summarized as ‘throne, altar, household, swing your dick around with pride, be good to your friends, be fire upon your enemies.’

It is not so complicated after all. You just got to get through the 99% obnoxious assholery.

Over at GA Blog, Adam discusses The Meaning of Meaning, and Metalanguage. Along the way, commentary on how meaning might be attacked.

“Rights” is a good example of a word that has been rendered meaningless by liberalism: it means something for a peasant to assert his rights, say for grazing land for his sheep, against the lord, because the rights refer to longstanding practices overseen by mutually accepted authorities. Today, “rights” have almost exactly the opposite sense, that of a claim upon other’s money, or respect, or attention that has never been acknowledged and, increasingly, never even imagined before. A “right” now is a demand that meaning be conferred where it hasn’t been previously, but that is precisely the way “meaning” doesn’t work: meaning is the name given to an emergent site of shared attention. Demands for rights are deliberately destructive of meaning, because the world of meanings is what prevented attention from being lavished on the plaintiff. The most obvious example is transgenderism, which demands that we accept that gender is both all-important and absolutely irrelevant—an almost perfect sink of meaning. It follows from this that persistent, precise, unapologetic linguistic analysis of almost any utterance in a liberal order should prove devastating for liberalism.

Which goes to show, I suppose, that linguistic analysis alone cannot topple entrenched powers. But it’s awfully entertaining to see them squirm. The regime controls the metalanguages, which tend to proscriptive and not prescriptive.

When central power is secure, the metalanguages co-exist with ordinary languages—the academic need not police the claims to “know” things made by laymen, and may even accept that within that attentional space “knowing” is in fact the relevant goal. When central power is insecure and a site of struggle, the metalanguages are occupied by those who wish to expand their power and can only do so by delegitimizing non-metalinguistic spaces; in turn the metalanguages themselves abandon their primary function of aligning reality with authority and become power-crazed.

Very interesting and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Atavisionary has a humorous (and timeless) digresssion: Aesop’s fable: The she-goats and their beards.

Titus Q. Cincinnatus is one of our Big Idea™ guys, and this week is no exception as he considers Using an Ethnokinetic Model to Advance Reaction on Social Media. What the heck is an “Ethnokinetic Model” you ask? For the noobs…

In his book Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, Peter Turchin includes a chapter discussing the phenomenon of ethnokinetics. This term refers to the mechanisms and rates at which various ethnies interconvert to each other. As an example, say you had an imperial nation that conquered another ethnie, who are then incorporated as a minority ethnic group within the new empire. Depending on various specific circumstances (which can nevertheless be modeled mathematically according to general equations), over time this minority may either lose population due to assimilation or emigration, or may grow due to higher birthrates or even because some form of high status encourages individuals and small groups within the imperial ethnie to assimilate TO the minority, eventually resulting in it becoming the majority. These ethnokinetic principles don’t apply just to interactions between traditional ethnic groups, but are relevant for similar situations such as the dynamics of religious conversion or the spread of ideologies.

Cincinnatus means to apply these principles to carve out strongholds on social media for dissidents. For the plan to work, for reactionary ideas to spread, “thick tailed” distributions of social distance will have to be maintained. The textbook case for such a spread is Christianity.

Extending beyond Turchin’s analysis, there are a couple of other points I would make regarding this autocatalytic growth of Christianity in its early centuries. The first is the importance of converting élites. For its first two centuries, Christianity was primarily a religion of the urban poor, with little penetration into either the countryside nor into the aristocracy of the Empire. However, around the beginning of the third century, that began to change. We begin to see members of the nobility, and especially the provincial, land-owning nobility, converting to Christianity in greater numbers. While generally not the upper crust, their conversion to Christ began the process of psychologically mainstreaming Christianity and making it more acceptable (if not believable) to many in the upper echelons of the Empire’s hierarchy. At the same time, an élite of well-respected clergymen began to arise from within as an observable élite of Christianity’s own, respected not for compromising with the pagan system around them, but for opposing it with mighty words and works. It is notable that the rate of conversion to Christianity in the Empire began to accelerate at around this time.

As luck would have it, fat tailed social distance distributions are fully encouraged by Hestia Society, despite its intentional obscurity. Tho’ we hadn’t really thought of them in exactly those terms. The intellectual ghetto is a defensive position—an understandable one in many cases—but no way to conquer an Evil Empire. Cincinnatus rounds out the piece with four superb suggestions for how dissidents such as ourselves are to conquer a privileged position in social media. (Which, parenthetically, just might keep Titus from getting twitter banned every 6 weeks.) I don’t wish to steal his thunder. Do RTWT! It earned a rare ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Shylock Holmes looks at The Briar Patch Strategy. His “aim is not for red state America to secede. The aim is to get blue state America to secede.” This is, of course, better than many possible outcomes, even if it doesn’t quite measure up to the Imperial Mindset. But blue state secession is much lower risk than the red state version.

[T]his may the single biggest hope of the Trump presidency. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Trump is unlikely to enact any major right-wing reforms. But he is supremely good at one thing, namely driving progressives insane with rage. If somehow he manages to survive the Republican loss of the House in 2018, the ramping up of the Mueller deep state coup attempt, and then wins the 2020 election, he may just sufficiently enrage Californians that they decide to leave themselves rather than put up with four more years of misery and impotent rage.

Ol’ Shylock snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.

Social Pathologist Slumlord chimes in, after a long absence, with a few Thoughts, specifically on the Alt-Right.

Over at Jacobite, Jacob Philips contemplates a curious oxymoron: Amnesiac Nostalgia.

Homesickness is a longing to return in the future to the place where you were before. Pining for a home-not-known is much more peculiar. It is to float in freefall, to be sucked into an unending spiral ñ it is an asymptotic homesickness, never making contact with the firm boundaries that give the defining contours which cause people be fully formed. This freefall happens on the other side of that precipice of malfunctioning hardware that can no longer do a system restore.

Malcolm Pollack has a bit on the Ezra Klein, Charles Murray kerfuffle and praise for Andrew Sullivan (of all people). Also some commentary on current events coming increasingly straight at you: Go Not Gently!

By way of Isegoria… When studying gun violence, be sure to include how guns save lives. Expert lessons in dancing around “the stark biological reality of race”. Great civilisations are not murdered—the weak ones are and why that’s a good thing. A look Inside an accused school shooter’s mind—disturbing. Scott Alexander admits Jordan Peterson is actually good. More about that. An interesting case of selection bias here: Hanging irregulars and firebombing Dresden—or so we think. And the marsh mallow is actually a real natural thing, by which marshmallows were once made. HT: @Evolutionist XX.

Finally, week’s missive from CWNY: And the Trumpet Shall Sound.

This Week in Jim Donald

Continuing from his theme of voting last week, Jim opines that Republican voters are losing interest in voting. This is a shorter offering, so you really have no excuse for not RTWT.

Americans voted for a wall. Republicans voted for a wall. If no wall, no point in voting.

Anecdotal evidence: I know people who had never voted before who registered to vote for Trump. I know people who were formerly hardcore ancaps who would never consider voting Republican—except for Ron Paul—who voted for Trump. The reason was the same: they wanted to build the wall and deport them all.

And feel free to enjoy the comments, where a commenter going by Anonymous Fake puts forward the novel idea that right wing activism fails because they just aren’t activisming hard enough.

This Week in Social Matter

Mark Christensen has been stepping up his frequency in publishing articles here. And the quality is, as always, through the roof. This week he discusses Patrons Of Modernity: Social Class As Political Mechanism.

Reactionary thought from de Maistre to Moldbug has claimed links between the ages of protestantism, liberalism, and modern progressivism. Mencius Moldbug brought renewed attention to this thesis by positing similar thought patterns between radical protestantism and radical liberalism. This raised a number of eyebrows. Despite themes such as freedom being important to both, it’s not at all clear how a religious dissenter in the 17th century, a liberal revolutionary in the 19th, and a progressive activist in the 21st really have anything in common.

The thesis of this piece is that class analysis can refine our thinking on the topic.

Weighing in at over 5000 words, Christensen’s is the most complete analysis of the “Puritan Hypothesis” we’ve seen in quite a long time. Possibly ever. He traces the growth of the reformers, through their triumph of 1688, and the entrenchment of Whig Liberalism throughout England and most of her colonies. HLvM plays a starring role. Crown and bourgeoisie initially unite against aristocracy. Come the Glorious Revolution, the crown is made wholly dependent upon Parliament.

The 18th century saw political liberalism come into its own as a system of thought. In this period, many new families ascended into the Parliamentary classes, including that of Pitt himself. Many of these families established wealth through the increasing opportunities of colonial adventure, be it in America or with the East India Company, or else through military service. Early Protestantism had been spearheaded by new men navigating an entrenched structure of church and aristocracy. Their power depended on capturing the support of existing structures. Two centuries later, increasing numbers seized opportunities to rise either at home or in colonial endeavors. While they still had to navigate existing structures, there was also more room to build power on independent grounds. It is fitting that we begin to see a dramatic shift in the language surrounding the concept of liberty, and its decoupling from a strictly religious duty.

The most prominent example of this is a man born to a family Puritan in religion and Parliamentary in loyalties: John Locke. From Locke came the idea of liberty as a natural state of man, circumscribed only by social contract.

Which, of course, seems mighty tame today, in spite of its objective inanity. Christensen’s history continues down to present day Progressivism, highlighting the evolution of the “Puritan” clades. I cannot excerpt my way to an adequate summary. It’s simply fantastic and an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.

William Fitzgerald is up on Tuesday with a run through some ineluctable statistics: Sexual Market Dynamics: Average Partner Numbers Are Gender-Identical. Which should be obvious to anyone with two or more neurons to rub together. The important part is… what the implications are for most people most of the time…

A society that lets you sleep with lots of women will inevitably be one where the women you are sleeping with have themselves slept with lots of men.

That’s it. There’s no way around it.

Which is to say, it makes little sense for a man to enjoy “being poolside” and reveling in the fun parts of societal decline by sleeping with lots of random women, while simultaneously bemoaning the sluttiness of those same women. In aggregate, the two are flipsides of the same coin.

Fitzgerald impressed The Committee this week… to the tune of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Christensen returns Thursday with an in-depth study of Vladimir Solovyov And The True Relationship Between Church And State. Unlike virtually every other Russian of the era, “Solovyov strongly desired the reconciliation of Russia and world Orthodoxy with the Catholic Church”. Relative arrangements of the truth-keeping organs of society and the order-keeping organs are the primary focus here. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week’s invariably awesome Myth of the 20th Century podcast is Episode 63: War By Deception And The Origins Of Israel

Finally, for Saturday Poetry and Prose, some original verse from newcomer Carl Hildebrand: The Lure Of The Indies.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Audacious Epigone runs Belief in Hell by theistic orientation and by religious affiliation; breakdown on those who support banning “semi-automatic weapons”, which was, alas!, not broken down by respondents capable of defining “semi-automatic weapon”. And Gun-grabbing by Old vs. Young.

Over at West Hunter, Gregory Cochran releases parts 1, 2, and 3 of his review of David Reich’s wave-making book Who We Are and How We Got Here. Cochran also posts a rather blackpilling blog on how we, as a human race, are getting statistically dumber. But we probably still create the best governments ever…

Over at Evolutionist X’s she documents The Progressive Mind Virus Spreads to… India? Well, it certainly doesn’t spread genetically.

Another invaluable Cathedral Round-up: Should I read Nichols or Pinker? She reviews the reviews from Harvard Mag on both. Nichols’ Death of Expertise sounds very concerningly concerned, for example about the health of “our democracy”. “Staggering ignorance”… Oh noes. Mrs. X admits:

I do feel a definite since of malaise in America. It’s not about IQ, but how we feel about each other. We don’t seem to like each other very much. We don’t trust each other. Trust in government is low. Trust in each other is low. People have fewer close friends and confidants.

We have material prosperity, yes, despite our economic woes, but there is a spiritual rot.

Both sides are recognizing this, but the left doesn’t understand what is causing it.

They can point at Trump. They can point at angry hoards of Trump voters. “Something has changed,” they say. “The voters don’t trust us anymore.” But they don’t know why.

Oh, and the question about which book to review (vis-a-vis, review of reviews) is real… Let her know whatcha think.

For Anthropology Friday, a final installment on Totemism and Exogamy: pt. 3/3: Mundas, Khonds, and Herero.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The week opens at Thermidor with Europa Weekly discussing the Empire of Misogyny.

Editor P. T. Carlo is joined by Walter Devereux, and they discuss Spengler in Bloom.

Doug Smythe has a bit of fun in The Will to Power and Contemporary Politics: A Martian Perspective. Following the whimsical introduction, Smythe dives into serious political analysis, observing a significant difference in political perspective between the Left and the Right.

To be precise: The Left is overwhelmingly interested in acquiring power; the Right, in what can or should be done with power. Rightists are above all interested in questions concerning the details of public policy and administration, the optimal constitution of the State, the right ordering of social relations, and so on. In short, Rightists are oriented towards governing.

Not content with merely observing this difference, Smythe goes on to analyze its significance in detail.

In a word, the patricians are lawful, and the subalterns are lawless, in the most inclusive sense. The patricians, who wield legitimate power, are men of law in the double sense that they administer and/or make the law for the whole community and in that they embody the principle of law in their persons—viz., in the aforementioned character traits of moderation, objectivity, prudence, self-restraint, etc. that define a man as capable of a lawfully regulated exercise of power. The subalterns, for their part, are lawless in the double sense of being disqualified to directly participate in the law (judging, legislating, etc.) and in that their inner lives are controlled by passions and desires that know no law and have no internal moderating principle. It follows that every subaltern, at heart, is a potential usurper with a totally untempered lust for power, and that a subaltern who usurps power inevitably becomes the worst sort of tyrant.

While the Leftists’ preoccupation with the pursuit of power gives them an immediate advantage in contests over power, Smythe gives advice on a constructive way forward for the Right.

A potential ace in the hole here is the strong value of the Rightist mindset, which in any of its forms is the custodian of the military and religious sensibilities of the nation, places on duty. Rightly understood, “muh principles” aren’t just a negative barrier to action, but impose a positive obligation to act, to put oneself in the active service of one’s principles, as opposed to viewing them solely in terms of a self-abnegating prohibition on acting. Once Rightists start thinking also in terms of positive duty, they will be able to develop a fighting spirit own to match the fanaticism of the Left, one that will combine the best martial values of unwavering loyalty, courage, and fortitude with the teleological striving for improvement that inheres in the spirit of religion.

Let us hope so. Smythe easily snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his superb work here.

Mark H. Christensen returns with an unconventional encomium, Donald Trump: Unwitting, Uncouth Champion of Art. Christensen is not referring to our usual notion of “art”—paintings and plays and such—but rather to an epistemic alternative to “Science”.

As much as relevant empirical and rational considerations provide needed context, justified belief comes down to an ineffable sensibility, the equivalent of Just Because. Moreover, head and heart don’t compete, as such, nor counterbalance each other. Science and Art are non-overlapping, the latter entirely beyond the former. Hence, the obligatory leap. Binary polarities on a continuum are merely how the mind conceives of the infinite gap and their uncanny, complementary relationship. Reason is ñ and can never be more than ñ a stepping stone to a deeper understanding based on higher, truer, permanent things, the unseen and incomprehensible. To have faith is to step off, without condition, and allow the direct and immediate experience of Being to totally override accumulated thoughts and words.

Jake Bowyer this week analyzes college students and The State They Want.

One must keep these facts in mind when we approach the gun debate in the United States. Yes, most of these anti-gun movements are completely astroturfed (i.e., funded by the super wealthy, almost all of whom are leftists). However, what we are also seeing in such stunts as March For Our Lives is the caterwaul of college and soon-to-be college kids who want society to look like the university. In academia, safety is now more important than learning or academic freedom. When marchers protest against guns, they are protesting for big state security a la the ever-growing university complex. When students go on a tear and bar center-right speakers from attending their campuses, this is nothing but a display from people who have been constantly reaffirmed and have been told that their mental health, security, and happiness are the most important things in the world. The university wants them to think this way because that means more money and more happy customers.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes The “Great War” and Tyranny: E. E. Cummings and John Dos Passos on the Destruction of Order 1914-18, making a case for those artists as reactionaries.

Bonald hopes that the optimal Christian philosophy is yet to be found, and that it will beat Thomism:

If Aquinas really is the last word, then there is really no great work left. “There is only one universe to discover, and Newton discovered it” used to be the lament, but fortunately it wasn’t true. If Aquinas can be superseded, then fame and glory await. Now I know my pious readers will disapprove of Catholic thinkers being motivated by personal ambition. Shouldn’t they work only for the love of God, the salvation of souls, and commitment to truth? I would reply that ambition plays a large role in intellectual life, and it would be a shame if only the enemy were able to utilize it. Maybe it would be different if the wider world’s intellectual consensus were relatively healthy, but as it is, it needs a serious shake-up, and for that young iconoclasts looking to make names for themselves are well suited.

James Kalb asks, is Liberalism: An Option for Catholics? Not really, because it just empowers the Church’s enemies. I am reminded of Bonald’s classic Ecumenism and Vatican II for the tribal Catholic in which he sets forth the argument that ecumenism, as practiced since the 1960s, is treason, viz., aid and comfort to the Church’s enemies.

Matt Briggs explores the viability of Chemical Castration As Conception Prevention. It doesn’t seem pleasant. And guestposting at Briggs’, in Divided We Are Soon Conquered, Ianto Watt compares abolition in England to America and Russia and the ongoing costs of that legacy. Also, the Blonde Bombshell asks Is Trump Still Winning? And more to the point, are you tired of it yet? And Jim Fedako writes a feel-good article with a wholesome message about his friend with Down Syndrome, An Easter Gift Not Rejected. You won’t regret reading this short testament.

According to Mark Richardson, historically women have tended to cultivate feminine virtue. So what changed? And is there hope for the future? One female blogger seems to think so.

Dalrock Headship tomorrow and headship yesterday, but never headship today.

I once attended a sermon where the pastor started by explaining that his wife is in authority over him, and discussed the proper ways she punishes him when he sins. Then, without missing a beat, he went back to Genesis and blamed Adam for not exercising headship and preventing Eve from sinning.

Then he writes this tutorial on How to creep out your wife. It basically involves different ways to beg for sex.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale brings us more Sydney for our Saturday Sonnet, and more Ann Locke for Sunday. Also, just in time for Easter, Why the Pope Needs a Good Excommunication. We tend to agree.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, David Arias brings us a little bit of theology on the little-remembered Harrowing of Hell. Though he doesn’t mention it, this episode of Christ’s story was treated with a far greater seriousness by medieval Catholics, who used it as inspiration for the aspect of Christ as a warrior; something the modern Church is sorely lacking. Jose Maria J. Yulo calls for Rigor in Place of Rancor in our universities. But rigor cannot fight rancor unless rigor has higher status.

Richard Carroll takes a quick look at Plato’s Dialogues: Cratylus, continuing the series.

John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening comments on a little-known portion of the Arthurian legend; The Last of Logres. Which raises a question or two for reactionaries: Is the fight hopeless? If so, it’s better to retreat from the world to keep the flame alive.

At Logos Club, the absurdly prolific Kaiter Enless publishes The Wicked Road, yet another short story. And also, The Origins of the American Literary Tradition, in four parts and still ongoing. An American Literary Tradition? Who knew??!!

In City Journal, Panero reviews D. J. Jaffe’s Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill. And Heather Mac Donald argues that Trump should Reject the Diversity Mandate of the latest spending bill. He should reject legislation by funding before that.

Finally, an interesting bit of cultural commentary from Chris Morgan on: The Anti-Horror of Neil Hamburger.

This Week in the Outer Left

Craig Hickman is back with a full-form essay, Wet and Windy: The Comedy of Existence. And as always, his aesthetics are superb.

The remainder of the “Outer Left” Sphere was just too boring to cover this week. Check back next week. Thanks!

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson kicked off a busy Passion Week with a thoughtful reflection on the Cross, Cathedral, and Ark of the Covenant. Peterson also released parts VIII, IX, and X of his Biblical Series. JBP finished off the week posting conversations with Australian radio presenter Richard Fiddler and former Australian Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson.

Steven Pinker continues his overreaching optimism in a piece for Project-Syndicate titled “Is Liberal Democracy in Retreat?” Unfortunately, there is a gate to read the article but one of the opening lines, “{democracy} remains the best system of governance compared to the known alternatives,” guarantees it’s gonna be a truther! Pinker also took a visit to the Rubin Report.

Also at the Rubin Report, Governor John “We Have to Bend Over Just Enough” Kasich talks about just that.

Heterodox Academy’s Musa al-Gharbi concludes that lack of ideological representation on campus is a bigger deal than lack of racial representation. HO also reviews an essay titled “Heterodoxy to the Rescue.”

Over at Quillette, Debbie Hayton assumes Progressivism doesn’t live to destroy in “A Plea To Trans Activists: We Can Protect Trans Rights Without Denying Biology.” Andrew Kelman examines how Marxist thinking has been corrupting legal teaching across the west for decades. John Wood, Jr. challenges Sam Harris’ assertion that “identity politics is a failure in rationality” but that it is, rather, a natural human tendency.

Over on The Medium, this was actually pretty good Modern “Liberals” Are 1950s Authoritarians. Jim Carrey is

…not protesting Facebook’s authoritarian pro-establishment censorship campaign. He’s protesting it not being authoritarian and pro-establishment enough.

To say nothing of Rob Reiner.

Old Radical: FIGHT THE MAN!!!

Millennials: Dude, you ARE the man.

OR: Listen to yer elders!!

— ♔ The Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) March 26, 2018

Finally, Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm says to “first become a key, then go look for a lock.”

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin looks at non-genetic, or at least not directly genetic, bases for Violent Crime: Inequality vs. the “Hip Hop Effect”. And Jordan Peterson gets some consideration in Maximum Impact: How One Man Could Change the World. Everyone changes the world, of course, just not very much in most cases. And not always for the better. There is a Change the World Part II. The chief problem, I think, is that material technology (power) has gotten out in front of social technology (wisdom). Finally, Change the World Part III considers the potential impact of Dangerous Children, which is definitely Al’s wheelhouse.

Nullus Maximus explains how to How To Manufacture A Sociopolitical Movement, a primer on astroturfing, of which “March for Our Lives” is a particularly egregious, as well as ready, example. Definitely loved #8…

8. Never accomplish all of your stated goals. A movement with no more objectives to complete is a movement with no more reason to exist. This is undesirable, as it means that the leaders of the movement have to be productive for a living and the politicians have to figure out a new campaign platform in order to get money and votes. As all competent consulting firms know, as long as one can appear to be working toward a solution, there is profit to be made in prolonging the problem.

Also there A Glossary of Social Justice Warrior Terminology, 2nd Edition. Two years had elapse since the 1st Edition, which is an eternity in the evolution of a movement whose very stock in trade is crushing the meaning of words. Comprehensive as it is funny.

And Insula Qui’s monumental treatise on Libertarianism and Statecraft continues with Part VII: Libertarian Philosophy and Social Contract. She is quick to throw certain libertarian fetishes under the bus, and rightly so. But there is this strange reverence for property rights that remains in the air without any visible signs of support:

As long as one remains within a non-aggressive philosophy, one will be able to establish whatever system one wants in libertarianism. All conceivable systems could be described as libertarian as long as they respect private property rights.

Laying aside the non-aggressive philosophy part—I mean you gotta be aggressive if you’re going to defend non-agression after all—what does “respect private property rights” even mean? Property is something that is proper for one to control. It fully presupposes an ethical system defining what is proper (and what is “private” for that matter), and an enforcement mechanism, backed ultimately by lethal violence, to resolve disputes. Such a system is logically prior to “respect private property rights”. It may, and it probably should, do so in the vast majority of cases. But it will be necessary, at least once in a while, to fundamentally not “respect private property rights”. My libertarian paradise respects the hell out of private property rights. But only up to the point where the common good is served, after which it disrespects them with swift and lethal prejudice.

Unorthodoxy has some good news about Idaho, a lesson for America at large. Also, by way of ¡Science!, Progs Are Brain Damaged . And: Mel Gibson vs Pope Francis. My money’s on Gibson.

Ace’s weekly offering: a brief note “Behind the curtain, in the pantomime”.

MLK’s Aphorism no. 49 comes from Alrenous, and it’s a good one.

Our good friend, Nishiki Prestige, has been MIA since November, but he made his triumphant return to both Twitter and blogging this week. You can follow him on Twitter @NISHIKIPRESTIGE. For his return to blogging, he built off Spandrell’s groundbreaking work on bioleninism for an investigation of bioleninism & anti-biopraxis. This is an absolute must read for reactionaries everywhere, as Nishiki runs the hard math and examines the pitfalls of the “just outbreed the left” strategy.

I used to think that we could intentionally breed our way to victory. With enough right-wing nutjobs starting families, we cure our dying land with an injection of high-IQ, high-disgust Nazi babies. On the face of it, it made sense.

…

You can decide how many children you have, but you cannot decide to how many children you want to have. Suck it up and have 5 children for Hitler? That’s all well and good, but your offspring will confront the same problem: They don’t really want kids. Even if they’re genetically far right, will they be able to resist emerging future temptations? How long until the right wing Youtube videos fail to capture the imaginations of our youth? Can they withstand the HitomiTanaka_TrainMolester_16K_120fps_3D.mpg? Will they opt for a 4/10 Stacy instead?

Here is where my autistic breeding program—one that I’ve pegged all of my hopes and dreams on—sputters and explodes on the launchpad. It just doesn’t work.

So what can you do? Here we can turn to anti-praxis’s cop-out: don’t try, but be a dick about it

Micro strategy: look for a woman from a large family. Trade away looks, intelligence, or earnings potential. Big family, wide hips. You don’t want kids, but you mix your DNA into a pool that is naturally fecund. Hope one of them gets the best of both of you. Get him into a STEM program. Gnon looks upon you with favor.

I bet there’s a few young women from big families with wide hips at your local non-pozzed church, so maybe go look into that. Nishiki snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine work here.

Meta Nomad continues his film review series with TSPDT7. Most of the films this time around were duds, including the criminally overrated City Lights, but there is also Fritz Lang’s classic, M, which Meta Nomad seems to really get.

Well… that’s all we had folks. Hope you all are enjoying the Easter Octave and an end to the penitential season of Lent. Special thanks to Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill who helped out immensely this week. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/04/01) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this week’s Highly Publicized Shooting of the Week was Nasim Aghdam’s at Youtube. Not terribly effective as highly publicized shootings go. But it could’ve been just a very dramatic suicide. Very odd girl. If she even was a girl? Vegan diet may not have been to blame, but why take chances, folks?

Turns out the least annoying thing the Youtube Shooter ever did was shoot up Youtube.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) April 4, 2018

This week in American Greatness, our old pal Victor David Hanson takes honest stock of Trumpian geopolitics finding Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality. Also there: Why is the Media Suddenly So Interested in the EPA? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. Related.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton makes an always welcome kick-off to our week with his Sunday Thoughts. Briefly put, the topic this week: Ruing the deracination of Easter from a non-Christian perspective.

With the caveat that most social psychology studies are bunk, Atavasionary wades into the purported finding that Many people would rather give themselves shocks than be alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. With an awfully funny animated gif for feature art.

Narm No posts a partial, but substantial, Review of Daniel Coyle’s Culture Code.

Over at GA Blog this week, Adam tackles the Spontaneous Organization v. Absolutist debate head on in: The Temporality of Sovereignty. Even King Cnut the Great could not command the waves the Spontaneists argue—the (correct) implication being that there are social forces beyond even the most powerful sovereign’s command. Adam’s framing:

[W]hat limits sovereignty, what represents the penumbra of social action resistant to sovereign command, is prior acts of sovereignty—what the sovereign is dependent upon, that is, and what the sovereign must respect and “correspond” to, are not spontaneously organized social relations but the decisions of previous sovereigns. If we could go back far enough, every social practice—every ritual, every kinship relation, every moral norm, every aesthetic criterion, everything—has its origin in sovereign decision and delegation—or in some pre-sovereign obedience to the sacred center preceding sovereignty and incorporated into it.

It’s turtles sovereignty… all the way down. An elegant theory, to which we absolutists at Social Matter are quite attracted. But, of course, one wonders whether “emergent social organization” might not simply a synonym—a colorful synonym—for “pre-sovereign obedience to the sacred center”.

A “revolutionary” sovereign who tried to tear up and remake drastically the order he has inherited would generate resistance not because he would be waging war against “nature” or “tradition,” but because he would be disrupting previously authorized relations between the center and its margins and thereby vitiating the social center.

True. But again, one wonders just how much distance there is between “authorized relations between the center and its margins” and “tradition”. Excellent food for thought and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Girl with coffee

Sarah Perry is up on Ribbonfarm with a nice aesthetics piece Deep Laziness: Riding minimum energy states all the way to beauty. She applies this process to finding time for laziness—enjoyable and/or contemplative activities—in one’s own rat race.

Our Russian tovarishch, Anatoly Karlin, had a pretty big week this week. First, he shared some graphs by Emil Kirkegaard and gwern that graph the Dark Ages. They should weigh heavily in the debate over whether there was such a thing. Just eyeballing the graphs, but it definitely looks like a Dark Age to me.

He also remarked on London surpassing New York in murder rates. As an aside, I, for one, am horrified that Negroes are only twice as common in New York as London. London’s occupying invader Mohammedan mayor has, naturally, vowed to crack down on humble knives, including confiscating butter knives. London, what the hell are you playing at? Stop it, just… please, stop.

And Anatoly snuck in just before the deadline with a quick take on Douma and Dumber. There really isn’t much to say here (other than: well punned) so I’ll let Anatoly have the last word.

The neocons surrounding Trump have locked him into a never-ending spiral of escalation towards Russia in a hopeless bid to “prove” that he is not Putin’s puppet.

By striking Syria, Trump becomes “Presidential” in eyes of the Western media and the average American is all too happy to swallow it up, no matter the patent false flaginess of this false flag.

At Jacobite this week, Stephen Baskervile asks the question What is Gender Ideology? The answer is well-known in neoreactionary circles, and Baskerville explains it eloquently.

My argument is that the sexual freedom and the sexual authoritarianism are not only inseparable; they are two sides of the same political dynamic, and they must be understood and confronted together. The same lobbies pushing abortion, same-sex marriage, hooking up, and sexualizing children are also behind the hysterias over “sexual harassment,” “child abuse,” “domestic violence,” “sexual assault,” “deadbeat dads,” and the rest, and now they are pushing for the incarceration of not only men and fathers, but other parents and now increasingly religious believers as well.

From Malcolm Pollack Three Models Of Equality—featuring Sam Harris, Ezra Klein, and Andrew Sullivan. Al Fin has been following that debate as well.

By way of Isegoria… Jordan Peterson reminds some dude on Medium civilization is fragile. The origin and meaning of sex—in which I am vindicated! More from Jordan Peterson. By way of Steve Sailer reviewing David Reich’s book: The old Robert E. Howard version is actually pretty much what happened. Many firms don’t know their numbers. And What caused the 1968 riots? My guess: He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Finally, a missive from CWNY, Be Not Afraid. This cuts both ways:

When an entire people makes hate the primary focus of their faith, they become a very dangerous people.

This Week in Jim Donald

To start the week, Jim points out that Trump’s military tranny ban is alive and well, despite reports you may have seen to the contrary. First, Jim engages in some much needed rectification of names, appropriately classifying many, and perhaps all, of the disparate phenomena that get lumped together under the meaningless label “transgender”.

The word transgender deliberately confuses people with very different kinds of problems, grouping unlike people together, and making distinctions without a difference.

Girl sipping coffee.

1. Actual transgenders: Crazy people who clearly of one sex, but suffer the delusion that they are of a different sex in the same way that some people who are clearly not Napoleon the First, Emperor of France, suffer the delusion that they are Napoleon the First, Emperor of France.

2. Traps: gay males who want to be screwed by manly men, and are painfully aware that other gay males are seldom manly.

3. Cuntboys: Lesbian women who want to screw feminine women. These tend to be less weird, nasty and evil than traps, and also tend to be conventionally attracted to manly men as well as feminine women, usually having more sex with manly men than with women, despite their theoretical lesbianism. Theoretically they have relationships with women and sex with males, but this is mainly because they tend to have sex with males who are not interested in having relationships with them.

4. Cross dressers: People who get off on being mistaken for a member of the opposite sex: These superficially resemble traps, but a trap will take it all the way.

5. Actual transexuals: People who are mixed up physically, who are born with mixed up physical characteristics. There are very few of these, and most of them are genetic males with androgen insensitivity syndrome. Everyone starts off with a female phenotype in the womb, and then those who are genetically male normally develop a male phenotype starting at the sixteenth week after conception. A few, a very few, abnormally fail. Some of these subsequently develop the outward and inward male phenotype belatedly at puberty with no medical intervention, despite failing to develop it in the womb.

I would perhaps add the sixth category of autogynephiles, which Jim might regard as a species of cross dresser. In any case, Jim points out that Trump’s policy bans transgenders, and most traps, cuntboys, and cross dressers, while allowing actual transexuals through, who are so rare as to make no difference anyway.

The ban on transition surgery bans most of the crazies and perverts, and the ban on gender dysphoria bans most of the remaining crazies and perverts. But the genuine transexuals are allowed in – both of them. As they should be.

So Trump used the Social Justice Warrior’s own doubletalk against them.

Big if true. The problem is that it still, in some sense, allows the vague exceptions to govern the rules. The rule for military entrance should be so simple that it can be written on a 3×5 note card: meeting strenuous physical and mental requirements XYZ. Simple, clean, and, if the standards are correctly chosen, completely screens out women, mental defectives, and degenerates without ever even acknowledging that such categories are meaningful in any sense. We must, first of all, never cede an inch of metaphysical or epistemological territory, which is why rectification of names is so crucial. It is highly likely that there are no homosexuals, no lesbians, no transgendered. They are metaphysical fictions invented solely as weapons.

And Jim announces the possibility of Operation Sovereign Borders. As is well known, Trump wants to use the military to secure the border. This necessarily conflicts with the judiciary’s “discovery” in the Constitution that everyone has the inherent human right to citizenship, welfare, and left-wing votes in a predominantly white and successful country. This sets up a collision.

Girl with coffee.

To use the military for selfish purposes, such as keeping hostile and predatory outsiders on the outside, is a clear violation of fundamental human rights recently discovered in the emanation of the penumbra of the umbra of the great and glorious US constitution. The US military should only be used for good and unselfish purposes, such as teaching Afghan schoolgirls how to put a condom on a banana and blowing up people who are insufficiently grateful for the benefits of freedom and democracy bestowed upon them.

