Well, this week ended with a Croatian loss in the World Cup Final. But well-wishes for Croatia were common throughout the sphere. Congratulations to France… and her former African colonies. Better luck next year, Croatia!

This week in American Greatness, Pedro Gonzalez notes America Is Not a Nation of Immigrants. A nation of settlers is far more like it. And this was interesting: Refighting the Indian Wars, apparently some text of the Declaration of Independence is a bit too hot to handle these days. Liberalism eating itself: Delicious! And Michael Walsh is triumphant about Dem prospects in November: Over in a Barrel, Democrats Hurtle Toward the Rocks Below. Well… let’s hope he’s right.

VDH is over at the venerable Hoover Institution explaining why Why Europe Gets No Respect.

Arnold Kling points to, I cannot tell whether approvingly or not, Mary Eberstadt’s Two Nations, Revisited, in which “she attempts to tie nearly every contemporary social problem to the sexual revolution and family breakdown”. Ummm… well, that does sound about right.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week at Northern Dawn, a now regular update Weekly Update on matters of interest north of the 49th parallel. Plus an excellent essay from Constantin de Mestre on Uncertain Future: The State Of Canadian Arctic Sovereignty. He reviews the current geopolitical state of the arctic, contemplates what impact global warming, should it happily prove to be true, might have on an uptick in interest in the region, and advocates compellingly for a strong Canadian military presence there. He contends that Canada should not depend upon America’s global empire for a quick defense—an empire in decline and spread thin across too many theaters.

Our friends up at the New Statecraft Project have up an outline and commentary on the Three Estates of Society.

The subject of discipline (qua excellence or expertise) remains a focus in Generative Anthropology this week Adam has: Learning, Discipline and the Thought Experiment. Before we determine true or false, we have to determine meaningful or meaningless, which is what disciplines are for. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Neoabsolutism fires an opening salvo at Steven Pinker’s unseemly devotion to The Enlightenment. We expect many more to come on that topic in the coming weeks here at Social Matter.

Spandrell offers a boatload of commentary and analysis on the Thai cave rescue—and the broader Southeast Asian socio-political landscapes—in the Black Swans of Common Knowledge.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

40 people died on a boat accident in Phuket last week too. The news was huge in China, because most of the dead were Chinese, and yes, the operator of the boat was also Chinese. The Thais weren’t interested in Chinese deaths, besides laughing at them, and the Western press isn’t interested in Chinese deaths either, so that news is not consequential. It’s not interesting, and so its not common knowledge. The 13 boys in a cave, though, that’s a good story, and so it spread. It spread so much that it became common knowledge. And when something is common knowledge, people must have an opinion on them. You gotta talk about something, right? Conversation is a way to convey information, but there’s only a real need for so much information most of the time. 90% of conversation is just a way of testing your peers and see if you can pick up some status from them. And that’s the most basic form of politics.The most important invention of the 20th century wasn’t antibiotics, or the airplane. It was TV.

From the perspective of social coordination it’s hard to argue against that.

If the Thai government hand’t delivered in rescuing the kids, it may very well have fallen. Which is crazy. Think about it. How many things are the responsibility of a government? Governments employ millions of people. They manage huge heaps of affairs, many of them extremely important. Food supply, the military, industrial policy, education, trade; you name it. A government should be judged by how it does the things it’s designed to do. Not by how it manages to save 12 dumb kids and their dumb coach who in some fateful day as an election campaign was getting started, decided to go 4 km into a damn flooded cave.

The government of Thailand probably can control it’s own broadcasters. But it can’t control the English-language ones. That’s what makes the English-language broadcasters sovereign. Fortunately, they got the kids out. RTWT. Spandrell snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his fine work here.

Social Pathologist has a really fine essay up on Catholic Inertia, which is definitely worth your attention. He is correct on many points. But I think it is a fundamental error to lay the responsibility for the problems of modernity upon the Church, much less the solution. By my accounting, the Church held out admirably for a couple centuries against aggressive states fully under the sway of a competing religion. By now, the Institutional Church has mostly capitulated. You either play with the new boss, or you’re assigned to a bishopric in Outer Slobovia. In short, a poisonous state got us (and the whole world) into this situation; only a Restored State can get us out of it. Meanwhile, of course, Church clerics should, and even sometimes do, teach the irreformable truths of the Faith and encourage heroic virtue in the face of overwhelming odds.

Politics is downstream of culture and religion… WHICH IN TURN are downstream of power.

There is only so long the humans governing the Church could hold out. Honestly, Rome resisted modernism far longer than could reasonably be expected.

We are now in need of a Constantine. https://t.co/xFNJLZsfty

— The Nick B. Steves (@Nick_B_Steves) July 13, 2018

Our old friend Sarah Perry makes an Hedonic Audit, or at least worse and better ways to pull it off.

Alfred Woensalaer contemplates What enlightenment is. “[A] human in peak performance is indistinguishable from magic”.

Just in before the ringing of the TWiR Week Bell… Atavisionary has a vid that explains Why games go politically correct, and then of course suck thereafter.

And from Anti-Gnostic, a refreshingly cold bucket of ice water thrown on the fevered imagination of Nth-wave feminists: Women and men.

First, women are, in fact, the “weaker sex.” Women’s political clout depends on having enough men agreeing with them to enforce their policy preferences. If the men don’t buy in to the program, say, the criminalization of rape, then nothing gets enforced. The laws don’t get passed, the wars don’t get fought, the bad men don’t get arrested. An all-female military or police force would just get laughed at. The physically fit men would leave, taking their wives who like masculine men with them, and the remaining masculine females would be reduced to bullying geriatric and disabled men and calling each other bitch. Women are neither physically equipped nor mentally wired to be violent enforcers of a social order. Again, if the men don’t have a buy-in, they won’t enforce anything. Marriage and parenting give men a stake in female safety and bodily integrity.

As is so often the case, the very predations for which feminists seek a remedy are solved by, and only by, Patriarchy alone. Bonus points for the TMBG. Anti-Gnostic snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his efforts on this one.

Over at Jacobite, Christopher DeGroot provides careful commentary on The Intellectual Dark Web’s Unwise Center. In the first half, DeGroot picks apart the classical liberals’ pretensions of being the voice of Reason crying out in the midst of ideological madness.

Although they present themselves as constituting a kind of “wise center,” it must be said that The Intellectual Dark Web, insofar as they purport to provide a classical liberal solution to the modern moral-political situation—which is a hard, justificatory question of how people with incompatible values and interests shall live together—is in grave error. For classical liberalism has never provided such a solution, nor can it.

In the second half, DeGroot debunks the hagiographic history of liberalism and argues that reason is on the side of the Right.

More people in this country used to feel virtuous, essentially affective motivation thanks to religion. Undoubtedly, that was a vital function. “Wisdom is cold and to that extent stupid,” said Wittgenstein. “Faith on the other hand is a passion.” But God is dead, and so mankind has a new idol. Its name is Reason, and its faith lies in the belief that men and women—who are, one knows, such rational and fair-minded creatures—shall employ argument and debate to arrive at a collective conception of how to live well together.

Reason is definitely a good, but it also is not God. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

By way of Isegoria… A civil defense film from 1978 Protection in the Nuclear Age. Mercantilism was never about economics. Forty-five things learned in the gulag—chilling. Richard Feynman has a powerful heuristic: The best design uses gears from the middle of the list. A bit on Toxic Femininity. And Liquid fluorine is spectacular—no doubt.

Finally this week’s missive from CWNY: parables of The Young Drummer and the Good Samaritan.

This Week in Social Matter

Hubert Collins kicks of the week at Social Matter with selections from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: How To Ascend Despair. A small taste (of Aurelius)…

Whatever befalls, Nature has either prepared you to face it or she has not. If something untoward happens which is within your powers of endurance, do not resent it, but bear it as she has enabled you to do. Should it exceed those powers, still do not give way to resentment; for its victory over you will put an end to its own existence.

Suitable for Christian and Pagan alike. Go, read, and pray.

C. A. Bond returns on Tuesday with a review of John Neville Figgis’ The Theory on the Divine Right Of Kings (1896). Hey! If you haven’t read it, it’s news to you! Bond finds much to praise in Figgis account. Not least, that the seminal source of Divine Right Theory seems to have been the papacy. And the humorous account of English parliamentarians in desperate need of sovereignty after they’d just gotten the head of Charles I.

In due course, the sovereignty of parliament is recognized officially, having been a fact since at least the government of Cromwell. But this dirty secret is not publicly celebrated, and so we are left with the bizarre contraption of liberal political theory which, having been born denying sovereignty, now has to be formatted to support sovereignty. Enter onto the stage popular sovereignty.

Like a dog that finally caught that confounded car. Mr. Bond earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine and unique work here.

The always magisterial Arthur Gordian shows up on Thursday with a—you guessed it—magisterial take on Feminism And Labor Exploitation

The purported conflict between radicalism (or leftism, or progressivism) and managerial neoliberal crony capitalism, however, is a false dichotomy, designed to channel people into pre-approved ideologies which are harmless to the ruling elites. Both groups are fundamentally aligned in a “left-hand/right-hand” paradigm. What this means is that the two sides collaborate to pursue the same objectives, while using the plausible deniability of blaming the other “hand” for the outcomes of their policies. Thus, the neoliberals blame the radicals for social disorder in society, and the radicals blame the neoliberals for spiraling inequality, yet both sides collaborate in the essential policies which create both outcomes.

Gordian recounts a long and consistent history of this pattern, and the reasons why—as yet—it has not collapsed. He takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his excellent work here.

Finally for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose column, Alexander Johkheer returns with a Lullaby. For the West.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Over at West Hunter. This is disturbing and encouraging all at once: Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by a persistent viral infection of the brain. Not least in the disturbing aspect is the vociferousness of resistance to the thesis. Vociferocity and science don’t usually mix well.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with a headline we can definitely get behind: Thou Shalt Not Wirehead: Religion vs Gratification. “Humans are just smart enough to wirehead themselves, but stupid enough to do it very badly.” Generally true, but what really worries is when we get really really good at wireheading. Consider VR Porn. And what about carbs?

EvX book club continues with The Code Economy: The DNA of Business. This really seems like a must-read book.

And Anthropology Friday kicks off with a new Old Book, appropriately selected from around 1900, Arthur Griffiths’ The History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons pt 1: Thuggee. Thuggee, Mrs. X explains, is

[T]he semi-ritualized murder of travelers by a group known as the Thugs.

So the term is not racist against blacks at all! I tell ya, India sure sounds like a shit show before Britain decided to dominate her. Predatory, marauding castes? Thugs apparently made a religion out of killing people. No wonder the Gypsies emigrated.

By way of Audacious Epigone… A look inside “Identity Politics”, the phrase as well as the phenomenon. Coverage of a governors’ race: Kobach for Kansas 2018. And Support for the death penalty by selected demographics—pretty popular around really.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Abbreviated week this week in Kakistocracy. In Porter’s first and only entry this week, he fantasizes about Making the Court Supreme Again, something made eminently more realistic by the appointment of Kavanaugh, and potentially more open slots.

So with three jews and a wise latina now staring across the cultural abyss at (potentially) four goyim and a schwartze, the pivot point of this fractured tribunal has shifted rightward to Roberts. That means the Constitution may vomit up entirely new dictates from its penumbrae. For once it may be them who eats it.