If Trump keeps this promise, chances are he is also going to have some wall in time for the mid term elections. If he does not, he will not.

Keeping either or both of these promises is likely to lead to confrontation with the judges, as it violates the inalienable human right of South America and Africa to move to America to live on crime, welfare, and voting Democrat.

Jim then spends the rest of the piece, and it is a must read, looking at a similar situation in Australia where Tony Abbott dared the judiciary to stop him from enforcing laws against illegal aliens, and the judiciary blinked. It remains to be seen if Trump will actually follow through with enforcing the laws, and if he does if the American judiciary will likewise blink. It was suggested by Herodian in the comments, and I am inclined to agree, that this is a societal shit test, which lends credence to the view that the judiciary will eventually back down.

This Week in Social Matter

This week at Social Matter begins with a debut from Walter Devereux, coming to us on loan from Thermidor where he produces consistently excellent work. This week he presents Something Completely Different™, The Disenchanted Forest: How We Lost Our Fear Of The Woods.

Just as Chesterton recast Tradition as a sort of “democracy of the dead” to make it palatable to his post-revolutionary audience, so too the best we are able to embrace in this mental framework is a conservationism of the fantastical—that species of antiquarian Romanticism that has left us content to look into the past and sigh. We are, after all, living in that grey and frozen winter of Western civilization; our spirit is in hibernation, and our race is dormant. This cannot continue forever. A new paradigm is necessary; for our children will be fellaheen, and raise fellaheen children themselves, with numberless generations of such until we remember why we once approached the wilderness with reverence and unease.

In a vast, sweeping literary and historical review, Devereux traces the originary fears Western men had of the forest, and how—not without social and psychological cost—we’ve overcome them. I simply cannot do this piece justice. One of most brilliant and unusual pieces in the Reactosphere® in quite some time. This one picks up the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Editor in Chief, aka. The Boss, Hadley Bishop announces our HTTPS Upgrade. Which is supposedly a good thing.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast covers a topic near and dear to my own heart: Episode 64: Blood Brotherhoods—Organized Crime In Italy.

Finally, some timely poetry by Arthur Powell: Butlerian Prelude.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Dad playing with daughter.

It was Review of Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise Week at Evolutionist X’s this week. Scratch that… it was Preparing for a review of Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters Week! By looking at the Times the Experts were Wrong. In those three parts. It sounds like Nichols thinks that policy wonk book authors should be trusted because physicists make such accurate predictions. But I suppose we’ll have to wait for the actual review for that.

Mrs. X in this three part series is merely laying a groundwork for the review by defining what “expert” might mean, and noting it depends not only on who’s noticing expertise, but very much on the field in which a putative expert is expert in. She undertakes to recount many of the ways in which experts are wrong Part 1 examines a few major failures of expertise in medicine. Part 2 covers naked emperors in Law, Academia, and Science. And Part 3 unearths wonk fuckups in wars and foreign policy. In truth much more can be said in these and other areas of human endeavor. But Evolutionist X has said quite a lot. This series earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀. We certainly are looking forward to the actual review.

Greg Cochran continues his review of David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here. Part 4 covers the Denisovans; Part 5 is where things really get juicy. Replying to Reich’s claim that believing in different races is indefensible, Cochran says,

He is wrong: sure, their position is logically indefensible, the facts are against it, but what does that matter? The significantly crazier idea that there are no differences between the sexes—that sexual dimorphism itself is a myth promulgated by the Gnomes of Zurich or the orbital mind-control lasers—has become very powerful in much of the Western world: barking-mad craziness apparently doesn’t need to defend itself.

Facts don’t care about your feelings; unfortunately, dear reader, the Cathedral doesn’t care about your facts—at least not yet…

By way of Audacious Epigone… Most whites know Diversity! is inherently anti-white. Most people have a “favorable view” of the NRA. And (my, aren’t you surprised) John McCain is more popular among Democrats than he is among Republicans. The bad news is that his favorability ratings are north of 50% across the board. Perhaps it is respect for the (almost) dead.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

This week at Thermidor, Walter Devereux kicks things off with Back to Chíang-an: The Twilight of Chinese Civilization. Like many before him, Devereux attempts to pull back the veil from the mysterious East.

[P]erhaps it is incorrect to say that we know where Xi Jinping is going with China, but it is at least not beyond the realm of possibility to explain where he is coming from. A great deal is made of the Confucian style of post-Maoist China—as much, at least, as has been made of Confucianism in North Korea, which is a patently absurd interpretation of Juche society. The conclusions are wrong, but the inspiration, at least, seems to touch upon something of value: namely, that there is precedent for the China we are today witnessing, seemingly ascendant in comparison with the Western world.

Devereux argues that the present is very much like the past, at least in China’s case, and delves into Chinese history and thought to illuminate the future. He picks up an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ to add to his BoTW Award this week.

N. T. Carlsbad delivers a thought-provoking meditation on Two Visions of National Sovereignty: English and Frankish.

Editor P. T. Carlo and Walter Devereux pick back up where they left off last week with Spengler in Bloom Part 2.

Finally, Jake Bowyer wraps things up with a commentary on the firing of Kevin D. Williamson in The Cuck is Vanquished (Again). Williamson’s fall was well-earned, and easily foreseen.

The always productive right-wing blogosphere has already rushed to remind everyone that cucking in the Williamson mode never pays. No matter how hard you demean rural whites, no matter how vocal your opposition to President Trump is, you are still evil to the Left. Nothing will ever change that, so stop trying.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Seriouslypleasedropit pens an epistle on the Hazards of Endarkenment, a warning crafted at least as much for himself as others. Which is the best sort of warning.

Mark Richardson reads some Patrick Deneen on creating the res idiotica.

Matt Brigg subtweets the Pope in Oh, Hell. What could be more “extremely dangerous to our democracy” than rote talking points artlessly spewed from every “news” source in the country? He has some suitably ornery metaphysics to apply to Quantum Potency & Probability. Finally, the only Black Pill worth taking: Insanity & Doom Update XXVIII.

Speaking of Hell… Bonald takes note of very bad arguments for hell. Some almost as bad as arguments against it. Noah Webster has been retroactively cast as a deplorable. Welcome aboard, sir! And a short but quite interesting question: Is the novel a distinctly atheistic art form? Seems implausible, yet… “there does seem to be something about the novel that makes it a poor vessel for religious or mythical narratives”.

And Bonald is over at The Orthosphere proper with a big paste from C. S. Lewis: “The mythology I believe in is not the one I like best”. Bertonneau links to an essay of his at Gates of Vienna.

J. M. Smith returns with an ironic suggestion for the use of empty churches which is all but coming true: I Hear the Crash of Toppling Pins.

If the Church is a hollow fraud, it should be dramatically abjured, not quietly repurposed. Few things are more nauseating than a humanist thinly disguised as a priest (although a technocrat disguised as a humanist comes close). Imagine walking past a great cathedral at night and seeing the glow of light from behind the stained glass windows. Imagine listening in the hope of hearing organ music. Imagine the feeling when you hear, instead, the reverberating crash of toppling pins.

Amen to that. Also from Smith, The Conundrum of a Democratic Snob. If historians can “historicize” history, then so may historians themselves be historicized. And, quite frankly, much more justly so. This too: a reflection on the Catharsis of Culling One’s Library—confessions from a former hoarder of books, which became only a “pleasing array of spines”.

And speaking of historicization, Bonald rounds out the week with notes from Butterfield on The Whig Interpretation of History.

Butterfield finds his perfect foil in Lord Acton. Acton was the worst sort of self-righteous liberal bigot, although I did not know until Butterfield presented quotes the degree to which Acton made it a principle not to try to understand the deplorables of past ages, thinking any such extension of sympathy morally hazardous, and his systematic presupposition of attributing to personal sin what could equally be explained by disagreement.

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

Finally, at Faith & Heritage, Considering Emigration.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale continues the series of Sydney for our Saturday Sonnet, and Ann Locke for Sunday.

At The Imaginative Conservative, a couple of Russell Kirk reposts of interest: First, The Necessity of Dogmas in Schooling. Forty years ago, he couldn’t quite imagine the dogma that the Left now inculcates in our students—right out of the religious playbook of course. Repeat the catechism: Diversity is our Strength. And also The Architecture of Servitude and Boredom.

A less hectic week than usual at The Logos Club, but Kaiter Enless did publish a soaring essay: Cradle The Fire.

Stephen Malanga at City Journal uncovers a Strange Solidarity. I’d follow the money on this one, if unions even leave a trail to follow. And Heather MacDonald asks the usual question: Who Misbehaves? The usual suspects of course, in school as elsewhere. And Kotkin and Cox explain What the Census Numbers Tell Us.

Richard Carroll reviews the religious tract The Art of Dying Well, which is somewhat more serious than the name suggests.

This Week in the Outer Left

Craig Hickman has been reading Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than Nothing and has some observations based on it. First, on modern art, the observation that we are alone with the alone. Second, a meditation on Žižek’s return to Plato. Fair warning, if you have watched Žižek videos, it is highly likely that you will read the quotations from him in his voice. You have been warned.

Over at The Baffler, Kieran Dahl has some thoughts on the growing popularity of the phrase could revolutionize. As is typical of left-wing journalism’s approach to the relationship between media and Silicon Valley, this must be read on three levels. On the first level, who cares? On the second, this can be read as the progressive not liking the world they made as it stares back at them. “You made your clickbait, now lie in it!” But it is the third level that is most interesting. Both journalism and Silicon Valley are heavily progressive. But journalism has been losing status, as the nerds in Silicon Valley have been gaining it, which is probably not completely related. And what is even the point of being progressive if it doesn’t give you maximum status-points? It must especially grate on journalists to see the socially inept taking status away from them. Sorry guys, Silicon Valley already did revolutionize how people get information, and you’re losing out as a result. Deal with it. Or don’t, soon you’ll be inconsequential anyway.

And over at Jacobin, a fairly smart observation that market liberalization has not led to democratic reforms in places like China. Call it the end of “the End of History”. Naturally, since Jacobin sees only a funhouse mirror version of the world they get things almost precisely backwards and think this is just an awful, awful thing. Sane people can understand that millions of people being lifted out of communism induced poverty is a great thing, regardless of the political forms under which it occurs. That China shows that there is no essential connection between commerce and democracy, and perhaps that they are even in some sense negatively correlated, is obvious common sense to any Reactionary worth his salt. It is rather weird when you think about it, the belief that double-entry bookkeeping and joint-stock corporations have anything to do with mob rule.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

‘Tis the (Easter) Season, and Jordan Peterson is contemplating Our Lord’s Death and Resurrection. Contemplating the Resurrection… you better have already clicked that link! In other news, Peterson has taken the meatpill. (If you haven’t yet taken the meatpill, watch this.)

Max Abrahms, Cathedral position and surname notwithstanding, has been the lone voice of reason crying in the wilderness of Blue Cheka Twitter and reminding the world that Assad isn’t a comic book villain and has no incentive to gas his own civilians. Israel, on the other hand…

Heterodox Academy reports that sensitivity to political correctness is correlated with liberal beliefs, poor emotional health, and arguments. Or in other words: SJW’s always lie, SJW’s always project, and SJW’s always double down. During the latest edition of Half Hour of Heterodoxy, political commentator Richard Reeves talks about the life and works of John Stuart Mill.

Over at Quillette, Phil Theofanos discusses academia’s consilience crisis, William Buckner explores the process of becoming a man in different times and cultures, and Kare Fog ponders the social constructionism that has taken over humanities departments around the world.

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin looks at educational priorities: First, educate the child to thrive in the (real) world. Then if He Wants More Schooling, He Can Pay for It. A nice rundown on the current realities of the job market and how the great moral crusade for post-secondary education is absolutely not in line with them. Also a nice bit of analysis on Mike (Rowe) and Jordan (Peterson): Unlikeliest Revolutionaries… or as we like to call ’em: Rising Reactionaries.

The Rebbe is nothing if not thorough here: The Jewish Question, Answered. His is a point-by-point refutation of Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique. It would be wrong to assume we agree with every point of this refutation, but this is a needful discussion and Rebbe has earned a right to be heard on it. Though probably controversial to many readers, The Committee deemed this work worthy of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Unorthodoxy looks at The Cost of Ethnic Cleansing—or how Chinese immigrants can be racist as fuck and totally get away with it.

Speaking of dark forests, Ace offers some advice on finding your way out: “It’s dark as Hell, and hard to find…”, featuring the Canucks: Nickelback.

PA posts the full text of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard 1978 Commencement Speech: “A World Split Apart”. Utterly undigestible by The Cathedral.

Zach Kraine explains why Libertarianism isn’t appealing for members of the working class.

Over at Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus embarks on a serious bit of political theory: The Color Theory of Conflict, Part I: Order of Battle. Nothing to object to thus far.

AMK gathers Some thoughts on various subjects, most of which are pretty good. He also says all that needs to be said about Christopher Cantwell. This is absolutely true:

Using your real name in White nationalism is a filter that brings in people who lack sound judgement. Indeed, White nationalism itself is a filter for bringing in people with bad judgement.

Nishiki Prestige analyzes one of the niche movements that has emerged from the fast-forward memetic Darwinianism of Twitter, inviting Nice/ACC back to his place. Accelerationism spawned variants left, right, and unconditional. Neoreaction spawned the “haha, only serious” is-it-ironic NiceRx, so why not a Nice Accelerationism? I’ll let Nishiki explain.

There was something beautiful I saw in those early U/ACC discussions … when the disagreeing parties came together to talk about the work of Nick Land and CCRU with relative civility. There were only couple dozen involved, and it was something special. I was there by accident, lead by loneliness and a puppydog-like earnesty to understand what these people were talking about. Strange and awesome time I will remember forever.

But what do we have now?

…

Let’s drop the fighting and becoming [sic] Nice/ACC. Keep the U/ACC name, sure—that’s extra nice—but remind ourselves to be Nice Accelerationists again.

We don’t have to be sad, misery-dispensaries updating our threatening Twitter AVIs anymore. We can be the court jesters of the Cathedral and the Vampire Castle. We can discuss the inhuman with a positive, uplifting, humanist attitude!

ACC Twitter has direct access to a honest-to-god philosopher, several prestigious professors, and a bunch of anonymous important people. You realize that Thiel probably knows about U/ACC? I bet he’s at least seen the hashtag. Justine Tunney, Steve Bannon, Moldbug? Yes, maybe, yes.

…

What we have now is a passing moment. It’s an opening where much is freely available, and much is being left untouched. Resources won’t always be there. Acceleration could be everything, and the chance to go deeper is staring us in the face.

It is well documented that (a highly prized and most prolific staff member of) TWiR is a fan of Nishiki, so I say this with all sincerity and without any sarcasm or ill-feeling: Dream on, dreamer, sounds beautiful, and we’d love to see it.

That’s all we had time for. A slightly abbreviated week by the looks of it: About 96 links and 4800 words. Still, try not to click those links all at once. As always our trusty TWiR Staff provided invaluable help in pulling this all together: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Burgess McGill, and Aidan MacLear, many thanks to you. Hans der Fiedler took the week off. I happen to know he’s taken on some new responsibilities. We trust that all is well with him. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/04/08) appeared first on Social Matter.

Strategically Counterproductive Chemical Weapons Attack of the Week this week came by way of ostensible Syria, as usual. What, after all, is at stake there? Tucker Carlson has been superb. Most of the time, America is ruled by public opinion. Sometimes her leaders act and manufacture consent later.

Thomas Pickety uses “Brahmin” in the Moldbuggian sense of the term in this presentation to EHESS and Paris School of Economics.

Over at Hoover, VDH catalogues Dueling Populisms.

This week in American Greatness, this was pretty good: Restoring the Sanctity of Sovereign National Borders—a common sense analysis of the perennial problem for rich nations and what won’t be done about it.

In what was probably the biggest (and best hidden) news this week… Neovictorian has published his novel: Sanity. And I was an early reader. Please go buy it and support Neovic. It’s the exact opposite of Menciian prolixity: Short and Stephensonian. I couldn’t put it down, and for someone with as short of an attention span as me, that’s saying something.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton’s week kick-offing duties were taken over by Neocolonial this week with his bullet points on The Empty Shelf and the ways it is not like a frontier. Don’t wish to steal his mighty thunder, but this is an excellent point:

Corollary—Eucivic expansion can only take place within a secure border.

This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ and may have set a record for the fewest number of written words ever to do so.

Henry Dampier makes his semi-retirement from public life just a little bit more formal.

In audio-visual production news, Prytaneum Times is /ourguy/—no really: our guy. Among others.

GA Blog has up an illuminating essay On the Culling of Cant. He identifies a particularly clever

Amish Girls (we suspect genuine).

[I]t’s still futile to urge a “critical” attitude upon someone, to tell someone to “be more critical,” either in general or towards something in particular. These are really just ways of calling someone stupid, or telling them to shut up and listen to you. “Being critical” requires that one be part of a disciplinary space that takes as its center of attention the “foundational” concepts of another discipline—and this is possible because anomalies in the various uses of those concepts have already become evident. As a metalanguage attached to a form of literacy, it is meaningless. Which is to say, it is cant.

So how do we tell meaningful metalanguage from the meaninless sort?

Meaningful metalanguage issues imperatives for attending to normal language use that are operable, that produce ostensive results that reset attention; meaningless metalanguage issues imperatives that are nothing but double-binds—they ask you to have already mastered the model that you are being measured against. The culling of cant allows us to formulate the political goals of anti-liberalism and absolutism more comprehensively: what we want is meaningful order. Meaningful order means that institutions and positions have the power and capacity to perform the functions allocated to them, and that they do so.

High quality stuff from Adam as usual, which earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Alf avers that we need more Defection: Parasites thrive in a period of excessive cooperation. Defect, at least, from known defectors.

Slumlord, the Social Pathologist, has an Exorcism to perform. Any organization capable of policing its membership is… well… a real Organization. And organizational fences make good neighbors—or at least better ones.

At Jacobite Chris Morgan pens After Discourse: On the Use and Abuse of Magazines. Morgan comments upon Kevin Williamson’s firing and delivers what must be one of the most stinging “defenses” Williamson might ever chance to read.

The secret to defending Kevin Williamson is a simple one: he’s not actually that good.

Oof! Morgan goes on, as the title suggests, to discuss trends in the magazine business.

Also there: Ryan Khurana discusses The Need for a Philosophy of Data in light of the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, focusing on the cultural and legal issues posed by social media and big data.

Anatoly Karlin, friend of Social Matter, had some gloomy presentiments regarding the road to World War III. Then, after the minor strike that actually happened, he has a post-bombing assessment. One of his grimmer points bears quoting.

Photo said “Amish”, but we suspect Mennonite.

I believe the main problem I outlined stands: Namely, that Trump has locked himself into an escalatory cycle. The jihadis now know that all they need to do to provoke geometrically expanding retaliations against Assad is to continue setting up false flag gas attacks. Talk of perverse incentives. As this cycle plays out, the chances of Russian forces entering into hostilities with US and coalition forces will continue to increase.

By way of Isegoria… Contemporary science fiction and fantasy is godawful. Some ancient wisdom: To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it. American troops used to own the night—no longer. Ape men and cutting edge tech from 1912. And… Physiogamy is real socio-economic class edition.

Finally, this week in Cambria will Not Yield, a cold splash of reality: The Vision of His Europe and His People.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim took the week off. We trust he enjoyed it.

This Week in Social Matter

Mark Christensen, who’s becoming a very regular contributor here, kicks off the week here with Beyond The Economic: The Political Class And Its Traits. He begins with the adroit observation that restoration cannot last long if it merely recapitulates an hierarchical structure without providing incentive to the various classes to preserve it. Following Carl Schmitt, Christensen distinguishes political class from economic and spiritual classes. They possess the charism of force—physical removal, so to speak.

The core competency of the political class, theoretically, is the creation and maintenance of order. They must maintain the peace of the polity against internal and external threat. This requires them to be extremely competent at making a key distinction: that of friend and enemy.

Of course they’re gonna have a hard time doing that if the economic and priestly classes are unwilling to identify enemies—of the people that is. The priestly class can become all too proficient at identifying enemies from among the people it ostensibly represents. And the economic class is willing to declare any paying customer a friend. America’s political class is, as you know, pretty much at war with itself, buying what little status it may from the classes upon which it should be imposing an order.

Definitely not genuine Amish, but still beautiful photo all the same.

In order to achieve Restoration, USG requires a political class which can act in a coordinated and long-term manner. If the existing institutions are not able to provide these incentives, then it seems that this will occur only with a state of affairs arising that allows for drastic levels of restructuring. Schmitt terms such a suspension of norms a “state of exception”. Were such a situation to arise, that segment of the political class able to create and normalize a new structure would prove itself to have won sovereignty. In the current order, no existing faction seems to have this ability. If this is so, we can conclude that sovereignty has become so dispersed that USG cannot be considered a unified body in any practical sense. We are not dealing with one unified political class of USG, but in fact multiple competing political classes of USG sub-structures.

Christensen goes on to describe various past successes of political classes re-imposing their will upon nations. These provide lessons for any restoration party who wishes to create a new political class whose long term interests align with the sovereign and the common good. A very strong outing here for Mark and an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Henry Olson swings by on Tuesday with Trotsky Peoria: The End Of Front Porch Republicanism. He chronicles the proliferation of Václav Havel’s green grocers in unexpected places. Like Olson, I too was a reader (and fan) of Front Porch Republic once. Not all that long ago, really.

But now, in the age of Trump, the Outer Right, antifa, and democratic socialism, I would have trouble conjuring up a more pointless ideology than one which finds the solution to modern problems in leaving the cities and raising your own pigs. Here I was visiting a largely homogeneous state, where small-town businessmen ostentatiously send a piece of their moderate profits to the Southern Poverty Law Center. You can travel to the heart of America, but you can still find the same types as fill the sociology department at Barnard.

I tend to chalk up the Front Porchers (lack of) excesses to hopeless romanticism… when I’m feeling charitable; philosophical failure to distinguish accidents from essences, when I’m feeling less so. But after taking stock of the highly reliable failure rate of conservatives to conserve anything—anything but hopeless romanticism, that is—one begins to suspect a certain complicity. Or at least useful idiocy. Olson snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine efforts here.

Hubert Collins has a bit to say about Party Ideology. Not that kind of party; the party kind of party…

Inebriation is a great deal more fun than morbid obesity. Importantly, nothing can change that. It did not stop being true the first time my friend wet himself in public he was so drunk, and it is still true now that he has taken to smoking crack cocaine.

On the other hand, a bag of potato chips is more fun than cirrhosis. Fun on it’s own, Collins shows, is a dead end. And explains much about our current decline.

For Friday the 13th, Nick and the rest of the Nicks are up with the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 65: The Battle Of Athens—Small Town With A Rebel Yell, America’s own cleansing of the Shire.

Finally for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose, Carl Hildebrand presents Manichaeus, Heresiarch.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Gregory Cochran discusses Amerind genetics in the sixth part of his review of David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week by going meta on Dangerous Memes. In the old days, we caught memes the old fashioned way:

In a mitochondrial memetic environment (that is, an environment where you get most of your information from relatives,) memes that could kill you tend to get selected against: parents who encourage their children to eat poison tend not to have grandchildren. From an evolutionary perspective, deadly memes are selected against in a mitochondrial environment; memes will evolve to support your survival.

What we have today is a lot more viral meme propagation. And certain memes have gone far more viral than others: like integration. And the one where you’re an evil person if you’re insufficiently enthusiastic about it. Which is pretty darn “dangerous”. I suppose it’s better to get your memes from your kinfolk, but once your elders have been infected—and they have—your gonna have to learn the correct memes all on your own. Or at Evolutionist X’s place.

But viral memes are not all bad, avers Mrs. X, in The Value of Viral Memes.

I’d like to discuss one of their greatest strengths: you can transmit them to other people without using them yourself.

Wait! That’s a strength?!?! Ya gotta keep reading…

Girl with coffee.

Suppose one day you happen to have a brilliant new idea for how to keep warm in a very cold environment–but you live in Sudan. If you can’t tell your idea to anyone who lives somewhere cold, your idea will never be useful. It will die with you.

But introduce writing, and ideas of no use to their holder can be recorded and transmitted to people who can use them. For example, in 1502, Leonardo da Vinci designed a 720-foot (220 m) bridge for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Constantinople. The sultan never built Leonardo’s bridge, but in 2001, a bridge based on his design was finally built in Norway. Leonardo’s ideas for flying machines, while also not immediately useful, inspired generations of future engineers.

Viral memes don’t have to be immediately useful to stick around.

I guess the viral memes you watch out for are the ones that increase short term fitness (e.g., status), but are long term losers for a society when widely adopted. Like, oh… say… integration or something.

Anthropology Friday kicks off a new series on: Sidney L. Gulick’s Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic. It’s remarkably sympathetic to those strange little yellow people. Gulick was a progressive missionary and he documents (and applauds) Japan’s rapid rise during the latter half of the 19th Century.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Support for U. S. military action in Syria is abysmally low—even among “Republicans who voted for Clinton” (but highest there, of courshe). Support for the NRA is straightforwardly a class issue among Americans. And, stepping away from survey data momentarily, Oh no, no, no, we don’t Apu of that!

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Richard Greenhorn starts the week off at Thermidor with Dead Letters of a Contrarian: On the Career of Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens remains popular in some circles for being not quite as far left is currently fashionable, but he still was very much a man of his time.

Hitch was always a liberal—he was always a free artist of himself. A lover of Anglo-Saxon freedom and American hedonism, he was a man who believed only in negative freedom, and therefore never needed an idea inside himself bigger than the idea of Christopher Hitchens. A great intellectual, consumed with great ideas, can be the most boring man and still write wonderfully; if Hitchens was not writing about himself, he was writing about nothing at all.

Next up, N. T. Carlsbad defends Metternich and his Secret Police. He includes a reminder that “fake news” is not a recent invention.

With regards to the free press, “only in a position of the most perfect peace” could Germany endure such a thing, and “amid a wild discord of opinions … which shatters all principles, and throws doubt and suspicion on all truth.” That is to say, taking action against republican fake news.

Girl and coffee.

Fake News is just the first draft of Fake History.

Walter Devereux stirs the pot with “Call None Father upon Earth”: The Implications of Clerical Celibacy. In this first of three parts, Devereux revisits ancient priestly orders as well as the Biblical text to argue for married priests. Thankfully, Devereux shoots down all the stupid reasons to end Roman clerical celibacy. He does err in believing the Christian priesthood is, or ought to be, modeled in any way upon the Levitical. The Christian priesthood is modeled upon Christ who is “priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek“. Looking forward to parts two and three.

Finally, Mark Citadel returns to Thermidor to do a comparison between The Patriarch & the Moral Mosquito. The patriarch here is Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, and the mosquito is George Weigel. Citadel squashes the mosquito easily. To the delight of The Committee, who bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews Jack Vance’s Wyst: Alastor 1716 (A socialist Dystopia) and Mika Waltari’s Dark Angel (1952)—A Novel for Our Time.

Bonald writes about Progress in philosophy and theology in the long view.

It is to be expected that existing philosophical systems—Thomist, Scotist, Cartesian, Leibnizian, Hegelian, Whiteheadian, etc—will all be at least somewhat inadequate to the data including revelation, and usually—if their Christian adherents are truly honest and rigorous—at least in part in conflict with orthodoxy. This is not necessarily a worry. These philosophies are to be regarded as toy models. Christian philosophers are encouraged to investigate and improve upon them. Such philosophers only become heretical when they take their philosophy to have more authority than revelation and declare the truths which contradict their system false.

Also at Bonald’s a witty take on Catholic common ground. “Common ground”, what a worn out phrase. (Almost said “boomer” phrase.) He notes:

The odd dad pic.

Why shouldn’t Catholics be divided on everything under the sun? Otherwise, would it not mean that we had failed to evangelize one faction? If we need a core that unites us and distinguishes us from the world (and we do!), we could point to the seven sacraments and the Nicene creed. However, that would mean giving up on “bringing Catholic principles to public life”, at least insofar as “public life” means what are commonly called “political disputes”.

Yup. The lure of politics: Our Bishops want the Church to be able to say more than She’s actually capable of saying with any certainty. I don’t wanna steal Bonald’s thunder, so do RTWT. This, too, was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Briggs reports on politics and witchcraft as Hillary Clinton Visits Coven ëThe Wingí. And a giant American cross violates anti-religion laws, China tightens its grip over its bishops, and men are banned from debate so they dont rape the women, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXIX.

Also at Briggs’, two types of activism are examined in A Tale Of Two Parks: Destroyers Vs. Preservers—Guest Post by Kevin Groenhagen. And an obvious question is posed: Was Syria Another False Flag?—Guest Post by Ianto Watt.

Wasn’t it just a year ago this same thing happened, and Donald threw dozens of cruise-missiles at Assad’s armed camp? And hasn’t this repeated use of chem-weapons resulted in further airstrikes over this past year? Isn’t that the backdrop of this whole scenario? This whole script is so Pavlovian that I want to retch. Ring the bell, watch the dog salivate. Repeat.

Mark Richardson relays the history liberalism in Australia through the early politics of Alfred Deakin (Deakin & higher unities, Deakin’s courtship) and Sir Henry Parkes.

William Wildblood ponders, Is Leftism Atavistic? The question had to be asked.

Leftism represents the return to the Mother. It is a refusal of spiritual responsibility and a retreat to an infantile environment in which the hero is feared and denied his chance to grow because that would imperil the whole. The leftist preoccupations with equality and the state indicate its dislike of the free individual who dares to stand alone. This may seem far-fetched when you take leftism on its own terms and as a purely political movement but when you look beneath the surface at underlying motivations another story emerges.

Dalrock points to an article at The Federalist by Matthew Cochran, If You Want Men In Your Church, Stop Treating Them With Contempt. Of course, Dalrock has been saying this all along. Then he predicts the future formation of Patriarchal packs.

At One Peter Five, Skojec says It’s Time for Catholics to Face the Truth About the Papal Confusion. Amen!

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale continues the series of sonnets, with Sydney on Saturday, and Ann Locke on Sunday. Also: Uriah’s Kipple.

At Imaginative Conservative, Jerry Sayler makes the case for The Deplorable C.S. Lewis. And Terez Rose introduces the underrated composer Max Bruch—the Romantic Composer You’ve Never Heard Of. (FD: I hadn’t.) Thomas Jefferson owned slaves: We find this very much in his favor. He was an unabashed elitist: Excellent! But there’s no universe in which Thomas Jefferson, Conservative.

John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening has a piece on Rediscovering the Centre—T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’.

Kaiter Enless at Logos Club continues his magnificent Origins of the American Literary Tradition with Part 5 and Part 6.

Richard Carroll tries to find something of interest in The Catena Aurea on Biblical Genealogies.

And Harper reviews the murder mysteries of a reactionary detective: Lord Peter Death Whimsey.

This Week in the Outer Left

We here at This Week in Reaction were rather hoping to see some Syria hot takes from our lefty friends this week, but were disappointed. Maybe next week! However, what was on offer was not entirely without interest, although it must be admitted they are fairly minor pieces. Still, a slow week.

We start the week over at The New Inquiry, where Jacob Bacharach has some thoughts on dogs. It’s on the long side, and badly needs an editor, but it is interesting to see how an effeminate gay man reflects on the experience of losing a beloved dog. It is nice to see personal things like this from the left every so often, to remind us that in a sane and non-democratic society where we don’t have to have political opinions, there is nothing to stop us from having perfectly normal relations with people such as Mr. Bacharach—outside of Männerbund of course.

And over at The Baffler, Tim Shorrock reports on some of Alex Jones’ doings. This one is here just for the humor. He never explains what is so bad about anything Alex Jones is saying, and after every paragraph my thought is just “OK, but where’s the lie?”

Craig Hickman continues his deep dive into Slavoj Žižek’s new book, Less Than Nothing.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson shines a light on the asymmetrical policing of the Overton Window: Only the Right (and not the Left) has a clear ideological line it’s not allowed to cross—advocating for racial superiority. Peterson proposes bringing balance to the Force by introducing such a line for the Left: advocating for equality of outcome.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

Over at Quillette, Joseph Klein reflects on Sam Harris’ recent interview with Ezra Klein and journalists’ coordinated character assassinations of him. In the same vein, Neema Parvini exposes the deliberate character assassinations of conservative literary critics. Brad Ross highlights the pressure on orchestras (which are already facing declining interest and financial support) to hire more nonwhite musicians and play more nonwhite compositions—a surefire way of appealing to the “black community.”

Heterodox Academy releases the second part of its series on the crisis of free speech culture on college campuses.

At EcongLog, Pierre Lemieux contemplates the economics of war, Scott Sumner argues against death taxes, Bryan Caplan offers a game-theoretical analysis of the (alleged) gas attacks in Syria, and David Henderson draws on Adam Smith to explain the bipartisan support for military intervention in Syria.

This Week… Elsewhere

TUJ opines on a variety of topics: Mueller, California, China & John Paul Stevens.

PA is very sharp in his commentary on The Two Speeches—those two being MLK’s Dream and Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Address.

I never liked the “I Have a Dream” speech. It was never Blues to me. It sounded like a salesman’s pitch. I grew up in Solzhenitsyn’s world.

And besides… “Content of Character” be rayciss. Also, in case there was some doubt: there is no Magic Wand.

Al Fin has A Warning About Antidepressants—not just the ones you hear in the ads. Also there: What to Eat When All the Food is Gone. Good to know, but better to make sure all the food isn’t gone. Having trouble believing stinkbugs are edible, doe.

Unorthodoxy unearths a rarity: Krugman actually being right about something. Another rarity: David Brooks Returns to Sanity . And Chinese privilege in Singapore is getting notice. And… this week in Baizuo.

Filed under: No, You Really CAN’T Make This Shit UP… Heartiste has a rousing and well-targeted send up of that Homewood, IL comic strip that is, against all odds, not actually a parody of Prog Propaganda. Poe’s Law-n-all that.

Insula Qui continues her sisyphean efforts On Libertarianism and Statecraft this week with Part VIII: Authority and Elite. On the one hand, it is admirable to make a case for libertarian absolutism. On the other, it’s never quite clear what the libertarian part is bringing to the marriage. I think what libertarians and reactionaries both want is good government, with a high degree of overlap of agreement on what is good and almost no overlap on why it’s good.

Also at Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus’ comprehensive Overview of Second-Order Logical Problems.

AMK hypothesizes: bad religion drives out good religion. That would explain a lot. He also thinks There will be at least 4 more sexual revolutions, unless… Restoration occurs.

Ace contemplates sacrifice this week in “Seems like the less I get, the more I have to pay…”

Contingent, Not Arbitrary is Rederiving Christianity and seeing how much he gets. I think what he gets is Natural Law, which is certainly not nothing. But it’s not the essential part of Christianity. And why would it be?

Meta-Nomad has some thoughts on extrapolating on the accelerationist ritual. We hear “accelerate the process” quite a bit, but there’s a lack of clarity and description of what precisely “the process” is. He discusses just that, and comes to some conclusions about so-called unconditional accelerationism.

The levelling, the conscious choosing, the creation of conditions is a must. Acceleration without conditions is allowing humanity to wither within an entropic-feedback loop of its own despair (contemporary progress), until it eventually fades into nothingness, dragging the ritual with it. As such, Acceleration must have conditions, for if it doesn’t what is it other that dull, decadent nihilism?

Welp that’s all we had time for folks. A light week: About 100 links and 4300 words. And terribly sorry this was so late. Usually I’m able to soldier thru on Tuesday nights until it done (even when it’s daylight on Wednesday sometimes). But last night that didn’t happen. My health and sanity came first. Special thanks to our excellent TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill, none of whom were late, BTW. Support your local Restoration. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/04/15) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well this was week in which Starbucks finally admitted to being racist filth, and “the hipster began to hate”. We’ll see how that goes. At least we’ll have entertaining memes…

Federal Regulation Week over at American Greatness: Who Will Regulate Our Regulators? chronicles a few of Trump’s little heralded victories over the bureaucratic swamp. And speaking of the swamp… Federal Rulemaking: Some Are More Equal Than Others. But as with all things AG, it’s always a story of True Democracy has Never Been Tried.

Also there, Pedro Gonzalez pours some uncut disdain on the New York Times: American Pravda Wins Pulitzer—for Public Service of course. Hopefully, this is like one of those Lifetime Achievement Awards they give to nearly dead actors just because they’ve been hanging around for a while. And I cringed before I peeked at this one: From Angelo Codevilla—whom we generally like: What Is Syria to Us? Thankfully, he comes down on the sane side of that whole issue.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

GA Blog links to this Anthropoetics article: Power and Paradox, which is normie-friendly as well as superb.

Social Pathologist reaffirms the importance of Christianity in the reactionary right: Rules of the Club. This is one of those rare instances where we think he doesn’t go far enough: Any Restoration of the West cannot occur without the institution of an Official State Church. What church that happens to be is a matter for debate, but at minimum it will have to be a church that has sovereignty over itself, which limits the pool quite drastically.

Free Northerner has up his second article in as many months: The Political is Personal. He traces the loss of personal loyalty as a binding agent in modern society, as loyalties to abstract ideas (creeds) took over. Here’s a taste…

At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.

Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?

Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.

The good news, Northerner reports, is that personal loyalty is making a slight comeback in the Age of Trump and Bernie. This should not be too surprising, since it is the natural equilibrium point for humans, irrespective of political fashions. And sometimes, there’s nowhere to go but up. His punchline is devastating, succinct, and 100% accurate. Don’t wanna steal that. Free Northerner picks up a ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his troubles.

Atavisionary kinda liked James Burke’s Connections (2), which I panned a few months ago. “Sucked” may have been a bit harsh on my part. Perhaps it was more seeing Blue Öyster Cult in 2015 versus 1978. Good… but disappointing.

Just before the week-ending bell, Giovanni Dannato reflects on whether To Stand Within or Without the Circle of Life. My own sense of it: Part angel, part ape, man must do both to do either. The Committee liked this one and bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Anatoly Karlin appeared on an episode of Stark Truth Radio to discuss the Syrian strikes, Russian politics, and the failures of Trump.

This Week in Kakistocracy… Now there’s a phrase we haven’t used in a while! Porter returns after a long hiatus, bringing his trademark contempt and vitriol to bear on a longstanding enemy of his, (well, two if you include SCOTUS) in Conservatism the Hemlock of Conservatives:

Observing the law with an eye untainted by his children’s future, Gorsuch cast the decisive fifth vote with the prog bloc in favor of Filipino burglars, and then the black robes all turned to flit out.

Definitely RTWT; it’s a vicious one this week. And remember, always shoot deserters before you fight the enemy.

By way of Isegoria… When the press hates you: it doesn’t matter. Dog training techniques work on children, too—LOL. Military laser weapons sound a lot cooler than they actually are. Universalist Socialism with Chinese characteristics. India is Indian with Anglo characteristics. And… some obligatory firearm geekery.

Finally, this week’s missive at Cambria Will Not Yield: In the Land of the Stranger.

This Week in Jim Donald

Jim is back from a week off tackling some cultural issues this week. First, Jim wonders about the rise in obesity since losing weight is a solved problem.

Girl in tea dress.

One frequently reads despairing reports that major weight loss is impossible. If you attempt it, supposedly your metabolism slows right down, making you weak, tired, lethargic, slow, and very very hungry.

I read in far right and manosphere sources anecdotes from people who claim to have lost a great deal of weight. I followed their advice and lost a great deal of weight: The short of it is weigh yourself every morning, paleo (no wheat products, manufactured foods, or sweet drinks), carnivory (adequate protein, lots of animal fat), fasting, and getting your testosterone and estradiol levels correct.

I am not going to repeat the advice on how to lose weight here. Rather, I look at the the connection between successful weight loss, and the rightosphere, and the obesity epidemic, and the endless and rapidly accelerating movement left.

Why is it that there is a connection between the rightosphere and sound advice on losing weight, and the leftosphere and bad advice on losing weight?

Is Jim proposing that the accelerating leftward shift is making people fatter? Yes, yes he is, and he may just be right.

Anecdotally, and from my personal experience, low testosterone in men leads to weight gain, high testosterone makes it easier to lose weight. Anecdotally, high testosterone in women leads to weight gain, and makes it hard for them to lose weight. Hence the stereotype of the fat mustachioed lesbian bully from Human Resources berating males for toxic masculinity while groping schoolgirls. In other words, androgyny causes obesity. And leftism promotes androgyny.

…

The diet high in fat and meat is demonized because associated with masculinity. Testosterone is made difficult to obtain because masculine. Women routinely get estrogen, but mighty hard for males to get testosterone. Fasting is ignored and deemed harmful because of the connection to old type Christianity.

In this sense, everything that works to lose weight is right wing, and everything that makes us fat is left wing. The obesity epidemic is connected to leftism in much the same ways as the human immunodeficiency virus epidemic is connected to leftism.

I really think Jim is on to something here. There may be a few individual leftists who look healthy and fit, but on the whole they are not, and are becoming less and less so over time. Someone like Bronze Age Pervert simply cannot be conceived of as a leftist. One man being stronger than another shows egalitarianism as the lie that it is, and that’s leftism finished.

And Jim returns to a favorite topic of his: women gone nuts. The question is asked, why did women go nuts? And the stupid, obvious answer is that there was no particular incentive in the opposite direction, and plenty of incentives in that direction. This is a definite RTWT situation, because I would gleefully quote the entire thing, and several comments too, if my editor would permit me.

When you repress bad sexual behavior by males, and do not repress bad sexual behavior by females, you get very little bad sexual behavior by males, and a whole lot of bad sexual behavior by females.

I see women behaving as if raised by apes in the jungle.

Things are going to hell because we fail to restrain bad behavior that gets right in our faces. Male sexual behavior in the workplace is nigh nonexistent and male heterosexual rape is nigh nonexistent, but to the extent that it exists, the man is looking for a warm wet pussy. Female sexual behavior is different. She is trying to disqualify males, testing as many males as possible to see if they meet her exacting requirements. This testing is necessarily stressful, for she is stress testing men to see if they break under pressure, thus necessarily more disruptive than male sexual behavior, more damaging to workplace productivity, male cohesion, and social cooperation.

In a normal and sane society, ninety percent of fertile age women would within a few minutes of behaving as they now do, be whacked hard with a stick, like a stray dog harassing a farmer’s chickens. And then they would stop. Their owner would be called, and they would be hauled off on a leash.

Jim goes on to discuss results of several surveys of sexual harassment, including one done by Scott Alexander, which find that sexual harassment is most commonly reported in professions where women vastly outnumber men, and least commonly found in areas where women are few and far between. Jim has it right: sexual harassment is not a consequence of horny men lusting after angelic women.

Obligatory woman smoking pic.

All workplace sexual harassment cases of males supposedly sexually harassing females, as near to all of them as makes no difference, are female initiated: It is a fitness test. The chick is looking for a coworker with the stones to beat her and rape her.

If workplace sexual harassment is male initiated, we would expect females in predominantly male workplaces to report a lot of it, in particular we would expect engineerettes and female miners to report lots of it, because outnumbered approximately a hundred to one by males, while we would expect actresses and supermarket checkout girls to report very little of it, because they heavily outnumber male co-workers. Survey data is the exact opposite. The more that female workers outnumber male workers (and thus the thirstier the female workers) the more “sexual harassment” by every plausible measure, indicating that all cases of males sexually harassing female co-workers are actually cases of female co-workers fitness testing attractive males, as near to all of them as makes no difference.

So, RTWT, and definitely give Jim a click to read the concluding paragraph, where he teases a big piece he has planned for next week.

This Week in Social Matter

Arthur Gordian graces the pages of Social Matter this week with: The Structure Of The New Economy. He contends for a new vision for reactionary economics that transcends an utterly inadequate capitalism-socialism dichotomy. And it begins with a proper philosophical grounding in that which we study:

Human nature is fundamentally fixed. This should be taken as a generalistic statement, rather than a universal law of physics; change in human nature occurs on a scale which transcends the lives of political systems. Certainly, one could argue that the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution changed the human creature in some way relevant to political economy, but within the confines of a civilizational lifespan, human nature is unchanging. Political actors cannot expect to change the basic motivations and drives which impel humans toward their ends. They can only channel these motivations and drives toward eucivic outcomes. In other words, we dance with the one that brought us, the human beings that actually exist and not hypothetical “better” men.

Since we understand that human nature is fixed, the past serves as a valid dataset for understanding and interpreting these motivations and drives. The men of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were no different than modern men in their fundamental makeup, thus their examples and situations provide us valuable insight into alternative modes of social, political, and economic organization.

Support comes from an unexpected source: Herbert Marcuse who was correct to point out that markets supply expressed preferences without distinguishing between real needs and fake ones—even artificially induced ones. And even if real needs, how do markets factor in the common good? That’s what we have elites for, except that’s broken too:

[I]n the modern Managerial system, the mass-production of identical, consumable goods serves the interests of the ruling class by impoverishing the middle class, yoking the masses in the bonds of usurious consumer debt, and drugging them from a consciousness of their own exploitation. The globalization of the economy serves to flush out regional styles, tastes, and cultures in favor of an international monoculture which is easier to manipulate through the usage of mass media propaganda, which also serves itself as a consumer good catering to the desires of the masses.

Thus, Marcuse gets rightly impaled on the horns of his own revolution. Led Zeppelin can sell Cadillacs a lot easier than proletarian class consciousness. Gordian goes on to outline more of a properly reactionary view of economics, but I don’t want to steal all of his superb thunder. RTWT! It would have won “Best of the Week” in almost any other week. This week, Gordian must settle for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Continuing a power-packed week here in socio-political theory, C. A. Bond arrives on Tuesday with An Introduction To Power Through The Lens Of Bertrand de Jouvenel. Jouvenel’s On Power: The Natural History of its Growth has been studied, as canonical, internally within neoreaction for years. But this is, I think, the first major exposition of this tract at Social Matter. It was long overdue. (Silly me, Bond expounded upon Jouvenel’s theories here two and half years ago.) The key takeaway from Mr. Bond, by way of de Jouvenel seems to be:

One only has to review the works of the liberal tradition, such as those of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, or Adam Smith to see that the human agent in the modern liberal tradition is one which operates on an individual basis within a moral framework that takes the human agent as an anti-social entity. It is no surprise, then, that all liberal theory takes governance as at best a necessary evil to be maintained to avoid all out conflict (Hobbes) or as something to be rejected entirely as an immoral entity (various anarchisms). All aspects of modernity are tied together by these very same shared ethical assumptions to which all their theories must accord. If, contrary to the modern liberal tradition, the human agent is not an anti-social agent acting from individually determined self-interest, but is instead a social one, then we should see the actions of the human agent being in accordance not only with the individual’s circumstance based interest, but also with the perceived interest of the society within which the individual resides. This would hold just as much for subjects as it would for rulers.

All of modern political theory propped up upon one flimsy—generally untenable—assumption. And now… mowed down. There is of course, much much more here. A canon-worthy effort from C. A. Bond, and an absolute Must-Read, and also an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ winner.

And if you though this week at Social Matter couldn’t have gotten any better… well you’d be wrong. On Thursday, Portuguese language and history specialist Wolfgang Adler trots out the final installment of his monumental Salazar series: Vatican II And Rome’s Betrayal Of Salazar. The entire series has been one of hopefulness in the regime tempered with the doom of certain failure; but this is perhaps the saddest installment of them all: António de Oliveira Salazar never lost the ability to distinguish friend from foe, but the Catholic Church he loved, served, and protected did exactly that—her temporal princes did so at any rate. As usual, it’s difficult to excerpt Adler into a synopsis, not least because the work itself is synoptic history. But one bit stands out:

Given the deleterious effect of the [Vatican] Council on Portugal’s social and moral cohesion, it is not surprising that one of Salazar’s greatest defenders was none other than the most vocal bishop in the opposition at Vatican II, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X. The late Archbishop described Salazar as “exceptional, admirable, and profoundly Christian of a leader” who set a model for the entire world.

It’s difficult not to be inspired to continue that struggle. But with lessons taken. The Committee were at loggerheads attempting to choose a single “Best of the Week” amid such strong competition, but the nod finally went to this one with respect to for the sheer breadth and depth of the research. Adler’s entire series may be perused at his Author Page. Over the last year, Mr. Adler has produced 7 articles of original (and original language) research on the Salazar regime, weighing in at over 42,000 words with many hundreds of footnotes. This is effectively a graduate seminar—guaranteed poz-free—brought to you, dear readers, at no cost. Courtesy of Hestia Society. (You’re welcome!) This one takes the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

For Friday, the Myth of the 20th Century guys are joined by special guest James LaFond for Episode 66: Fight Club—Yardstick Of Civilization. Not just about the movie.

The multi-talented Michael Andreopoulos returns for Saturday Poetry & Prose with Orbes.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Gregory Cochran summarizes the history of group mixing in Africa and India. Next, he takes a look at David Reich’s professional journey. Cochran also takes time to examine the genetics of modern stallions . He finds room to inserts his, almost weekly, reminder that every group isolated and endogamous for a period of time will have significant local adaptation.

Woman with coffee

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Thoughts on the Loss of Social Capital. She counts the ways we’re losing in the West and looks at some of the root causes. Fine piece and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

I’m not sure if I’ve heard this thesis before or not, but filed under Big if True: Did tobacco become popular because it kills parasites? But not that big, because nowadays we may have too few parasites.

Finally, for Anthropology Friday, we have excerpts from Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic, Part 2, with commentary thereupon.

By way of Audacious Epigone, Neoconservatives may not quite be “an ethnocentric death cult”, but Nobody does Russophobia like Jews do. South Africa’s demographic black hole. Also, nothing too surprising in GSS reported Support for wealth redistribution via taxation.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

This was a slow week over at Thermidor. N. T. Carlsbad starts things off with Giacinto de’ Sivo: Enemy of Italian Unification. De’ Sivo provides a scathing assessment of the Risorgimento and the incompetence of the national government.

Richard Greenhorn offers up a book review: The Failure of Why Liberalism Failed. Author Patrick Deneen believes the power of liberalism to be waning, an error undermining his general critique of liberalism.

The primary reason Why Liberalism Fails itself ultimately fails is because Deneen never satisfactorily adopts a definition of liberalism. For this reason, no matter how trenchant some of his arguments are, he is always dependent on the definition of liberalism which liberals have assigned to themselves. Sometimes this is enough. But since Deneen’s goal seems to be attacking liberalism wholesale without an adequate definition of the enemy, he is often left with arguments that do not follow to logical conclusions, and prescriptions that are inadequate to the task at hand.

Finally, Jake Bowyer has some fun with Dan Piepenbring in To Liberate from Urbanite Smarm. Piepenbring is terrified of a monster rising from the deep to menace his beloved New York City: the monster known as Chik-Fil-A. Bowyer contemplates the Lovecraftian horror.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Bonald identifies some of The marks of anti-intellectualism.

Change “aliens built the pyramids” to “religion”, and one has a common new atheist attitude. I can respect an atheist who thinks that religion is bunk and has no time for the sophistries of the theologians because, hey, life is short. The moment he decides to devote energy to attacking religion, he makes it his business to work through the theologians and their sophistries, if he wishes to engage in an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual pursuit.

Another tea dress pic.

And over at the home blog, Bonald has us Imagine how it looks to Mark Zuckerberg right now.

Briggs writes about that Christian trojan horse moving into New York City, Chicken Chicken Chicken Chik-Fil-A. Also, a story with a happy ending when Penn Professor Amy Wax Under Fire For Speaking Hate Facts Receives Academic Courage Award for sticking to her guns. And A Society Run By Atheist Scientists Would Be Horrible because science doesn’t distinguish between right and wrong. And Israel Falou is basically the reactionary answer to Colin Kapernick. Rugby Player Raises Hell. And the UK really is trying to ban kitchen knives, Democratic party defectors, institutional racism in Australia, and sex-ed sit-outs, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXX. As a bonus, Forest Bathing & Ecosex: To Save The Planet, Have Sex With The Planet.

Bruce Charlton asks of the Reckless global elites—are they afraid of something?

Dalrock covers the Boston Marathon’s history of Tackling the patriarchy, holding the door open for trannies. Then he points out this dead canary: Casual dating and serial monogamy as lost virtues. Finally, there’s money out there for people willing to destroy the family: She got the message.

One Peter Five offers Suggestions for Those New to the Latin Mass. Which is probably most of you. The blessings and benefits of the TLM simply cannot be exaggerated in this dark hour in both the Church and the World.

By way of Hapsburg Restorationist… “Theology without praxis is the theology of demons”.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale continues the series of sonnets, with Sydney on Saturday, and Ann Locke on Sunday. “Stella” probably wasn’t quite worthy of all Sydney’s praise… but there’s something to be said for escapism and ideals.

At City Journal, Myron Magnet outlines Project Freedom; or how Trump can really bury the welfare program for good. Freedom to starve, I think, but I still heartily approve. I give more of my unimpressive income to the government than Henry VIII demanded of his people in wartime so that my neighbor can get fat off her EBT card and beat her bastard daughter where I have to hear it. Mr. Magnet seems to think ending the programs will uplift people, but I hope it brings on the horsemen.

Bruce Charlton at Albion Awakening takes a look at Yeats’ The Second Coming, which is reactionary poetry 101. He ties it into current events, but in this ‘umble intern’s opinion, Yeats’ antichrist has been slouching around this corner of Bethlehem for a good century.

Also there, William Wildblood also has a defense of the British Empire in Empire and Albion, which is always a good bit of deprogramming to feed a man.

There can be little doubt that when what became the British Empire began in the 17th century, and right through the 18th, the impetus behind it was enrichment of the mother country with little to no thought of the countries colonised. But the motives in the 19th and early 20th century gradually changed and so did the actual purpose of Empire viewed from above. It became a vehicle to spread civilisation throughout many parts of the world that had either fallen into a kind of stagnation or else needed bringing up to speed because they lagged behind in terms of development, both intellectual and technological and even, dare one say it, moral.

Anyone else of the opinion that British imperial corporatism worked as well as it did because it produced an unintended (ultimately unstable re: democracy) but effective simulacrum of the feudal männerbund in contrast to the clunky bureaucratic absolutisms of France and Austria? (Yes.) Wildblood picks up an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine contribution here.

Harper McAlpine Black at Out of Phase introduces Sydney Long and Australian Paganism—the short-lived artistic movement that tried to capture the spirit of the Australian land. Short lived, of course, because it was eclipsed like most things by execrable postmodernism. Black includes a lot a must-see images. Reminds me a bit of the Hudson River school stateside.

This week at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless offers highly poetic prose in Fording The Liminal Sea. He seems to be extolling the potential of the web media. If so, it deserves extolling. With the obligatory caveat of Sturgeon’s Law.

Richard Carroll takes a look at something of his own private interest: The Pillow Book of Art Garfunkel. “Pillow Book” being a way to make a diary sound hip and exotic.

PA has a nice two part series: Greeks Bearing Gifts (and songs)—Part 1 and Part 1.

This Week in the Outer Left

The left came through with some takes on Syria this week, both of which can be filed under “agreeing, but for different reasons”.

The Baffler voiced their opposition to Trump’s strike on Syria, but did so in a manner that can be described as fairly weak. Still, the author, Max Sawicky, understands the sheer inanity of what he calls procedural objections.

I’d like to dispense with some secondary objections to Trump’s attack on Syria. The most common is procedural—that deeply idiotic policies should first be ratified by the U.S. Congress. Of course, this isn’t wrong, but it glosses over critiques of the deep idiocy itself. It’s defensible as a momentary tactical move, to try to slam on the brakes, except it never works.

A related objection is that stupid military exercises should only be done in concert with our allies. It is vulnerable to the same rejounder [sic], and even so, Trump has checked that box.

His broad point that procedural objections never work is one that every procedure-and-rules obsessed conservative should have shouted at them until they submit. Sawicky finishes by admitting that he is no Middle East expert, but then supports vigorously arming the Kurds. I too am not a Middle East expert, but the fervor with which the Deep State is in favor of arming the Kurds makes me very suspicious of such a project.

Over at Jacobin, Greg Shupak offers a much more blunt and full-throated argument for getting the US out of Syria. There is little opinion here, he just lists out (some of) the facts that you aren’t supposed to know. So, I suggest you RTWT and marvel that we are in almost total agreement with anything being published by Jacobin. Happens occasionally.

Craig Hickman continues his deep read of Žižek, looking at the prospect of Christ without God.

We don’t believe in extra-judicial executions around here. But if we did, Tim Wise would be one of the first out of the helicopter.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson discusses free speech and the softness of modern society with Bill Maher—and then joins him on his Overtime panel. If you want to see Cathedral priests’ disdain for Trump supporters in action, watch this video.

Quillette interviews Steven Pinker, who expresses surprise that nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment principles have remained as “resilient” as they have. You may drive out Gnon with a pitchfork, yet still He will hurry back…

Also at Quillette, Coleman Hughes discusses Kanye West and the future of black conservatism, Nick Phillips (whose writing in three separate publications has now been covered by TWiR) argues that mainstream media is in desperate need of viewpoint diversity, and Neema Parvini contends that incentive structures within academia encourage groupthink.

Heterodox Academy’s Musa al-Gharbi publishes a study in The American Sociologist suggesting that the role of racism in the 2016 election was greatly exaggerated by anti-Trump researchers. (Sad!) Ian Storey defends intersectionality.

Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Kenneth Sinozuka analyzes the quantum mechanics of identity.

This week in demographic geekery, Lyman Stone is back at Medium with Aging America: A Brief Spin Through the New Age Estimates

This Week… Elsewhere

By way of Al Fin, if you’re Still Waiting for Peak Oil, plan on waiting a while. And this week in The Dangerous Child: Working With Your Hands—and no, that does mean operating handheld electronic devices. Unless it’s building them from component parts, of course. That’d probably be okay. Also: Discoveries in Learning and Forgetting. And… Do. Or do not. There is no feel. Not only does doing count for more than how you feel, but it usually changes how you feel.

Over at PA’s, Nationalism: Amateurs, Criminals, Leaders. Not nearly enough of the latter, but he notes, “Cream is already rising to the top.” Indeed it is.

If you’ve the stomach for such non-analysis, Orthodoxy discovers how Baizuo Contemplate Black Infant Mortality, which is every possible way that won’t do any good.

AMK is a little longwinded in Aphorism no. 50 for it to be a, you know, aphorism, but he’s exactly right. (Maybe call it, “Brief Meditation #50”.) Not that we’d prescribe Schadenfreude as a political strategy, but he’s right: Shadenfreude trumps money. Every. Single. Time. And it’s the reason you should detest democracy: it kills the soul. At the very least.

Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui continues her epic series On Libertarianism and Statecraft: Part IX: Trust. She does a fine job of motivating why social trust is important, which should be familiar to reactionaries. As usual, though, it gets a little hand-wavy as to how that social trust gets created and preserved, in which the reactionary would assign no small amount of emphasis to enforcement of norms and the punishment of defectors. How much punishment? As much as is necessary, unconstrained, we’d suggest, by libertarian taboos. Left unaddressed is the importance of shared religion, culture, ethnicity, and heritage—forces largely coercive and rarely contractual—in building social trust. As for why commons should be privately-owned versus state-owned, I think libertarians and reactionaries simply speak different languages. If the prince owns the park, is that privately-owned or state-owned? I don’t know… but he must own it, if you want it to be a long-lived free resource for the enjoyment of all (non-defectors). The best libertarian paradises are created, we think, at the coercive end of a gun.

Also there, Nullus Maximus expounds On Degeneracy, Loss, and Civilization, exploring the unsettling thesis that civilization could be degenerate. We certainly hope he doesn’t mean per se degenerate, which would undermine our entire raison d’être. But he means civilizations becoming degenerate, rotting as a fish from the head. He has a clever answer to what defines a degenerate civilization: One in which…

…the above definitions of civilization conflict with each other in such a condition. Namely, there is “a relatively high level of cultural and technological development” and “a situation of urban comfort”, at least for those at the top. But a degenerate civilization is not “characterized by…restraint”; it either lacks “refinement of thought, manners, or taste” or perverts such refinement into something sadistic and grotesque. This is an unstable status which will end with either a restoration of restraint and proper refinement or a loss of culture, development, and urban comfort.

Or, in other words, becoming uncivilized. A degenerate civilization is one that is dying. Civilization takes energy: enormous energy to build and substantial energy to maintain. So when you start spending that energy on trans-bathrooms in North Carolina, your civilization might not be dead, but it’s bleeding badly. Maximus is great until he gets into bashing the state, “the most degenerate possible foundation for a civilization”. With which we simply cannot agree. States don’t care about trans-bathrooms. University professors, journalists, and clergy do. And because states are weak and cannot drop professors, journalists, and clergypersons out of helicopters—not without other professors, journalists and clergypersons electing a new state—we burn up precious civilizational energy on trans-bathrooms. The problem, within reach of English-speaking media at any rate, is not so much the state as the insane prog theocracy that’s calling the shots.

Ace channels the Black Crowes (one of my fav bands) this week: “And no one ever wanna know, love ain’t funny; a crime in the wink of an eye…”

Nishiki Prestige had a long piece that he hopes will function as an escape pod for young radicals. If you know any young guys getting into anarchist or leftist stuff, make them read this, skipping the first seven paragraphs, which I suspect only make sense to Nishiki’s Twitter cadre. But the actual escape pod begins as reflections on Nishiki’s own time on the radical left and morphs into a guide for the young radical to make sure that the left fringe doesn’t chew them up and spit them out.

Anarcho-CyberMarxism actually wants you to get in a fight with Uncle Bill at Thanksgiving dinner. It wants you to “cut out the toxic influences” from your life, like for instance, your mom and dad, AND.. your old friends! The group may even reward you for dressing or behaving in life-crippling ways (see: crust punk, )

Do not do this! This is the way that people become trapped within fringe ideologies and subcultures.

Tolerate your racist uncle. Tolerate your heteronormative old friend. Politics is secondary to these bonds. Do not let ideology use you. Marxism does not care about how your life turns out. But I do.

Welp… That’s all we had time for. A lighter week than average at about 100 links. But more words (5600) than I’d expect for the given number of links. Probably because someone likes quoting Jim so much! This week at Social Matter was simply incredible. Things are looking a little light for next week, but we’ve got great things continually going into to the pipe. Many thanks to my excellent and utterly on-time TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill, I couldn’t do it without ye. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/04/22) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this was the week Kanye West tore a hole in reality. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this. Definitely grab yer popcorn.

Over at American Greatness, Brandon Weichert counts the The Cost of Doing Nothing About Venezuela. Esther Goldberg has a fine good riddance for Kevin Williamson—tho’ anti-semitism registering at pico-hitlor levels was quite far from his worst feature.

We saw a massive purge of Anti-Trumpers over at Redstate—the wailing and gnashing of journalists’ teeth is veritable music to our ears.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton kicks of our week with an aphoristic length Sunday Thoughts—Eternal Anglo meets Eternal Jew edition.

Neovictorian shares Some Background on Sanity—the Novel, of which I was a draft reader. So I need to re-read due to edits and dash off a review.

GA Blog returns to high-test linguistic philosophy in this week’s The Discourse of the Center.

Quincy Latham cuts the tension with a machete in Nine Hypotheses on Women, Status, and Education. Along the way he elucidates (for the first time of which I’m aware) a spectrum with reactionaries between primitivism and traditionalism.

All reactionaries hate the modern educational system; but what traditionalists resent above all else is its low standards, whereas primitivists are suspicious of the project of “education” itself. Traditionalists cherish Western civilization and have contempt for liberals who squander its treasures, primitivists take the liberals for its malformed fruit; traditionalists assume reactionary thought will be vindicated by its accuracy and erudition, primitivists are inclined to abandon the models of dialogue and inquiry entirely.

An articulation that immediately resonates with my experience over the years with reactionaries of many sorts, much of it quite frustrating. Speaking of education…

Wearing his primitivist hat, any good reactionary can explain to you the dangers of over-educated women. Wearing his traditionalist hat, any good reactionary can tell you the importance of a genuine ruling class, one that is actually more competent than the loyal subjects it protects. But you don’t get brilliant colts from idiot dams.

The age old Educated Woman Question (EWQ), so what to do? Latham dials back earlier rhetoric just a little. And just long enough to look for societies that may have educated ruling class women without causing a rift in time-space.

[H]ow did they do it? If there really were some ruling classes that solved the female-status problem, what might explain their ability to navigate the potential dangers of female education?

Carlyle Hotel, view (I think) from Central Park.

His nine invaluable hypotheses stem from this study, the thunder of which I’ve no wish to steal here. Except “Enlightenment philothottes”… LOL! Latham takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his work here.

Also there, a brief note from the notebooks: Jaucourt on “la race”.

Gabe Duquette exlplains What [he’s] been thinking about and hopes to write about over the next year. If so, it will be an interesting year.

Moose Norseman seems to have had a fourth second child—for a family total of four. Congratulations, sir!!

Parallax Optics presents an extended discussion with an unnamed mysterious interlocutor On Cults—Intellectual ones of the late 19th and 20th centuries principally.

Alf contemplates religion and the apparently essential role it plays in Cooperation, which seems to enhance group adaptive fitness more than it harms individual fitness. At least up to a point.

Atavisionary delves into why sociologists just might be confused that conservatives view them as unscientific—the few that don’t already know that conservatives “hate science” at any rate. An interesting little side bar on how, as late as the 1960s, sociology was still trying to police itself into a respectable objective science. Trying, at least.

At Jacobite, Diana Fleischman offers a meditation on the implications of sexbots in Uncanny Vulvas. SFW… except for the title.

Anatoly “Friend of This Blog” Karlin covered the dawn of the floating nuclear power plant. Suck it, Greenpeace! We here at Social Matter can certainly agree with this sentiment:

There’s no limits to the imagination on what we can do when we finally round up the atomophobes and send them down to the uranium mines.

Anatoly also corrects the record on a persistent dirty commie lie: No, Solzhenitsyn did not ask the US to nuke the USSR.

Malcolm Pollack has a detailed report on his trip to Austria.

By way of Isegoria… A few of the strategic advantages of being Trader Joes. Leftists should appreciate The Case Against Education, for mostly the same reasons we do. A powerful autobiographical vignette from John Ringo: Children in the snow. Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press. Firearms geekery: Maximum Effective Range of Buckshot. And… Moneyball, applied to warfare.

This week in CWNY… The Stone Which the Builders Rejected.

This Week in Social Matter

After an astoundingly rich publishing week last week, things slowed down here at Social Matter. Aside from our own weekly update, we had only two articles published:

Friday brings us the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Episode 67: Operation Barbarossa—The Invasion Of The Soviet Union. These guys really know their stuff.

And for Saturday Poetry & Prose, newcomer Alexander Johkheer has some freshly minted verse Isti Mirant Stella.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran continues his invaluable “Who We Are” series with #8 India.

The Aryan-Invasion-Theory sure looks to be basically correct. As for the archaeologists saying that there’s not enough evidence of devastation, Reich points out that they can’t really detect the fall of the western Roman Empire, which hardly means it didn’t happen. War and migration are well-known important factors in written history—why not in prehistory? Because many contemporary archaeologist and historians think that wishing can make it so. They should be paid accordingly.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Homeschooling Corner: Math ideas and manipulatives for younger grades. We have counting bears, not penguins, but the exact same sort of pattern blocks. And enough legos to step on for a 1000 year stint in purgatory.

Next, she riffs off a superb essay from Gwern (must-read in its own right) and wonders: Maybe Terrorists are Actually Just Morons?. (Gwern has a patreon, BTW. Who Knew?) Terrorism is strategically ineffective, so maybe terrorists are stupid… But maybe not:

The article recounts an amusing incident when a terrorist organization wanted to disband a cell, but struggled to convince its members to abandon their commitment to sacrificing themselves on behalf of jihad. Finally they hit upon a solution: they organized social get-togethers with women, then incentivised the men to get married, get jobs, and have babies. Soon all of the men were settled and raising children, too busy and invested in their new families to risk sacrificing it all for jihad. The cell dissolved.

Starting a wife pipeline is definitely not stupid. Mrs. X steers the conversation to sorts of terrorism that live closer to home in the states, and to sorts of terrorism that aren’t all that terrorizing, and to sorts that aren’t terror at all: Activism. When it comes right down to it, there’s no clear line one can draw between terrorism and activism. And everybody knows activists are only in it for the chicks. Well… so are the terrorists.

One wishes Cathedral Roundup worked like this.

Liberal groups seem to be better at social organizing–thus I’ve had an easier time coming up with liberal examples of this phenomenon. Conservative political organizations, at least in the US, seem to be smaller and offer less in the way of social benefits (this may be in part because conservatives are more likely to be married, employed, and have children, and because conservatives are more likely to channel such energies into their churches,) but they also do their share of social signaling that doesn’t achieve its claimed goal. “White pride” organizations, for example, generally do little to improve whites’ public image.

But is this an aberration? Or are things operating as designed? What’s the point of friendship and social standing in the first place?