Roe V Wade? Small potatoes. How about Brown V Board of Ed? We dream big around here!

This Week at Thermidor Mag

Really busy week over at Thermidor. Fred Watson makes his debut with Barbarian Hordes for a Digital Bronze Age. Watson offers another review of BAP’s recent book and comments on the vital spirit suffusing the text.

BAP is writing of the spark within all of us, that fire, that vitality, and what the Greeks called thumos. BAP cites so much Greek that you should be buying Greek histories and plays just to get on his level. How can one exhibit that spark in a world where man is caged?

N. T. Carlsbad, in sore need of an editor, returns with a hard-hitting polemic against the Temptations of Right-wing Socialism. Though some on the Right have let their anti-capitalism lead them over to the Left, Carlsbad provides a stern check against such movements.

This post isn’t about non-socialist alternatives to capitalism, but rather to set the record straight on the classical counterrevolutionary position on socialism: it’s rotten to the core, and cannot be salvaged. Actually this is trivially obvious if you know that right-wing politics is the politics of class distinction, and that any bunk about producers-versus-idlers, unity of the working class, emancipation from class exploitation, etc. is an open threat to the classic ständisch principle of “With classes three God filled the world; As best as best can be; One class must teach, another feed, The third ‘gainst wicked lads must strive.” (Erasmus Alberus, 16thc.)

Overall a fine article and spot on, Carlsbad’s incoherent jibes at Social Matter notwithstanding. (Here Hubert Collins back in March basically agrees with Carlsbad’s view: “There are only morals”… Right?? Bueller??!! Perhaps Collins just didn’t say it in a jivey enough manner.)

M20C stalwart Alex Nicholson discusses the prospects for the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin in The Dream: A Russo-American Alliance. Nicholson also gives a considered assessment of Trump’s position and judges it to be strong.

Speaking of M20C, this week we have Episode 78—Jay Dyer—Laurel Canyon and the CIA Counter-culture. The titular character, Mr. Dyer, joins the regulars to discuss a particular episode in the history of controlled opposition in America. Remarkable how tiny a social universe gave rise to so many of the Big Names in rock from the ’60s.

Jake Bowyer lends incisive commentary on the popular Right’s Addiction to a Pretty Face. Bowyer takes aim especially at abortion-advocate Tomi Lahren and calls for the Right as a whole to raise its moral standards.

The mainstream Right in the U.S. must drop its addiction to false beauty and false gods. Being a fan of a golden-haired harlot will not make you seem less sexist to a leftie, and it will not cause more and more women to join the Republican Party. Get this through your head: unless the entire framework of modern morals is destroyed, most female voters (and a large share of male voters too) will tend to gravitate towards laws that protect their libertine pleasures. Stop worshiping Baal in the form of made-up Jezebels, and stop thinking that democracy is anything other than a mass delusion.

We, at Social Matter, love a pretty face as much as the next person. But we don’t generally let them do the talking. Bowyer impresses The Committee and snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Finally, P. T. Carlo’s writes a piece entitled No Exit: Against The Delusion Of The Post-Political—which may be fairly summarized as “Everything I don’t happen to like constitutes a moral disorder, which I can diagnose in souls from 1000s of miles away, and the name of it is… Dadism.” A message from this Dad to Mr. Carlo: “I’m in the fight. Just not the one you happen to think I should be in… Now clean your room!”

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Matt Briggs kicks off the week in the Orthosphere counting the ways, over at The Stream, in which Diversity Is Our Weakness. Over on the home blog, he notes Western Colonialism Did Some Good. More than some, I’d say (and I’m sure Briggs would agree). When the Western Colonialism Train comes to town… everybody rides.

Moving back into cranky epistemology: if Bayes is right then it’s always right and frequentism wrong. Specifically he advocates for logical, i.e., epistemic, Bayesianism. And so has little patience for “update yer priors, dude.” Related: Is Presuming Innocence A Bayesian Prior?—with tasteful yet provocative feature art. Finally, sponsored by the Society for the Preservation of Roman Numerals, Insanity & Doom Update XLIII.

Extremely busy week over the The Orthosphere proper. Dr. Bertonneau has an in-depth review of Berdyaev’s Fate of Man in the Modern World (1935).

Kristor offers a series on Consciousness & Time: Part I: Vulcans, Zombies, & Desert Islands Part II: A Little Consciousness. Also another one of his Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Yet More on Angels.

J. M. Smith examines Incivility and its Discontents.

Bemoaning tumultuous political discourse is, as always, a specialty of the genteel Right, for whom the word civility means gentlemanly comity between political rivals. That these fretful funkers have, to date, maintained their gentlemanly comity with a sly policy of gracious surrender and dignified retreat is not my topic here. My topic is the true nature of political civility, and my purpose is to explain that politeness in dealing with political rivals is not the essence of political civility.

That true nature being: conceding political rights to people even if you vehemently disagree with them. Which, Smith notes, no longer seem terribly important to opinion leaders in surprisingly high places.

It appears that Professor Van Norden no longer see conservative opponents as fellow citizens who have just as much right to vent shabby reasoning as he has. He would like to make them “second class citizens” by stripping them of political rights that he proposes to retain. This is because they fail Professor Van Norden’s literacy test and are “ignorant.”

I must confess that, despite my civil restraint in the face of that provoking yard sign, I am beginning to feel much the same way about the likes of Professor Van Norden. If someone were to stuff a sock in his mouth, I don’t suppose I would be first in line to pull it out.

Well, that whole pluralism and free speech thing was never more than a cudgel for the revolution anyway. Good riddance political civility! The Committee were obiliged to give this one an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson, excerpts and interview with Bishop Schneider, who seems to see well through all the jeezusy pro-migrant propaganda. And he tackles a trans assertion that “human physiology is largely plastic and interchangeable”. Which, TBH, doesn’t seem entirely worth tackling…

Knight of Númenor exposes a final reason Why mass democracy will not work: Cracking open the mystery of non-working class left wing socialists and non-oppressed leftists. I think Conquest’s First Law of Politics goes to explain a lot of that.

Check out the views from inside St. Lawrence parish in Harrisburg, PA. Stunning.

And by way of Faith & Heritage, Adam Grey recounts the ways The Media Is Using You, Americans. Gell-Mann Amnesia should be enough to make us swear off consumption of news media once and for all. But before a journalist can cover a topic incompetently, he must cover it at all.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Kicking off a bit of a quiet week on the Arts & Letters front, Chris Gale continues with Sydney for his Saturday Sonnet, and digs up an unlikely author for a religious Sunday Sonnet: Oscar Wilde. Who comes across as remarkably reactionary for a homosexual libertine— this sonnet of his wouldn’t look out of place being published by TRS.

At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald highlights Yale’s (or their student body at least) inane reaction to Kavanaugh’s nomination in “Emergency” at Yale: Qualified Judge Named to Court! And Theodore Dalrymple considers Brexit and Britain’s Decline in Chaos in Our Time, and asks the question:

Or is it that the conditions of modern democracy guarantee the ascension of ambitious mediocrities, leaders without powers of leadership?

Here, let me fix that for you:

It is so that the nature of democracy guarantees the ascension of ambitious mediocrities, leaders without powers of leadership.

That’s better.

Richard Carroll first introduces the Sixteenth Friend, another Cavalier poet, Abraham Cowley. And then a rundown of the second episode of Serial Experiments Lain.

And over at Imaginative Conservative… A big piece on The Art of Beautification: The Graces of Ordinary Life. Brad Birzer on Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis. And a trip to opera: Madness and Death: Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

This week at Heterodox Academy, they permit a Constructive Criticism of Heterodox Academy and Its Inaugural Open Mind Conference. Criticism of HxA, whether fair or not, that sounds very much like HxA’s critique of the Academy.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale embeds a video of Peter Stryk and Lisa Page agents’ Love Letters—reenacted for maximum hilarity.

Tom Hart does a good job of explaining what people mean by “equality”, and how not all meanings are equally retarded. This part was particularly well put:

If we accept that all societies must be unequal and hierarchical to a degrees, the question at hand is which hierarchy and system of inequality is the most just. I do not think that inequality must lead to carelessness for people who are inferior to you in one particular sense. We all excel in one way or another—even if it is in a very modest way, such as by being thoughtful. Everyone is at the top of their own hierarchy, and it is recognition of this inequality that provides the basis of respect between people—rather than a pretended equality of sentiments, feelings, or literal equality.

The ideology of equality, usually represented by the left, actually frustrates justice, because it provides the elites with an excuse to dispense with the lower orders. In the United States, failure is regarded as a lack of pluck or industriousness. This is because US citizens are seen as equals, each with an opportunity to better themselves.

Achievement, even if by pluck and hard work, is largely a gift of congenital endowment. Which is why pure meritocracy is so poisonous: It creates the illusion that one has earned his position and status, which in turn mutes the obligation to be gracious to those less fortunately endowed. Society should accept an inequality of endowments and outcomes, and strive to imbue a sticky dignity for virtuous lives, independent of verbal IQ. Hart snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

Also from Hart, a trip inside British political baseball (and psychology) with The Mogg myth. And he compares the Dark Enlightenment with the Dark Mountain Project and a long but worthwhile Ideological Analysis.

Our good friend Кирилл Каминец also has a piece up on Medium. Unfortunately he writes, no doubt eloquently, in Russian. If Chrome auto-translate is to be trusted, it is entitled “The Holy Roman Commune, Part I”.

Lorenzo from Thinking Out Aloud, has a weighty bit of light commentary on Migration complexities and the campaigns against social bargaining. As always, it’s replete with data and graphics and astute analysis.

Al Fin examines a few green shoots in employment since the Obama Decline. Interestingly women and minorities benefitting most. Speaking of employment: What Does Full Employment Look Like? It should look pretty good for employees.

On the Dangerous Child side, Al has a solid in-depth look at Avoiding a Society of “Passionate Failure” and the question of Pursing Fixed Passion versus Cultivating Passions by Consistent Effort. One is less plausible… and way more expensive.

Nullus Maximus has a major Think Piece up at Zeroth Position: How Much Force is Best for Civilization? Usefully, he breaks up force into three independent axes: official violence, officially sanctioned (lawful private) violence, and criminal violence. Striking the right balance of these (obviously keeping criminal violence to a probably non-zero minimum) is the goal of libertarian statecraft—at least among libertarians not allergic to salutary levels of coercion. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention here.

Ace checks in with a lift from the great Jim Croce: “But ’til I get myself straight, I guess I’ll just have to wait…” “Women”, he notes, “are a luxury.”

Welp… That’s about all we had time for. My staff was decimated this week for various reasons. Many thanks to David Grant and Aidan MacLear who helped out immensely. Hopefully, we’ll be back at full strength by next week. Trust you all are enjoying your summer thus far. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/07/15) appeared first on Social Matter.

This week at American Greatness, we find a sudden and full court press against NATO. Long overdue in our opinion. Angelo Codevilla acknowledges NATO Now Serves the Interests of the Transatlantic Ruling Class. NATO is the new UN. One fmore enemy that needs starving. Christopher Roach follows suit. So too VDH.

Also there, VDH takes Deport the Deplorables to task. And Conrad Black things Trump Will Win This Round With the Deep State. We certainly hope so, but if wants to actually rule, he’ll need to win the whole war.