Anyway, I don’t wanna steal all her thunder. But this article about terrorists turns out to be about a whole lot more than terrorists, and snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ this week.

Finally, Mrs. X presents the next installment of her invaluable “Cathedral Round-Up” series… Checking in with the Bright Minds at Yale Law.

Over at Audacious Epigone’s, scientific literacy among Democrats and Republicans—not much difference. And… AE attends an apparently successful (and peaceful) Hater’s Ball in Tennessee. Day Two and Day Three.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up at the Kakistocracy this week, Porter explains why identity politics are Safe at Home on the Left:

The topic of the essay was identity politics—that is to say tribal politics—and why those on the left who would eschew them are wrong. And for the first time ever at such a site, I thought the author was absolutely correct. Of course his premise was flawed in that antipathy for white people, white culture, and white nation-states is the modern left. There is simply no other adhesive holding its many disparate factions together. So telling the left to not be anti-white is telling it to not be. And taking away what moves and motivates its foot soldiers is hardly a better idea.

Then, he comments on being on the Right Side of History (and the Wrong Side of an Ice Pick):

One of liberalism’s most unflattering mottos is being on the right side of history. The fact that this not a compliment of one’s morals but rather an indictment is hardly a nuance noticed by right-siders.

It’s familiar ground, of course, but Porter always manages to put a fresh spin on things.

Next, tongue jammed firmly in his cheek, Porter has some sad news on Islamic Terror Attacks: How Japan’s Strategy is Failing:

The proposition being that doors keep people who want to hurt you out of your house, which frustrates the people who want to hurt you, so remove the doors. There is one group who will always appreciate the simple elegance of this theory: people who want to hurt you.

Really can’t get a handle on what those Orientals are thinking. How can we figure out which Muslims want to kill us until we invite millions of them in? No, really, someone (bugman) actually suggested this. Hopefully, that’s the last time I need to link to CNN in my tenure here; I feel like I need a shower just reading that.

Finally, a quick look at a liberal who does believe that correlation equals causation (at least on one issue). Porter reminds us that Healthy Lives Aren’t Bought With Dollars.

In many ways wealth serves as the blanket bete-noir for the liberal worldview. People whose group pathologies are most conspicuous suffer not the results of their own agency, but strictly from want. And white people are guilty of perpetually under-providing. But who provides for whites? Why privilege, naturally: the dark matter of social sciences.

As an aside, I love the word “agency”, despite the libertarian connotations. Using it on a leftist is like reading from the Vulgate Bible in an exorcism.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith was very busy this week over at The Orthosphere. He starts with A Note on Victims and Victimology and the increasing frequency of human sacrifice. Then he notices that most audiences are simply seeking To be excited for an hour—and, if possible, amused. Smith next puts a Marxian twist on a poem by Blake regarding Whores and Gamblers, Gamblers and Whores. And for this week’s lesson in etymology, The Meaning of Sexual Debauchery is to render one insensitive to his natural duties:

Manustupration debauches the genitals because it isolates the orgasm as the summum bonum of erotic desire. Fun is transformed from a happy accident of sex into its defining purpose. Whanking is not the only means whereby this transformation can be accomplished, but it is certainly one of the most common ways in which eros is debauched.

Thomas F. Bertonneau covers Nicolas Berdyaev on the Despiritualization of the West. Big quotation incoming…

Carlyle Hotel, NYC.

What are the characteristics of this “bestial” world, in which “inhumanity has begun to be presented as something noble, surrounded with an aureole of heroism” and in which also “man, in making himself God, has unmanned himself”? It is first of all a world dominated, not by “the human personality, or the value of truth,” but rather by “such values as power, technics, race-purity, nationality, the state, the class, the collective” and in which also “the will to justice is overcome by the will to power.” Berdyaev sees in these phenomena something other than “the triumph of base instincts,” those having been always present, because they are elements of human nature, without exercising the same extreme distortion in the overlapping social, cultural, and political environments. He sees them rather as the outcome of fatally attractive errors made five hundred years ago and steadily compounded over time. If there were a return of “idolatry,” for example, that would be precisely what one would expect in a society almost totally visually mediated whose orientation to simulacra of reality began with the obliteration of symbolism in the dominance of perspective in painting. If there were a destruction of politics and law in an upheaval of “instincts of revenge,” that would be precisely what one would expect in a society that has consummated the rejection of the Biblical morality that began in Humanist skepticism. Berdyaev sees, in sum, “a return of the human mass to the ancient collective with which its history began.”

Matt Briggs examines a headline from GQ: Holy Bible Repetitive, Self-contradictory, Sententious, Foolish, & Ill-Intentioned. Then he takes some Gallup polls and maps the statistical Correlation of Non-Procreative Sex & Lack of Traditional Religion. And in the Uncertainty Book Report, it looks like Briggs’ book is doing well. Finally, gender quotas in the workplace, male exclusion from the workplace, and for good measure, witchcraft in the workplace, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXI.

Mark Richardson shares A refreshing take on the wage gap.

[Hadley Heath Manning’s] second argument is even more significant. She observes that married fathers end up earning the most, but that this is because these men make sacrifices in order to financially support their families. She then makes the very logical point, one that I have made before many times, that the extra money that these men make does not go into their own pockets but is shared with their wives. It is not as if the extra efforts of these men at work deprives women of money—the money ends up being made available to women anyway, and gives to women some degree of choice in their work/life balance that is not available to men.

HT to Lex Corvus for Carlyle Hotel Meme.

Over at Albion Awakening, William Wildblood writes broadly on the Deviations of Modernity from truth.

And John Fitzgerald raises Tolkien’s The Music of the Ainur as a candidate for official Christian creation myth.

In the context of girls entering the boy scouts, Dalrock notes that chivalry, while inapplicable to women, is only with regard to men Visible in absence.

By way of Faith & Heritage, author Adi presents a defense of tribal Christianity against Marinov’s Attack on the Boers, Historical Christianity, and God’s Covenant: Part I. Marinov sounds like a Calvinist prog shit-stain utterly not worth your time, but Adi’s exposition is worth the trip. Here’s Part 2.

Cologero makes a (now somewhat rare) appearance to drop some ancient wisdowm on Space Aliens, Pigs, Roosters, and Snakes. Just the tiniest taste…

There are two belief systems. The modern view is that all will be known in the indefinite future. The traditional view is that all important knowledge has been given to us already, but has been forgotten.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale continues both series of sonnets, which creates a nice contrast between the ornate, sensual neoclassicism of Sydney on Saturday, and the spartan religiosity of Ann Locke on Sunday.

At City Journal, Micheal Ledeen plugs David Horowitz’ latest book I have no idea how cucked or not Horowitz is, so take this with a grain of salt. And the generally not very cucked Joel Kotkin suggests Giving Common Sense a Chance in California.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless reprints an old Futurist Manifesto of Achitecture. It’s an interesting read, mostly because history in this domain proved, as in most things, modernist optimism and disdain for “traditionalist cowardice” disastrously wrong. He also continues The Origins of the American Literary Tradition, Part 7 and Part 8

Richard Carroll dives into another of Plato’s Dialogues: Ion. This time on poetry. In answer to Richard’s reservations about Socrates’ assertion that poetry is more divine inspiration than a work of craft, I seem to recall that the old Greeks used a very specific word for the Homeric epics that became a keystone of culture, and that Plato is referring more specifically to these foundational works rather than any few stanzas that can be dashed out by an amateur.

By way of Imaginative Conservative, a handy primer on The Legacy of C. S. Lewis—an author I have a habit of recommending. A short bleat about American Children and the Culture of Disrespect, and practical tips on what to do about it. Gustav Mahler and the Curse of the Ninth Symphony. And a timeless essay from Russell Kirk on The Essence of Conservatism.

PA weaves some original translation into the theodicy problem.

And Harper McAlpine Block offers two pictorially beautiful and, as always, lovably idiosyncratic essays this week. The first: Old Roses Renamed—the Cis Binary Rosarian. And then a Portuguese infused Vintage Daughter—a little shop in Malacca.

This Week in the Outer Left

So, let’s understand this: the outer left took weeks to get together thinkpieces on the Syrian strike, but managed to get out material on Kanye West and the Beta Uprising damn near same day as things happened? Priorities, I guess.

The Baffler was the one who came through on both the Kanye and beta uprising fronts. The beta uprising one really just looks like a placeholder for a longer thinkpiece later, as they just extensively quote an older one from 2016 by Angela Nagle, of Kill All Normies fame.

The Kanye essay is a thing of beauty though. Pure staggering towers of BS grasping-at-straws overanalysis from start to finish. Let’s be frank here, it is amusing that Kanye West is tweeting out some things that make the libs uncomfortable, but he is only in a position to do so because the media hyped him so much as some sort of spokesman and voice of a generation, when he’s probably barely literate.

And, over at Jacobin, a bit of a surprise as they make the left case for Brexit. As you might expect, this is very much an instance of agreeing with them but for radically different reasons. I try to avoid turning the coverage of the outer left into a point-and-laugh session, but this one sentence is just too perfect.

The Left’s anti-Brexit hysteria, however, is based on a mixture of bad economics, flawed understanding of the European Union, and lack of political imagination.

The left engaging in hysteria based on bad economics, flawed understanding, and lack of political imagination? No, surely not!

Craig Hickman sums up Žižek’s philosophy in a nutshell and also ponders the limits of the mind.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Doug Smythe kicks off the week at Thermidor in full form with Progressivism on Steroids: The “Conservative” Anti-humanism of Jonah Goldberg. Smythe gives Goldberg some credit for originality, but that of course does not spare him from good-old reactionary ire.

[F]or Goldberg, society isn’t the opposite of barbarism, but the very substance of barbarism; not the telos of evolution, but that which must be discarded by it. In this respect, I’ll grant that the cult of Progress on steroids is at least honest with itself and about itself here. Society must be destroyed to safeguard the Miracle of civilization; and man’s instinctual propensity to mutual aid and association on a personal and intimate basis—that is, to form human relationships—is to be suppressed in order that impersonal bidding and other bureaucratic procedures administered by an impersonal bureaucratic State can take their rightful place as the ordering principle of a globalist anti-society of de-socialized bugmen at once promiscuously thrown together and rigorously isolated from one another.

Concise and articulate as always, Smythe earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his troubles here.

Europa Weekly this week: NEETbux for NEETsocs.

N. T. Carlsbad offers up another review of an unjustly forgotten reactionary with Boulainvillier’s Project for Aristocratic Rejuvenation. The comte de Boulainvillier was held by contemporaries as a republican, but his aristocratic republicanism was very much out of step with the spirit of his age.

In the perennial debate of whether nobility is about blood or virtue, Boulainvilliers answered both. The noble title “gives an absolute right that the favors of princes can neither give nor communicate with wealth and jobs alone since it is attached to the bloodline that births us.” (“Essais sur la noblesse de France”.) At the same time, he stresses worthiness and even proposes revocation of title for those who shame the nobility. Above all, he seeks to discredit the idea that nobility should be meritocratic. Blood and stoic conduct are the essence, not administrative, artistic or scientific success.

Thomas Bradstreet and Dominic Foo make their debut with Be Thou My Dignity: A Reformed View of Human Dignity. Our authors make the case for a conception of human dignity standing in contradistinction to the contemporary liberal version.

[T]he dignity of man provides the right to be recognized as one with a capacity to contribute to community but does not directly demand any duty from society to provide individuals the autonomous space, supports, and resources to become the person of their choosing in that society. In other words, individuals deserve recognition for their formal capacity, whose expression is made possible only by membership in a particular community. But the content or particular nature of that membership—the decision concerning one’s place in the social, economic, and political order—is shaped by a combination of the natural ends of the community itself and contingent historical character of it, not according to the natural ends of the individual.

Bradstreet and Foo impressed The Committee, earning an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Jake Bowyer offers commentary on the Leftist commentary following the van attack in Toronto with Inciting the Incels.

Finally, N. T. Carlsbad rounds out the week with Cultural Marxism: An Alternative History. Carlsbad argues that the origins of Cultural Marxism long precede the infamous Frankfurt School—indeed, clear germs of it can be found in the writings of Engels and Lenin themselves.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

In a conversation with American Magazine, Jordan Peterson says that the Bible is the pillar of Western civilization, advises the Church on addressing modern world, and describes his own journey to faith. He also in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia audaciously suggests that not all differences between men and women could be erased by legislation.

Steven Pinker, who has been making the rounds lately defending the Enlightenment and arguing that mankind is better off now than ever before, answers personal questions for the Financial Times—which observes (we hope with an appropriate sense of irony) that Pinker is “thrice-married and childless.” But he does have better oral hygiene than his 18th century ancestors.

Quillette’s Matthew Scott explains the United Kaliphate Kingdom’s laws pertaining to the tragic case of Alfie Evans. Helen Dale and Shazia Hobbs discuss free speech in the aftermath of the Count Dankula case. Robert Showah grapples with the impact of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s communist views on his legacy. (The obvious concern is that King’s communist views might taint his otherwise irreproachable legacy of infidelity, orgies, and plagiarism.) Terry Milewski recounts the violent history of the Sikh independence movement.

Over at Heterodox Academy, Christian Gonzalez contends that conservatives often talk past progressives because they do not understand the roots of progressive rage. Feelings, as it were, don’t care about your facts…

Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Vanketesh Rao proposes mediocrity as a means of surviving and thriving in a world of AI, based on lessons from evolutionary history.

This Week… Elsewhere

Heartiste reprints a heartwarming story of What Makes A MAGA Man. Also good insight in The Abortion Test.

An emotionally dead woman is a faint echo of womanhood; her coldness on matters fetal belies a pact made with the devil: the nurturing part of her feminine essence in exchange for a veneer of empowered self-guidance.

Demons are real, and people still make pacts with them. Women who do so used to be called “witches”—as if it were a bad thing.

AMK speaks a fair amount of truth in The socialism of sex, but it is, I think not quite fair to socialism or problems of the commons, to keep referring to equitable access solutions to limited common resources as “socialism”. Equating patriarchy to socialism is like equating religion to totalitarian mind-control. Speaking of which… an amazingly big brain dump here in 1.1 on the Scientology Emotional Tone Scale.

By way of Al Fin, Paul Ehrlich is a one-trick pony who’s still doing his one good trick. And… Is Trump Bringing Latin America to Its Senses? Or is it just natural consequences??

This week in Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton goes a bit current events in commentary On American Intervention in Syria. Fortunately for Syria and Trump, the recent Western missile attacks don’t seem to have done much. Welton brings up a very interesting angle: Was Syria even the intended target, metaphorically speaking…

It appears that conservatives, liberals, and all colors beyond the political pale gnashed their teeth over very little. Trump’s decision to bomb Syria will not stop President Bashar al-Assad from winning the war. Indeed, some pundits have even suggested that the Syrian strike was not truly aimed at Assad, but rather at North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Michael Malice, who reported on his journey inside of North Korea in his 2014 book Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Biography of Kim Jong-il, told Breitbart that he believes President Trump is playing the “bad cop” to China’s “good cop.” By cultivating a reputation as a loose cannon, President Trump is allowing China to whisper in North Korea’s ear something along the lines of “Reform your state along our guidelines before that crazy Yankee decides to bomb you.”

If so, it seems to have worked. Welton goes on to argue that American and Syrian civilian interests are well-aligned in America getting the hell out of Syria and/or supporting Assad. A position with which we at Social Matter can wholeheartedly agree! This one earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

At 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace checks in “No way to prepare; impending despair…” He makes the case that the thing men who are good with women have in common is profound Loss.

Speaking of Kanye, “If you have cultural power, you have political power”. Both of which are synonyms of “power”. Hip-hop artists, reality show hosts, and tap dancers shouldn’t have much power. The fact that they do is a bug in our power system, not a feature. But they’re certainly no less likely to wield power well than professional politicians or NYT editors. And infinitely more entertaining.

After almost a week of warnings that this article would be published, TUJ finally does so on Saturday: The Only Thing to Look for in Negotiations With North Korea. He may have been aiming at a moving target earlier in the week. He remains skeptical about North Korea, but not without hope.

Nishiki Prestige did an interview with the notorious musician of internet fame, School Shooter.

That’s all we had time for folks. Our Based TWiR Staff™ did much of the heavy lifting. Many thanks to: Burgess McGill, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant, Egon Maistre, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/04/29) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week the Incel Question (IQ) finally hit the Big Time™. Hanson and Douthat at least sorta get it. This guy totally does not get it. Could we please just drop the “re-” bit, people? (Nobody wants sloppy re-distributed seconds.) Alfred Woenselaer and Malcolm Pollack totally get it, as we make note below. (The definitive analysis on the IQ comes next week. Shhhh!)

Over at American Greatness, VDH wonders: Is Trump Now Bad Cop or Good Cop? It’s a solid strategy either way.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

The Great Incel Revolution began last week, and Alf was among the first to lend coverage: Wrath of the incels. His tenor is precisely right:

Sex is a big deal. If you are not getting any, not even a kiss, if woman scold you, ignore you, laugh at you, hell yes you are going to be bitter! Especially if you see those same woman slutting themselves out to assholes. It isn’t fair.

At which point the normie interjects: ‘well, life isn’t fair! I never got anything handed to me either! Better just shape up, face it like a man.’ With which I agree, up to a point. Indeed, if an incel doesn’t lift iron at least 2 times a week, he isn’t really trying.

But the incel isn’t really saying that life is unfair. The incel is saying: it’s not just unfair, it is made to be unfair.

Nail driven through 2-by-4 with single swing of the hammer there. For most of the last two thousand years, those in charge of civilized social norms evolved clever ways to ensure a widespread distribution of sex. This motivated a maximum number of men to produce an above self-sustenance economic output, which enriched the entire society. Then, on a Friday afternoon in 1962, this system was deemed oppressive. Women were emancipated, and the West now enjoys the socio-sexual dynamics of Malawi. You’ve come a long way, baby… To the extent that said Incel Revolution is not simply an elaborate, and thus far quite effective, troll—and that extent remains unclear to me—Alf has some advice for the would-be revolutionaries:

The problem is that while incels reject certain parts of modern society, they do not reject fundamental myths of modern society such as the myth that women are virtuous and angelic. Elliot Rodger simultaneously saw women as angels and whores. He couldn’t reconcile those positions because listening to men who know the secrets of women attacked the notion that women are angels and Elliot did not want to let that myth go.

Strong, and timely and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also there, Alf puts together a history, some of it glorious, up to the current moment (not so glorious) of Dutch Royalty: an unprincipled exception. Netherlands has a King (and a Queen (and princesses))? Who knew??!!

Dutch Royal Family in 2013.

The royal family is popular in the Netherlands, except among rabid leftists. But, everything is in flux, nothing is static. Official Cathedral position is that the royal house is a horrible unprincipled exception, that poor taxpayers bleed millions of euros to fatten the purses of the royal family and that every time the royal house tries to come off as generous it is only further proof of how horribly evil they are. Right now the Dutch culture war is entrenched around Sinterklaas, but who says a new front can’t be opened? On the radio you hear occasional whispers—‘we should really have this discussion‘. Also, I feel like I see less orange each year on king’s day. Though that might just be the weather.

Still trying to wrap my head around this, apparently Dutch, idiom: ‘do normal then you do crazy enough.’ This too: How to have POWERFUL game like Joe Biden. Yes, Alf is quite serious about that. And also correct.

This week at GA Blog, Adam explains The Architecture of the Center. As usual, it’s pretty deep. Actually, it’s deeper than usual.

An illusion which cannot be filtered out of “reality” is not really an illusion—it is what Hannah Arendt called a “necessary appearance,” or what we could call an “imaginary.” In this case, a central imaginary—that is what we can’t think or speak without. All of culture is human beings placing things at the center, which is indistinguishable from being told what to place at the center by the center, and charting and narrating the movements of whatever is at the center. As I suggested in the previous post, we are always trying to get word from the center, no less when we generate complex genetic and psychological typologies than when we consult with demons and spirits. There is a continuity between magic and science and technology, as evidenced by the fact that the vanguard of each new scientific revolution accuses its predecessors of some variant or residue of “magical” or “mythological” thinking.

I would have thought it at least as likely to be the other around: viz., that the vanguard is accused of magical thinking by defenders of established consensus. Magic that manages to end up working, ends up getting relabeled “science”; and the previous consensus: “magical thinking”. But point taken.

Well… you asked for it: Quincy Latham’s Unsolicited thoughts on dating. He focuses on parity of cult, which is important to moderately committed cultists…

Now, if a girl really imprints on you she’ll convert to Tengrism to have your babies. Girls are hyperconformists that way. But ex ante, you are either:

1. Dating a lot of girls who aren’t serious candidates for starting a family, or
2. Restricting yourself to looking someplace you are likely to meet orthodox people, which would be someplace like a church where you’re unlikely to make a romantic match to begin with

That adds up to a lot of wasted time.

Unless that Church, or at least the people in it, recognizes its own centrality in match-making. True story: one of our guys—who had, to be clear, shit fully together—walked right into a TLM-church, joined the choir, and in just a matter of weeks is now courting (fingers-crossed) very beautiful future trad waifu. Not a big sample size I know. But having shit together cannot possibly hurt you.

Also at Quas Lacrimas, an apology for editorial introductions, provided one understands their proper use—i.e., long after one has been introduced to the matter at hand:

The editorial introductions weren’t useless, they were just useless to someone who was starting from zero. It was as though I had been browsing the index, from A to Z, before starting on the main body of the text. A good index is the literary equivalent of a sniper rifle, but it takes a long time to learn enough to have a reason to use one.

Thymos Book Club Derek Turner’s Sea Changes (2018), which he describes as an “ethnocultural apocalypse” like Camp of Saints but by a much slower process.

Speaking of thymos… Social Pathologist pens a welcome defense of Reps for Jesus, and the Aristotlean-Thomist synthesis that made that OK now. Apparently I was part of the conversation that inspired it. The fellow that I was disagreeing with (and later cursing at (not shown)) is now a suspended account, so… I’m glad Slumlord capped part of the conversation.

Neoplatonist tendency is still strong in the Church. Historically, the Church has been quietly supportive of mortification of the flesh in the pursuit of sanctity but has remained rather silent or very hostile on the subject of the perfection of the flesh in pursuit of sanctity. Fasting for Jesus is good but doing reps for Jesus is suspect. But why is fatness less an evil than fornication? Why is the prudent pursuit of physical perfection a morally suspect thing?

Hard to make an equivalency between fatness, a state of being the result of no single act (possibly even no single sin—it’s no sin to gain 3 pounds/year, even if you do it for 30 years); and fornication an objective grave sin. But point taken. TBH, I find authoritative objections to either fatness or fornication to be quite rare in my life in the Church. I’d be happy to get either one. At any rate, Slumlord earned an nod from The Committee, who gave it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Over at Neo-Ciceronian Times, Titus offers some nice, fresh Non-Toxic Masculinity. As always, lots of good stuff. This is a mere morsel:

Perhaps the key trait that defines biblical and proper masculinity is that of temperance. Everything else I’m going to be talking about below springs from this. Self-control in all areas of life enables men to transcend mere genetic maleness into the realm of genuine masculinity.

Please RTWT!

Spandrell looks at the reality, and the predictable horror response, to Making Japan Great Again. Surprisingly…

…the left in Japan is losing power in Japanese early education. It used to be commies everywhere. And I mean real commies, actual card-carrying members of the Japanese Communist Party. They’re still around, and still prominent in many school districts, but they don’t own the school system as they should do. As I was saying, in the recent decades there’s been a slow but steady pushback from the government, backed by some rightist organizations which have been lobbying for changes in the ideological orientation of early education.

Spandrell goes on to explain how this could be. Turns out they’ve had their own version of the “Alt-Right” for over a decade, fueled by an anonymous message board suspiciously called “2-chan”. Not that this is enough to secure power, but it’s apparently made an impact. Interesting as always and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Anatoly Karlin, friend of Social Matter, has up another of his humorous anti-reviews, covering Marx’s Capital. Nothing here that we would disagree with, especially not this devastating paragraph.

To read his works is to struggle through pages upon pages of laborious explications of utterly banal concepts. It is to wade through a morass of shifting definitions, seemingly authoritative but unsubstantiated statements, long-winded and often irrelevant anecdotes, and imprecise verbal descriptions that confound any attempts to construct a rigorous economic model.

A big week at Jacobite this week. Mike Crumplar chronicles the rise and fall of Slavoj Žižek in Slipping Slavoj.

Though still well-known enough to pen frequent op-eds, he no longer commands the influence on the left he once did. His appearances in The Guardian and In These Times seem to have stopped since last year, and now Žižek contributes more regularly to RT. He has, reluctantly, found a new audience—one that shares his taste for shocking provocation and esoteric philosophical arguments against the scolding mantras of political correctness. Žižek has become a neoreactionary philosopher.

Žižek hasn’t truly earned the dignity of “neoreactionary philosopher,” but the man has produced some genuinely insightful work, even if not insightful in the way he intended.

Also at Jacobite, Aaron Jacob tackles The American Question. Jacob considers America more as an “experiment” than a nation and diagnosis part of its widely-perceived illness as congenital.

Girl with coffee.

The one thing every participant in this experiment—at least those of us who are not from pre-Columbian indigenous backgrounds—has in common, more than any political ideal or television fandom, is that our ancestors left home. Those who weren’t taken here in bondage may have left in service of their ideals, to flee persecution, to explore, or simply to make a quick buck; all in all, it’s probably safe to say most of us are not here because we signed on to some noble world-historical vision but because of some combination of misfortune, dissatisfaction, and plain old avarice.

In that sense, America is indeed a “nation of immigrants”. Jacob meditates on the tension between the rootless at the root of American identity and the inherent human need for community.

As it is, hardly anybody hitchhikes anymore; people flake on their friends as if they were strangers; our American can hardly name any of his own neighbors. He considers how short-sighted it is—how cruel, even—to subject people to a comfort so seductive and yet so tenuous, a comfort which has already begun to slip away on the psychological level if not the material. If there’s a god, our American thinks, he (or she!) probably isn’t very happy with us.

Aaron is a long-time friend of ours, and it’s great to see him writing again in the sphere. This was a superb piece and merited an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Malcolm Pollack has an excellent analysis on the “Incel Question”: The Sixties: The Gift That Keeps On Giving.

[B]y destroying the social norms and pressures that once tended to make sex available only in the context of marriage, and by replacing monogamy with consequence-free sexual libertinism, we have created an unstructured sexual marketplace in which a great many males—who might otherwise have found partners, as higher-status males were removed by the pool through marriage to high-status females—are now completely excluded from all sexual opportunities. This unintended consequence of the sexual “revolution” is only now attracting notice…

Well the Manosphere’s been noticing it for a while. Pollack traces the prediction back to J. D. Unwin’s 1934 Sex and Culture. Pollack notes:

Successful civilizations do not simply fall from trees. They are complex and intricate living things, depending for their existence upon conditions and interrelationships that are beyond the comprehension of any person. The traditions and moral systems that such societies preserve may also preserve them, and to assume that such things are mere artifacts, or atavistic caprices, to be discarded without care is a species of arrogance, and of solipsistic foolishness, that can have mortiferous and irreversible effects.

If there’s a fence, it’s a Chesterton fence. Not only should you not tear it down, you’d probably better fortify. Pollack snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent analysis here.

By way of Isegoria… The CDC did look into defensive gun uses but neglected to tell anyone—My aren’t you surprised?! When it comes to athletics, Nonelite males routinely outperform the best elite females, as any elite female could tell ya… if she wasn’t under an implicit gag order. Looking at current levels of testosterone is not going to cut it for permitting trans-“women” in (actual) women’s sports: Exposure to male-levels of testosterone during puberty provides an immense and permanent competitive advantage. Finally… an exception that proves the rule: Maria Konnikova darn good at poker.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, The Demons of Europe.

This Week in Social Matter

Fritz Pendleton returns to the pages of Social Matter with an essay on Clean Streets. The Broken Windows™ Theory of social decay explains a lot, according to Pendleton. It actually explains too much to be popular within the current regime:

Don’t wanna get stopped and frisked? Don’t go around looking like a criminal.

[T]he theory vindicates norms that some would rather not see vindicated. Graffiti, like those tattoos on the neck of your local Whole Foods cashier, is not just another form of cultural expression: it’s a sign of a disorderly mind, the kind of mind that brings about social degradation. The squeegee man on the corner isn’t just trying to make ends meet, he’s most likely a crackhead looking for a quick fix. The woman snorting coke in a nightclub bathroom probably ought to be settling down with a man, having kids, and tucking them in at that hour of the night. The theory makes it clear that communities work best with the aesthetics produced by traditional values: family, church, country clubs, fresh-cut lawns, open windows and unlocked doors—the stuff dreams are made of.

Fresh-cut lawns are racist, of course. This leads to why the left can’t govern…

The Left must doubt all authority, even its own. If one of these have-not groups were to seize power, the clockwork would spin mechanically to the next target. If a black nationalist party murdered or frightened away every last white man in South Africa, the Left would immediately begin with the rich-black versus poor-black dichotomy. Or maybe dark-blacks versus light-blacks. If gender non-conformers took over at Yale, the various forms of gender non-conforming people would turn on each other, such as those with blue hair versus those with braids. It never ends. It never relents. Liberalism is the politics of disharmony.

“Liberalism is the politics of disharmony”. Pendleton takes home an unexpected ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his fine work here.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast is the stuff of legends: Episode 68: E. Michael Jones—Cultural Revolution In America. Jones is a brilliant polymath, and a bull in the, usually quite orderly, Myth china shop. I’m not sure what the topic of discussion was supposed to be, but you won’t really care.

Finally, in Saturday Poetry & Prose, a surprising bit of verse from Nathaniel Lucas: California Republic: Industry, Virtue, And Literature.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter is really back. I trust he knew he’d get his separate subheading back right away. This week, he wonders how teachers can simultaneously campaign for better pay while advocating for conditions that depress their wages in Pay Everyone, But Pay Me First. Something doesn’t add up…

…But how can you blame teachers for their ignorance?

Next, he pays a visit to Lake Wobegon, Where All the Advances are Wanted.

One of the most troubling aspects of criminal unwanted advances is how prone certain profiles are to committing them. Within minutes an observer will notice that men who are ugly, poor, or not useful to a woman’s aspirations are wildly more disposed toward making unwanted advances than men who are handsome, rich, or a potential career catalyst. Why do undesirable men act so reprehensibly in comparison?

Then, he reports on the Puerto Rican hurricane relief debacle and the notorious stingyness of the US government: Sixty Seven Billion Dollars? Fuck You!

Vengeance! Yes, I think that’s how you pronounce thank you in Spanish. Though honestly who among us has ever been handed $67 billion dollars and not felt their fury coming to a boil?

It’s almost as if corrupt third world leaders need white scapegoats when they plunder the commons!

Porter also makes time for a lighter post, holding the Left to its own moral standards in Tolerance and Tecumseh.

It’s tea dress season.

According to that paper’s 18th century reporting, a tribesman and warrior named Tecumseh found himself particularly aggrieved one afternoon and put arrows in two immigrants that he viewed as having encroached on ìShawnee Lands.î The fact that this paper blithely cited a land as belonging explicitly to any given group only emphasizes how widespread and accepted xenophobia was in tribal society. It’s really quite grating. For God’s sake, “Shawnee lands”? What’s a “Shawnee”? It’s almost amusing to realize these people didn’t even understand that “Indians” were a social construct. And white pioneers were just looking to make a better life for themselves.

Make no mistake though, Porter points out the hypocrisy because it’s funny—and potentially enlightening. He well understands that the left’s ‘morality’ is simply a weapon in the cultural war.

And finally, a little who/whom: What’s Best for We. I’ll let Porter take it from here:

For instance, it is trade if me sells we his house for $100. It’s a trade that we will assuredly trumpet, just as me will feel rich from the cash infusion. But is me actually better-off from this transaction? And how much benefit will endure for his children compared to if they had inherited the family estate? Can wealth be measured in ways more subtle—yet much more meaningful—than how many chalupas a man can buy with the cash in his pocket?

The truth is globalization is an offer to purchase your patrimony. And nothing else whatsoever. The national slumlords are simply trying to convince the gullible of how much richer they’ll be after selling their home.

People frequently ridicule profligate and easily manipulated black athletes and entertainers who squander immense wealth. It is thought that only the most foolish would choose cars and clothes over a carefully nurtured nest-egg that could have sustained their posterity for generations. Well who’s the naggers now?

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane kicks off the Week in HBD, with the next installment of his Who We Are series: #9 Europe. With highlights on the Indo-Aryan expansion. Also an update concerning migrations of the Denisovans: Luzon, Sulawesi, Flores.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

Evolutionist X kicks off her with week with a response to Eurozine article: How to Change Human History. The article sounds like pseudo-scientific prog propaganda. Her response to it is a solid review of what we know about “gender equality” among hunter-gatherer and other primitive societies. Which is that it’s non-existent.

Related: she speculates on the Causes of Polyandry and Polygyny. Polyandry, exceedingly rare, seems to stem from not enough women to go around less gay virus. Polygyny is much easier to understand. She thinks that polgyny can cause polyandry. I think it more likely to create a large market for prostitution.

For Anthropology Friday, Mrs. X continues her series on Gulick’s Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic (1903). Even though Gulick was a progressive and universalist well ahead of his time, he’s still charmingly enough racist to make for entertaining reading.

Finally, a kick-off (I think) to the EvX Book Club: Come read “The Code Economy: A 40,00 Year History” with us. Chapter 1 discussion commences May 23. So you’re not late yet.

By way of Audacious Epigone… A wrap up post on The Haters’ Ball. Spencer, Fuentes and the white babbies question. And a, more or less, definitive look at Jew IQ, in America at least.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Lighter week than usual over at Thermidor. Sean Sullivan makes his debut with Laughing at the Face of Seriousness with Diogenes. Sullivan details how the ancient Greek philosopher pokes holes in the popular conceits of his day with both wisdom and wit.

Europa Weekly goes to the doctor (or other relevant official) for Femur License Renewal.

Walter Devereux delivers the second installment of his series on clerical celibacy “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”. Devereux replies to some of his critics and then dives into a rather extensive historical survey of celibacy in the ancient context as well as monasticism.

Finally, Billy Pratt returns with Underachievers: Nirvana, Green Day, and Generation-X. Pratt breaks down what he sees as Generation X’s defining characteristic: self-conscious apathy.

Generation-X became the first generation to be obsessed their own identity. Whether wanting to be perceived as self-aware, ironic losers or “woke” political analysts, and thinking they were the right kind of cool was very important to them. […]

There will never be a Generation-X president. They weren’t a generation interested in changing the world—as long as they have the right emoji reaction to this week’s tragedy on their Facebook profile, that’s good enough for them.