Social Pathologist, with a lift from Dreher, examines the Wound that just won’t heal.

Reading through Dreher’s comments section I was struck by just how many people still believed in the Catholic Church while being appalled by the hierarchy. This is important because I feel the Church is the only organ out there capable of resisting Modernism but its clear that the hierarchy aren’t up to the task at hand. Any renewal of the Church, and therefore West, is going to be a “bottom-up” affair. Probably with much opposition from the hierarchy.

While we agree whole-heartedly with Slumlord’s sentiments and justifiable anger in this matter, we cannot disagree more thoroughly that “bottom-up” is any sort of solution. What is needed is a New Constantine—one willing to enforce the Church’s irreformable teachings right back on the Church hierarchy’s head. Meanwhile, the faithful should watch and pray… from the bottom-up.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Our friends up at Northern Dawn offer (I think) a first: Commentary in the Original Language of Reaction: L’Appel de Juillet by Jérôme-Bernard Grenouille. With a warning:

Possibly French girl smoking cigarette.

L’homme occidental du XXIième siècle ne peut comprendre l’affrontement parce qu’il est incapable de choisir. Il subit. Comme une feuille portée par les caprices du vent, il subit les grands bouleversements de l’âge: la numérisation de son métier, la perte des ses acquis économiques, l’effondrement de sa culture et de sa langue, l’immigration de remplacement… Coupé de ses racines, il ne représente rien. Il ne peut comprendre la tragédie de l’histoire et l’affrontements des ambitions puisqu’il n’en a pas. C’est un petit soumis, confronté jour et nuit sur l’écran de son portable à son manque de virilité, à des objets et des femmes qu’il ne possédera jamais. Frustré, il se console le soir en se branlant.

Which I won’t dare translate. That may be Québécois and not French, but close enough. Also there the ND Weekly Roundup: 07/20/2018. In English.

Alf ponders speaking the truth as a Schelling Point for cooperation. Not sure about that: outrageous lies make a much stronger coordination point. We care about truth because good people care about truth. And good people need to coordinate, too. Next, he sets out to write a critique of Aristotle on Friendship, but ends up agreeing with him. So bonus points for Alf… and Aristotle on that one.

And this was completely different: Miss Alf speaks About doubt & love, with some confessions that will not surprise most of our readers. Sounds like a keeper, Alf. Wife her up!

Adam’s deep dive into the significance of literacy and domain-specific expertise continues apace in The Disciplines, the Imperative of the Center, the Generative Thought Experiment. As always, hard to summarize, but profound food for thought. A taste:

The language and traditions we have to confront the situation or choice lie beyond our conscious decision. So, how do we talk about this, at the very least, “residue” of the unchosen? This, to a great extent, is what the disciplines are for, including sacramental disciplines: saying that the trauma caused by my parents, or unjust social structures, or unconscious desires, etc., are not all that different from saying I was tempted by the devil. And there may be some truth in any of these “explanations”—at any rate, any of them is better than nothing. But they’re all really black boxes, sites of proxy wars for power—a particular psychology or sociology empowers a particular set of interests, within the disciplinary institutions and beyond. To be master of the “unconscious” is to be master of much more.

Another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for Adam for his fine and off-the-beaten-path work.

Unorthodoxy proposes a new metanarrative 3RC: Republicans aRe the Real Commies. I like it.

Our good friend Кирилл Каминец is back up on Medium with, for those who can read Russian, Кинжалы и угольник, ч. I. By the looks of the Chrome translation, pretty interesting.

Atavisionary offers an extensive and sympathetic review of A Fair Hearing: The alt-right in the words of its members and leaders from Arktos Media (2018).

Shylock Holmes is on a Mission from God™ to Break the College Monopoly on Credentials.

As far as I can tell, the massive increase in demand for higher education over the previous decades seems to be cargo cult reasoning writ large—rich successful people went to college, ergo if I go to college I will be rich and successful. A fortiori, if we all go to college, we’ll all end up rich! Better subsidize all those student loans, now helpfully made non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The unfortunate part is that I suspect that a good number of the people who go to college (or at least their parents) probably sympathise with the fact that the above reasoning is moronic. So how come they don’t just skip it? Because, of course, it’s a signalling arms race. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and nobody ever got fired for hiring the Harvard undergrad.

So, smart people are looking for a smarter and cheaper way to play the signaling game…

But how do you get past the first HR screening? How do you avoid people just assuming that you didn’t go to college simply because you couldn’t go to college, or at least any one worth attending?

Holmes offers a novel, and I think not implausible, method that just might work. At least some of the time.

Marina Butina. Proper trigger discipline is sexy.

Over at Jacobite, Michael Siebert discusses the possible future of ecofascism in Linkola, Montana.

And Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, reports on the arrest of Russia’s foremost gun rights activist by the American Blue Deep State. The activist in question, Maria Butina, is a photogenic young woman who founded a Russian organization called Right to Bear Arms (Pravo na Oruzhie), and has been living at least part-time in the United States since 2015. It is claimed that she is actually some sort of Russian Natasha super-spy, funneling money from Putin to Trump and the GOP via the NRA. Anatoly gives this conspiracy view all the ridicule it deserves.

Malcolm Pollack comments on the Madness of the regime press regarding Russia. He likes Angelo Codevilla On The Helsinki Summit (Codevilla’s essay here.) Plus… a Happy Surprise From The Ninth Circuit.

By way of Isegoria… Athletes were quite ready to take the bargain. Good news in the case of Cody Wilson’s Ghost Gunners. The physical strength of nations varies considerably—three guesses and the first two don’t count. Interesting: Israel significantly relaxes gun license regulations. Operation Barbarossa: In the end, it all depended on petroleum. What to do When a flash-bang grenade isn’t enough. Finally: the Wealth Gap explained by persistently bad spending habits—future time orientation be all rayciss.

Finally, this week at Cambria Will Not Yield, an imprecation against Most Barbarous, Most Degenerate Liberalism!

This Week in Social Matter

Very quiet week here at Social Matter as retooling continues. But we did have some excellent verse queued up for Saturday Poetry & Prose: newcomer Solon Orientalis weaves Beyond Kali’s Night.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane ponders some More Theory on genetic variations versus genetic death sentences.

Evolutionist X makes A Modest Educational Proposal. Several actually, to keep smart women away from not having kids.

We need to completely re-think this system where the smarter you are, the longer you are expected to stay in school, accruing debt and not having children.

Expectations (for women) are the key. Down in the comments, Mrs. X admits: “If you want change, IMO, it has to come from the men first.”.

Turning to even darker matters: War is Code for the Production of Corpses.

And for Anthropology(ish) Friday and The History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons, Part 2: the Andaman Islands.

By way of Audacious Epigone… After France’s World Cup win, he looks in on the “celebrations”… among the “French”. Praise for Kansas Gubernatorial candidate Kobach in Koch country. Finally, he revisits The gun gap.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First, Porter makes the astute observation that the “immigrants will pay for boomer retirement” argument is Reverse-Mortgaging the Future. And not even a financially sound one:

…how many American retirements will Guatemalan squatters actually fund? Very few in Guatemala, as we know. But while they are allegedly subsidizing boomer greens fees, how much will we be paying them in first world social upkeep? I wonder what our net take home from this arrangement is.

Then, he evokes a little Shakespeare against An Admirable Evasion of Whoremaster Man

And he also enjoys a moment of schaudenfreude at the expense of a leftist attacked by his own hate mob in Rabid Dogs Get Bitten Too:

If any readers are moved to sympathy, you’ll be without my company. The author’s disdain for destroying lives was only discovered as the left came for his, which is not much of a compliment to one’s foresight. Because even the dullest men are prone to epiphanies when teeth are sinking into their throat.

Finally, he retreads some old ground to say that being American is not A Matter of Perspective, no matter how badly you want it:

Mockery aside, the article goes on to drench the page with tears for deportees over their loss of American safety, order, and social compassion compared to the apathy and “crime, corruption and lawlessness that pervades Mexico.” Those are their words. Perhaps we should take care to remain so distinct from Mexico that her citizens can still lament the difference.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Lue-Yee embeds a video on the Visual and Aural Æsthetics of Hagia Sophia, which should motivate us to bring it back into Christian hands. This time permanently!

Cologero posts expansive thoughts on Sophia and the Eternal Feminine.

At The Orthosphere proper, J. M. Smith advocates against extermination. After all, The Yahoos Will be With You Always. It also serves as a reminder that the maladjusted and poorly socialized are not a scourge unique to large cities.

Thomas F. Bertonneau looks at the reactionary relationships between Poe and his Frenchmen and Baudelaire and his Amricans.

Richard Cocks begins the series Social Justice: an analysis—part 1 of 4.

To reject inequalities is to rebel against reality itself. All people bar two are superior to some and inferior to others in any conceivable characteristic. To reject that fact is to renounce the character of existing at all.

Bonald argues, concisely but powerfully, that Tribal motivations are rational.

Gratuitous pic of girl smoking.

Liberal critics of Catholic loyalty speak as if identifying an opponent’s behavior as “tribal” is equivalent to showing that it is irrational. In fact, there is nothing irrational about tribalism; it merely supplies another set of concerns to guide our reasoning. One sign of this is the fact that liberals do not apply the same anti-tribalist critique to the groups and loyalties they really care about. They certainly do not think that their fellow liberals should seek out and carefully consider criticisms from their professed enemies. Such critics are dismissed as irrational preachers of hatred, and it is considered important that they have no mainstream platform that might “legitimate” their views. This is, indeed, a rational strategy for them in pursuit of the critical goal of space-control.

Do RTWT! This earned the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. Also from Bonald, as if Nature herself wills it, a few green shoots of reactionary ideas spreading.

Matt Briggs aims a 16″ gun at the very basis of the Fermi “Paradox”. He revels in how Trump & Putin Drive The Media Mad. And It Was Beautiful. Then on the academic front, at University of Minnesota: Use The Preferred Pronoun Or Be Fired is a policy under consideration. Next, he writes Does Free Will Exist In The Universe? (That Would Be A Yes) in response to a nearly identically titled article that reaches the opposite conclusion. Finally, unspeakable acts is the theme of this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLIV.

Mark Richardson notices an encouraging Twitter trend in More trad women. Then he countersignals Jordan Peterson In defence of identity.

Group identity has another advantage in that it creates bonds of loyalty and support within a community, which then provides for individual security.

William Wildblood at Albion Awakening takes a trip through the ruined monasteries and intact Gothic cathedrals of England in Christian Albion. At least to our Northern souls, I don’t think there’s another style of architecture so spiritually evocative.

Bruce Charlton writes positively about the traditional Chester Mystery Plays 2018—a review.

And John Fitzgerald solemnly reflects on Logres, Britain, and the Betrayal of the Romanovs.

This Week in Arts & Letters

This is new and I’m not sure how to classify it: Lou Keep at Sam[]zdat offers a paraphrase edition of Plato’s Republic Parts I-IV: Footnotes 1. (“Footnotes”… on Plato… get it?)

Chris Gale starts off the week with more Sydney for his Saturday Sonnet, and then John Henry, Cardinal Newman with the Sunday Sonnet.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Mark S. Milburn touches on a personal bigotry of mine in Gnostic Bodies: Why Millennials Love Tattoos. Gnostics that is, not (necessarily) Millennials or tattoos. And thus inadvertently touches on a great eldritch demon writhing at the spiritual core of leftism.