I’ve argued this point with Billy before: variability within age-matched cohorts exceeds the differences in the means between age-separated groups.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith paints some Profiles in Prurience. Try to stay calm.

A hankering is truly prurient when, like an itch, it is inflamed by scratching. If you have ever suffered from a suppurating poison ivy rash, you understand the fundamental character of the metaphorical itch that we call prurience. There is at first the unbearable itching of the rash. This normally triggers an ecstasy of furious scratching. And this is normally followed by guilty despair, as the itch returns, inflamed, redoubled, and more unbearable than before.

The irrepressible Ianto Watt explains why reality is less determined by what is probable than by What Is It You Truly Desire.

Kevin Groenhagen uses the defamation of an old Reagan appointee to demonstrate why Fake News Is Not Harmless.

Matt Briggs criticizes the methodology of a study which purports to prove that People Are Less Religious When Government Is Bigger. Then, the death knell is sounded as Toxic Effeminacy Kills The Boy Scouts. Finally, Chinese Gallicanism, a call to end the current era of Christian passivity, and a sweeping history of sexism, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXII.

Mark Richardson notices a right-liberal criticizing left liberals on race. So it doesn’t matter?

To say that race shouldn’t matter therefore undermines one of the larger identities that “moralises” people – that locates them within a tradition they can be proud of and act positively to uphold. It helps to ground the social commitments of individuals. That is one reason why there is such an effort in Australia to build up a positive sense of race for Aborigines – there is an understanding that young Aborigines are bolstered (“remoralised”) in this way.

Richardson also writes about The deepening of modern industrialization.

Cologero has assorted, but pretty interesting, thoughts on Graduation Day, of the spiritual kind.

Our good friend, Moose Norseman reports on Giving up progress to make progress, i.e., of a more important kind. But don’t skip da gym for too long, bro’. It’ll eventually catch up with ya. Also there: How to do what you can to homestead a little bit at a time.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale continues with the sonnets of Sydney—“overshadowed by wealth and power” on Saturday, and Ann Locke’s Puritan regularity on Sunday.

At the Imaginative Conservative, we see Shakespeare wise to the Puritan Question (it was hard not to be, in those days). Also, a handy guide and introduction on How to Read Dante. And K.V. Turley remarks on Britain’s Culture of Death. My preferred term is necrostate. Doesn’t that sound hip and edgy?

Cheshire Ocelot, Richard Carroll has a rather expansive (for a blogging update) Blogging Update. He get’s several bonus points for using the title of a very old and obscure Pink Floyd song in the title.

At City Journal, Heather MacDonald reports on Harvard Against the Police; Harvard coming down squarely on the side of naked drug addicts accosting people in public.

Harper brings us an in-depth analysis of the 19th century painting A Eunuch’s Dream.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless begins a discussion in the vein of futurist architecture in On the Prospects of Inverse Arcology. Arcology being the prospect of entirely self-contained human societies; think a sci-fi Noah’s Ark (hence the name). He also continues The Origins of the American Literary Tradition, Part 9.

Chris Morgan has a very worthwhile meditation on poetic vs. prosaic government: The Oncoming Fever.

Finally, PA links to some very fine Music of various sorts.

This Week in the Outer Left

cyborg_nomade has a long entry on what he calls Brazil’s constitutional uprising. If you feel the need to know more than anyone really should about ongoing politics in Brazil, definitely RTWT.

Cool pic that’s the wrong orientation for feature art.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb at The Baffler invites us to consider what goes into the making of the hockey sausage. As might be expected from the title, he is complaining about the pressure put on professional hockey players to play through minor injuries and its long-term effects. Three points need to be made here. First, this is an issue that hockey writers have documented quite well since before I ever got into the sport. Second, this issue affects every major professional sport, has done since the beginning of professional sporting, and, contra Kalman-Lamb, is not an artifact of capitalism (seriously, who the hell thinks athletes aren’t pushed beyond their limits in the pursuit of communist Olympic glory?), which leads to the third point: odd that they choose to focus on hockey for this analysis. There have been far more 40+ active players in the NHL than the NBA, for example, so it’s not immediately obvious that hockey is rougher on the body than other team sports. It seems more than coincidental that well over 90% of all NHL players are white, which stands in stark contrast to football, basketball, and baseball. Draw your own conclusions.

Jacobin asks who killed the anti-war movement? This is an interview with Fabio Rojas, who has apparently come up with the stunning hypothesis that the Democrats killed the antiwar movement after it was no longer useful to winning elections in the wake of the 2006 midterm and Obama wins. I can’t help but be snarky on this one, since it only took over a decade for them to figure this out, but it was commonplace knowledge among antiwar libertarians at the time it was going down. Everyone knows Jeff chains Mutt in the cellar when it’s his turn to be in charge.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Our coverage of Liberalism Besieged has taken the week off. The heroic efforts of the folks at Heterodox Academy, Jordan B. Peterson, Stephen Pinker, and Charles Murray to make Liberalism work the way it never did will return next week.

This Week… Elsewhere

At Zeroth Position, Insula Qui continues her (by now) book on Libertarianism & Statecraft with Part X: Time Preference.

If our goal is to create civilization and prosperity, then it is necessary to embrace LTP [Low Time Preference] in economics, as not doing so would ultimately lead us to ruin. This is done not to worship economic growth for the sake of economic growth, but for the sake of future generations and human development. The more capital is consumed, the less the next generation will have capital. The more the economy is developed, the fewer people have to live in misery and poverty. Growing the economy is a way in which we grow civilization, though it is not the entirety of creating civilization.

Smoking girl bonus pic.

Not much with which to disagree there. Tho’ I’m not entirely comfortable with the equations “low time preference” = “good”/”high time preference” = “bad”. More often than not that is the case. But sometimes the best long term course of action is… spend it now!! Qui goes on to view LTP through a lens of declining natural interest rates. A naturally low interest rate means present demand for future money is low. An unnaturally low interest rate means someone is getting rich, and it ain’t you.

Al Fin expect more turbulence than doom in the economy, but Is Evil Google Destined for a Mighty Fall? Also, a report from the other billionaire space guy; Jeff Bezos and dreams of A Future in Space. It’s 1495 and we’re living on the Iberian peninsula… Finally, What’s Holding Blacks Back? In a way, it really is whitey.

Ace channels Megadeth for his weekly pearl of wisdom: “He’s dancing on the breadline…”

If you have been wondering what is up with all the guys popping up in your Twitter feed with pine tree emojis in their names, Nishiki Prestige has you covered with his post on decelerationism, the latest permutation of primitivist insanity.

Deceleration and acceleration both pursue a degree of reality-acceptance that leaves followers in a state of alienation. Both schools are acolytes of Gnon—“The God of Nature or Nature.”

Who worships the one true Gnon?

For the last time… GNON is an acronym for Nature or Nature’s God, reversed for sayability. I know because I was there.

Well folks, that’s all we had time for. Many thanks to our excellent and almost perfectly on-time staff: Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant, and Aidan MacLear bore most of the heavy lifting this week. I couldn’t keep this up without ’em. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/05/06) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this week New York Times discovered the Intellectual Dark Web—too “renegade” by half, by our estimates, not particularly intellectual, and not at all dark. Arnold Kling comments briefly. Chris Morgan more substantially, and critically.

This week in American Greatness, Ned Ryun rhapsodizes on China’s Clear and Present Threat. Which makes a lot more sense than that of Russia, and has for a couple decades now. Also there, Karl Spence’s meditation about how The Times, They Are A-Changing is rather askew of the usual (i.e., news-tinged) AG fare, but quite worthwhile.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Spandrell takes his turn with The Incel Question (Henceforth The IQ). He gets everything spot on. Of course.

[T]he problem that normies have with incels is not that they are losers for not getting laid. The problem is that they organize, that they gave themselves a name. That they have class-consciousness of a sort. Liberal states have “freedom of association” in their constitutions as a relic of the time they were fighting the old monarchies which wouldn’t give it to them. And they wouldn’t give it to them because “associations” are a hidden-in-sight form of political conspiracy, and any state which wants to survive doesn’t admit political conspiracies. Try to gather 50 people in public in China and see how long it takes for police to ask what the hell you’re doing.

Of course liberal states, i.e. Western states have freedom of association as a symbol of their revolution against the old order; but they aren’t stupid. They don’t really allow freedom of association. Ask Roosh what happened when he tried to organize a meetup of right-wingish PUAs. Ask any club or association of size that denies access to women; or accepts only white men. The liberal state understands that only white men are potentially disloyal, and so any association of white men is illegal de facto.

Disloyal… to the progressive regime, that is. White men are not particularly known for their disloyalty in general. Spandrell asserts that incels are principally leftist and fits them neatly into his, now epoch-making, Bioleninist Theory. All with inimitable Spandrellian Pizzaz™—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Only one degree removed from The IQ, Alf explains Scott Aaronson, one last time, or: how smart people can be pretty stupid. Also there, an extended metaphor on human cooperation: The dancing monkey’s monkey dance.

Women can’t distinguish between the monkey dance and the monkey reality. For a women, the monkey dance is the reality. Soaps are a bunch of very pretty monkeys in pretty clothes performing dances on steroids. Of course they love it.

Men, on the other hand, are harder to entertain:

The trick is to get men to enjoy their monkey dance.

Self-development used to be religious. Both are about your identity and place in this world. Now, people are very different, but people are also pretty similar. Men need property, need a woman, need monetary purpose, need männerbund, need children. None of these are absolutely necessary, but exclusion of any goes against our genetic programming. A happy father is a happy dancing monkey: it is good to feel in control of your life.

Quincy Latham Faith and Gullibility. He takes note of superstition, with special concentration on the superstition most ostentatious in our own age: godless materialism. After all, you cannot see Leprechauns not existing…

The vulgar errors of the plebs have actually become part of the metabolism of our godless society. As the Cathedral and its choirboys have gradually improved message-discipline on science and superstition (yes, they “freaking love science”), the contrast between the amusingly rustic ignorance of the commoners and the smug confidence of the overclass has become part of the status-structure that draws ambitious youngsters into the Cathedral’s cold embrace. Abandoning the poor to the torment of demons is now part of the Left’s plan; more room to tut-tut and demonstrate that you are a reasonable bugman, more misery to justify the next stage in the revolution.

Faith, Latham notes, permits supernatural explanations for events, but faith also requires skepticism towards explanations that probably aren’t worth an angel’s (or demon’s) time.

Also at Quas Lacrimas, Latham has an hypothesis on Leftism and Inevitability. What if fashionable opinion were shaped principally by moral momentum trading? If so, why is the momentum always in the leftward direction? Because only certain types of people, e.g., those who care more about status than truth, would engage in moral momentum trading.

Isn’t it odd that radicals who are so quick to attack even the most benign and harmless institutions as vestiges of regimes like feudalism or Jim Crow are so confident that all currently existing institutions can be swept away? Logically, it would seem the two shouldn’t go together. Either you think old oppressive regimes were easy to get rid of and existing oppressive regimes will be too… or you think old oppressive regimes were insidious and near-impossible to purge from the fabric of social life, and the existing regimes will be just as hard… but why would TCY [Thee Current Year] mark an enormous break between the insidious, obdurate forms of oppression of the past and the doomed, vulnerable forms of oppression of the future?

It’s an excellent thesis that deserves your attention. And an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam explores Center Alignment. He notes that, although power has never been perfectly secure (tho’ it would seem modern technology has perhaps made it more possible than ever), the worst kingship is more sufferable than “the unintelligibility of any social order without a center.

Billy Pratt reposted his Thermidor column from last week over at his home blog: Underachievers: Nirvana, Green Day, and Generation-X. It didn’t get the accolades it deserved last week principally because it was optimized for the Over 35® Crowd, and most of our (otherwise august) TWiR Staff doesn’t fit that demographic. Take from an older Gen-Xer… the most amazing thing about Green Day (and their only redeeming feature) is they sound a lot like The Monkees. Few know this. A belated ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Social Pathologist still has a bee in his bonnet over Neoplatonism, Thomism and Modernism. I suppose he is basically correct on the point, but this error is like #257 on the list of most popular errors in Catholicism these days.

Neovictorian’s novella Sanity is now out in paperback.

Unorthodoxy reads NY Times so you don’t have to. He also reads The Economist, for the same reason. With which, has a bone to pick. This was particularly well put:

One of racism’s new broadly defined qualities is having the opposite political opinion of blacks. Since blacks vote their interests race, and their race allies with the left, to be a right-winger is to be a racist. If blacks think 2+2 = 5, then if you say 2+2 = 4, you are a racist. That is how the definition works. It’s also why you and every right-winger you know needs to be red-pilled. Racism is not a logical or rational argument, it is an emotional and rhetorical argument designed to make you stop thinking logically. It is social pressure designed to push you into abandoning your own self-interest.

Shylock Holmes has an extended meditation On Predicting Divorce, and predicting it doesn’t happen to you. He focuses on what to look for, and what to avoid, in a spouse. A taste:

[T]he biggest personality trait I’d worry about is selfishness and self-centredness, broadly defined. And importantly, you can’t look to how they are with you. You have to look at how they are with other people, especially those they don’t really like. Sacrificing and making an effort when in the first flush of excitement and love is very different than doing it after ten years when you’ve got two young children and you’re chronically underslept. The latter is when it actually matters. How does the person behave when they’re tired, and stressed, and having to do something they don’t really like?

Good point. And he has a plethora of others. Holmes snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

I’ve intimated my own views on divorce risk before. They are akin to safety risk with a car. There are more and less safe cars. You are wise to choose a safer car. But no matter what the risks are with any given car, the most important safety feature of a car is the driver himself, over which the driver has, at least in theory, full control.

Malcolm Pollack comments upon Trump’s abrogation of the “Iran Deal”. Also a timely and important re-read from Moldbug.

Anatoly Karlin, Friend of This Blog, gives some very eloquent reasons why he is not celebrating Victory Day. For those not in the know, Victory Day is a made-up celebration in Russia for the end of WWII. Anatoly, quite rightly, calls BS on the whole affair. A must-read, if only to understand the differences in public perception of the end of WWII between Russia and the United States.

Alrenous chimes in with a Folio of Decay, courtesy of The Atlantic.

A slower week than usual at Isegoria’s… Here’s a game based on on Pinochet’s coup d’état. How is this even possible? Peewee Powerlifters—I seriously doubt it will stunt their growth. And… Intellectuals talking to each other can be dangerous, which any serious sovereign, such as the NYT, must realize.

Finally, this week’s missive at CWNY: The Precious Cornerstone.

This Week in Social Matter

Mark Christensen continues to be something a regular here at Social Matter. This week The Secular Brahmin’s Guide To The Nature Of Christendom, tracing the thought of too-little known English Dominican priest Fr. Aidan Nichols, primarily from his book Christendom Awake. Says Christensen:

What makes Nichols a unique source is that he is not a denizen of the old Christian civilization; rather, he is crafting the battle plans for a Christendom to come.

A key is that “every society is shaped by its foundations”. Christendom has not been replaced with nothing, where everyone is free to pursue their own goals and preferences. Oh no… not at all! You must serve this “nothing” with fear and trembling:

Those who follow social teaching from religious competitors of universal progress are seen as unworthy of the public sphere—or at the very least highly suspect. This game has been played by the Right as well as the Left, especially when it is willing to adopt the language of progress to oppose Islamic practices. Indeed, pressure increases to adapt even in nominally private spaces such as religious schools. Rather than admitting that this is the result of power-holders exerting influence, the myth is promoted that this is merely the result of popular preference. Democratic myths aside, power does not correlate with numbers.

Until such time as the masses can be convinced to answer opinion polls correctly, at least.

Just as these truths [i.e., of Christian thought] permeate political life, so too with those communities which make up the polity. The smallest and most vital of these is the family: man and woman bound in covenant to raise children, produce the home economy, and preserve social bonds. In this area, Christendom discerns subversion not only by the modern state but also the modern marketplace. The mobilization of all to economic life has left people unable to perform those duties necessary for families to go on. Libertarians will no doubt be discomforted by Nichols’ restatement of Catholic views on property: it is bound, like individuals, to virtue.

Well, Christensen’s got much more to say. I can’t excerpt it all here. Mark took home that ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his outstanding work here.

And Walter Devereux takes a break from his epic series on clerical celibacy over at Thermidor to bless us with an huge essay: Higher Civilizations Must Privilege Male Children. Devereux is at his best in historical analysis. He traces the rise of the nuclear family vis-à-vis the extended family or “household” and explains what is being lost in that tradeoff. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

James LaFond joins the Myth of the 20th Century gang for podcast Episode 69: Hell’s Angels—Sympathy For The Devil. As always, well-researched and thoroughly entertaining historical discussion. Outlaw Biker Gangs were once proposed as a model of Neoreactionary governance. Despite a surface resemblance, Männerbund is a superior idea.

Finally, for Saturday Poetry & Prose, Nathaniel Lucas returns with a second poem in as many weeks: Qualifying The Humanities. This one is a very different style from last week’s.

An editorial note: We are blessed to have a large volume of high-quality poetry cued up for future Saturdays. I’d urge creators of short or serial fiction, screenplays, mix-tapes, etc. to get on the stick an submit original content to Social Matter. Nothing against poetry, of course, but the feature is called “Poetry and Prose“.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Gregory Cochran says it’s a waste of time to try and understand the opposing view if the opposing view is idiotic. How does Cochran tell if they’re idiotic? If none of their predictions ever come true.

Very busy week over at Evolutionist X’s… She starts out with The Empathy Trap:

No. Mind-viruses are not polite. They USE you. They use your empathy and compassion to make you feel like a shit person for rejecting them. They throw dying children in your face and demand that you start a war to save them.

They hijack your sense of yourself as a good person.

I call this the empathy trap.

She dissects an appropriate example. Empathy is a good thing. It is abhorrent to use it to circumvent logical thinking. The net effect of doing so will only be a decrease the amount of empathy in the world. “Burn me once…”

Next up: When did language evolve? It’s a surprisingly complex question, deftly handled by Mrs. X.

On to Anthropology Friday for a Part 4 wrap-up of Gulick’s Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic (1903).

Finally, a bonus this week A Response to Epigenetics and Ethics: Rights and Consequences. (Dr. Robinson’s original post here.) The question:

What responsibility do I—as an egg-bearing person—have to ensure the health of my children and grandchildren’s epigenenomes?

Evolutionist X analyzes the question.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Jewish IQ advantage seems to be slipping—probable reasons will not surprise you. And Trump’s 2016 white vote share by state.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this week, Porter comments on The Arc of the Wave—of sexual misconduct allegations. And it hasn’t crashed on shore just yet. In summary:

What I have heard… are the sounds of lib jackals eating one of their own. It’s not an entirely unsatisfying sound until one realizes plenty of hungry jackals will still remain when the meal is over.

And, cutting to the heart of the matter, MyFrappuccinoSpace; or Starbucks as a retreat space for whites, which, like the ill-fated MySpace, is about to become ghettoized.

Racial subordination may be the left’s morals, but white yuppies don’t pay $5.25 to sip toasted graham lattes beside screaming black Hebrew Israelites. Libs love diversity best when it’s watched through binoculars.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

The week at Thermidor kicks off with The Podcast: Episode 29: Incel Apocalypse. P. T. Carlo and Nathan Duffy discuss.

Nigel Carlsbad chimes in with a first of two essays this week: “Reform, Therefore, Means Rule of the Mob”. He chronicles an 19th century exchange between the British radical MP John Bright and a level-headed tory Henry Drummond.

Drummond dissects Bright’s speech, bringing up the latter’s drawing an equivalence between reform and democracy. Since parliamentary reform entails “to place the power of governing in this country exclusively in the hands of the dregs of the people—i.e., in the hands of those who are by necessity, in all ages and in all countries, the most distressed, the most ignorant, the most improvident, and the most reckless class of the community,” and democracy is later used synonymously, Drummond naturally concludes: “Reform, therefore, means the rule of the mob.”

Drummond thought the real liberties of the nation depend exclusively on the existence of a body which is independent both of the Crown and of the people.

One perspective he vigorously held which is rarely seen today is his sheer antipathy toward rule by the middle class, nothing more than an engine of graft and narrow-mindedness…

From there, Carlsbad hunts down other historical examples of “reform”, finding a common theme. Although he takes issue with the Jouvenelian HLvM formulation of revolutionary agitation, I think he’s observing the same phenomenon. No revolution proceeds without overwhelming support of the middle class, which, prior to the revolution would probably be classified in the “L” category. The Committee were impressed with this one, bestowing an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

Next, rather a surprise: P. T. Carlo steps down as Editor-in-Chief of Thermidor. Things did not go exactly as Carlo planned, but something superb got created any way. Best wishes to P. T. Carlo in all his future endeavors and incarnations. Our good friend, Nathan Duffy, will be taking the reigns of the publication.

Finally, Carlsbad rounds out the week with another lesson, set of lessons, from history: Put Ultramontanists In Body Bags. Not that he’s advocating it, of course. But liberals rightly should.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau gives us the rundown on Evola with Against Nihilism: Julius Evola’s “Traditionalist” Critique of Modernity. The “scare quotes” are necessary of course. Quoting Evola…

Socially, politically, and culturally, what is crashing down [today] is the system that took shape after the revolution of the Third Estate and the first industrial revolution, even though there were often mixed up in it some remnants of a more ancient order, drained of their original vitality.

Bertonneau finds Evola prophetic on a number of cultural fronts and this overview is quite valuable especially as an introduction to those who might be allergic to him. The Committee bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this fine article.

Prof. Bertonneau also points to a Campus Reform article with this headline: Students “deeply hurt” by criticism of liberal intolerance, as an example of continuing leftward drift on campus.

J. M. Smith reports on a school bus purposefully desecrated with Some Slogans of Satanic Audacity. Then he criticizes the Blackwashing the Maid of Orleans in a new theatrical production of St. Joan’s legend.

Bonald figures out women and concludes, I guess every girl wants to be swept off her feet. Or tied up and kidnapped.

Matt Briggs predicts Big Brother Is Coming For Your Cash. Then he opens a window into the world of the modern occult when he asks, What Do Sex Cults, Spirit Cooking, Cannibalism, and Will Ferrell Have to do With Each Other? And in Profoundly Ignorant: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed—Part I, Briggs begins a series on miraculous epistemology and its skeptics. Next, Inference To The Best Explanation: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed—Part II. Finally, songs of abortion and experts replacing parents, but not without pushback, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXIII.

Bruce Charlton investigates Where did we go wrong? He starts with materialism. William Wildblood responds by looking on the bright side in these The Best of Times, The Worst of Times.

Dalrock discusses Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and interprets The moral of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale had an unfortunate accident this week; the good man is safe, but his blog has been scrubbed, and he is currently in the process of restoring his files. He will return next time.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Bradley J. Birzer explains the Art and Delight of Progressive Rock. And the IC’s resident classical music girl, Terez Rose, introduces Franz Schmidt’s Lament: Requiem for his Daughter.

Girl with coffee.

At City Journal, Troy Senik has a favorable review for Jonah Goldberg’s execrably misguided (or pure evil) Suicide of the West. Said suicide being… identity politics. I’m not kidding. And the West’s triumphs? “capitalism, liberalism (in the classical sense), rationalism”. Which supposedly represent the taming of human nature—ego and lust for power clearly not included in “human nature”. The preceding “triumphs” being what he terms “The Miracle”. And the Jews wonder why we think they worship Satan. According to Goldberg, “any search for collective meaning will inevitably yield authoritarianism.” We sure bloody hope so.

In brighter news, City Journal’s Alex Titus considers the recent New York proposal for what is perhaps one of the most degenerate policies of modern times, and one that has already graced my fair northerly state, Safe Injection Sites. Hey, it’s working out great for San Fran, I hear. </snark> This is great news for us, as with the stroke of a pen, DeBlasio could incriminate his entire government with something like “aiding and abetting felony drug trafficking”—in the eyes of the right prosecutor. Any volunteers? And Heather MacDonald gives a comprehensive rundown of How Identity Politics are Harming Sciences. Soon, I think, even the material benefits of liberalism are going to evaporate like so much smoke. Anecdotally, a former girlfriend of mine was driven to despair over the sheer stupidity of the Current Year’s crop of affirmative action engineering students, who she was responsible for educating. Don’t drive over new bridges if you can help it.

Richard Carroll returns this week with some of his own examination, inspired by Plato’s Dialogue, of The Purpose of Poetry.

Harper McAlpine Black, continuing on the orientalism trend, takes a look at the paintings of William Clarke Wotner: Appropriations. He contrasts the traditional view of the (Middle) East as a place of sensuality and decadence with our mental image of its modern inhabitants and social mores. Blame the Wahabbists for that before “Crusader hostility”, I’m thinking. The main thrust, though, is that other cultures are best appreciated from a healthy, and healthily biased, distance.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless publishes Nihil Futurum, a scholarly critique of ‘queer theory’ in specific and critical theory generally. It’s long, but RTWT. Formal academic-level scholarship is something we’d like to see more from NRx, not to ingratiate ourselves into the Cathedral but to install a fire escape for the dispossessed young intellectual. The Committee were quite impressed with this one and gave Enless an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also there, Gio Pennacchietti also pens an excellent piece on Media Gaze and the Incel ‘Other’, Part 1. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, and we’re certainly looking forward to more.

PA translates possibly the all-time greatest Polish rock song. It drips with Brezhnev era desperation.

This Week in the Outer Left

The Baffler had a bit of a banner week, with two pieces worthy of inclusion, because they work so well juxtaposed with one another.

First up, Rand Potts, self-proclaimed “dude who had grown up gay on a Pentecostal compound in Oklahoma”, shows how brave he is by covering the annual NRA convention. The whole thing drips with so much venom, I am tempted to just quote all the fnords and leave it at that, but I have a duty here, so I’ll only quote enough for you to get the point.

white supremacists Charlottesville men Confederate flag flyers “build the wall” chanters Blue Lives Matter incels open racist evangelical Christian hetero white supremacist young boys performing masculinity men black T-shirts tough slogans badass logos Camouflage Barbies girl playing violin shooting team Liberty University never lived outside Lynchburg faith firearms

I felt sick to my stomach all weekend. I couldn’t eat on Saturday and then when I finally did, I ate too much. I took in what I saw. I thought, they’re telling us all, plain as day: this is a show of strength, a mobilization. They want us to know they’re coming for us all.

As Vox Day famously put it, “SJWs always project.” Keep all this in mind though as we go through the next one. They may seem unrelated, but I assure you, it all comes together in the end.

Tafari Mbadiwe covers the rise and perhaps fall of Thinx and their period feminism. For those who don’t know, and I certainly didn’t, Thinx, founded by Miki Agrawal, is a company using woke feminism to justify selling ridiculous and overpriced menstruation-proof underwear to women with more money than sense.

Agrawal was a millennial feminist icon straight out of central casting, with a character arc bordering on cliché: Ivy League college, investment banking, 9/11-induced crisis of conscience, and much heedless pursuit of youthful passion projects before finally resolving to devote her life to neutering the patriarchy—and in just a few years had grown Thinx from nothing into a company with the wherewithal to bend the New York subway authority to its will.

But all was not well in the land of batshit feminism. Bit of a long quote here, bear with me.

Kristin Kreuk, one of the world’s lovliest hapas.

ex-Thinxers have gone so far as to claim that the corporate culture made it seem “selfish to take a salary representative of your worth.” The company also stood accused of systematically hindering the progression of women up the corporate ladder, limiting fully-paid maternity leave to a two weeks for the birthing parent and offering employees health coverage so meager that some were unable to even afford birth control. Soon after these allegations were publicized, as many as ten of Thinx’s thirty-five-person staff reportedly resigned in protest. In the blink of an eye, the same publications that a few months earlier had been splashing glossy paeans to Thinx across their covers were now racing to air its dirty laundry.

The received wisdom was that the lion’s share of the blame belonged to Agrawal. Anonymous ex-employees charged her with fostering a hostile work environment, personally manipulating Glassdoor reviews, and very publicly taking credit for the firm’s success while deflecting responsibility for its failures…. Even more seriously, Thinx’s former head of PR filed a complaint charging Agrawal with a pattern of sexual harassment that included commenting on physiques of particular women, changing outfits in full view of other staff and touching an employee’s breasts. Even if the allegations stopped short of painting Agrawal as a Weinstein-level predator, there’s no question that this was, at very least, conduct unbecoming a feminist.

…

The sexual harassment complaint was ultimately settled privately, but the media firestorm caused Agrawal to relinquish her CEO title. She stepped down to “Chief Vision Officer” a few days before the news broke, then left the company completely, tarnishing the luster of her carefully manicured public image.

Goings on at a tiny thirty-five person company caused such a “media firestorm” that the founder and CEO was hounded out of the company, and is here having her dirty laundry aired by The Baffler. Miss Agrawal, whatever else one may say about her, was as hip and woke a feminist as one could possibly find, and she was hounded out of her company for being ever so slightly unwoke. Read the sexual harassment allegations again: total bullshit, that is just how women of this sort behave when they’re around each other without men around, or so a reliable woman informs me. She wasn’t forced out for sexual harassment, that was the excuse, not the reason.

I told you that these two would connect up together, and they do. Maybe you’ve already seen it. A feminist faltered just a little bit (muh maternity leave, muh birth control), and she has her name smeared in the press and she is forced out of her own company. Scroll back up and read the venom expressed for the decent people at an NRA convention, notice the sheer contempt, and remember: SJWs always project. They did that to Miki Agrawal, just imagine what they would do to you.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

There’s a Place for Religion in Public Life according to New America… where (and only where) it serves New America’s policy interests, of course.

Jordan Peterson does another Patreon Q&A and shares his opinions on Orthodox Christianity, Myers-Briggs, avoiding mental fatigue, and much more. He has Ben Shapiro on the podcast to discuss the nesting of human perception and cognition in the mythical world. Peterson also has a talk with Dr. Warren Farrell on of fathers in childhood development. Peterson also pays a visit to the NBC Nightly News to discuss inequality and radical ideologies.

In other Peterson news, Reason says that the GOP needs a dose of the Canadian professor. That might sound like a refreshingly (and surprisingly) red-pilled take from Reason, but the reason Reason is calling for more JBP is to criticize Trump more. The Eternal Libertarian…

A couple of months ago, Jordan Peterson, as covered here, addressed the Jewish Question in a blog post where he came out in strong defense of the Jews, accrediting their influence to high IQs and their leftist tendencies exaggerated. This week a Jewish publication, Forward.com, ran an expose accusing JBP for fanning the flames of the anti-Semitism by having the audacity to even bring up the JQ, comparing him to—you guessed it—Hitler. Jordan Peterson gave his two-cents on the matter along with the particularly slimy email correspondence with the Forward.com journalist, Ari Feldman. My guess is that the particular sleaziness of Forward.com’s handling of the situation will spawn more organic anti-Semites than any Literally Hitlor ever has.

Robert Wright breaks with tradition by interviewing Steven Pinker without fawning over him. A good conversation between the two.

At Quillette, Steve Salerno examines university-sanctioned persecution of “whiteness.” Matt McManus presents two arguments in favor of inequality. Avel Ivanov describes the choice students have to either conform to their professors’ leftist viewpoints or learn new ideas. Neema Parvini optimistically proclaims the fall of the managerial class. Melanie Notkin discusses the shockingly depressing reality of childress women. Coleman Hughes takes a (relatively) honest look at the existence of differences in racial outcomes.

Heterodox Academy’s “Half Hour of Heterodoxy” discusses three myths about Asian-Americans. Elsewhere at HA, Jonathan Haidt and Sean Stevens release part three of their research exposing political intolerance on campus.

Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Sarah Perry considers how to live in harmony with one’s emotional, subconscious self. As we discover, the relationship between one’s logical self and emotional self is like the relationship between an owner and its dog. When making decisions, “the wise owner is mindful of the dog.”

This Week… Elsewhere

Zach Kraine points out The identity contradiction of Christians. There is no contradiction here: We seek a global empire under the banner of the cross… it having been rescued from the banner of the dildo.

Heartiste picks a particularly inspiring Alpha Of The Month: Daniel Ritchie.

TUJ predicts North Korea Will Not Be Influenced by Trump’s Decision on the Iran Deal.

Arnold Kling offers a good review of Taleb’s Skin in the Game.

Our favorite pre-reactionary demographer, Lyman Stone takes a stab at the IQ here: Male Sexlessness is Rising, But Not for the Reasons Incels Claim. Stone makes a fair amount of sense, but takes GSS self-reported data on sex at face value, which would seem to be a methodological brain fart.

AMK get’s a lift from our friend Halifax Shadow in a A critique of charity.

Charity is organized crime for women

— нαℓιƒαχ ЅЂаↁош (@HalifaxShadow) May 6, 2018

Al Fin has a fine welcome back to the Public Lecture in Jordan Peterson and the Rise of the New Chautauqua. This was a surprisingly Catholic take on a subject most of us (Catholics) avoid: Cyborgs and Longevity: Simplification and Redundancy.

Obligatory girl smoking pic #2.

Lorenzo takes a good spit on a couple of graves: Marx at 200 and Robespierre at 260.

Nishiki Prestige continues his dive into the world of pine-tree primitivist Twitter this week, doing the dirty job so you don’t have to. He interviewed musician and survivalist, Storm King (@linkolawave) on primitivism, accelerationism, and the future of capital. They had a pretty good back-and-forth, and Nishiki is knowledgeable enough about these things to ask the right questions to generate good responses. Definite read if you’re curious about these things.

Meta-Nomad reaches all the way back to Lucretius’ much derided clinamen for an atomist reading of accelerationism. If you’re a follower of accelerationism or Nick Land (which comes to much the same thing) and have a soft spot for that ole time Epicurean philosophy, this is a must read. There was one paragraph that made me mop my brow, and I’m not going to tell you which one.

And just beating the This Week in Reaction end of week bell, Insula Qui makes it up over at Zeroth Position with another installment of her Libertarianism & Statecraft series: Part XI: Immaterial Externalities. The problem, of course, is libertarianism’s famous (infamous) non-aggression principle:

[I]f the same standard of non-violence were to apply to every group, it would subsidize those groups who can be parasitic without violence. These are the people who are unpleasant, subversive, and repulsive to others without being aggressive. This gives degenerates, maladjusts, and other undesirables an inherent attraction towards libertarianism, as mainstream libertarians are willing to subsidize their behavior in the name of non-violence.

How, in other words, do I keep my neighbor from shitting on his own lawn??!! It’s not as though libertarianism is unacquainted with the problem.

That’s all we had time for, folks. Actually more than we had time for. David Grant was out this week, and his absence was sorely felt.
Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/05/13) appeared first on Social Matter.