Richard Carroll first brings us Notes on The Odyssey. Which I happen to know a thing or two about, and went into a bit more depth in his comment section than I could do here. In short, there’s a good reason why Froude chose “The Bow of Ulysses” as the metaphor on which to hang his defense of monarchial sovereignty and Restoration. And then his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless first compiles a number of his more philosophical and analytical pieces into Suzerain, in a handy long-form PDF. And, prolific as ever, another short story: The Mire.

Finally over at City Journal, Dalrymple takes stock of the World Cup and Rooting for the Home Team. And based Heather Mac Donald tells A Tale of Two Killings.

This Week in the Outer Left

Over at The Baffler, David Neiwert pontificates on the freedom to bash heads. For context, the Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys groups had a rally in Portland, Oregon last month. They were attacked by antifa and elected to defend themselves. Antifa quickly found out that they had bitten off more than they could chew. We here at Social Matter do not endorse activism or public rallies of any kind, while we do admit to more than a little schadenfreude at seeing this.

There are two issues of interest in David Neiwert’s hand-wringing. First, the sheer number of times he has to switch from active voice to passive voice and ambiguous pronouns in order to try painting Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys as evil aggressors. Look at this particularly egregious instance:

Most of the day’s event had been relatively peaceful, the two groups of demonstrators shouting at each other as they clustered on either side of the police barriers around Terry Schrunk Plaza in the heart of downtown….

The first fights erupted as the crowd turned the corner near where the counter-protesters gathered; as they assembled, a couple of water bottles were lobbed at them. Shortly after that, firecrackers and smoke bombs filled the street with smoke.

This particular part of the rally has been well-documented on video and the events can be clearly seen: antifa threw (glass) bottles, antifa threw firecrackers, antifa threw smoke bombs. All crying out in pain, of course.

Second, Weiwert makes a big deal out of the martyrdom rhetoric from many of the Patriot Prayer organizers. They had that kind of rhetoric because this was not their first rodeo, they knew exactly what kind of violent response they could expect. And that is the point: you can wring hands about the violence all you want, but the simple fact is that if antifa had not shown up and started shit, then Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys would not have finished it. But it’s the usual leftist framing, that the right’s words are violence and actual violence from the left is a just response.

And, over at Jacobin, Rachel Reiderer reveals herself to be definitely a woman as she whines about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos doing cool stuff for space exploration. I draw attention to her sex because women generally fail to appreciate the importance, and inherent coolness, of anything having to do with space exploration/colonization. Another reason to repeal the 19th Amendment. Just look at this moronic take:

Musk’s idea was to “make humans a multiplanet species, and create a backup hard drive for the human race there, just in case Earth crashes like a faulty computer.”

It is impossible for any reader living through the ravages of global warming to scan these sentiments without skepticism. If someone is going to invest enormous amounts of wealth and time in an engineering project, gathering together some of the smartest scientists on the planet to develop and test creative solutions to an intractable problem, in the interest of saving the future of humanity, how could you choose any focus but climate change?

Perhaps because climate change isn’t an existential threat and a stray asteroid is?

But this is all hand-waving and distraction from the real issue: the left is hostile to mature space exploration and especially colonization. Not as a result of it being done by private billionaires, but inherently as a project of any kind. Access to space is access to Exit, and they know it. What good is a welfare state and state-enforced homosexuality if the most enterprising and productive people can hop into a ship and move to a different hollowed out asteroid, leaving all the Bioleninist parasites behind? That is what terrifies the left about space, the endless open frontier—a brain and revenue drain from socialist policies. Precisely that which excites right-leaning and especially libertarian people about it.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale finds Israel aligning On the Rightist Side of History. To shrieks and convulsions from the usual suspects. But Israel does what it wants. It’s good to be Israel.

Anti-Gnostic links us to a prophesy regarding porches, which seems to have now come true.

Not only is People Power corruptible, it is the most easily corrupted of all.

Spotted Toad looks at Kindergarten versus 4th grade achievement in high and low poverty schools and finds very little that money can fix. Next he looks at the ways the income gap between black and white might narrow in coming years—basically by the United States continuing to be a brain drain on the Third World. Like I always say: all the Ghanaians I know are socially well-adjusted engineers with PhDs.

Al Fin bemoans the waste (and ugliness) of Texas wind farms. Also there, some bad news: Russia Could Use Some Help. He’s bearish on China as well. Tho’ we admire what the CPC has been able to accomplish in China. We hope Al’s right because China (alone in our estimation) represents an existential threat to the West. Apart from the West’s acute on-going suicide, of course.

TUJ makes a simple yet powerful reframe on Russian Collusion.

PA has a review, not without praise, for Cobra Kai—an authentic serial drama for the Trump Era.

Heartiste highlights a particularly excellent reframe of the “racism” slur. Based Poles are based. Now they just better start having more children! This too was particularly astute: The Hard Bigotry Of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jewish Provincialism. And yes, I suppose it really is only the 98% of girls with tattoos who give the rest of them a bad name.

Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Theroux, & their lessor imitators specialise in taking advantage of natural hospitality, pliability, & willingness to be considerate to foreigners to create a parody of “weird” mid-America that is sold as propaganda to the Coasts & Euro middle class.

— Tom X Hart (@tomxhart) July 24, 2018

Speaking of Tom Hart… he kicks off (apparently) a promising new series on “Ideological Analysis”. This week What is this thing we call decadence? and Against Linkola. From the former…

When discussing decadence, the great block to clear thinking is envy. A great deal of what is called decadence in the sexual, financial, artistic, and political life of nations is called so by people who cannot access the “decadence”.

My suspicion is that if these people had a sniff of decadence then their demands to end “decadence” would dry up almost immediately.

Despite my suspicions that the roots of accusations of decadence lie in envy, I believe that there still is such a thing as decadence itself.

Which he proceeds to define, more in terms of fitness or aptness:

Decadence is, therefore, a matter of having things in their proper place. A fifty-year-old man who still pursues the fashions of seventeen-year-olds is, in this sense, decadent. He is out of place. He is decaying relative to the actual demands of that period of his life. But there is nothing decadent about the clothes he wears or the music he adopts.

There is a particular way decadence is expressed, even in the rigour of war. The black marketeer is decadent, but the man who continues painting a picture during a war is not. Obviously, during a war, not everyone can paint pictures. That would be decadent. But the man who struggles to preserve something of art in conditions where art would otherwise be abolished is anti-decadent – even if he is drunk, sexually loose, effeminate, or whatever “typically” degenerate behaviour you can think of afflicts him.

Highly recommended and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Hart’s critique of Pentti Linkola is solid as well, and appropriately nuanced. Sufficiently strong rejection of technology amounts to an anti-human rejection of the tool-builder himself. Rejection of the excesses of Western Civilization ought not civilization herself. Man is a tool-builder. Man is a civilization-builder. To reject these is to reject telos.

Roman Dmowski offers coverage and commentary on the Summit Meltdown, viz., the coordinated deep state and establishment press freak-out over Trump and Putin.

Over at Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton is simply superb Against the Magna Carta.

There a few documents in the world that receive such undue reverence as the Magna Carta. Conservative MP Daniel Hannan has called the signing of the document a “secular miracle”, the logic being that it was the Magna Carta that enshrined limited government in the English, then British soul. Hannan and others sincerely believe that the 1215 document is the root and origin of modern Anglo governance, with its protection of individual freedom, liberties, etc. Let us show that this is bunk.

Welton turns yet another Libertarian sacred cow into steak tartare, with capers on a crisp baguette. While the symbolic importance of the Magna Carta in enshrining “English liberties” is vastly overblown, a significant poison in the document is the primordial and aspirational separation of Church and State:

Clause 61 places man ahead of God in terms of the creation and structuring of civil society. Taken together, Clause 61 might be the most egregious in the Magna Carta for undermining the Christian nature of monarchy and the rights of the English sovereign. Historian Wilfred Warren argued in his book King John that Clause 61 made civil war inevitable in England because it so drastically upset the balance of power in the country in favor of the barons.

Excellent bit of analysis from Welton and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Steve Burton (I suspect he is this Steve Burton, but can’t say for sure), offers a beautiful little gem: Nietzsche on Ben Shapiro.

Ace tackles “female empowerment” this week: “…frown upon her face, tryin’ to be sincere…”

That’s all folks. Many thanks to the on-time TWiR staff this week: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler. You are all indispensable! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/07/22) appeared first on Social Matter.

A week packed with high quality articles within and without The ‘Sphere. When it rains, it pours.

Over at American Greatness this week: VDH wonders Just How Far Will the Left Go? And reviews how far they’ve already gone. Also there: how Our National Conversation on Race is a Joke. True, of course. But admonitions against “identity politics” are bound to be as efficacious as warnings against Newton’s Law of Gravity. All politics is identity politics. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can finally have that adult conversation about race.

Also there, last week’s NATO hate becomes this week’s Reforming NATO Is the Only Way to Save It as VDH plays his own good cop/bad cop.

Arnold Kling us up at Hacker Noon explaining Talent Effects and Inequality, and why he was wrong about the relative advantages of small versus large during the dawn of the Internet Age.

Not exactly new, but news to me: Straussian titan Michael Anton has a review of Thomas G. West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding over at New Criterion. It’s big, calling West’s “The most important political book published in my lifetime.”

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton leads off the week his Sunday Thoughts—Unbearable Stuffiness of Elite Egalitarians Edition.

Our friends up at Northern Dawn introduce Sakamoto Ryoma who pens a handy Guide For Canada On Trump’s Global Trade War. He thinks it one that Canada cannot win, and offers solid guidance on what Canada needs to do. Not least: stop being so polite. A more economically diversified, and militarily stronger, more assertive Canada is something I think both sides of the 49th parallel can agree on.

Related, Constantin de Mestre returns, this time in English, with an essay Building The North: A Canadian Imperative.

The area of interest is the Arctic archipelago, its internal waters, its territorial waters and, most contentious, our claimed Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). That is the objective, but securing this massive area is easier said than done. The archipelago (as I will now refer to it) has 36,563 islands and covers an area of 1.42 million square kilometers. It is larger than France, Germany and the UK combined but has a population density of 0.0098/km2, with only 14,000 souls. This scarcity, combined with the nature of the terrain, makes it extremely difficult to police the area.

The first step, de Mestre thinks, is growing the population on Baffin Island, where humans already have somewhat of a foothold. Step 2 is a dramatically increased strategic military presence. Again, a strong Canada is good for everyone. But especially Canadians.

Over at GA Blog, Adam’s regularly scheduled Wednesday essay: Towards Permanence.

President Trump’s (central, animating) concern for sovereignty, while certainly not aiming at the abolition of democracy, allows us to see the way there through the extinction of the Left that concern presupposes. Trump’s idea seems to be the simple one that governments should govern, i.e., oversee the interactions of a particular people located on a particular territory, which means those with responsibility should issue commands that should in turn be fulfilled; that is, there should be a commensurability between power and responsibility.

Of course, commensurability between power and responsibility—a.k.a., “formalism”—is today quite retrograde and almost surely racist. Adam credits Trump with seeing the obstacles to coherent government and warring against them. But even if he’s right about that, can Trump actually win? Adam offers some strategic plays to attack Cathedral power centers Social Matter readers will all know and hate. Shutting down The Leak™ for example:

If Trump succeeds in shutting down this means of controlling the administration in power (the ongoing blackmail represented by the possibility of dropping devastating leaks at any time), the forms taken by anti-sovereignist efforts must become more explicit and hysterical, reverting to more overt forms of rule-breaking and self-discrediting accusations. And not only can those be suppressed, but in the process local jurisdictions supporting disorder can in turn be countered and disempowered. There really is nothing stopping Trump’s DOJ from arresting the mayors of “sanctuary cities” and governors of sanctuary states: this is what insurrection looks like. Always target law breaking and rule breaking, which means targeting the transgressions of the enforcers themselves: all sovereignist politics can be compassed by the imperative to guard the guardians. Targeting the swamp, then, gets you the most bang for your buck.

Adam credits Thomas Wictor for substantial inspiration for this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award winner.

B. D. Matthews returns to Sovereign Exceptions examining Politics as a Conspiracy Theory. Like I always say, nothing political is ever accomplished without a conspiracy. It’s just that conspiracy theorists tend to under estimate the conspirators’ operational security. Matthews points to the multiply failed conspiracy to unseat the Tudors.

We have a much more civilized approach to conspiracies, now. Instead of raising armies, we just count noses: whoever can muster the most people on election day is the winner, no invasion required. Foreign intervention is expected … but frowned upon when it’s too blatant.

And, in the absence of real political dynasties, everyone is a pretender. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump worked hard to assemble the trappings of executive legitimacy. Hillary had her policy proposals and speeches, her resume, her supporters. Trump had… well, he had a plane, an electrifying stage presence, and some live-wire policy proposals of his own. Both Hillary and Trump were very much conspiring to seize control of the government, and enlisting supporters by appealing to their sense of legitimacy and their desire to be rewarded. The Trump conspiracy won, although it was a close call.

All of which makes the conspiracy even juicier. Scott Adams makes good bank telling people they’re watching two different movies, but he’s never going to convince them to stop watching movies. Matthews snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

Also there, superb analysis on AIDS: A Black Swan. Or GRIDS, as we sometimes call it. If AIDS did not exist we would have had to create it, but we wouldn’t have been clever enough. In outline…

1. Because of its long incubation period, the number of people known to have AIDS was always well below the number of people who had it, and were spreading it. Funding per person looked higher than it was.
2. The populations infected with AIDS were politically unsympathetic, particularly to the Republicans who controlled the executive branch during the 1980s.
3. Anonymous, promiscuous sex was the Third Rail of gay politics.

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

Atavisionary has become a chief chronicler of occult influence within the Cathedral power structure. This week he tackles James Gunn: Hollywood pedophile and satan worshiper.

Speaking of James Gunn, Free Northerner checks in to explain Gunn, Roseanne, and Power. If you’re looking for principles in the aftermath of high profile firings, look at the power, not the principles:

The fight over who can legitimately mob and fire whom over what issues, is a fight over power, between two opposing tribes, which is why where most people line up on it it makes no sense in any strictly rational way.

Leftists defend pedophilia and pedophilic jokes, not because they support pedophilia per se, but because even in their own minds it maps closely to other sexual proclivities they support, and too strong a taboo around pedophilia will carry over to those proclivities.**

Knowing this though, makes the cuckservative response even more confusing, as they are turning against the tribe they nominally support, while supporting the tribe they nominally oppose (how often does NRO pretend to rage against Hollywood values and crudity in our culture?) in favour of values, sexual subversion, they’d normally oppose.

He goes further into what this means for the Establishment Right. Which is an absolutely delicious thought. I won’t spoil it. Northerner snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.

Neovictorian collects some odds-n-ends in Book Notes No. 1, July 2018, what he and others are up to in the fiction domain, and an affirmation that… yes there will be a sequel to his excellent Sanity. Also, Neovic reviews Loretta “The Prole” Malakie’s novel: Love in the Age of Dispossession.

Over in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf proposes The 3rd wave of game, where natural self-possession and social control are more caught than taught. Also an examination of Beta male blindness—i.e., toward female bad behavior.

Also a two part reflection on religion: Starting a religion is the easy part, Getting it right is the hard part.

Late in the week, Doug Smythe chimes in with, as always, a brilliant gem: How To be King, in Point Form—a translation of the tables of contents from von Haller’s Restoration de la Science Politique volumes II and III. Just the tables of contents—more an outline really. Read the whole of this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention, then read the whole of von Haller.

And just when this week couldn’t get any better, Shylock Holmes slides under the bar in the waning moments, with some personal observations and analysis On the Cultural Aggression of the Québécois. Their acute hostility to all things not French and especially things English, in the almost total absence of mutuality, does deserve some psycho-analysis:

I had just put all this down to the French generally being stubborn socialist assholes, and especially resenting Anglo-Saxons. Charles De Gaulle could never, ever forgive the British and Americans for kicking out the Nazis. It was almost easier to forgive the Nazis themselves. A recipient of charity nearly always hates his benefactor, as Orwell wisely observed. Quebec wasn’t exactly in the same position, but resentment of the Anglos has a long, long history, dating at least back to the Plains of Abraham in 1759. It’s not for nothing that the license plates read “Je Me Souviens”—“I remember”. It’s hard not to detect a vague note of sullen hostility in that, a determined insistence to bear a grudge. There are plenty of ways to remind people to celebrate their French heritage, and most of them sound more upbeat, like “Vive Le Français Canada”. Instead, it always seemed to imply to me “I remember when this used to be France”.

Much more to read of this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Anatoly “Friend of this Blog” Karlin reports on a new paper that attempts to answer the age-old question: where do the WEIRD0s come from? It should come as little surprise that the WEIRDos hail from western Europe. More interestingly, the authors come to the conclusion–for which they really should’ve cited HBD Chick—that the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibitions on certain marriages altered the familial bonds of western European peoples in a way that weakened kin-based institutions and enabled the rise of impersonal social structures, such as representative government and markets. Thus, the WEIRD psychology emerges.

Over at Jacobite, Sonya Mann meditates upon Voice vs. Exit in The Conversations that Cryptocurrency Killed.

Malcolm Pollack serves up some cask strength Nicolás Gómez Dávila On Reaction And Resignation.

By way of Isegoria… Google was not a normal place—in some surprisingly pedestrian ways. On cells picking up damage all the time. The development and maintenance (and evolution) of libraries: You’re as rich as your database. Liquid water on Mars? Still… “ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.” But neither was North America for a while. Salutary effects of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. Finally… One streaming platform is prioritizing classic catalog titles, which may not be an unalloyed good, but certainly better than the alternative.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: In His Name.

This Week in Social Matter

Yuuuge week here at Social Matter. Mark Christensen kicks it off with We Need Tremendous Government: Why Conservative Mythology Must Be Disrupted. The ground, he notes, is quickly shift away from the old (and profoundly wrongheaded) Small Government vs. Big Government debate. Almost entirely thanks to Trump. But old myths die hard:

[T]he notion that government must be incompetent means that Trump’s mission to make it competent and successful is a doomed mission. As the rest of this piece will detail, this is unacceptable for two reasons. First, it is manifestly untrue—we’ll consider several examples of competent government. Second, the Schelling point of government as a necessary evil rather than a possible good impacts beliefs and behavior in destructive ways. Fortunately, American conservatism is at an hour of decision: President Trump and his supporters should use it to jettison this false doctrine from the consciousness of Red America.

Big government vs. Small government is a ridiculous question, as Christensen abundantly shows.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

Ironically, the conservative disdain for government has often become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is that much of American government truly has become inept. But being a dominant power between two oceans, America has perhaps failed to check if this holds true elsewhere. In fact, there are many examples of competent government to be found. We need not even limit ourselves to the small-state powerhouses like Singapore and Switzerland. In a matter of decades, the Chinese state has achieved massive industrialization, the establishment of political norms and institutions after a chaotic era, extensive geopolitical power, and the lifting up of two hundred million souls from poverty. We can point to Poland, which has achieved tremendous economic growth that it has effectively translated into political clout within Europe, pursuing its own vision informed by Polish and Catholic values, rather than those of Brussels. Not just competent but even (dare we say?) dynamic and accomplished government is eminently possible. So why has it so often failed at all levels of American life: city, state, and federal?

But I don’t want to steal all his thunder. Please RTWT! Christensen earns the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award this week by the narrowest of margins.

Next up, our old friend Empedokles Papadopolous brings his considerable talents to a book review rejoinder of Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now—merely the first of five parts I am told.

In the book, Pinker comes across less like an Enlightenment philosopher and more as a Henry Ford-type voicing disappointment over the tunes kids are listening to these days and urging them to listen to the music of his youth. In Greenfield Village, Ford built a reproduction of the small town America of which he himself had contributed to the demise; Pinker, the intellectual, is trying to rebuild the intellectual environment of his youth in the 1960s, an environment that gave birth to the current climate from which he feels so alienated.

Not the first review to take issue Pinker’s latest, but we hope the best and most thorough. Thorough is Empedokles’ stock in trade.

I suppose one could argue that the thesis that technology should be put to work improving human welfare is an Enlightenment value, but does anyone today deny this? Who is he arguing against?

And this is the fallacy that lies at the heart of the entire book:

Enlightenment = science/technology + liberalism.

Technology has produced improvements to human welfare.

Therefore, liberalism produces improvements to human welfare.

Most revealingly, in chapter 23 on humanism, in just a few pages Pinker dispenses with the debates between utilitarianism vs. deontology, the argument from cosmological constants, and the nature of consciousness without making any original points. I don’t want to criticize Pinker for failing to resolve ancient and difficult issues, and wouldn’t if he didn’t act like they had all been solved. He must know his easy dismissal of these difficult debates is not going to convince anyone who has studied these issues in any depth, so why are these issues present at all?

And there’s much much more there. Magisterial describes it well I think. Empedokles has to settle for a “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award by the narrowest of margins this week. (And we cannot say that The Committee weren’t influenced by the fact that there’s much more of his award-winning critique to come.)

Lawrence Glarus returns on Thursday with A Letter To An Imperial. It is something different. A taste:

Within the social sciences there is natural tendency to systemize. Historians are quite good at systemizing the past; however, the social sciences tend to break down the closer one gets to the present. There is just too much emotional investment and strife to get a good, cold, and analytical picture. A historian who might not blink at the xenocide of Carthage will still rail against the evils of colonialism. Morality seems to be very time sensitive; you might want to check the expiration date. After all, we live in a time where anti-colonialism is the norm, and the advocates for Carthage are long dead. So, when I say the you are a member of the imperial ruling class, take a deep breath.

Glarus crafts, in the style of de Tocqueville, a view of America in Thee Current Year from the outside. And his brother Jonathan seems every bit like an Open-Minded Progressive… at least when he takes off his Phrygian cap.

Your compatriots have been acting very unbecoming. If you were so concerned with the behavior of the barbarians, you could have the decency to uplift them. I know your education centers have only had minor effectiveness, but if you can’t laugh at your own jokes why make them? So, when a New Yorker makes jokes about a “flyover state,” who are they making fun of? Do they see a Midwesterner as one of them? Are they making a gentle jest at their brother? Our culture would say otherwise.

We’re probably well past Peak Education Centers, anyway. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award winner.