Tom Wolfe passed away this week, and he will be missed. Steve Sailer offers a fitting RIP.

Also this week, Arnold Kling fields Comments on the Intellectual Dark Web, including a big one from Handle. And while we’re on the subject of Kling—who coined the term “neoreactionary” to describe Moldbug back in ’09 or so—I’m not sure how to describe De-politicize college? as anything but obtuse. Should we de-politicize college? Of course we should. And we should also have unicorns that fart beautiful rainbows! And by the way, who’s “we”?

Harvard was founded to train Puritan ministers, and it never stopped.

— Lex Corvus ♔ (@LexCorvus) June 28, 2015

Over at American Greatness, Weichert dances on the grave of the Obama Iran deal. The lovable VDH explains Why Trump Is a President Like No Other, featuring Conrad Black’s recent biography on the sitting President, which Hansen apparently likes. And a story from Outside the Defensible Perimeter.

And Paul Gottfried—who hates neocons more than any human alive (and more than previously considered possible)—reviews Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. (HT: Malcolm Pollack.)

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Official Week Kicker-offer Fritz Pendleton kicks off this week singing the Ivy League Blues. In contrast to his usual brief notes, this one is a full form essay, on the decline of the Ivy League.

It’s a sad, slow realization that dawns on earnest thinkers: the institutions that were once quintessentially American are not American anymore.

The American aristocracy slit its own throat somewhere along the line. The bowtie, the cocktail party, and the Mid-Atlantic accent are gone and along with them went Harvard, the New York Times, and Detroit’s automobile industry.

The Ivies remain ruling class, of course. Filters always have that effect. But now they train a ruling class to hate America, except for the “idea” of it, and certainly to despise it’s ordinary people.

A new site has cropped up in the sphere that his highly worthy of your attention: B. D. Matthews Sovereign Exceptions. His back log is extensive, and we apologize for the delay in pointing you there. This week, he’s got up Child’s Play—a meditation on coming of age and how not to do it. Also a thrashing, thoroughly deserved, of the Policy-obsessed Matt Yglesias: Why The Department Of Education Should Spend Less Money Investigating For-Profit Frauds

Dipping back into the previous week, we find Getting Religion: An Atheist’s Guide to Going to Mass, in which we find Matthews sorting recycling with his eldest (but not very old) daughter, when it occured to him:

Recycling is an empty, pointless ritual. Sorting your paper and plastic is less useful than just dumping the whole mess into a landfill and calling it a day. Moreover, performing a stupid ritual you don’t believe in is demeaning. As Theodore Dalrymple once pointed out about communist propaganda, the point of making someone repeat something stupid is not to make them believe it; it’s to make them used to debasing themselves. Now, I’m sure proponents of recycling are good and earnest people, who didn’t intend to create a humiliating ritual reminder of their cultural conquest. But that’s what they did.

If my kids are going to look back on a ridiculous ritual, I decided, it should be a real ritual with a real history, something my ancestors had been doing for generations and not something dreamed up by a bureaucrat in the 70s.

So we went to a Catholic church.

And you’ll never guess what happened next… Matthews snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

In Dutch Neoreaction, Alfred Woenselaer characterizes The Eurovision Songfestival as peak bioleninism. In zie Deutsche, that’d be eurovisionsongfestival I suppose.

Which is not to say it isn’t entertaining. It is fine entertainment. The artists, songs, costumes and performances are fun to watch. Certainly not gladiator fight level entertainment, but not bad.

So grab the popcorn, enjoy the spectacle, and try not to injure anything whilst cringing at the moral signaling.

And back by overwhelming popular demand, Alf trots out the next installment of The Orb of Covfefe: Part IX: SS Escape. You’ll laugh. And maybe cry. The Committee offers an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ merely in the hopes that the series continues.

Social Pathologist advocates for A Religious Dissident Right.

Atavisionary has some analysis on the recent Supreme Court decision to legalize sports gambling in all 50 states. Also: Toasting James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, for his 90th birthday is an outrageous heresy. And he’s quite closely following this development: Well-funded SJWs coordinate to bring down well-known dissident right sites. Last one in the submarine, lock the hatch!

Free Northerner argues definitively Against Peer Review

The legitimacy of any particular scientific finding is whether the application of the methods used in the study will result in similar findings upon repetition. If a study can be replicated, the study’s findings are verified.

Peer review does not replicate studies, so it does not speak to the veracity of scientific findings; it does not effect the legitimacy of a study’s findings.

Peer review has it’s uses, Northerner admits… if you have the right kind of peers doing the reviewing. But…

[P]eer review acts as a filter for what is novel, important, and, most importantly, relevant. This filter is anti-scientific. A study finding nothing useful, may not be as practically relevant as a a study finding something novel, important, and relevant, but it is as methodologically relevant. You can not filter out the studies finding “nothing” and filter in only studies finding “something”, and expect to have an accurate view of the world.

Confirming the Null Hypothesis is no way to fast track yer tenure! Excellent, concise work from Mr. Northerner on this one and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Speaking of which, the remarkably well red-pilled Coach Rippetoe rails against peer review in sports medicine in his most recent podcast.

Quincy Latham, whom I was surprised to find is not Catholic (who knew?!!), offers a generous helping of Pro-Popery (#1: Monks). In which we find monasteries protected secular society from the monks at least as much as they protected the monks from secular society. This is a major plank of neoreactionary social theory, BTW. Also at Quas Lacrimas, a brief instructive note on Christianity and Egalitarianism.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam explains Linguistically Constructed Empires within Empires.

Unorthodoxy has some news of a resurgent Communist America. #AIACC: And sometimes it doesn’t even lie about it.

Neocolonial chimes in with a pair of posts: First he rues The Curse of Kinglessness.

Consider the effect of kinglessness—each capable man determining first his own vector, with no guide, no coordination. Being capable, he draws men unto himself and sets out on the vector established. Immediately he does so, he comes into conflict, not only with the degenerate left, but also with every other capable man. For each having chosen independently their vector, will find their vectors at odds, and will naturally war.

Not only is the king the guy who kills anyone else who says he’s king, but he’s a coordination point for the larger number who don’t really want to say they’re king. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also there, he explains The Foundational Right to Rebellion. I’m not sure I’d use the term “right” so much as a “natural power”, but point taken. This is crucial:

Restoration is explicitly not Rebellion, and as such the notion of rights cannot be its cornerstone.

Anatoly “Friend of Social Matter” Karlin visited London for the British Alt-Lite’s Day of Freedom march so you didn’t have to, and reports back on the absolute state of British nationalism. Basically, there is no such thing as British nationalism anymore. Some of the highlights: only 5,000 people at most, several Israel flags in the crowd, and the climax involved a drag queen on stage “to prove that New Labour are the real transphobes”. I typed and re-typed something here to try softening the blow, but I got nothing. Take your rage porn straight: The absolute state of the UK!

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. March 2, 1930 – May 14, 2018. RIP

Jacobite has up a piece: Somebody Wants to Take Down Nick Land. Somewhat sympathetic, it is written too much in the style in which Nick Land fans always seem to write.

By way of Isegoria… The Spanish Conquistador Helmet was not worn by the Spanish Conquistadors. Only a few of Steve Jobs’ amazing superpowers. A case of credential inflation so bad it only has to happen once. Tom Wolfe hid in plain sight. Wolfe’s three weaknesses as a novelist The Me Decade. And how Bonfire of the Vanities preceded the events upon which it was supposedly based. In other news, parents really don’t care that much about test scores, inconvenient truths about Gaza, back to Tom Wolfe and the “awakened” vote, and just how awesome is Robin Hanson?

Finally this week, Cambria Will Not Yield leads us down In The Lion’s Den for a weekly lesson.

This Week in Social Matter

Without warning, without wake, and utterly without 21 gun salute, the Comments Section of Social Matter was laid to rest this week by Editor-in-Chief Hadley Bishop. We apologize for any inconvenience.

It was a quiet week around here, getting off to a late start. On Friday, the Myth of the 20th Century podcast aired: Episode 70: Eugenics—Francis Galton And The Legacy Of Social Darwinism.

That very same day, Douglas Smythe, whom we’ve admired at Thermidor and at his home blog for years, makes a Social Matter debut with Can The Intellectual Dark Web’s Classical Liberalism Heal the Bonds of American Affection? Weighing in at over 8000 words, it’s more pamphlet than article. But with Smythe you know it’s going to be well worth the read. Friday is generally a terrible day to poast, but a quick response to NYT (and Quillette) was necessary, and this is the only response you’ll really need to read. Smythe explains a bit of the late political history which brought us to this point wherein neoliberal Jeff rules the world “International Community”, placating and apologizing for his neo-Marxist buddy Mutt all along the way. Classical liberals like Michael Shermer think they have an answer: Moar Classical Liberalism (of course).

Certified Intellectual Dark® Web member Bret Weinstein poses for NYT publicity photo high in tree in dark, lush, but surprisingly well-lit Middle Earth forest.

It seems a little strange to prescribe the rediscovery and revival of liberal individualism as the cure for the ills of a country that has never known any other philosophy of government; one with no feudal past and where it is unlawful for the state to grant titles of nobility or establish a church, founded by revolutionary liberal partisans and ideologues who meticulously hard-coded every liberal precept they could think of into the nation’s fundamental articles of law and governing institutions, and where hegemonic liberalism, as we have seen, soundly defeated the “collectivist” ideologies that convulsed much of the rest of the world in the 20th century. If to Shermer’s mind it makes sense to propose the rediscovery and revival of a doctrine America never abandoned to begin with, and in order to solve problems of social and political fragmentation that emerged under the hegemonic watch of that very doctrine which, by the time identity politics as we know them now appeared on the scene, had long since buried fascism and was standing at the deathbed of Soviet Communism, it is because (here his roots as a self-described fundamentalist are showing) the true Gospel has been corrupted.

The collectivist demon, always lurking, always ready to commit genocide at the drop of a hat. This is where, the otherwise remarkably based Jordan Peterson consistently falls down: Always insisting upon the primacy of the individual. Yes, Dr. Peterson, but every individual is born and lives somewhere right?

[I]f the cracking of the civic unity of the Republic into so many factional shards is really the product of a vestigial spirit of asabiyyah lurking in the hearts of men, that spirit sure waited a long time to manifest itself in its subversive power, seeing as how the American state has from its inception in the late 18th century been systematically organized in conformity with liberal principles, and its predecessor in the mother country for about two centuries before that.

We just need to… Give Individualism A Chance! Or so besieged liberals say. On the contrary, we’ve had rather more individual freedom that most people can handle. And Smythe goes on to emphasize that the repression of natural collectives, such as the family and voluntary associations, is not some mere accident of the post-industrial age, but the result of a deliberate advertised effort on the part of the powerful institutions that run things in the West. Anyway, I could go on quoting the whole thing, but that will just keep you from reading the whole thing… Smythe outperforms our already extraordinarily high expectations and cruises to an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Rounding out the week, Nathaniel Lucas returns with some fresh verse: What You Don’t Hear In Berkeley.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Weekly dose of Ana de Arnas.

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran considers what would happen if the steel-driving lefties of yore met the gender-bending lefties of the present.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with some analytical oddities: People who Mysteriously don’t seem to Know the Field they are Researching.

Next up: A mercifully short note on Lice and the Invention of Clothes. Turns out the evolutionary history of lice can help us out with when clothes got invented.

And a new Anthropology Friday series kicks off Pygmies and Papuans, by A. F. R. Wollaston (1912).

By way of Audacious Epigone some interesting, perhaps unexpected, results on support for state secession by demographic group.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Only one post from Porter this week: the Wall of Bubble Voodoo, aka., the apex fallacy.

That’s the misapprehension frequently embraced in social groups comprised of people from different races but the same IQ. Because all institutions are increasingly driving social arrangements into silos of intellect rather than blood, more and more smart whites are becoming dumb enough to forget that their own bubbles aren’t representative.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

A relatively quiet week at our sister publication: Thermidor. Jake Bowyer has much praise for Victor Orban’s Hungary: A Most Christian Country. Bowyer looks at a long and rich Christian history for the country. Hungary is, of course, a democracy, but this doesn’t score it any points among its enemies: Soros and the usual liberal internationalist suspects. They know the difference between fake democracies and true ones. The latter are those whose policies they approve.

And Gio Pennacchietti turns his attention toward Free Speech and National Review’s Auto-Suicidal “Principles”. In a recent editorial National Review defense the execrable waste of flesh known as Randa Jarrar, who enjoys multiple privileges (fat, Arab, female) in her sinecure at 2nd-tier Cal State Fresno. I mean… it is Fresno, but this woman gets 3 squares and a roof over her head. Maybe 4 or 5 squares by the looks of her. Pennacchietti’s main focus, however, is on the NRO—the Washington Generals of the late political ideological sphere—who defend Jarrar waving at principles like “free speech” and “academic freedom”. Principles that conservatives neither invented nor benefit from.

Girl smoking pic.

Now that American culture is in a freedom-based and spectacle-driven Gomorrah, no one really wants to hear about a society based on morals, virtues or principles, especially ones that will impede on their freedoms. Conservatives see free speech as the only issue they really have a monopoly over, since the Left has abandoned any pretense to this principle long ago. In some vain hope of winning over the largely apathetic public, all the Right must with one voice condemn academics and media figures who trample on free speech. All must come together to hold free speech up as the one enduring and uniting principle that should be fought for. This all seems noble and just, but deep down, the equation most in the official Conservativism™ club make’s is evanescent, and at its worse, self-destructive.

The only way to win is not to play, but Conservatives consider this tantamount to treason: Downright un-American not to play by the rules the left laid out for us. Free speech is a contingent and secondary good. Not inviolable, and certainly not one to hang the hopes of restoration by consensus upon. People just don’t care, and the few who do are overwhelmingly liberal. Conservatives, are congenitally very nice people. Too nice: They refuse to name their enemy. Pennacchietti snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from the Committee for his fine work here.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith explores hypocrisy and crooked ways, ultimately asking “What ha’ ye done?” Then he recites a tongue-in-cheek “I Pledge Allegiance . . .” to the globalist order.

Last week it was Evola. This week, Thomas F. Bertonneau gives us the rundown on The Kali Yuga: René Guénon’s Traditionalist Critique of Quantitative Modernity

Richard Cocks explores The Halting Problem and whether a universal Turing machine which can solve all equations is possible. Then he writes about the history and importance of Gödel’s Theorem of incompleteness.

Matt Briggs continues from last week his investigation into the epistemology of miracles with Inference To An Explanation: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed—Part III and The Why & Frequency Of Miracles: Shapiro’s The Miracle Myth Reviewed—Part IV. Then he gives us this Book Sneak Peek: Imposing Your Beliefs Fallacy. Finally, social justice in mathematics, eye dilation proves everybody’s gay, autism on the rise, and a correlation between fracking and gonorrhea, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXIV. Oh wait, there’s more. Ancient planned parenthood, criminalization of conversion therapy, and patient death incentives in this week’s bonus edition of Insanity & Doom Update XXXV.

The irrepressible Ianto Watt guestposts: Don’t ‘Taizé’ Me, Bro!: The Attack On The Liturgy, tracing the revolutionary origins of the new Mass.

Mark Richardson finds a pretty, successful woman airing More feminist regret on Twitter.

Bruce Charlton writes about modern Life without leadership.

As I have said before, most modern leaders are overpromoted middle managers; mediocrities who are permanently out of their depth, avoidant of judgement, and reliant on committees and protocols to tell them what to do. The others are psychopaths—some charismatic, others merely aggressive; parasites who aim to exploit by manipulation.

Dalrock notes that divorce rates go down when there are Not enough cash and prizes.

In the literature on the economics of the family there has been growing consensus on the need to take bargaining and distribution within marriage seriously. Such models of the family rely on a threat point to determine distribution within the household. The switch to a unilateral divorce regime redistributes power in a marriage, giving power to the person who wants out, and reducing the power previously held by the partner interested in preserving the marriage.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale is back, continuing the cycles of Saturday and Sunday sonnets. He also has a little Kipling for us.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Terez Rose brings us, clickbaity title and all, Ten Great Violin Concertos You Must Hear. An excellent soundtrack for reading TWiR of course. If you’ve only three minutes, here’s Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Ave Maria” (1860).

Also there, a timeless, dare I say prophetic, Russell Kirk essay Decadence in the American University (1969). But not the kind of decadence we typically bemoan. It’s more about how, in the university’s quest to gobble-up under its aegis all credentialing power (engineering, nursing, hotel management, IT repair specialist), it has fundamentally lost its primary mission: the formation of souls. Also, an interesting take: The “Me Too” Movement: What Would Plato Say? And in popular culture: “Black Mirror” and the Soul.

Of interest over at City Journal, Guy Sorman’s reflections on May 1968: the Forever Protest. And based Heather Mac Donald’s analysis of How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences. Even the hard ones.

Richard Carroll introduces his Eleventh Friend: James Shirley, a Cavalier playwright from the early 17th century.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless brings us more formal scholarship, or at least the introduction to such, in The Image of Man|Specter of Earth, outlining a key facet of progressive religion and detailing a modern shift in Man’s mental/spiritual relationship with the world. Here is Part II. And the series continues into this week. A very important series from Enless and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Newcomer Zero HP Lovecraft (follow him on Twitter) started up a blog this past week and made a very strong entrance with his story “The Gig Economy”. This is an absolute must read. Stylishly penned, full of provocative ideas, and guaranteed to give you weird dreams if you fall asleep reading it. As you go through it, you may realize it is not so much a story as it is a biography… your biography. This is normal. (It is?) Rare that someone makes it into the august pages of TWiR with his first blog entry, and rarer still to take home an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his trouble.

This Week in the Outer Left

After the absolute venom directed at the NRA last week, I was shocked to see The Baffler offer up an on-the-ground report from the Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) that was actually… pretty fair. Given the number of people in our sphere who came from libertarianism, I thought this would be of interest to the community, and we do like to praise the left when they are reasonable to people. The author, Emily Cataneo, seemed to have a bit of a fun culture shock from the sound of it, and I think a few quotes might be amusing.

I came here thinking everyone would have a hot take on Trump, but after only two hours at PorcFest, I already find mainstream politics receding from my thoughts. That’s not what these people are about. They’re optimists. Somehow, they believe in the good of humanity again.

…

Soon after, a man with an unbuttoned shirt walks by wielding an AR-15. There are a lot of guns at Porcfest—as in, a lot of guns—but I actually don’t feel uncomfortable. Everyone seems even-keeled: they seem like they know what they’re doing. They’re just a big group of friends hanging out in the sunshine, who happen to have open-carry permits and assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

…

What happens when Walmart tries to pay workers thirty cents an hour?

And Jacobin covers the shocking truth about Russia’s troll campaign. Tongue is planted firmly in cheek with this one.

The good news is that now, with Congress releasing the more than 3,500 Facebook and Instagram ads made by the IRA over the past few years, the voting public finally has the information it needs to protect against future Russian attacks.

…

So what kind of nefarious messages has the Kremlin been polluting your social-media news feeds with? Find out, and you too can avoid getting hoodwinked into being a Kremlin asset.

A fun read, and maybe, just maybe, evidence against the claim that the left can’t make jokes.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

In the mainstream media’s continued blitzkrieg on Jordan Peterson’s personality, The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles published a profile on the man calling him the ‘Custodian of the Patriarchy’ (that’s a little overly flattering). JBP defended his positions on his blog.

Like clockwork, Quillette came to the immediate defense of Dr. Peterson. Alexander Zubatov discusses the importance of racial homogeneity symbolic culture in national social cohesion. Nicholas Phillips asks whether or not The New York Times should hire a radical.

Heterodox Academy makes a call for submissions from members of the university community. If you feel like feeding some red pills to a purple-pilled community, acquire within. HA’s Richard Reeves tells us why John Stuart Mill still matters on his 212th birthday. Looking around, I don’t think anyone cares.

Over @Medium, Andrew Sweeny thinks The Intellectual Dark Web is Dead—i.e., because the ideas are mainstream. He writes mostly in praise in Peterson. It’s true that the so-called “intellectual” so-called “dark” web thinkers are mainstream, and not at all dark. The mainstream is at war with itself and only one side is going to win. And it isn’t going to be the classical liberals, whom we like to call: proto-reactionaries.

This Week… Elsewhere

Ace checks in with a blast from CCR: “Lock the front door, oh boy, got to sit down, take a rest on the porch…” with a confession of sorts, and a lesson. That gets credited to last week. This week, Alan Parsons Project is featured: “See the rat race in a new way, like you’re waking up to a new day…”—along with more straight talk. Make that a three-fer from Ace.

In light of recent shifts in American foreign policy with Iran and North Korea, Al Fin finds Donald Trump: Fighting Chaos with Chaos? Also, in time for American Craft Beer Week: Support Your Local Brewer. We agree… but watch out for too much hops. And Al’s got a bucket of ice water—chilled, for the time being, by the power of cheap and abundant fossil fuels—to throw on the feasibility of wind energy.

Heartiste explodes The Myth Of The Maladjusted Bumpkin. Also: Will Old Photos Save America? Well, they certainly can’t hurt.

PA’s provides some very fine Shots Of Wisdom, Part 9. I find his thoughts on Fred Reed particularly perspicacious.

Venn Diagrams make everything more impressive.

TUJ has a bone to pick with The Koran & Torah According to Scott Adams, who, to his great credit is the “second best policy analyst in the world”.

I bash Medium a lot and not without good reason. But credit where credit is due: 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings was funny as hell. I’ve been in that exact meeting many times!

Giovanni Dannato scores some hits and misses with There’s No Power Without “Downward Distribution”. Abstractly, he’s correct of course: The Sovereign, in order to promote the common good, doles out various privileges to secure his power, which is not a small part of the common good. War sucks and is also expensive. The misses have to do with failing to observe power-law distributions.

Only one article this week at Zeroth Position, but my it is a duesy. Nullus Maximus strays a bit from the libertarian wheelhouse and pens Capital Punishment as Ritual Magick for Social Order. He starts out with a sweeping history of both capital punishment and ritual magic. Maximus then proceeds to his main argument, which likens the role of sovereign to magician, which in turn provides lessons on how to do capital punishment the right way. Well worth your time and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Ed Realist gets pretty real here: Why Not Move to Where the Jobs Are? Explained mostly in the saccharine glow of Helen Thorpe’s The Newcomers. Thorpe makes Mrs. Jellyby look like Ebenezer Scrooge, pre-conversion.

When Charles Murray, Kevin Williamson, and others wonder why the hell American workers don’t move, why not instead ask why the hell we spend so much time and resources importing unskilled workers with scores of children who cost a fortune to educate, when we could be spending that money supporting American workers to relocate?

Meta-Nomad continues to be the front-runner for the title of “TWiR-covered blogger who most quotes French philosophers” (Patent Pending) with his new piece, towards a Serresean patchwork. He builds off last week’s invocation of Lucretius and mixes it up with insights from Michel Serres and, naturally, Deleuze & Guattari. As is most work heavily influenced by Continental philosophy, it’s a dense read, but ultimately interesting and rewarding.

Welp… That’s all we had time for folks. Many thanks to our trusty TWiR staff: Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, Burgess McGill, and Aidan MacLear helped out tremendously this week. We look forward to David Grant’s soon and safe return. Be excellent to each other… Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/05/20) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week Ireland was unfashionably late to the modernist clusterfuck. Ireland is rotting from the head, as is its Church hierarchy. Will Ireland Soon Be Lamenting Her Children?

Here's a live look at the streets of Dublin: pic.twitter.com/YL8Lv4EGxi

— Stephen White (@StephenWhite11) May 26, 2018

VDH takes note of How Democracies End: A Bureaucratic Whimper. True. But—following the Iron Law of Oligarchy—bureaucracy is really the only thing that holds “democracies” together.

Interesting piece over at Quartz: The Amish understand a life-changing truth about technology the rest of us don’t.

It’s interesting that the Amish have different districts, and each district has different rules about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. Yet it’s very clear there are two technologies that, as soon as the community accepts them, they are no longer Amish. Those technologies are the television and the automobile.

Note also: Amish retention rates are off the charts!

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Atavisionary takes an in-depth look at Autism and the Extreme Male Brain. Also: The best Pizzagate documentary [he’s] seen. And… How expensive are women? Basically, a lot. Which would all be worth it, if they’d do as they’re told.

Free Northerner defends The Neoliberal-Socialist Synthesis as a description of the present, if admittedly incoherent, international ruling structure.

This is the economic cycle of our modern society. Ruthless global neoliberal capitalism churns out consumer goods efficiently while eating up and vomiting out the working and middle classes. The socialist state provides the refuse of the neoliberal system with a material standard of living just tolerable enough to prevent revolt at the alienation and soullessness of the system while having only minimal drag on efficiency (the state takes it’s ~40% tax and puts a few less arduous regulations, while leaving the system intact).

Globalist neoliberalism could not exist without the socialist state, (at least not until the Landian technofuture where we’re all economically efficient biomachines), for we’d revolt against its heartless machinations. Yet, the socialist state can not exist without globalist neoliberalism churning out untold quantities of goods and services as efficiently possible to take their cut to dish out bribes and placate those who may rebel against their economic slavery to the socialist state. The symbiosis of Moloch.

Northerner snags ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine work here.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam contemplates the monster of “equality” in Primus and Skunkworker.

Lockheed Martin skunk works in action.

The moral equality of Christians is equal in relation to God. Everyone deserves moral consideration as a member or potential member of the Church and child of God, not as a bare “human being.” Let’s frame this in Girardian terms: the Christian revelation discredits scapegoating and human sacrifice by displaying what we can anachronistically call the “bad faith” of such means of maintaining social stability. The selection, as an object of violence, of someone stigmatized in some way, follows not from any genuine knowledge of social relations or divine-human relations, but the logic of mimetic rivalry and crisis. So, from now on, violence against individuals is proscribed, because intrinsically tainted by scapegoating tendencies, while those who engage in violence can be prevented and punished, but only according to rules designed to ensure that such prevention and punishment is free of traces of mimetically motivated hostility. So, everyone is equal in being accorded such protection from mimetically motivated violence.

Which works okay… until you decide to deep six Christianity—traditionally understood. “Equality” becomes a mere political football, designed to mean whatever those wishing to aggrandize their power wish it to mean. The solution, of course, is the person of a monarch (“primus”) as cultic center for a society. But that doesn’t solve everything on its own. Adam explores the issues that remain outstanding. This snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

This week in Quas Lacrimas, Quincy Latham has a fine essay on Schisms and Politics. It seems that everywhere Quincy finds a Christian schism, political considerations are not far behind, when not in front. The Committee gave Latham a nod with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Also there: David Foster Wallace on Updike on the Boomer.

At Neo-Ciceronian Times, Titus Cincinnatus is a pleasure to read as always: Aristocracy, Real and Imagined. He gets an inspiration from our old friend Victor Davis Hanson’s Camouflaged Elites, but believes his very correct observations lead him to quite erroneous conclusions. Cincinnatus doesn’t buy the story that the Elites pretend to be slovenly proles to dupe the masses:

[T]hey’re sloppy because they’re not aristocratic in character to begin with.

I’ve pointed out previously that we have a non-aristocratic “aristocracy”. By this I mean that while we may have an elite that forms the upper strata of our society, this elite does not exhibit the traits and characteristics of a genuinely noble caste. This is, of course, entirely unsurprising for a nation whose guiding document explicitly forbids its citizens from receiving titles of nobility.

Which calls into question all those Prom Kings & Queens out there… But seriously a non-aristocratic aristocracy is the worst kind of aristocracy of all: Because, being based loosely upon merit, the aristocrats will be inclined to think… that they actually deserve their status. Noblesse Oblige BTFO!

Rather than being comprised of genuinely superior individuals, natural aristocrats if you will, the functional elite in most Western states is made of vaisya commercialists—the perennial nouveau riche who use their wealth not to enrich their communities and provide leadership to their people, but to buy influence and power within increasingly corrupt democratic systems.

Or buy mosquito nets… but that’s the same thing. And Titus has much more. Superb essay. Please RTWT! This too earned the ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.

On the Dutch front, Alf comes down on the side of Enforced monogamy. Aka., monogamy. And he takes some reading suggestions from Jordan B. Peterson: Panzram’s A Journal of Murder & Hitler’s Table Talk.

Dividuals has interesting thoughts The Strange Places the “God of the Gaps” Takes You. He’s reading B. D. Matthews… good for him!! Dividuals thinks that evolutionary psychology will eventually prove Catholicism. He’s probably right… except for all the nagging questions evolutionary psychology cannot possibly answer. For those, we’ll still need Catholicism. Dustin’ off my old KJV here: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Over at Jacobite, Mike Crumplar examines Elliot Rodger’s manifesto in The Aeneid for Incels. Crumplar tries to get inside Rodger’s head—and by extension, the head of the incel—and also meanders into political meditation.

Britney Spears appears in video advocating domestic violence.

Breakdown, celebrity, fascism. Britney Spears shaves her head and attacks a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella. Mel Gibson drives drunk and goes on an anti-Semitic rant to a cop. Lindsey Lohan drives drunk, shoplifts, does drugs, fights people, and converts to Islam. Elliot Rodger drives his BMW around Isla Vista, shooting people at random as part of his fantastical “Day of Retribution.” Donald Trump, furious that President Barack Obama mocks him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, runs for president himself on a widely-ridiculed neo-fascist platform of hate and resentment… and wins. Did the alt-right pepes and other iconoclastic, “Dadaist” fellow travelers really take the idea of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan at face value? Or did they actually vote for the seductive idea of the breakdown, the idea of dying in a final blaze of glory that would exact delightful retribution on all the people they hated?

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin continued his coverage of the UK and Tommy Robinson from last week. If you have been on Twitter, you know that Tommy Robinson’s tranny outreach didn’t do him much good, as he was arrested and sent to prison for 13 months for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, but amount to talking about ongoing trials of Muslim rape gangs to the displeasure of Her Majesty’s government. The most, to use the cliche, Orwellian thing about the situation is that the UK banned reporting about Robinson’s arrest, and ban which even RT, which has been known to poke the Cathedral in the eye from time to time, has followed.

By way of Isegoria… If you were sent back in time to the year 527 AD. A not terribly fond look back on “Encounter Sessions”, which bear an uncanny resemblance to Struggle Sessions. Related: An other order that ran the universe. I remember these guys: Jesus People USA—fscking commies. And There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening—I’m not even sure the first and second could be described as “great”. More autism from Bryan Caplan. Caplan thinks Stalin was “a sincere Marxist-Leninist” (mostly). And… a wild new cinematic strategy Making movies for the audience Hollywood has ignored.

Finally this week in CWNY… The One Great Mystery, in which he turns to another little known, eerily prescient, 19th Century prophet: W. H. Mallock. Little known because eerily prescient.

This Week in Social Matter

Very quiet week here in the pages of Social Matter. But our Myth of the 20th Century podcast team produced a duesy: Episode 71: The WASP Question—Evolution And Future Prospects Of The Invisible Race. Featuring the remarkably woke Professor Andrew Fraser.

And Nathaniel Lucas is back in Saturday Poetry & Prose with an enigmatic: Civics, After Death.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Gregory Cochran imagines a world in which people are afraid to predict through genetics whether Thoroughbreds will be fast and Shetland ponies will be small. Wait… that sounds a lot like the world we live in.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with a Homeschooling Corner: Science (geology and geography). “Science kits” would seem to be a bust mostly, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good books, nor, curious kids (and adults) who wish to learn. “Magic Schoolbus” was so popular in our family that we had a cat named Frizzle. Alas! he died a while back.

Next, Mrs. X has more conversation with Shea Robison on Epigenetics and Public Policy.

The Book Club begins in earnest with discussion of Philip Auerswald’s The Code Economy pt 1. A taste:

Auerswald believes that the past 40,000 years of code have not been disasters for the human race, but rather a cascade of successes, as each new invention and expansion to our repertoir of “recipes” or “codes” has enabled a whole host of new developments. For example, the development of copper tools didn’t just put flint knappers out of business, it also opened up whole new industries because you can make more varieties of tools out of copper than flint.

And rounding out the week: Anthropology Friday. A. F. R. Wollaston’s Pygmies and Papuans (1912) Part 2.

By way of Audacious Epigone… not entirely surprising results from Republican rank-n-file on “free trade”, except to Establishment Republicans—totally shocking to them. Better prude than rude. And a contrarian take on Jewjitsu.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter was quiet this week, but I can see he’s already got up several things for next week.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Busy, and extremely strong, week at our sister publication Thermidor Magazine: Richard Greenhorn leads off with Empire of Hatred: An Attempt at Defining Liberalism, which he finds…

…operates as a wrecking ball to every impediment it meets cannot be defined ahistorically. We cannot know what era’s liberalism we are encountering without knowing what era’s walls it is trying to smash. For this reason, it seems liberalism is always a reaction to something else. But again, this raises the question whether liberalism has a motive force. We cannot expect to attack liberalism, and certainly not to erect something in its place, with only a fleeting half-knowledge of what it is, and thus it seems vain to try to assign a precise definition, and our attacks must be waged against a vaguely defined concept, or worse yet, a feeling. And we are left with the above-stated problem: Whether we can define the monster at all.

Which Greenhorn sets out formally to do.

Stunning Claudia Cardinale.

Liberalism is the process of enshrining what is unnatural in the body politic and ultimately the minds and souls of men. Liberalism is not about freedom, it is about license. For liberalism is never concerned with the liberty to do something we ought to do, but to gain the ability to do something we know we should not do, and as an ideology, it ultimately exists only as a justification for vice. It is, in fact, vice turned into a science; it is applied injustice gussied up as justice; it is what is inherently irrational contorted into the boundaries of social rationality, and from there, incoherently posited as a universal principle. That which is not irrational can be adapted without the methods of liberal suasion, but liberalism demands coercion to establish itself. The liberal rights which men come to enjoy, and which may at times lead them to prosperity or indirectly to virtue, nonetheless arise out of the motive of squalor and vice.

From there, he draws out necessary implications of liberalism. He also elaborates on liberalism’s antipathy toward Catholicism—another element strong enough to function as an alternative definition. In very tight balloting, The Committee gives the nod to Richard Greenhorn: winner of the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Walter Devereaux delivers Part III of his Implications of Clerical Celibacy series: A Father of the Fatherless. He delivers an admirable and incredibly wide-ranging historical analysis of fatherhood, and the central role it plays in the development of civilization. The critique of the discipline of clerical celibacy falls short, however, when Devereux reveals his agnosticism toward sacramental grace, viz., holy orders:

[T]he tradition of celibacy in the West has produced a priesthood that is doomed to fail even in a highly fecund community because of the divorce that exists between the personal inheritance of a—for lack of a better term—Levite and the impersonal inheritance of the celibate priest. The celibate priesthood has, in order to replace the sort of training a son receives from his father, created a professional priesthood, a priesthood subjects to the demands of professionalization but also to the faults and artifice of bureaucratisation.