For Saturday Prose & Poetry, Phileas Frogg pens an eerie Emmanuel.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Even HBD full-time moms need a vacation every now and then. So Evolutionist X kicks off the week with a bit of Vacation posting: When Capitalism Devours Democracy. Induced by the endless drab Interstate, perhaps?

EvX Book Club continues with The Code Economy: Economics as Information Theory.

And Anthropology Friday is supplanted by another, always valuable, “Cathedral Roundup” You can have my towel when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. The ways to discourage women from entering STEM—apparently even after obtaining a degree in it—continue to grow without bound.

Science! FSCK YEAH!!

Short version: A couple of sociologist “gender researchers,” who of course know STEM culture very well, sat in on tech company recruiting sessions at Stanford and discovered that nerds talk about nerd things, OMG EWWW, and concluded that icky nerds doing their nerd thing in public is why women decide to go apply for more prestigious jobs elsewhere.

Now, I understand what it’s like not to get someone else’s references. I haven’t seen Breaking Bad, NCIS, Sex in the City, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, or the past X Starwars installments. I don’t watch sports, play golf, or drink alcohol.

But I don’t go around complaining that other people need to stop talking about things that interest them and just talk about stuff that interests >me. It doesn’t bother me that other people have their interests, because I have plenty of room over here on my end of the internet to talk about mine.

That is, of course, a very adult attitude to take. But really, Mrs. X, I can’t recommend Breaking Bad enough. Oh, and take a glass of Riesling with it.

Over at Audacious Epigone’s… a look at key GOP primary races in GA and KS. Identity politics is the present and even more so the future—this is actually a bad thing, but not for any of the reasons Ben Shapiro thinks. And a visit with GSS data on the Hispanic flight from white, because, after all who would admit to be white if they could “pass” as Hispanic.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First this week, Porter laments Trump’s seeming inability to place his confidence in loyal men in People Make Policy. They do indeed:

Probably the most important task of someone who would lead an edifice so monstrous as the USG is to create a constellation of smart and loyal lieutenants. But that’s easy to say. And so when obliged to settle for only one, better make them loyal. Because surrounding yourself with smart insiders who can’t be trusted is no less irksome than shoving a rabid rodent down your trousers.

Hmm, I wonder where Trump could possibly find such a society of competent loyalists. Anyone?

Then, he brings the great heft of his contempt to bear on Time Magazine’s comically fawning profile of some black lesbian who’s running for office in The Story of Me. In which we see the Cathedral’s rites of canonization being performed in full force.

And finally, he takes a moment to marvel at Zuckerberg’s personal security expenditures ($10,000,000 annually) in The Wall Goes With Him:

For instance, immobile walls on national borders are nazi bigotry. Thus those who expect to reside in a sovereign territory behind them are nazi bigots. In contrast, portable walls and lavish layers of private defense are inclusive liberalism. Thus those who jog behind a security phalanx with drone surveillance and an armored escort vehicle are inclusive liberals.

I’m not sure how many miles of border wall $10 million gets you, but I know we could build a hell of a nice one with Zuckerberg’s $60 billion.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith finds Blood and Soil Nationalism in Sidney Lanierís ìCornî, a poem he here analyzes. Then he stares into the abyss, “That Foul Great Swallow”. What happens next should be no surprise. Also, because the founder of Austin, TX owned slaves, the powers that be are talking about Redacting Texas. Or at the very least, changing a few names.

Thomas F. Bertonneau pits Melville’s Typee (1846) and the Case for Civilization against Rousseau’s noble savage.

The Myth of the Noble Savage turns out to be, on analysis, merely a savage myth for the self-ennoblement of those whose resentment of limits prompts them to rebel against the expensively achieved attunement to the structure of reality called civilization.

Ianto Watt makes a comparison in Trading Places: Aleksandr Dugin’s Putin vs Putin.

Matt Briggs thinks Peter Thiel’s Reformation-University Comparison Isn’t So Good, where Thiel claims a university degree is the equivalent of purchased salvation. Also, STEM diversity quotas, Christian legal disaccreditation, criminalized homophobia, and anti-religious interference with contract, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLV.

Mark Richardson suggests the fall of our empire might be due to Falafel & Circuses.

Dalrock reports on a recent popular article about men preferring debt-free virgins (without tattoos) being met with pure Hysteria. Video documentation included. Then he follows up with more on The cost of sluthood.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale starts off the week with more Sydney, and Sydney’s pearls of wisdom, for the Saturday Sonnet, and for his Sunday Sonnet, a requiem for last week’s author, by Christina Rossetti

Bonus smoking girl pic.

At Imaginative Conservative, Eva Brann gives a long lecture on the Perfection of Jane Austin. A bit too feminine for me to get much out of, but it might be of interest to our many beautiful female readers. Joseph Pearce resurrects Chesterton to debate Distributism vs. Free Market Globalism. And Emina Melonic defends Beethoven’s 9th.

By way of City Journal, Milton Ezrati writes about Closing the Skills Gap. It’s always fun watching mainstream cons agonize over problems that have very simple solutions. Perhaps if college enrollment was 1/20th of what it is today, we wouldn’t have much trouble finding skilled labor. And Theodore Dalrymple inquires into Riots and Their Motivations. He doesn’t give a cucked answer, of course, but the truth is again fairly simple. Riots, if you can get away with them, are power, and power is like crack cocaine.

Richard Carroll quotes extensively from Cardinal Newman on Education and Journalism for his first post this week, and then has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain.

Finally at Logos Club, Giovanni Dannato publishes parts one through four of The Warlord. (Here are Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

This Week in the Outer Left

Over at The Baffler, Yasha Levine has a fairly long post criticizing the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he claims is all EFF’d up (see what he did there?). Boiling this down to the essentials, Levine takes the EFF to task for failing to stand up for users’ privacy in the wake of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica kerfluffle of a few months ago. He decides that the EFF is ultimately a lobbying and shilling organization for big Silicon Valley companies, which is a predictable enough take from the left. I don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, because the EFF has opposed some bad laws, and missed the boat on other issues… not unlike most organizations. This piece is of interest primarily for the history and the absolute hair trigger leftists have on castigating institutions that don’t toe every line.

A yuge week from Jacobin with three, count’em three, pieces that merited inclusion. First up, Seth Ackerman sizes up ‘Russiagate’ and decides it can’t end well for the left. While it is nice to see the whole Russian collusion narrative collapse in real time, the truly interesting thing about this one comes in the shocker contained in the first few paragraphs.

But it turned out that Hiss was a Soviet spy, and so were many other New Dealers. By 1934, dozens of them, divided into cells, had been working at the highest levels of government, including the State Department, Treasury Department, and the Manhattan Project. Hiss was even reportedly awarded secret Soviet decorations in honor of his service to Moscow. And nothing less than the global balance of military power was at stake: in 1949 the Soviets shocked the world by successfully testing a nuclear weapon that they had learned how to build with critical help from Communist spies working at the heart of the US. government.

Continuing at Jacobin, Shawn Gude wants to capture the ground and describe what exactly the leftist movement du jour is all about: democratic socialism is about democracy. I would say we quite agree with that statement. I’ll let him expand on it in his own words.

At the core of democratic socialism is a simple idea: democracy is good, and it should be expanded.

At the core of sanity is an equally simple idea: democracy is bad, and it should be abolished. But it is telling how anti-democratic his idea of democracy really is. It is the obvious and overwhelming democratic will of the American people that illegals should be deported and that both illegal and legal immigration should be eliminated and strictly limited, respectively. Only the clout of the Cathedral prevents this from happening. Yet Mr. Gude demands—as expansions of democracy, mind!—that ICE be abolished and every savage who can get into the country be allowed to vote. Truly, his idea of democracy really is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. But this is typical of the left: any procedure that generates the outcomes they desire becomes baptized as democratic, and any process, regardless of how actually democratic it is, that delivers a result they don’t like (e.g., Brexit) is… anti-democratic.

Also: democracy is selecting officeholders by sortition and nothing else, but that is autism for another day.

And finishing up at Jacobin, we are again looking at the climate change issue. Holly Jean Buck makes a case for the need for carbon removal. While it is well understood here that the left drastically and disingenuously overstates the danger of climate change, it is still important to draw attention to leftists who are actually arguing as if they really believe climate change is a real thing. Often, that means highlighting instances of argument for an expansion of nuclear power. In this case, however, it is a surprising case for massive, industrial carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Surprising because the left is almost as horrified of CCS as they are of nuclear power. CCS involves, in its most radical formulation, capturing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it deep underground in stable geological formations. Since most leftists do not think, but can only emote, and they have it in their minds that carbon = dirty and Earth = good, they cannot help but read CCS as pumping the pure, precious Earth full of dirty things, and so conclude it is bad and evil.

Ms. Buck, if you forgive her occasional excursions into how CCS plays into social justice, actually makes an intelligent enough case for CCS… on the assumptions that climate change is real and likely catastrophic, of course. If it’s an issue in which you’re interested, I say give this one a read, and not a hate-read either. However, there is one point where she goes full retard, and I would be negligent to not point it out. For context, oil companies currently pump carbon dioxide into older oil wells to capture the remaining petroleum that normal pumping can’t recover. This is called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).

Perversely from a climate change standpoint, carbon dioxide is currently being mined for use in enhanced oil recovery from natural sources in Colorado and elsewhere, and piped to areas like West Texas for oil recovery. The US already has a 4,500-mile network of CO2 pipelines primarily for this purpose, and the carbon dioxide supply still can’t meet the demand of the oil producers.

…

The fact that the industrial tools for carbon clean-up are primarily in the hands of polluters means that worse-case scenarios for large-scale geologic carbon removal are likely: … that CCS will be a bailout or way forward for the very same industries that put the pollution there, who paradoxically may transform themselves over this century to, in the words of Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon “stewards of underground carbon stocks rather than extractors of oil.”

The oil production network could become a waste-carbon conveyer, dominated by actors who own or control carbon reservoirs.

And she had been doing so (relatively) good! Only a leftist could come up with this take. Oil companies drive development of a new technology because it helps them in their goals, and this technology can potentially be spun off to engage in what she calls “the world’s most massive pollution clean-up operation, conducted as a public service”, how can this possibly be spun as a bad thing? So what if oil companies transition from the petroleum business to being managers of carbon sequestration sites? Obviously, they’d still be evil. I’m sure it must make sense, somehow, if you’re a leftist.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA hits a lot of solid notes here: The Right Is Truth, The Left Is Power. Absolutely consistent with observation and the last few centuries of history. An artifact of (intentionally) insecure government. Also discussing The Relevance of Katyn.

Sotted Toad makes a data-driven dive into the paradox of Mismatch and STEM underenrollment. One of the lesser known perversities of Affirmative Action—and, after all, there are so many perversities in it one can hardly be blamed for not keeping up—is the observed fact that black students are less likely to take STEM majors in elite colleges than they do in less selective ones.

Heartiste makes rhetorical mincemeat of Bezos’ Empire: Are You An Amazonian Citizen?

Tom X Hart was quieter than usual this week, but offers a pamphlet sized essay Psycho-Political Analysis | The contemporary assassin, the eclipse of violence, and the birth of taboo, further subtitled “The development of the contemporary assassin”. The problem:

Playing the family game has become almost impossible for men in the West, and the wider. Westernised world. The situation is one of dissolution and uncertainty. Stable jobs becomes rarer by the year. Stable relationships have been undermined by easy divorce, abortion, and contraception. Changes in social mores mean that loyalty to one partner is considered regressive.

This condition of universal precariousness in not exactly new. It has existed, especially in the West, since the 1920s – if not before. What has changed is that bohemia has become a universal condition in the contemporary world. The rootlessness of Bohemia was once contained in very particular geographic spaces. There was Soho or Greenwich Village in the Anglo-Saxon world, and there was the Left Bank in the Latin world. The social conditions that were once reserved for artists have become not just common but normative.

Hart explains how we got here, and what, if anything, might be done about it. Along the way, this particularly poignant shiv to the deracinated Social Media #Prayer:

We will change our social media icons in easy sympathy with the victims. We will #prayforParis, #prayforDelhi, #prayforLondon, and on. Few, if any, of the people using these hashtags will have stepped inside a church, mosque, or synagogue to actually utter a prayer.

In this sense, the social media ‘prayer’ is more superstitious than actual prayer. It is a vague remembrance of an act that used to carry real heft, if only socially. The emptiness of this act reflects the impotence of our societies. The society that prays with conviction also acts with conviction.

Honestly, Hart hits so many strong points in his vast sprawl of ideas, that one easily forgets what Bukowski has to do with it. But definitely recommended reading… and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast covers Mosley and the British Union of Fascists—Men of Action.

Insula Qui, frequency contributor at Zeroth Position, is over on her own blog this week calculating The Price of Liberty.

And speaking of Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus makes and extensive libertarian Case Against Corporations. He sees, quite rightly we think, leviathan corporations rising necessarily as a product of the leviathan state.

From Arnold Kling on The business model of a new university: “If you define complacency as an unwillingness to try significant innovation, then our higher education system is steeped in complacency.” Viewed as a money and influence generation scheme, it’s hard to imagine a better system than the Higher Education Industrial Complex, so why on earth would they change it?

Al Fin launches a jeremiad against the Universities: Destroying Lives for Ideology and Profit, with the data to back it up.

Richard Greenhorn points to some fresh, rather haunting, fiction of his own: ‘A Kept Woman’.

Ace checks in right on schedule “Better lock it in your pocket, takin’ this one to the grave…”—a warning, I think, about being too useful to the opposite sex.

That’s about 100 links for you, and nearly 6000 words. Try not to eat it all in one sitting. Absolutely superb week from everyone. We’re glad to have been a part of it. Many thanks to my faithful TWiR Staff: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear, I couldn’t do it without ye… Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/07/29) appeared first on Social Matter.

We knew coming out of the gate that the depth-n-breadth of last week’s articles was going to be a tough act to follow. Nevertheless, plenty of interesting stuff happening within and without the ‘Sphere this week. I guess the biggest news was NYT’s appointment of Anti-white Bigot Sarah Jeong to their editorial board. Biggest boon to Dissident Right ideas since Hillary’s Pepe Speech. Normies feel compelled to understand NYT, and the message has never been clearer: “It’s OK, or at least easily forgiven, to hate white people”—(signed)The Grey Lady. Heartiste pokes much deserved fun. Steve Burton agrees with me: What a Gift.

Victor Davis Hanson is up over at American Greatness explaining Progressive Regression. Liberalism always eats itself. What else is it going to eat? Also there, Ian Henderson explains Why Artificial Intelligence Will End the Need for Immigration. He could’ve said “increasingly automated low-skill work” will end the need. But that wouldn’t have been quite as sexy.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Northern Dawn provides its Weekly Roundup—News & Views Canadian Style.

Always magisterial Those Who Can See provides an encyclopedic explanation of Widening Circle of Empathy: The Final Frontier. An almost automatic “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Anti-Gnostic kicks Marginal Revolution off his blogroll. For causes.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam explains what happens Way, Way, After Sacral Kingship. He starts out with something that had thus far eluded me (and perhaps many readers).

I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary principles from the first one (freedom, consent, the will of the people, etc.) including justifications of monarchy in terms of such principles, like the monarch as serving the people, or God, or constrained by “natural law.” All these “principles,” and the institutions with which they become co-dependent, are endless sources of imperio in imperium, installing the assumption that the ruler must be justified, opening up the constant struggle over who controls the means of justification. Instead, I begin anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, with the assumption of a relation to the center, a sacred center, and, with regard to politics proper, a sacred center that has been occupied by a human.

Whether he is drawing arbitrary distinctions—i.e., between “political thinking” and “political philosophy”, or between interpreters of “natural law” vis-a-vis interpreters of “sacred centers”—is perhaps debatable. But it’s helpful to know where Adam’s coming from, and either way he’s one of a very small number of people doing high grade “political thinking” in broader reactionary sphere these days. So… back to Sacred Kinship, he documents how seemingly inexorably, over generations or perhaps centuries, the office of Sacred King begins to lose its sheen.

The difference between the occupant of the center and what we could call the meaning of the center, is already opened, at least a crack: kingship is not wholly embodied in the existing king, whose centrality is somewhat indirect.

That distance is the problem we have to solve. Having the king ordained by God obviously doesn’t solve it—it simply highlights the fact that what God has ordained He can unordain, and who is privy to God’s will on this question? We have to accept the break with sacral kingship once and for all. This is no simple manner, and anyone who thinks we have accomplished it by establishing secular rule doesn’t pay much attention to what people, even in the most “advanced” societies, expect of their rulers. It is repeatedly pointed out that economic growth, unemployment, technological development, and so on, are only tangentially and in highly complicated ways related to policies enacted by the President, but all of that is irrelevant: everyone speaks with complete certainty of the “Obama economy” or the “Trump economy,” as if, just as with the sacral kings of old, all benefits and calamities follow directly from the hand of the ruler.

We are “way, way” after Sacral Kingship. Yet its modes of thinking still predominate in political discourse. It was, of course, Moldbug who pointed out the Modern Presidency is a purely symbolic role. But purely symbolic is quite far from nothing. Adam snags yet another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent work here.

Sarah Perry wades into the under-analyzed phenomenon of Boilerplate. As for the etymology…

The origin of the term “boilerplate” from the steel plates used to make boilers strikes me as mysterious. Why would intellectuals criticizing newspapers expect their audiences to be familiar with the specific materials used to manufacture industrial equipment? As far as I can tell, the answer is that during the steampunk nineteenth century, boilers were constantly exploding and killing people.

Sufficiently constantly for reporters to copy verbiage from the time it happened last week. Mrs. Perry finds boilerplate to be analogy of code that extends powerfully into a variety domains.

Let us take boiler plates, then, as an analogy for tiling systems or tiling structures: cultural elements, from architecture to activities to mental states, that tend to copy-paste themselves in identical form over and over, tiling over variation that existed in the past. I have written before about the problems with tiling the world in a top-down, legible manner, but there are both exceptions and redeeming features of this mode of production.

Unorthodoxy explodes the idea You Can’t Control the Environment—well you can’t when it’s not in your political interest to do so. That’s for sure.

Alf thinks Christianity needs to “Saintify” Charles Darwin. How ’bout we just declare a truce? (Which the Catholic Church has pretty much done from the start.) After all, what post-humous miracles might Charles Darwin perform? And this part was spot on:

The main purpose of religion is to prevent holiness spirals so we can all just get on with life. If Christianity can do that once again like it used to do, who am I to reinvent the wheel? I have no problem getting behind Christianity if it is capable of what Jim thinks it is capable.

Well, that’s not its main main purpose. But it is so from the point of view of any well-governed state. That more souls go to heaven—e.g., by eating God—that’s just pure gravy for the King.

Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin coins the Frito effect as a shorthand for all dysgenic trends in intelligence. If you know the source of the name without looking, I don’t know whether to be impressed or worried.

And Anatoly also gives an overview of Russia’s historical gun culture and the changes to it. To the surprise of literally no one, there were no significant restrictions on firearm purchases until the 1905 unpleasantness, and even then, it was much less restrictive than many areas of the U.S. today. Naturally, the communists began confiscating privately held weapons almost immediately after their rise to power, and they even went so far as to start banning knives. Today, Russia is still very restrictive towards gun rights and many Russians think that is essential to their safety. Sad!

Ron Unz has been hard at work these past few weeks with his American Pravda series with The Nature of Anti-Semitism. Unz reviews several sources and historical episodes and concludes that reports of anti-Semitism have been exaggerated.

Malcolm Pollack interrogates Roger Scruton on What is a Conservative? What it ought to mean is a different question.

By way of Isegoria… European financial history: starts with Fibonacci. Tyler Cowen describes what the decline of America would look like. Turkish Airlines produces an airline safety video worth watching. Microfilm may still have a future yet. Filed under My Aren’t You Surprised: The most expensive new public school in San Francisco history failed. Finally, How do placebos work.

Finally, over at CWNY, As You Would Oppose the Devil, oppose these six modern, very stylish, hypocrisies.

This Week in Social Matter

Jérôme Bernard Grenouille, on loan from Northern Dawn, returns to Social Matter with something completely different: (quasi-)autobiographical Thoughts Upon The Huangpu River.

There is a stigma in this new China—this seemingly open China—towards Chinese women throwing themselves at foreigners. A confident culture intrinsically seeks to perpetuate itself, which in turns requires it to regulate the behavior of its women. For a society significantly more socially intricate than any in the West, the mechanism of choice for enforcing the social contract is shame. Chinese women who date and marry outside of the nation’s social and biological compact can expect to be rather publicly disgraced. I have witnessed more than one interracial couple strolling down the streets on a breezy Shanghai night, jeered at by bystanders. The official term for Chinese women who engage in this social faux pas is “white cock sucker.” Although this may seems crude to a West steeped in the mantra of “diversity is our strength,” a civilization with five thousand years of uninterrupted history knows a thing or two about survival.

This state of things underpinned our entire conversation without it ever being stated….

Grenouille switches between personal vignette and deep commentary on the Chinese soul. And as if in a
mirror: the Western. Superbly crafted and a Must-Read: Winning the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

Empedokles Papadopolous drops part 2 of his Dark Enlightenment Now, an on-going critique of Steven Pinker’s breezy Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s primary target, it would seem, is loyalty. At least any loyalty to a biological or historical given. Loyalties to abstractions (fandoms of Canon cameras or enlightenment rationalism) get a pass. This would be, of course, horribly racist if the only people bound by the No Loyalties Rule weren’t white working classes.

If you are in any way disturbed by the prospect that your people are disappearing from the land they have occupied for generations, centuries, or millennia, if your neighborhood goes from being Irish or Italian to Mexican or Chinese seemingly overnight, if you feel any sense of loss, tragedy, or anger at this prospect, if you would like to urge your people to take steps to continue to exist, this is viewed as unacceptable. You have no justification to complain or feel a sense of loss. It’s just a condo complex. It makes no difference who lives there, and if you don’t like what’s going on, move to another complex with higher property values.

In reality, neither reason, nor science demands the shedding of attachments to one’s people, traditions, religion, or homeland to become deracinated cosmopolitans.

Oh, and it’s always 1939 when it comes to Nationalism too. Of course it is… Superb work again from Papadopolous and another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award. Three more installments to come.

Finally, Benjamin Welton is back this time with some exquisitely crafted poetry: The Clerk Returns.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Over at West Hunter, Cochran aims his spotlight (and wry wit) at NYT’s Paige Harden Blowing Smoke about increasingly strong associations between genes and completing college.