The gift that the Bishop Timothy had was given by the laying on of the Apostle Paul’s hands. “Impersonal” is not a merely unfortunate word to stand in for lack of a better one. It is the precise opposite of the truth. His points about bureaucratization are true so far as they go: Poor priestly formation is as poor priestly formation does. But priests are not born: They’re made. By Bishops. Who, by the way, are celibate in both the East and the West. If, as Devereaux claims, “Manhood and fatherhood are mutually dependent—one cannot be one without an experience of the other”, then not only is he going to have a lot of ‘splainin to do about the putative manhood of Jesus and St. Paul (just off the top of my head), but he’s going to have to explain how the Eastern Church, as well as the Western, managed to get episcopal celibacy so wrong.

Jake Bowyer offers up A Modest, But Indecent Proposal. This proposal is more intellectual than Swiftian, and Bowyer meditates on the relationship between sexual mores and violence.

Richard Carroll was kind enough to review Neovictorian’s novel Sanity (now available in paperback).

[P]reachiness was my main concern going into today’s novel, Sanity, written by Neoreactionary blogger Neovictorian. Since I only know him through his articles and am unaware of any previous experience he may have writing fiction, I feared that his book would turn out as either a political tract thinly disguised as a story or a wish-fulfilment fantasy. Though there are NRx and broader dissident Right gang signs all over the joint, they never get in the way of the narrative and the end result is, I’m happy to say, a genuinely good novel that stands well on its own as a novel.

FD: I read an pre-release draft of Sanity and was deeply moved by it. Like others, I was “sad that it was over”. I urge our readers to support those in our sphere who do high-quality craftsmanship. If the Restoration is to succeed, and it must, it cannot do so without winning the aesthetic domain. Carroll snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his important and high quality work here.

And Nigel T. Carlsbad puts to bed the accusation that “conservatives never conserve anything” with Hats Off to Marianne. Apparently tipping one’s hat was a genuine trigger to German republicans back in the day.

Cary Grant, make the fedora look more un-fedora-ey than hitherto thought possible.

This is excellent news for the neoreactionaries, as it turns out that tipping your fedora is a counterrevolutionary act.

The conservative movement is owed an apology. They stood athwart history yelling “Stop!” and the march of progress actually did slow. Although the threat of government-subsidized sex changes for 3-year olds is on the horizon, it is nevertheless a fact that today you will not face major repercussions for tipping your hat—a clear and unambiguous victory for the right.

I also stumbled upon the bizarre phrase “Hutnichtabnehmungsfrage” in the Nürnberger Abendblatt of 1844 coined in response to this social movement. It would seem that this would literally mean the “hat-not-tipping-question” or “hat-unacceptance-question.”

The point being there was a time when whether or not liberals could strip you of your right to tip m’lady was raised to the status of a social question.

The Hat Tipping Question. The HTQ, we could name it.

“Why do the cuckservatives refuse to address the HTQ?”

“You know, I like Jared Taylor, but he’s too soft on the HTQ.”

Now… if we could only decide what type of hat to wear!

Finally, editor Nathan Duffy delivers a review of The Aviator. Not the Martin Scorsese movie, but rather the novel by Eugene Vodolazkin. Duffy describes many of the themes, and while he shies away from spoilers, Duffy also approves of the plot. All in all, Duffy gives a strong endorsement.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Bonald writes about The rationale of a brittle Church, unpleasantly humiliating though it may be.

Richard Cocks broadly lays out some principles Chaos and Order; the right and left hemispheres of the brain being his starting point.

In the past, the universe and the world were thought of as alive and ensouled. The word ìcosmosî refers to a harmonious well-ordered whole which has pleasant home-like connotations. The tendency since the scientific revolution has been to substitute the organic metaphor for the mechanical and metaphors tend to determine what is perceived.

William M Briggs suggests bloodsport may be making a comeback as Watching Murder Is Acceptable Again. Also, English kids can’t tell time anymore and the church of scientism proclaims the heresy of criticizing GMO food, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXVI

Mark Richardson writes about The rape of nature, left and right.

Traditionalists do not want to live outside of nature, whether that refers to the natural world or to human nature. We want to be connected to it, deeply, and to draw from it what is best within the human experience. We orient our lives, in part, through our place within a natural order (an order of existence that encompasses the biological, the social and the spiritual). That does not mean rejecting efforts to employ technology for useful purposes, but this is not the principle we live by, or that we wish society to be ordered by, or that we measure progress by.

In a similar vein, Bruce Charlton explains Why traditionalism has become impossible in an age of corrupted instinct

Instinct cannot save us—but will, on the contrary, direct and drive us into damnation and death; but divine intuition can save us; and it is the only thing that can save us.

Also from Charlton, a call for the Restoration of English magic.

According to William Wildblood, the Royal Wedding sermon was a display of Mock Christianity. Indeed.

Mark Moncrief writes this handy little list of Things I Hate About the Left.

Penetrating thoughts from Cologero on man, and his life well-lived: When the Angels Disappear. All with an assist from Aristotle, and three or four from Schopenhauer.

Lue-Yee has gives this idea a well-earned thrashing: Baptism for Public Testimony of Your Own Faith? Sola Scriptura indeed!

Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?, asks Pat Buchanan. Obviously not, but he can sure drive away many from the faith.

And the new issue of the always stunning Regina Magazine is up: Issue 31 “The Travel Issue”.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Things seem to still be down over at Chris Gale’s place. We trust all is well down there.

Claudia Cardinale (so it is claimed) smoking.

Over on his home blog, Richard Carroll introduces his Twelfth Friend: John Crowe Ransom, “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”.

At Imaginative Conservative… Russell Kirk’s 1958 essay Cultural Debris: Two Conferences & the Future of Our Civilization. The immortal Joe Sobran praises The Prophetic C.S. Lewis in 2000 essay. Donald Devine outlines René Girard’s Challenge to Fusionism. Fr. Longenecker nominates Four Good Non-Christian Books by Christian Authors. Appropriate to the month of May, a former Protestant contemplates The Humility of Mary.

Over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless was hard at work this week publishing installments of his “Image of Man|Specter of Earth series: Part III, IV, and V, in which he tackles the philosophy surrounding human sexual dimorphism, man’s relation to climate, and “natural resource” depletion respectively. Enless earns another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his outstanding efforts in this important series.

Finally this week at City Journal… A snapshot from the frontline in Mogadishu, Minnesota. An encouraging story about Mike Rowe and Dirty Jobs, Good Pay. Remember: It’s never been easier for average people to be above average. A tragic look at A Plague on Cities, and the Poor—Brutalism’s enduring influence. And more bad news in public aesthetics: Baltimore Museum of Art looks to trade its classics for the hottest new thing, and art becomes just another cash transfer scheme.

This Week in the Outer Left

Girl smoking.

Becky Garrison opened up the week for The Baffler with a piece on the #metoo spinoff, #churchtoo, which is exactly what it sounds like. I don’t normally recommend that you RTWT when it comes to our leftist ‘friends’, but I think it is warranted in this case. As I understand it, the extent to which churches have been feminized is already quite bad. Expect it to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Seriously, give the thing a read, she is very nearly explicit that the point is not to catch rapists but to topple traditional sexual and gender norms in the church.

And staying with The Baffler, Jacob Silverman fires a salvo in the emerging Cathedral offensive against Elon Musk. In their view, this is a matter of brave journalists standing up for poor, oppressed Tesla workers who aren’t even allowed to unionize and Musk is trying to silence the free press in response. This is nonsense. In cases like these, the Randian reading of events as hatred and jealousy towards a remarkably successful man because he is successful is actually not far wrong. Musk, whatever his faults, is driven by a positive vision of the future and wants to see it accomplished. As a result of demanding only the best for his companies, his companies are too white, too male, too heterosexual. He has been able to outrun criticism from the left by wowing the public with rocket launches and getting a contingent of environmentally concerned leftists excited about his electric cars.

But the contempt in which he was held was always there, just under the surface, looking for an excuse to try to get him to bend the knee to diversity dogma. Musk popping off some tweets critical of the media’s coverage of Tesla was just the excuse, not the reason. But then he went further and challenged their monopoly on the truth, and that is what they absolutely cannot permit from anyone, ever.

Who do you think *owns* the press? Hello.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2018

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson joins The Economist’s podcast to receive the hard-hitting questions: #MeToo and which feminist he respects the most. Peterson welcomed Steven Pinker onto his own podcast to further promote the intellectual classical liberal movement. To round things off, JBP posted a blog defining and critiquing postmodernism, explaining its relationship with Marxism. An insightful read on the doctrine of our time.

Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras of The Josias discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s arguments for government’s concerning themselves with man’s final destination. An exciting addition to Besieged Liberalism, The Josias are a group dedicated to articulating Catholic political perspective and resisting the tides of liberalism.

Quillette made some waves this week by suggesting the radical notion that men and women have innate differences. Max Hymans says maybe it’s not the justice system’s fault that there’s a bunch of black people in prison. Uri Harris gives his take on Jordan Peterson’s recent Munk debate in which Peterson was called “an mean mad white man.” Jamil Jivani explains why Sam Harris, despite his race realism, is better for colored people than Ezra Klein.

Heterodox Academy’s Musa Al-Gharbi tells us why we should care about viewpoint diversity on campus, despite the fact that literally nobody does.

Over at Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao explores how we construct and maintain realities.

This Week… Elsewhere

Inveterate China Skeptic, Al Fin rolls the curtain back on Xi Jinping’s Extreme Makeover: Marxism that Really Works! Also: Can Women Really Think? Yes and no. And Wow! what a feature image.

Roman Dmowski examines the Deep State Meltdown.

PA offers commentary on (and a pean to) a recent episode of Murdoch Murdoch. Also, reflections on “Cobra Kai,” The First Two Episodes.

Unorthodoxy reports, not without a bit of shadenfreude: Wheels Coming Off the Cathedral: Deutsche Bank Back in Trouble. But economic woe could be heading in America’s direction. Related: VDH’s Great German Meltdown.

Heartiste provides an excellent analysis of The Double-Edged Sword Of Identity Politics. Identity politics for me but not for thee isn’t working out too well for the left…

Now personally, I don’t relish a society structured solely around identity politics. It’s gauche, claustrophobic, miserably stressful, and a mockery of the transcendent. But damned if I’m gonna idly sit by as every other group looks out for themselves at my group’s expense. That’s a suicide pact. But the only way out of this inevitability is to restore Whites to demographic primacy in their homelands, from which perch Whites can safely and confidently eschew identity politics without risk of parasitic infection.

We too at Social Matter, find identity politics repulsive. But only because we find politics repulsive. All politics is identity politics.

AMK presents a Concise Domestication Thesis, which scores some points, I think. But concision isn’t one of them. My own related thoughts from a year ago.

Trump perma-bull, TUJ, claims victory on another prediction: Russia Investigation has Backfired on Spymaster Comey & his Investigators.

This week in Zeroth Position, Insula Qui wraps her, by now at least book-length, series On Libertarianism & Statecraft with: Part XII: Greed. (Miss Qui, BTW, has her own blog here.) Tho’ Rush once inveighed against “kindness that can kill“, that doesn’t mean, pace Ayn Rand, that “Greed is güd”.

That’s all we had time for, folks. Hope you all enjoyed your Memorial Day Weekend, if you live stateside. As always, TWiR would not be possible without the generous assistance of our staff. A welcome back to David Grant, who returned early to help me out. Many thanks also to Hans der Fiedler, Burgess McGill, and Egon Maistre for their valuable contributions. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/05/27) appeared first on Social Matter.

Leading the news this week: we heralded the arrival of Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset. From what I’ve seen of it, it appears to be incredibly erudite and esoteric ideas expertly hidden behind a thick wall of stream of bicameral consciousness. Of course, I mean that in the best possible sense! BAP is, at the time of this writing, 26 for 26 in 5-star reviews, and already near the top of Amazon best-sellers in History. Nude bodybuilders in Washington when?

Over at American Greatness, Julie Kelly indulges a bit of schadenfreude by way of an open letter to Dear Ex-Friends in #TheResistance. And our good friend, Victor Davis Hanson, unmasks The Carnivores of Civil Liberties.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton helpfully kicks off the week with a trip down memory land and an analysis of The United States of California.

It’s from this nostalgic vision of California that one can understand just how far from grace the state has fallen. Surf shops have turned into grimy taco stands. The Beach Boys have been replaced by rappers out of Compton. Rebellious teenage greasers are now drugged up, MS-13 jailbirds. The cities have become a Mecca for hobos and illegal aliens looking for a safe haven. San Francisco has so many bums shitting on the street that there’s now a smartphone app that will tell you where the latest dung heaps have been spotted. Date rapists, sex traffickers, and those who’ve committed assault with a deadly weapon are considered “non-violent” criminals thanks to Proposition 57; the state gets to save a few nickels as these criminals skip merrily out of jail and back onto the streets.

California is basically becoming Mexico… with a better sovereign credit rating. While it lasts. Fritz runs the numbers and snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his trouble.

Alf has had it Up to Here with Manosphere sour grapes.

Am I so singularly amazing that I have found the last good girl left in the world, or is the manosphere selling me sour grapes?

It seems to me that for men, unlike for women, complaining does not fix anything. Don’t get me wrong, I empathize with the complaints, but I empathize with action more.

This is the high agency viewpoint. Also Byzantine privacy laws, which seem a bit unfair to the actual Byzantines, TBH.

Unamusement Park ascends to transmission depth with Reading old books: some practical suggestions.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam expounds upon Center and Centrality and the distance between them. In which he sees the distance between signifier and thing signified as a reliable indicator of civilized order.

Quincy Latham thinks Reality is Ugly (Race and Gender). Ugly if you don’t like what your lying eyes tell you, at any rate. Perceptive. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Also at Quas Lacrimas, some disambiguation pointers for The Three Ammonii. And a short bit of analysis on how Diversity Kiddies Create Their Own Reality:

The more positions awarded to the lazy, the incompetent (blacks, women…), the more the Bolshevik thesis becomes partially true: personal success isn’t determined by industry and talent. At least not any more.

Social Pathologist decries The Age of the Empozzment. As always, he gets much correct. But his equation of “secular program” and “secularism” is a categorical mistake. As I tweeted earlier today (not at all, incidentally, in response to Slumlord):

"Christian" is NOT the opposite of "secular". "Sacred" is. "Secular" is not a synonym for "evil". Start using these words correctly and you will clear your mind of 80%+ of the cant which passes for thought in Anglophone religion.

— The Nick B. Steves (@Nick_B_Steves) June 5, 2018

Was Constantine’s a “secular” (i.e., of this world) program? Was Putin’s? Of course they were. We’re they secularist? Of course not. Secularism is a, I think uniquely, Christian heresy. A Protestant one to be exact.

Unorthodoxy has an interesting find: Vermont Will Pay You to Colonize It. $10,000 is not a huge amount, but Vermont is a pretty attractive and low-cost place to live already.

Spring finally came to upper Canuckistan, prompting Bill Marchant to cut a hole in the softening ice to send this message about: Ontario’s Confused Election.

At Jacobite, Robert Mariani reflects upon the cyberpunk genre in A Different Grim Future. Originally a revised form of Leftist futurism, cyberpunk has become too real for its authors to accept.

The genre’s founders married a criticism of corporations to the dreary aesthetic of rootlessness, but progressivism only offers a critique of the former on its own merits. Take away the violence and grit and you get Brave New World, a setting that the gender ideologue can’t levy an argument against. Consumerization of the body, reproduction, and social relations lost their conspicuous ugliness when they were rebranded as “liberation.”

Girl smoking.

Malcolm Pollack finds something nice to say about Kevin Williamson. Also… Conquest’s Second Law not going far enough.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, again shines his light on the right’s human capital problem. He is working from a deep dive into Croatian politics, but it is a problem among all nationalist movements. Because nationalism is so low status, the whites who tend to be nationalists are generally lower status, somewhat lower IQ, or somewhere on the autism spectrum compared to the whites who go for high status globalism. This constitutes a problem for the right’s prospects. There is a common riposte to this point to say that the right tends to attract the lower and the highest IQ whites, the bronze and gold model. Which may well be the case, but for a movement to succeed, it needs a significant number of merely above-average IQ individuals to act as administrators. This is not an issue to be swept under the rug.

By way of Isegoria… A note from Claude Shannon: “No one else was familiar with both fields at the same time”. Highlighting a Quillette article that questions the Institutional Racism Narrative—which is itself horrifically racist. Human action is not the only relevant parameter in human history. The interesting case of an Islamic yet-another-communist-sex-cult—low church Islamic. A window into the evolutionary psychology of warfare from Why We Fight. Looking under the hood of practical violence: Confrontational tension and fear make most violence incompetent. And it’s your fault for following the wrong people.

Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: The Liberals’ Metamorphosis.

This Week in Social Matter

Another very quiet week here at Social Matter, but it was not without a major highlight: Jérôme Bernard Grenouille making The Case For A Reactionary Anti-Hero: An Application Of The Principle Of Loss. This is George Bataille’s Principle of Loss, BTW. Grenouille has the most literary take on the Principle of Restoration:

The Restoration is a barricade. The reactionary, clad in armor, draws a line into the bosom of the earth. He builds walls whose stones are the tales of great men. All within is order, all without, chaos. He warms himself at the fire of his masters—Plato and Cicero, Caesar and Charlemagne are the light in the darkness of his night. He stares into the abyss. Pitch black, absolute silence.

It is not a breeze which disturbs this silence, but the soft scratching of guitar strings—coming from somewhere beyond the walls. More and more distinct, he makes out the charming laugh of a woman and a coarse voice singing off key, then the sound of hooves sinking into mud. From the night emerges a cavalier on a skinny, tired steed. He approaches the barricade, stops his singing, dismounts his steed, and grabs the leather flask from his saddlebag. Handing the canteen to the reactionary, he greets in his raucous but comforting voice: “Good evening, Dear Friend”. The reactionary, stunned, eeks out a salutation and grabs the flask. It is more piss than wine. The cavalier taps him a little too hard on the shoulder and says: “I have come from a journey to the end of the night.”

Not sure you like where this is going? You’ll have to read on…

[A] cursory look at the historical emergence of great empires reveals more than ample evidence to support the case for an anti-hero.

The best and clearest examples of the conviviality between imperial power and its anti-heroes can be found in the experiences and efforts which led to the establishment of the Spanish Empire. The figure of the Conquistador is a 15th century manifestation of the Restoration anti-hero. There would be no Spanish Empire and no Spanish Golden Age without the fool-hardy enterprising of some very questionable figures.

The fact that Neoreaction is made up chiefly of high achieving proles—proles striving their way into, and ultimately rejecting, the Brahmin caste—is probably no accident. Grenouille goes on to reference Marx and Diogenes to build his case. I can’t say I completely agree, viz.,

There is no Golden Age without anti-heroes.

But his case is absolutely worth an attentive reading and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast was Episode 72: Critical Infrastructure—Scale Up, Power Down. Featuring our friend and subject-matter expert Dark Enlightenment.

Saturday, Nathaniel Lucas is back with some more fine poetry: Federal Districts.

Finally, on Sunday, something completely different, and also completely awesome: Iulian Bretonescu’s Parable On Power. Without wishing to steal too much of his thunder, I’ll provide this snippet:

[T]he hermit answered, “Because you deceive yourselves when you think that evil is found in the form of government and not in the hearts of men. You set men to guard other men, and so increase the number of offices in which evil may take root. But this is folly: there is no constitution so noble that it will not be perverted should wicked men hold its offices.”

It’s not very long and a definite RTWT… Bretonescu takes home the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

This week at West Hunt, Greg Cochran says Neanderthals would have alcoholic tendencies. He also argues for the common sense of heritability in complex traits. Cochran closed out the week releasing two podcasts on the prehistory of Europe and America.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another invaluable Cathedral Round-Up: Harvard’s New President. Lawrence Bacow, a boring white dude, is taking the reigns there, along side of some suitably racially ambiguous women, taking lesser, but no doubt well-compensated mandarinates.

Bool club continues with The Code [Robot] Economy (pt. 2). Which is worth reading, even if you’re not reading the book.

And for Anthropology Friday, finishing up with a part 3 of A. F. R. Wollaston’s Pygmies and Papuans.

By way of Audacious Epigone, the browning of America does not bode well for Israel.

And Elfnonationalist has a solid survey of British Genetics in Detail.

This Week in Kakistocracy

This week, Porter commemorates Memorial Day 2018 in pictures; remembering what America has lost.

Then, a short commentary on “hate crimes” and the Tommy Robinson case in Building Better Beliefs.

And on the same topic, a piece on Roseanne Barr’s sitcom going Out the Gigante Window due to an ill-advised bout of lese-majestie:

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! You can’t say blacks and Asians are “just like us” unless you’re a left-wing anthropologist or advocating for open borders. Or at the very least, you need to ask. There are times when being just like us accrues to their benefit and preference, and times when it does not.

Porter also takes some time for one of his rare non-vitriolic musings on life: One Piece At a Time.

And finally Porter notices a bumper sticker: “Real Christians Love Their Enemies”—and in the spirit of Keeping It Real feels compelled to ask the driver:

You assert that Christians have enemies. Do you mean this as individuals or as a group? Most groups do have enemies—or more mildly, “opposition”—presumably Christians are no different. Given their longevity, Christians may have ancient enemies, perhaps even mortal ones. So what groups are the enemies of Christians?

This Week at Thermidor Mag

N. T. Carlsbad kicks off the week over at our sister publication, Thermidor, with Despotism Ain’t a Bad Place to Be. This time Carlsbad’s subject is Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, French theorist of the 18th century. Linguet is hard to place in a philosophical tradition, owing to his having been largely forgotten, but while he was not of the Left in his own day, the Left has nonetheless claimed him.

An enemy of physiocracy and laissez-fairism, he was nonetheless not an identifiable socialist, as he quite openly rejected all emancipatory and liberatory projects as being incompatible with any form of society, the latter being necessarily based on subjection. He does not quite reject the idea of a primitive equality, but classifies it as highly distant and pre-societal, incompatible with civilization. […] Linguet’s concern was to create an ordered and gentle system of subordination. His own sociological model is in some sense a form of historical materialism, in that he saw the management of property and the distribution of the food supply as both the determinants and most important elements of jurisprudence. “Abolition of property” is nonsensical under this view.

Editor Nathan Duffy addresses the Left’s sudden, impassioned defense of MS-13 in Of Men and Beasts. Duffy neatly dissects the argument that comparing humans to animals is intolerably sinful and unchristian and reviews the history of Christian writers and Christ himself doing exactly that.

Dehumanization is indeed a bad thing. But sin is what dehumanizes, not noticing sin and pointing it out. The dehumanizing agent, in this case, is MS-13 themselves and yes, they absolutely should cease their own dehumanization. Trump and all sane people, on the other hand, should continue noticing it and pointing it out.

Duffy earnes an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.

Jake Bowyer meditates upon Ireland Fallen in the wake of the recent legalization of abortion.

Sadly, the once proud and brave Catholic Church of Ireland responded to this news by saying that they are “exhilarated” by the challenge. Not “horrified” or “disgusted”; “exhilarated.” This, my friends, is what a beaten lion looks like during his last days in the pride.

Finally, newcomer Ninco Nanco offers a movie review: Reactionary Themes in Zardoz.

Zardoz contains a number of reactionary themes. No literary or dramatic genre is so characteristic of late modernity as science fiction. When narrating a story about human society in another place and time, the narrator may start thinking along lines of: what does human society look like outside a Whig conception of history as “progress”? What are the essential features of culture, politics, and the relationship between men and women? It is not a flawless procedure but can yield some interesting answers.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau tries his hand at the higher art of fake news, reporting Upstate Consolation University to Equip Classrooms with Sensitivity Smart Airbags.

Kristor hasn’t posted in a while, so he discloses A Word About My Late Silence, lamenting the recent relocation of his estate.

We have just intentionally destroyed the highly evolved order of a household, and so of a family, that was the careful, loving work of decades, and of a million thoughtful decisions. Howsoever needful, and indeed inevitable, it’s an ugly act.

J. M. Smith remains Unprotected, Undismayed in the face of ancient laws of defamation still in force, protecting the modern elite.

The recent shemozzle over Roseanne Barr and Valerie Jarrett reminds us that Jarrett is part of a protected ruling class, indeed a nobility. It suggests that similar protections may extend to all female politicians, and more especially those of color. These protections are not written in the statute books, of course, but they are nevertheless amply supplied by the controlled and social media, where public shaming, denunciation and ostracism are a formidable force.

You don’t need me to enumerate the races, religions, and erotic impulses that today enjoy this sort of special protection against offensive speech. All I will say here is that offensive speech is a verbal attack, unique protection from such attacks is a privilege, enjoyment of this privilege is the mark of nobility, and nobility is conferred because doing so is in the interest of the state.

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

Matt Briggs explains why There’s Nothing Wrong With 9-Year-Old Drag Queens If There’s Nothing Wrong With Sodomy. Meanwhile, Acceptance Of Homosexuality Grows, Even Among “Conservatives”. Finally, straights acting gay, a drill sergeant is fired when an enlistee cries, a student presents thesis in underwear after professor questions choice of clothing, and 39% of colleges have 0 Republican professors, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXVII.

Cassandra Outlander writes a chilling exposé on Why Child Sex Abuse & Trafficking Is Allowed To Continue.

Ianto Watt tells the history of Lord Acton’s Apostasy.

Bruce Charlton writes about William Arkle and the telepathic adder—the nature of modern English magic. William Wildblood responds with his own personal Snake Stories.

Dalrock reports on Dr. Paige Patterson’s crimes against feminism. Hysteria grips Man-Up Headquarters:

As SJW’s like to say, there is no room in the world of complementarians for men or women who believe that separation, not divorce, is the biblical solution to serious abuse. Nor is there room for men or women who don’t wholly accept the feminist definition of abuse. Paige Patterson’s beliefs were thought crimes against feminism, and the leadership of the complementarian movement is proud to have made an example of him.

And perhaps a fair criticism of Jordan Peterson on his own failure to criticize PUA promiscuity. In other words, maybe Peterson can’t handle the truth.

Cologero takes a philosophical survey of The Persona and Ego.

This Week in Arts & Letters

It seems that Chris Gale’s blog still down, preventing us from retrieving last week’s postings. Looks like woes with Ghost—which people do seem to like, but transitioning can be very painful. Hopefully he sorts the issues out and is back with us next week.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Kenneth Odom believes that Aristotle Got Virtue Wrong; and he makes a good argument. John Horvat has a novel take on the Emerald Isle’s recent abortion referendum: The Druids Return to Ireland. And Terez Rose introduces Rimsky-Korsakov and his opus Scheherazade.

Richard Carroll has a Thirteenth Friend: Edmund Waller, who was a better poet than he was a Cavalier.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless begins a new series: The Occidential Origins of Race Theory (part I), Part II, and Part III. And he continues his excellent “The Image of Man|Specter of Earth” series: Part VI.

Also there, remarks on the Tommy Robinson case: Turner et al. v. Hate Speech.

This Week in the Outer Left

Craig Hickman announces that he feels like he’s in a slump, but that fresh content will come later. We look forward to the promised torrent of essays.

Tom Malleson opined in Jacobin that the U.S. should move beyond electoral democracy. No, not moving beyond electoral democracy in quite the way we want, but that’s not to say that his idea is wholly without merit. Malleson think we should go full Athenian democracy and institute sortition to choose the legislature. I say: do it, do it now. A good stiff dose of actual rule-by-amateurs democracy at the very historical moment when the Cathedral is starting to lose their grip on the narrative would not only be hilarious, but would inoculate us against any variation of democracy for generations to come.

Matt Cameron writes at The Baffler about somebody else’s babies, to use the controversial Steve King phrase. To his credit, Cameron backs away from overheated leftist rhetoric about ‘Trump administration lost 1,500 children’, but is aghast at “the forced separation of children from their asylum-seeking parents, jailed after turning themselves in at the southern border”. Put another way, he is shocked, shocked I tell you, that the law enforcement agencies of the United States would dare prosecute perpetrtors of child trafficking and remove the victims from the custody of those traffickers. Children are being uprooted from their familiar homes and communities, and forcibly moved to another country so that the parent can wail and whine that they simply must be allowed to illegally stay in the United States. Absolutely an instance of transportation of children for the purposes of exploitation. It exploits the child to play on the sympathies of well-meaning and decent Americans.

Vox is an outlet that we typically do not cover in the august pages of This Week in Reaction because they, quite frankly, aren’t worth our time. However, a piece there by Tara Burton swept through right-wing Twitter this past week, and so we choose to indulge the masses and make fun of it. Ostensibly about the religious appeal of Jordan Peterson, it was readily apparent to… well, looks like everyone… that Jordan Peterson was just the hook to get her editors to approve the story, but the primary focus was actually on the Supreme Leader of the Alt-Right™, Bronze Age Pervert (@bronzeagemantis on Twitter). Bronze Age Pervert—BAP for short—is well known among the right for his promotion of nudist bodybuilding, a tropical Hyperborea, and #HandsomeThursday posts of aesthetically developed men. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “so, some journalist wrote about a right-wing Twitter personality with 10K followers, so what?”, but what makes this so amusing is that Ms. Burton is in to BAP, really in to him… like it embarrasses bystanders how publicly she is thirsting over BAP. Let’s roll the fnord reel. Be careful, this is highly concentrated thirst-poasting from a post-Wall liberal woman, so read at your own peril.

Who is Bronze Age Pervert?

impossibly buff man “Aspiring Nudist Bodybuilder Free speech anti-xenoestrogen activist” leadership figure Pepe the Frog

MRA rhetoric “roasties” “enforced monogamy” women breeding stock celebrating #HandsomeThursdays physiques chiseled muscular Aryan Slavic men performative trolling authentic far-right

Bronze Age Pervert demigod neoreactionary proto-alt-right thinker Mencius Moldbug Bronze Age Pervert notoriety tight

anonymous leader alt-right fundamental mythic

ridiculous illustrative implicit Bronze Age Pervert explicit trolling traditionalism aesthetic embrace past order triumphant transgression

Bronze Age Pervert embodiment strange effective tension nostalgia transgression eroticized valorization splendid “warrior” bodies atavistic appeals return era men real men distillation essence

Bronze Age Pervert naked wood nymph Nietzschean

Twitter DM interview Bronze Age Pervert Homeric Classical Greek thought Tibetan Buddhism

“beauty and excellence” “biological hierarchy” privileges French Greeks Japanese dislikes Ashkenazi Jews

promised send me manifesto

absurd politically correct transgression

Bronze Age Pervert historical tradition intensifies mythic nature ideology he promotes traditionalism without a tradition valorization warrior imagery mythic heroes absence historic anchor

Bronze Age Pervert ideology platform subtext highly aesthetic ideologies made text

Peterson’s implicit rhetoric of order and chaos, once distilled, leads us inexorably to #HandsomeThursdays.

While we are certainly making sport of Ms. Burton, we do not blame her; she can, after all, only follow her hormones. But those are the words of someone who has got it bad.

However! It is the policy of TWiR to not just point and laugh at the outer left, but to applaud them when they get it right and use it as a teachable moment when they get it interestingly wrong. In her final paragraphs, Ms. Burton comes very close to something like truth regarding aesthetics, meaningful stories, and the appeal of tradition and the right.

If Tara Burton thinks this is impossibly buff, she needs to get out more.

… the fundamental draw of right-wing traditionalist ideology. It fulfills authentic needs — for meaningfulness, for a sense of structure — by providing adherents with a sense of their own “specialness” in a mythic narrative created for them, a specialness further intensified by the highly eroticized thrill of transgression.

It is easy, and necessary, to condemn the racism, sexism, and classism that make ideologies like Peterson’s so popular. But it’s vital to understand their effectiveness in order to counter it. What Peterson and even Bronze Age Pervert understand is that people fundamentally need stories of meaning, and that in an increasingly secular age, those stories are not necessarily culturally present.

It’s just a shame we don’t have better storytellers.

As I said, this is surprisingly close to truth. However, it ultimately expresses a desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. It is not due to the failures of storytellers that they are unable to balance being woke on every leftist checklist-item with providing meaningfulness and a sense of structure. The two are inherently contradictory, as the left inevitably deflates all meaning to indulging in envy, gluttony, lust, pride, etc. and actively seeks to undermine structure. I put forward the hypothesis that any mythic narrative that actually fulfills the need for meaningfulness and a sense of structure, no matter how overtly left-wing it is now, will, with continued leftward movement, be denounced as racist, sexist, and classist.

… "On the contrary, it carved a platform for itself using the part of my skull it wasn't drinking fermented soma from."

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) June 2, 2018

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson talks to Dr. Richard Haier about the neuroscience of intelligence and how a large portion of the population is born without the intelligence to lead a stable life. Haier thinks that there could be a cure for low-IQ people in the near future. Oddly enough, after an hour and a half of talking about the genetics of intelligence, race hardly comes up.

Over at Quillette, Philippe Lemoine asks if centrists are the most hostile to democracy and most supportive of an authoritarian leader. Big if true. Lyle Broom bemoans the power of the technocrats. Blake Smith recounts the history of liberal globalists using the charged word of “tribalism” to put down well-meaning people who want to preserve their culture. James Collins explains the irrationality of the Starbucks protests. Quillette’s in-house based black guy, Coleman Hughes, sheds light on the lower ethical standard of with blacks are held to.

John Inazu joins Heterodox Academy’s Half-Hour of Heterodoxy to declare diversity of thought is our strength.

Peterson documentarian David Fuller has a question for the New York Times’ Nellie Bowles and promulgators of Official Equal Pay™ Dogma:

Why are you using capitalist metrics like pay to decide on whether women have achieved equality? Isn’t that just another version of the ‘patriarchy’ controlling your minds? How has “the man” persuaded you that equal pay is the right metric to look for equal respect and value?

What makes women actually fulfilled and gives genuine meaning in life? Is it the same as for men? I doubt it, and I personally know many women who made that realisation too late in life to easily have a balanced life that included children.

Beware anyone making a Case for More Religion in Public Life. We suffer not from too little “religion in public life”, but from rather too much of it. Cf. Starbucks: Where now you can get a coffee… with a finely tuned interior disposition.

This Week… Elsewhere

TUJ presents Three Memorial Day Cheers for the Condor Principle & Three Jeers for Iraqi “Democracy”.

Late model rock-n-roll gives way to a dramatic GoT scene in Ace’s “What an unexpected pleasure”.

Arnold Kling highlights yet another Handle appearance.

Thrasymachus has remarks on Tommy Robinson. As well as upon the house of mirrors the pretty well describes the “Alt-Right”.

Who runs Heimbach? He has been a highly public figure in this kind of activity for many years, and no doubt somewhere along the line someone visited him and suggested he might like to provide useful information to some alphabet agency, or even some NGO. He may even have been assured he would do no harm to his cause, in fact he would be helping himself and his followers by keeping the heat off. And being a federal “asset” is a very nice deal, as Jeffrey Epstein shows.

Al Fin recounts The Attempted Honour Killing of Jordan B. Peterson, i.e., by former University of Toronto mentor: Bernard Schiff.

When a former friend and elderly retired academic chooses to air his personal animosities toward a colleague in public—with the clear intent to permanently damage the former friend’s reputation—some deep and usually concealed undercurrents of disturbed emotion have been unleashed with savage intent, in full public view.

This is not the act of a wise father who wishes to reconcile with an errant son and reach a quiet, private accommodation and meeting of the minds. This is the act of what seems to be a disturbed individual who is using his privileged position as former guide, mentor, and family friend to have gotten close enough to sink the knife into a vulnerable place, in the public square.

And… Jordan Peterson is Still Evolving. Also there: chronicles of the Dawn of a New Space Age. Courtesy of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Or so it is hoped.

This was alarming: The Coming Doom of the “Y” Chromosome and Human Males. Tho’ the relationship between degradation in the Y-chromosome and sperm counts are not made clear. Is it not a problem well-solved by natural selection?

PA plugs the “It’s Okay To Be White” Music Video. As subversion I can see it working. As genuine aesthetic, I’m not so sure.

The Rebe explains How Greg Cochran’s Jewish IQ Theory Helps Answer the JQ.

Lue-Yee finds a lot to like in Goebbels on Women in Society (1933). Prophetic.

Heartiste notes Fake It Till You Make It Really Works. We agree, for morally licit values of “fake it”. Also this worthwhile shiv: Behold Liberal Tolerance. My opinion is the reason liberals are much less tolerant of, say, a roommate with opposing political views their strange twist of the sanctity/purity moral axis. The idea that gays may have had buttsecks in this very hotel room doesn’t bother them. But the idea that a conservative evangelical may have slept in that very bed does. Which is why leaving innocent far-right tracts in the Gideon’s Bible might just be an effective low yield weapon.

This week in Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus does a bit of Agree & Amplify: Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Minimum Wage. He’s also given a nice facelift to the front page over there.

Oops. I missed World Goth Day. Apparently I didn’t miss much.

That’s about it, folks. Banner week for BAP, whose timing appears to be impeccable. Many thanks to my organized and talented staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Burgess McGill, and Aidan MacLear did most of the heavy lifting this week. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/06/03) appeared first on Social Matter.

Happened in April, but it was news to me: Lovable VDH get’s The New Criterion Edmund Burke Award for Service to Culture and Society, delivering remarks (video included) entitled The good populism. Or, as we like to say, “the less bad populism”. And Hanson is over at the august Hoover Institution with Ten Paradoxes Of Our Age, most about as red-pilled as you can get and still keep your job. Of course they are not at all paradoxes to readers of Social Matter.

Over at American Greatness, a celebration of the new Gay Wedding Cake orthodoxy, while that lasts at least. And coverage of The Trump-Putin Summit. Also there, an interesting shoe on the other foot story: The Cosmic Racist. Lloyd Billingsly plumbs the “Chicano” (remember that word?!!) movement and finds a big fat “Yes We Will Replace You” smack dab in the middle of it.

This Week in Bronze Age Mindset… Ah we see it is #1 New Release in Ancient Greek history, with an average of 4.9 stars. As it should be.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Alf kicks off our week around the ‘Sphere with Byzantine privacy laws (Part 3), for those who say it “probably won’t” get that bad. It can. Also there, Alf opens his heart about Love—sounds like he’s got a good thing going. Hopefully there’ll be little Alfs and Alfettes running around soon!

This week in Generative Anthropology, deep linguistic philosophy continues: Disciplining Disciplines. Along the way, a simple truth that gets almost perfectly obscured most of the time in the modern mindset:

There is only one political principle or axiom worth anything, and that’s because it is converted into an anti-political axiom when adhered to: if you give someone the responsibility to carry out some task or function, you must give them the power they need to do it. It’s difficult, but possible to imagine forms of democracy that accord with this insistence, at least for a while; it’s impossible to imagine any form of liberalism that does. Liberalism compulsively undercuts any form of delegated responsibility—even one as simple as “maintain public order” must be subject to “checks and balances,” “oversight,” “review,” etc., at every level and at every moment. That liberal societies function at all is due to the fact that most of any social order is run non-liberally, liberalism being wholly parasitic on established civilizational forms.

We are aware that Adam’s often dense philosophy is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he is one of only a handful of people (with perhaps a few fingers left over) who’s doing fundamental philosophy of human social organization, certainly whilst retaining both feet in securely in reality. It’s important work, and he deserves the sort of readers with the chops to handle that sort of thing. He snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention along the way.

In preparation for the Centennial of Armistice Day, Quincy Latham notes: World War I was a mess. In almost every conceivable way of course. But less often observed…

The shocking thing about the Great War wasn’t the death toll or the carnage of modern weaponry or even the ruinous trench-warfare strategies. The most shocking thing was simply how much the citizenry paid their rulers so they could fight one another. They paid taxes, of course. But stranger still, they voluntarily lent their states money on top of what they legally owed.

Come to think of it, that really is the $64,000 Question. Answers may surprise you.

Also at Quas Lacrimas, Latham looks at War and demonization and the goodie-two-shoe liberals who absolutely fostered it. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Spandrell offers paean to David Irving: The State Religion. And an embedded BBC video worth watching.

Giovanni Dannato writes in defense of The New (Old) Social Science in Human “Stupidity” Comes From Conflict of Interest. We only go to war with unspeakable devils, so no mercy. Unless they’re Viet Cong, of course, then strictest adherence to rules.

Nicolas Hausdorf returns to the pages of Jacobite to discuss
Willpower and Will-to-Power.

Over at Malcolm Pollack’s place, Not Hillary, Day 506 and the photograph heard round the world. And… There She Was♪ … ♫ Miss America ♪:

The contestants will also be asked how to meet five-year Party goals for increased agricultural production and improved worker morale.

Soviet-style humor, coming soon to an empty grocer’s shelf near you.

Speaking of Soviet-style… Friend of This Blog Anatoly Karlin shares another of his Egor Kholmogorov translations, this time dropping some science on the troubling phenomenon of Russian Stalinophilia: Stalin is not great. Bit of a preaching to the choir thing for us, but worth reading for the Russian nationalist case against Stalin. But at least he wasn’t an FDR.

By way of Isegoria… (by way of Slatestarcodex (by way of Jordan Peterson)): Political activism is the opiate of the masses—hard to disagree. A damning indictment of democracy, even the idealized kind. When do demonstrations become riots? The answer may surprise you. Related: “boredom is your friend”. I sure hope David Hines is reading… More and more and MOAR from David Collins. Finally remembering Anthony Bourdain, of whom I, an admitted Chef Show Imbiber™, had never heard.

Finally this week’s epistle at Cambria Will Not Yield: One Particular God. Inspiring, as usual:

If white Christians really want to do something about the liberals’ reign of cruelty, they must leave the democratic process, which includes peaceful protests, behind and make the great return: They must return to the blood and soil faith of their European ancestors. And I am not referring to our pagan ancestors, I am referring to the followers of Odin who bent their knees to Christ without sacrificing any of the fighting spirit that inspired them to fight for Odin. The Christian Europeans such as Alfred did not become lesser men when they took on the mantle of Christ, they became greater men, because the measure of man is what he fights for. How can there be anything greater than His reign of charity?

Amen!

This Week in Social Matter

Another sleepy week here at Social Matter as Summer Vacation Season kicks off in earnest. The Myth of the 20th Century guys are joined by Lynn Lockhart Episode 73: African Decolonization—Empire Of Dust, in which Star Trek’s prime directive makes a crucial appearance. The panel are not united on what burden the white man might have there. Interesting conversation. My own sense is that Africa did not and still does not present a much different moral or strategic case than North America once did. Europeans, especially those of the Super-Hajnal variety, are generally very good at government: People of all kinds are generally willing to pay a fair price for it.

And for Saturday Poetry & Prose, an evocative bit of verse from Carl Hildebrand: Gone To The Templar Knights (The Complaint Of Gerard de Ridefort). La Wik if it helps to decipher.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Over at West Hunter, Gregory Cochran tells us there’s a chance of the existence of an advantageous and special cell exclusively transmitted through the female line.

Evolutionist XX kicks her week off by going meta: What IS “Social Studies”? (I think she means “ARE”, but we’ll that slide.)

Tarker, “Yanomamo Indians of South America”. Available in giclée print.

The question bugged me for months, until Napoleon Chagnon—or more accurately, the Yanomamo—provided an answer.

Chagnon is a anthropologist who carefully documented Yanomamo homicide and birth rates, and found that the Yanomamo men who had killed the most people went on to father the most children–providing evidence for natural selection pressures making the Yanomamo more violent and homicidal over time, and busting the “primitive peoples are all lovely egalitarians with no crime or murder” myth.

In an interview I read recently, Chagnon was asked what the Yanomamo made of him, this random white guy who came to live in their village. Why was he there?

The answer shouldn’t surprise you, dear reader. But remarkably concise, nonetheless. Don’t wanna steal that thunder. There is much more to read in this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

EvX Book Club continues with excerpts from and discussion of Auerswald’s The Code Economy ch. 1.

And a new series kicks off for Anthropology Friday: Appalachia, pt 1/4, featuring Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913).

By way of Audacious Epigone… From the GSS: Racial preferences are unpopular; Or why the Sailer Strategy is an electoral winner. Praise for Nick Fuentes, King of Amren. And, surprise, centrists find politics boring, wish it would go away, a trait shared by the extreme right, by the way, if only the political compass measured that far right.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First, Porter comments on the recent Masterpiece Courtshop, er, Cakeshop, case. You generally don’t want to miss his perspective on the doings of SCOTUS:

What was more striking than normal, though, was the real estate [Kennedy] devoted to pronouncing upon each party’s mindset. Pleasant and generous thoughts he thus found produce constitutional behavior, while callous or churlish impulses were impermissible. And so if the verdict hinges on the mind, why even ask what the body did? I can’t overstate how much Ahmed and Jose’s children will come to regret this devolving legal doctrine..

Then, he has us All Rise for the reading of his verdict on the Court:

I frequently ridicule the court, as it is populated by such pompous star-gazers. But the truth is they have an impossible chore before them. The constitution was written for a homogeneous society of high trust and personal responsibility. It does not function in anything else. Because it does not function in its original form, justices have turned to invisible penumbrae as a means of changing the rules necessitated by a changing society.

And finally, Porter schools us on how to engage the Left rhetorically in Right, Now Go:

Pete could have dug ruts in the rhetorical road arguing whether souls are actually tainted by fermented hops. Or he could have chosen a more customary conservative counter attack: pointing out the poisons Steve doesn’t find disagreeable. But those tactics grant your opponent’s position something even more valuable than legitimacy. They grant them respect.

Pete wasn’t saying Steve was wrong, he was saying he didn’t care. Steve’s strictures were not Pete’s. And assuming they must be was an unspoken imposition that in subtext was meant to establish who was calling the shots. If I’m dictating your morality, then you have a new boss.

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Over at our sister publication Thermidor, retired editor P. T. Carlo (living on a pension no doubt) begins a new long-term project: a systematic review of Sam Francis’s Leviathan and Its Enemies. Francis was a modern thinker of remarkable insight, and Carlo is going chapter-by-chapter to understand and explain his work. The first chapter focuses on the rise of the managerial class.

The forces of the “Old Right” thought themselves, correctly or not, as the rightful heirs and defenders of the old Bourgeois, the “Optimates.” But this class, whom they idolized and pretended to belong to, was, even by the mid-1950’s, rapidly collapsing. So much so that, in the present day, it’s become increasingly obvious that this class barely exists in any meaningful way at all, with what [remnants] remain having been more or less absorbed into the managerial elite (a fact which Moldbug also acknowledged himself).

A terrific project. And an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention. We look forward to further installments from Mr. Carlo.

Next up, Richard Carroll strolls through the Forum once again discussing The Lively (and Nauseous) Genius of Martial’s Epigrams.

Like his predecessor [Catullus], Martial is known for his short, often comical poems skewering fair-weather friends, the shallow rich, and promiscuous men and women, among other (mostly) deserving targets. However, he doesn’t work in obscenity and abuse quite as often as Catullus.

Jake Bowyer discusses the rise of the nationalist Right in Slovenia and Italy in Lilliput Unbowed.

Finally, N. T. Carlsbad skewers an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the Right with the idea of the Old and New Conservatism (1852). The culprit here is Wilhelm von Merckel (relation to Frau Doktor Merkel unknown). This too snagged an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Over at Matt Briggs’, he examines Why Younger Evangelicals Waver in Support for Israel, and with a stop along the way at Hal Lindsey’s Late, Great Planet Earth, which was for a while more popular than the Beatles. He also provides a Lovely Example of Statistics Gone Bad:

The blue line did not happen. The gray envelope did not happen. What happened where those teeny tiny too small block dots, dots which fade into obscurity next to the majesty of the statistical model. Reality is lost, reality is replaced. The model becomes realer than reality.

You cannot help but be drawn to the continuous sweet blue line, with its guardian gray helpers, and think to yourself “What smooth progress!” The black dots become a distraction, an impediment, even. They soon disappear.

Like all of us he breathes a short sigh of relief about the Mild & Temporary Victory Over Gmarriage, or at least compulsory gay wedding cakes. Back to philosophy of science in The Epidemiologist Fallacy Strikes Again: Premature Birth Rate Edition, featuring those pesky p-values. Finally… Insanity & Doom Update XXXVIII. Water is to California is food on shelves was to the USSR.

Bonald reviews Ed Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction (2014). Final cause, it seems, is alive and well.

Up Down Under at the Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson dissects the Having it All mentality.

Busy week over at The Orthosphere proper… J. M. Smith makes an Apologia pro vita sua to a “concerned reader” (who probably wasn’t worth his time). Then this gem from Smith: There is Trouble in River City. There is a problem with “we”, and it isn’t exactly new. Compelling historical and cultural analysis. A taste:

The banks are, of course, symbols of the Americans’ transactional society, knit together by the “cash nexus.” The courthouse and jail are symbols of the legal scaffolding that transactional society requires after the decay of tradition. Henry Sumner Maine called this the replacement of status by contract. All three buildings have the form of a temple since they the holy places of the Americans; but they are also, and just as rightly, ersatz temples of unseasoned pine.

Carlyle explained the connection between the cash nexus and legalism in his priceless catechism of “pig philosophy” (Later Day Pamphlets, 1858). This is Carlyle’s name for Manchester Liberalism, and it is all but indistinguishable from Irving’s frontier republicanism.

This was incredibly powerful too:

Transactional societies flourish for a spell, and then seem to die of acedia. I believe [this] is what we are seeing in the melancholy spectacle of the collapsing West. We have pulled down our ancestral houses and felled our sheltering trees. We have raised our holy trinity of banks, courthouses and jails. We have dug our canals, and laid our railroads, and counted our profits, and been overcome, at last and of a sudden, by a terrible weariness.

Prophetic. Sounds similar to Brezhnev Era Sclerosis. Our task is to heed the warning, so the prediction doesn’t come true. Please do RTWT. Professor Smith snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his troubles here.

Kristor pops in with a quick article on The Arms Race to the Degenerate Bottom, i.e., of industrial strength attention grabbing. Thomas Bertonneau finds a particularly heinous example.

J. M. Smith, who was just on fire this week, finds in the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, A Sudden, Inexorable and Appalling Fit of Unlust. Not at all unrelated to his previous post.

Bourdain’s fourth virtue was, of course, his love of “fine food and drink,” for gourmandizing is to my generation what poetry was to the Victorians. This gourmandizing is a natural part of our dominant “pig philosophy,” the cognoscenti of which spice their hogwash with words. A glutton really likes food; a gourmand has reasons he really likes food. A gourmand is also, as Epicurus long ago taught, a rational hedonist with the intelligence and willpower to maximize his gustatory pleasure over the course of a lifetime.

“Virtue” that is in our flat modernist culture that cannot distinguish between “virtue” and “value”. Smith earns an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his astute commentary here, as well.

Dalrock discovers a dafter than usual proposal: “science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention”… which would surely fix everything for women in STEM. And, in time for Fathers’ Day this year, a sampling of the contempt for fathers common within Christian circles.

Cane Caldo wonders Where are all the clergy? I.e., on the dissident right. I think their mostly overseeing parishes where English is not the primary liturgical language.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Gratuitous girl smoking pic.

Chris Gale is back, continuing the series of Sydney for Saturday and Locke on Sunday. Reading the untransliterated version, from a time when thots patrolled themselves, is nice and bracing, and probably good for the soul. And also, Kipling as Satirist

At the Imaginative Conservative, Louis Markos props the book Augustine’s “Confessions” Unpacked.

City Journal’s Inez Stepman details Trump’s Small Strikes Against the Administrative State, which we here at Social Matter all know the proper name for. And hopefully he is only laying the foundations for a much larger one.

Richard Carroll points us over to Thermidor, where he reviews The Lively (and Nauseous) Genius of Martial’s Epigrams. Perhaps my recent cracking open of Spengler has prejudiced me, but I’ve come to see the Romans as little less degenerate than our contemporaries.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless continues The Occidental Origins of Race Theory, with Part III, introducing Prof. Blumenbach, who was a good century ahead of Darwin.

This Week in the Outer Left

A slow week from the lefties this week. We can only assume that they are reeling and on their back foot due to the release of Bronze Age Mindset.

At Jacobin, Kyle Burke alleges that a few hundred soldiers of fortune who went to fight communists in 1970s Africa were somehow key to neoconservative foreign policy and the development of companies like Blackwater. Obvious nonsense, but things concerning Rhodesia tend to be of interest to those in our neck of the woods. Check this out though:

For those who had fought in southern Africa—or more often fantasized about it—the dissolution of Rhodesia after 1978 foretold a frightening future that might befall the United States. Many believed that communists, liberals, African Americans, Jews, and foreigners—or some combination of those groups—were trying to establish a totalitarian state in which guns would be illegal, religion outlawed, and racial mixing compulsory.

Throw in Sam Hyde’s “state-enforced homosexuality”, and well… where’s the lie?

Umair Haque is witch-hunter, very brave, besieged about by incredibly powerful, mind-controlling Right Wingers: He alone has escaped to share Ten Techniques Authoritarians Use to Bend and Twist Reality (and How to Fight Them.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

In a busy week for Jordan Peterson, he transcribes his entire Easter lecture on the death and resurrection of Christ. The Canadian psychologist also records a podcast sharing his thoughts on the Munk Debate where black-civil-rights-preacher-caricature Eric Michael Dyson proclaimed that what Peterson, the “mean, mad white man”, calls political correctness, he calls progress. Or, what JBP calls immoral, Dyson calls strategy. Also joining the podcast is Russell Brand, who’s a communist, but he’s for viewpoint diversity on campus so it’s chill.

It seems like almost every week some major news publication writes a Peterson character assassination piece. Not to be left out, Vox brought in a female psychology professor, and self-proclaimed “feminist philosopher”, from Cornell to claim Peterson doesn’t care about rape victims and that he admires school shooters. Peterson responds.

At Quillette, Greg Ashman bemoans Australia’s adoption of progressive education methods and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence on the matter. Clay R. Fuller says nations around the world are becoming less liberal and democratic over time. You can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she’ll hurry on back. When asking what’s wrong with the American academy, Jonny Anomaly quips, “when the price of bulls*** is zero, demand is inelastic.” And Musa al-Gharbi analyzes the demographic statistics from the 2016 presidential election.

Heterodox Academy’s Seth D. Kaplan sheds light on how not just politically dissenting viewpoints are being suppressed on campus, but traditional Christian religious views are also. Wait, aren’t they supposed to be the suppressors?

Finally, a boatload of demographic geekery from our Favorite Living Demographer, Lyman Stone, who has Updates on a Few City Populations.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA shares a heartwarming story by way of Spanish translation about “Having it all”: Carpe Diem. Also, more translation from the Original Polish: Reconciliation Songs.

A striking admission from David Chapman: Circumscription: a logical farce.

Over at Al Fin’s Next Level: Behold Venezuela! Bernie Sanders Country. Well Venezuela was a paradise for the greedy capitalist fat cats messed it all up, right? Also there, a review of Accomplishments in Trumps’ First 500 days—a surprisingly long list. Still no wall, doe, last I checked. Also a bit, but only a bit of satire (the rest was real): Vibranium Asteroid Disappears Over Wakanda.

This too: an extended meditation on Lord of the Flies: World Without Men—only boys set adrift.

Heartiste has a well-constructed difference of opinion with JBP on Sex-Based Status.

Social Matter almnus Benjamin Welton returns to Zeroth Position with a post-mortem: How Leftism Killed the Boy Scouts.

While membership in the organization has been dropping since at least 2005, the new, softer Boy Scouts is leaking membership and driving away boys at unprecedented rates. If one cannot be a boy in the Boy Scouts, than where can one be a boy in 21st century America? Not only are the old civic bonds of yesteryear decaying thanks to demographic changes and the dysgenic sexual revolution, but public schooling, the one major institution that almost all boys must suffer through in their lives, holds them to the same standards as young girls.

Of course, it didn’t start out that way at all. Welton traces the origins of the Boy Scouts beck to Baron Robert Baden-Powell, a man of action whose missions brought him under Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company.

Baden-Powell joined the BSAC in 1896 and soon became one of their ablest commanders. In Southern Rhodesia, Baden-Powell learned expert tracking and scouting from the American Frederick Russell Burnham. Burnham, like Rhodes, realized the economic and civilizational potential in southern Africa, and alongside Baden-Powell, he helped to put down the rebellious Ndebele and Shona tribes who had earlier began killing off the small white population. During this bush war, Baden-Powell, Burnham, and about 400 white militiamen defended the city of Bulawayo against overwhelming odds and led reconnaissance missions deep into the heart of enemy territory.

And much more. After an astoundingly close call in the Boer War, the British began to realize they were becoming perhaps a bit too civilized. (Well, I’d call that mal-civilized rather than too, but… point taken.) The vision for the Boy Scouts grew out of this need to train boys to be men well-qualified for hardships in the wilds of the then far-flung British Empire. Welton traces the history through a remarkable heyday and into these final decades of decline, by multiple factors. With a mighty attractive proposed counter-measure at the end. Welton impressed The Committee, who bestowed an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his fine work here.

A brief but salient note from Arnold Kling on Student debt and inequality:

For several years, I have believed that the higher education system impairs economic mobility. It certainly serves to segregate affluent young adults from non-affluent young adults.

Education, once mythologized as a great equalizer, is actually the great un-equalizer. Hard to disagree. See also, Kling’s classical liberal to classical liberal review of Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.

Local Kiwi news, but pertaining to a global (Anglo) pattern: Xavier Marquez writes passionately Against Renaming Victoria.

Roman Dmowski offers a Periodic Roundup (During Twitter Purgatory). A round-up largely orthogonal to mine. So… diversity!

Pearls of wisdom from Ace this week: “Staring at the shadows; blowing smoke rings at the moon…” Or, ways to not be successful with women.

That’s all folks. Sorry this was a bit late. A busy couple of days quite apart from regular duties. Many thanks to my sturdy staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Burgess McGill, and Aidan MacLear bore much of the load this week. Hans der Fiedler was off this week. We look forward to his safe and soon return. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/06/10) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week in American Greatness, Ken Masugi analyzes the Supreme Court Gay Gake ruling: Cake, Conscience, and Kangaroo Courts. Also: No, Tariffs Are Not ‘Domestic Sanctions’, countering one of the stupider pieces of spaghetti thrown against the wall by neoliberal elites. And Thank God Trump Isn’t a Foreign Policy Expert. No, seriously, thank God!

Arnold Kling engages Eric Weinstein on the IDW—i.e., the “Intellectual Dark Web”.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

A flurry of activity up at Northern Dawn. First a Weekly Roundup 06/12/2018 of news relevant to Canadian (and Anglophone) restorationists. And then this was a real tour-de-force: Mark Christensen takes a saber and begins Cutting Through Nationalism’s Gordian Knot. He shows, conclusively, that the ol’ “Civic Nationalism” vs. “Ethnic Nationalism” debate is not merely a false dichotomy, but hopelessly shipwrecked on erroneous ideas about human nature. He exposes ineluctable flaws in both systems of thought.

Happy Fathers’ Day!

All societies we think of as “great civilizations” begin as much smaller entities, at the mercy of the great powers of their own day. But as time goes on, they are able to project growing economic, military, political, and cultural power. This is a dynamic process, but not a consistent one. A new invention, alliance, religion, or military victory can massively expand a society’s sphere of influence. But a factor which is more consistent is that the expansion of a society depends on that society’s governing elites. They must make correct decisions, exercise sound judgement, maintain their skill in politics and war, and have the confidence to expand their influence. At some point, their position as a great power in the world causes an elite to develop norms of governance, symbolism, and historical narrative. Collectively, this creates a vision of what their polity’s position should be and how it should be ruled. We might say that the elite forms an imperial idea.

Nationalism of any form lacks Imperial Mindset. Your private seastead of may have no interest in Empire, but rest assured Empire is going to take an active interest in you. Especially seeing as whatever peace and prosperity you gain will be built upon the back of it. Please do RTWT! Arguably canon quality work from Christensen here, and a “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award crack out of the box.

An intriguing blog, The New Statecraft Project, popped onto the scene without me noticing a couple months ago. Pretty solid stuff all around from anonymous contributor(s). This week: Some Social Technologies of Interest. Keeping an eye on this space.

Shylock Holmes engages in some post-game analysis of The Red, White and Green March. Many of us remember the great Camp of Saints scenario shaping up in April. Few of us actually recall what happened. Holmes engages in some speculation about what might have been, if the conflict had been allowed to come to a head:

Let’s consider the event where the protesters mass at the Mexican border and begin to stream across. Nation Guard units stand opposed, with instructions to stop them at all costs. The order is given to fire. Against all likelihood, the troops actually fire.

Congratulations, random National Guardsman who gave the order! You get to be painted as the modern William Calley, subjected to imprisonment and approbation for the rest of your life. Except it’s The Current Year, not 1971, and some Democrat-appointed judge just can’t wait to paste you with life in prison to set an example to not violate Steve Sailer’s Zeroth Ammendment to the Constitution.

But deep down, everyone knows this is what will happen, and calculates accordingly.

Fortunately that didn’t happen. Trump engaged the services of American satellites Mexico and Honduras. Muy clean. By the time the long march ended, the news cycle had long waned. Score one for ADHD. Along the way though, Holmes digs up an important historical analog to the Mestizo March, namely, the Green March. Which worked about as intended. Proving the maxim: If you’re going to pretend to be willing to fire on unarmed invaders… you’d better fire on unarmed invaders. Holmes earn an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent analysis.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam takes an appropriately deep dive into Morality and Reference.

Over at Quas Lacrimas, a repost of Quincy Latham’s Review of Martin Jay’s Reason After its Eclipse (2016), which “represents the culmination of Jay’s many decades of research into the intellectual history of critical theory in general and the Frankfurt School in particular”. If you, like me, never heard of the site “TAM” where this review was originally published, you’d better skedaddle over and read this. A taste…

In RAIE, Jay is not interested in the history of this cultural turn (the subject of his earlier books) but rather in the Frankfurt School’s underlying rejection of instrumental reason: what, exactly, was the nature of the alternative they saw, the “objective” or “substantive” reason which they championed but rarely deigned to define? What was it that the cultural Marxists (most notably, Max Horkheimer in his The Eclipse of Reason) thought had been eclipsed by the cancerous growth of its own “instrumental” aspects?

Jay, it must be noted, is sympathetic to the Institut für Sozialforschung. Nevertheless…

Happy Fathers’ Day!

Ultimately not only the entirely Bolshevik movement, but even the kind of mainstream conservative apparatchiks who commute from Alexandria to their think-tank jobs in D.C. became intimately comfortable with a certain multi-pronged attack on “instrumental” reason. Fetishism, bad faith, and “unmasking” have become the bread and butter of mainstream social analysis. With any sort of consistent or systematic application, such rhetorical maneuvering soon amounts to a taboo on any grounds for abstraction, for impartiality, or for realism: in effect, a taboo on thought itself. Nothing is left of reason, once the supposedly “instrumental” part of it has been excised, but the sort of droning, cabalistic chant which has characterized the spiritless liturgy of progressive thought for the last century or more.

This may be have been a re-run from Latham’s perspective, but for most of us it will be new. And there is much much more there. Do RTWT! This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Also there, a Note on Public Housing Statistics, which are not surprising but might be occasionally useful for making a leftist feel ashamed of himself for lying.

Spandrell takes a decidedly contrarian view on The Past and Future of Korea. I.e., that the Norks aren’t giving up their nukes, and the U.S. isn’t going to leave South Korea. This is all mixed with a suitably entertaining bit of Korea-mockery, linguistic analysis, and Asian history.

Sarah Perry delivers a long-form rebuttal of classical causation in The Well-Being Machine.

At Jacobite, Chris Morgan offers up some fiction: In Defense of Myself.

In just before the close bell for last week’s “this week”… Social Pathologist posts Some Thoughts on the Child Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church.

Anatoly “Friend of Social Matter” Karlin assesses the (physical) strength of nations. He was originally motivated to investigate the popular notion that Gauls and Germans were individually stronger than Romans. However, the research appears to have taken on a life of its own and Karlin ended up doing a much broader comparison on grip strength variations between nations and sexes. Some takeaways: northern Europeans tend to be stronger than southern, Icelanders are almost freakishly strong, and the average south Asian male is about as strong as the average Swedish or Polish female. I would be derelict in my duty if I failed to point out that India has the highest rate of vegetarianism (38%!). “Vegetarianism: Not Even Once!!

Over at Malcolm Pollack’s: Racist Things #103 and #104. And just how racist was Albert Eistein Et Tu, Al?

By way of Isegoria… by way of Quillette: “If you want to profit from expertise, you must first tame it”. Forensic analysis of WW1: Strategists had planned for one set of crises, but got another. I hate when that happens. A bit of EE-geekery: Re-creating the first flip-flop, takes me back to the days when electrical engineering was actually about, ya know, electricity. And some pearls from Taleb: “We’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany” and “Some religions are religions” (others just bodies of laws).

Finally this week in CWNY, a missive: Even Unto the End of the World.

This Week in Social Matter

Hubert Collins kicks off a busy week in these parts with the fourth annual Sucker of the Summer award. The 2018 winner, amid stiff competition… Andrew Sullivan. For quite a while, Sullivan was the voice of a generation, but then, inexplicably, the crows came home to roost…

American politics is now a zero-sum struggle for power between warring and fundamentally incompatible tribes. Andrew Sullivan does not care for this landscape: it does not suit him constitutionally and it does not engage him intellectually. Like a lot of members of his generation, he clearly wishes it could be another way, and on some level, he does not understand how things ended up like this, and why we cannot all agree to go back to being the way we were.

Basically, Sullivan became a grumpy, old (gay, GOPe) man.

Next, Editor-in-Chief Hadley Bishop steps up to the podium to deal with a very serious problem: How To Plagiarize Social Matter Without Actually Getting Caught. It’s an exceedingly dry-witted takedown of Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, wherein we find egregious acts of plagiarism against the very men, against whom she claims to pure-heartedly inveigh. Yes, Angela, we know: We’re irresistable…

Happy Fathers’ Day!

Nagle’s been widely accused of being a secret white supremacist or having some level of deep ideological affiliation with the far-right, which makes people mad and provides motives for digging into her work to find wrongs. And in fact, Charles Davis and others have found those wrongs in the form of plagiarism. There are probably a host of other works in non-controversial areas that are shot through with plagiarism in even more offensive and blaring ways than Kill All Normies, but who cares about that, anyway? It’s not salient. That person is already on your team. No need to look into work too closely. Scrutiny is for suspected traitors, not loyal allies.

Is Nagle actually deeply sympathetic to the far-right? In reality, when the caricatures are so obnoxiously false and lazy, it’s hard not to gain some amount of sympathy for a group that’s been so hysterically maligned that it makes you laugh and laugh when you discover the truth.

The Committee were in no way influenced by Bishop’s station in awarding him an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his efforts here.

Benjamin Welton, fresh off an award-winning essay last week at Zeroth Position, returns to the august pages of Social Matter for a survey of Anarcho-Monarchism, Anarcho-Fascism, And The Anarch.

While American individualism has always been more fiction than fact, there are anarchist philosophies worth studying. Three will be highlighted in this article: anarcho-monarchism, anarcho-fascism, and the anarch. Each attempts to achieve personal freedom and liberty for the individual outside of the delusion of mass democracy. Tellingly, each philosophy believes that liberty cannot coexist with libertinism or hedonism. All three agree that something must be done in order to change the rot of liberal modernism.

For the first of these, Welton turns to no stranger to regular readers here: Insula Qui and her Anarcho-Monarchism: A Collection of Essays. Welton’s anarchophilic tendencies do show through on thin edges, but that doesn’t mean his isn’t a very useful bit of analysis. There is much the admired in the anarch, all the more when he stoically awaits the arrival of the True King. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

For Thursday, new-comer Pedro Blas Gonzalez has review of Erasmus’ The Praise Of Folly.

The Praise of Folly is a work of satire. However, in Erasmus’ case satire acts as a mirror that is placed in front of man, while the author dares the reader to ignore the truths it conveys about us. The book begins with frolicsome folly sizing up her listeners. In the latter part of the work folly unleashes a tempest of chastisement on man. Like the vast majority of authors and thinkers that make up the Western Canon, Erasmus was a spiritual aristocrat, in addition to being a Christian non-conformist. These qualities make Erasmus a solitary thinker—a precondition for intellectual honesty.

One wonders if Erasmus may have been too harsh on hypocrisy, however. And whether by his influence came the West’s debilitating allergy to it. Hypocrisy is, after all, merely the tax vice pays to virtue. Certainly that’s a bad thing, but not as bad as failing to pay taxes due.

Friday brings, as always, the Myth of the 20th Century podcast. This week’s subject, Episode 74: Like the Roman—Enoch Powell—50 Years of Blood. And just how prophetic he was.