Harden argues that genetic inequality is unfair, and so -> redistribution. The earlier argument was that everybody is really the same, and so -> redistribution. I’m pretty sure that if the astronomers found that an asteroid the size of Texas was going to hit us in twenty years, that answer to that would also be massive redistribution. What does she says about the boring topic of making society actually work better—where well-understood genetic influences could have a role? Nothing, of course.

Still vacationing (which apparently she doesn’t like???), Evolutionist X presents Notes From The Road™… Brain Modules, Fertility, and Conspiracy.

Book club discussion continues unhindered on Philip Auerswald’s The Code Economy: Chapter 10: Complementarity—In which I am Confused.

Auerswald suggests that automation bifurcates products into cheap and expensive ones. He claims that movies, visual art services (ie, copying and digitization of art vs. fine art,) and music have also undergone bifurcation, not extinction, due to new technology.

[…] [T]hat word–bifurcation—contains a problem: what happens to the middle? A huge mass of people at the bottom, making and consuming cheap products, and a small class at the top, making and consuming expensive products—well I will honor the demonstrated preferences of everyone involved for stuff, of whatever price, but what about the middle?

Is this how the middle class dies?

Is the economy made for man? Or man for the economy? Along the way, Mrs. X hikes through some related sociological trails. An unexpectedly large effort here nets an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention from The Committee.

Finally, for Anthropologyish Friday History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons, pt. 3 Burma, China, and Japan. Not sure what makes it merely anthropology-ish. Study of mankind is as study of mankind does. But this is a particularly gruesome episode.

By way of Audacious Epigone, some pretty solid Meditations on America and Rome, and nationalism and identity as well.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took a well-deserved week off this week. Given the various outrages late and impending, we’re virtually certain he won’t say silent for long. Tune in next week for finely crafted, cold-aged skewerings of your favorite liberals.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau looks at some maladaptive cultural practices when he reviews Robert Edgerton’s Sick Societies (1992) Revisited.

J. M. Smith muses on academic bombast and a corresponding lack of substance in Hellebore, Nettles and Jimson Weed. He reports from the front lines of the latest droll academic trend. A taste:

Woody Guthrie was a communist, but was not, at least, a bombastic communist!

“Spatial justice” is just a bombastic way to say desegregation, and a soothing way to say forced integration. In this anthology, “justice” will almost certainly mean equality, in which case “spatial justice” will require that every individual is equally likely to occupy any particular “space.” As a practical matter, it would mean that families were assigned to neighborhoods randomly, and without respect to their wealth or preference.

Whatever the opposite of gentrification is… I think that’d be it. Smith, impresses The Committee yet again, and earns an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his troubles.

Kristor detects Reaction at First Things when Nathan Pinkoski writes an article about Understanding Marion Maréchal. Don’t count First Things out quite yet…

Matt Briggs weighs in on The McCarrick Scandal & Objectively Disordered Sexual Desires. Then he writes about What Christianity Fails Into.

People don’t usually embrace Caribbean animistic Santeria when abandoning Christianity. They instead become animal “rights” supporters and talk about being nice to the planet.

Briggs compares HR departments to Corporate Zampolit, that is, the Communist military thought police. Also, corporate meat bans, the developmental benefits of lying, and antifa summer camp for kids, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVI.

Mark Richardson wonders why Tony Abbott thinks Australian immigrants are The best citizens?

William Wildblood takes us on an early Christian pilgrimage to the island of Iona in Scotland.

Dalrock examines the “servant-leader” and Complementarian contempt for the servant’s heart.

By coining this new term to replace biblical headship, complementarians are challenging traditional Christian men to affirm that leadership and service can coexist in the same role. The cynical brilliance of this strategy is that complementarians themselves don’t believe this. Complementarians don’t believe that leadership is a form of service. They see leadership and service as a zero sum game.

Over at Faith & Heritage, perceptive explanation of how Racial Reconciliation Is a Gospel Imperative—just not what proggies mean by it.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, the eminent and tragically underrated Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was prolific enough to keep the blog fueled for many weeks.

Courtesy of Baron Zach

At the Imaginative Conservative, Anthony Esolen asks: How Would Our Ancestors View the 21st Century?. Not too well, of course.

By way of City Journal, Heather MacDonald describes the anarchy currently Shooting Up Chicago. She advocates a ‘culture of marriage’ to solve the city’s problems; but culture is downstream of power. So we come back around to the lash and the noose as panacea. Frank Furedi gives a brief history of The Campus Culture of Fear and its Costs. Like many conservatives, he believes that college victimhood culture inhibits the university from conducting serious intellectual work. When in reality, the cause and effect are opposite. The university had already stopped producing serious work and its current climate is merely a war over status in an institution that still has the cultural power to confer it, but no longer fulfills its primary purpose.

Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, which I guess is some sort of anime thing.

And over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless has Writing Advice: Note-Keeping and Linguistic Fluidity for us. He’s also Accepting Submissions in the realm of fiction and theory. If you’re a writer, hit him up! And finally, the brief horror vignette Interval One: The Severing.

Finally, Chris Morgan offers the somewhat surreal, and hopefully not autobiographical, tale of Magic Fingers.

This Week in the Outer Left

The Outer Left were too boring this week to link. If the pinko avant garde manages to say anything interesting—or at least funny—next week, you can read about it here.

This Week… Elsewhere

Nigel T. Carlsbad drops a pile of poasts all on the same day. Must have had them in the hopper. He makes fun of the once hoped for The banana family of nations—forgetting that the last century of Brazilian and Uruguayan history hadn’t happened yet. He digs up a gem of Woke racism from 1922. He makes a very strong point Leninism and scale: Why do putative reactionaries have romantic feelings for historical commies, when those feelings are never reciprocated? And a reading on the manners of the Roman aristocracy.

PA has coverage of Occupy ICE vs. Philly Police—armed with bicycles, round one. Video: very lulzworthy. Also there, recognizing the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising: White Eagle—with more original translation.

Hapsburg Restorationist quotes Otto von Habsburg on The Inherent Fallacy of the Ethnic State.

Something completely different this week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Quiz Show—Listener Q&A.

Al Fin looks at the Surge of Americans Renouncing US Citizenship. It’s been on the rise for a while now, but it’s still really tiny numbers. And besides… Good riddance.

Spotted Toad is (unusually) brief with The Problem of Meritocracy in One Graph. Basically, “meritocracy” is a morally soothing euphemism for “something else”.

You can “take The Derb out of National Review, but you can’t take The National Review out of The Derb“.

Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui does some ideological analysis with The Producerist Theory of Society and Civilization. What exactly is “producerism”? Well, despite its origins as yet another communist sex cult, it is an ideology centered on being productive, albeit not in the crass economic/materialistic sense.

Life, by its very nature is productive insofar as it exists to self-improve and self-perpetuate. This means that those humans who do not use their lives to produce anything are inherently misusing their life.

For sufficiently expansive definitions of “produce anything”… maybe. The focus on maximizing production also leads to specialization, since pursuing multiple objectives causes inefficiency.

Instead of trying to get a firm grasp on the political apparatus, we ought to improve that which we can improve. Trying to do both at once will always lead to having to make sacrifices which are ultimately destructive. If one is blessed with a sociable nature, the best one can do is to create connections, lead people towards an ideal of connectedness, and imbue individuals with a higher regard for production. But if that person is instead talented in the arts, it is in his power to change the landscape in which aesthetic values are conceptualized to make people embrace that which is good.

Qui goes on to apply producerism to historical epochs and thereby make a case for political liberty. Though we’re not about to endorse “yet another communist sex cult“, Qui snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for the depth and quality of work here. A full-blown critique of “producerism” is, we think, a worthy next step.

Late in the week, Ace offers some hard-won lessons in “I still dream of dad…”.

That’s about all we had time for this week, folks. A less densely packed week: About 80 links and 3400 words. Well… it is August. And, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you should be out enjoying it; not slaving over blogposts. Many thanks to my faithful TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, 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 (2018/08/05) appeared first on Social Matter.

Late in the week it became clear that Sky King was going to be the biggest news within or without the Reactosphere in quite some time. Giovanni Dannato was quick to post on its potential meaning: Seattle Airplane Suicide Is A Barometer of Culture.

Please click to read Borzoi’s whole magnificent thread:

I'm going to attempt to explain what's going on with the Skyking thing for people who don't get it.

Rich is a martyr.

And if you don't get that, then you aren't part of the people or culture that understands *immediately* what I meant by that

I will try and explain 1/

— Borzoi (@ByzantineSnake) August 11, 2018

I’m sure there’ll be a bunch more about Richard Russell (RIP) next week.

Over at American Greatness, VDH documents The Elites’ War on the Deplorables—round #437. As well as The Ancient War Between the Press and the President. Brandon Weichert looks at Confronting China: America Needs Japan, India, and Australia. We agree, but would certainly add Canada. And our favorite “yellow journalist” (heh!) and professional bigot is still in the news: The Genocidal Elite, Part I: Who’s Afraid of Sarah Jeong?. The AG take is that this is mostly a crisis for the New York Times. We quite agree. I would not be surprised if The Grey Lady does eventually find some plausible way to fire her.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton helpfully kicks off the week for us in the ‘Sphere. But instead of “Sunday Thoughts”, it’s “Yellow” Journalism, in honor of the NYT’s Sarah Jeong of course.

Based on her Twitter statements it becomes abundantly clear that despite her imposing educational credentials, she not only looks like a Starbucks barista, she almost certainly has the IQ of one, too. With that in mind, it’s not too hard to see why the New York Times hired her recently.

He also mentions “Europhobic” to describe her—“europhobic” is a word that is in need of a far more widespread use. Pendleton’s main effort is in taking “conservatives” to task for merely trying to get her fired for “racism”:

Racism was a term conjured up by Marxists to get ethnic minorities to help them tear down the power structure of the West; it’s a continuation of the class struggle dynamic, carried over to racial, rather than economic classes. The left created the word and as such they get to determine the parameters under which it gets used; and logical consistency is not one of those parameters. They are more than happy to use the term against their enemies while smugly dismissing any criticisms that they might meet the criteria for racism as much as their enemies. Reactionaries must etch this point into their skulls like they would the Lord’s Prayer or the maxims of Confucius: leftists are not concerned about logical consistency. They are concerned first and foremost with power, and they will use any means necessary to seize it.

Remember, dear reader, you’re just a prole from a fly-over state so you don’t have enough power to hold them accountable for their logical inconsistencies. They control Cornell and Harvard, they control the New York Times and the Washington Post, they control the NSA and the FBI—what do you control, silly altar boy?

What, indeed? There’s much more, and I urge a full read! Strong showing from Pendleton—one of the very best things I read all week—and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Our friend Кирилл Каминец checks in with a quick update: Где мы есть и куда мы двигаемся.

This week in Generative Anthropology finds Adam Hypothetically Speaking. As usual, difficult to summarize, but very good reading. A taste:

I am proposing a kind of freedom of thought, one already practiced by many on the new or dissident right (which makes it possible for me to reflect upon it). We’re not obliged, nor does it always serve our purposes, to “prove” that we have a better theory of “human nature” or “social structure,” or to provide, on demand, iron-clad “alternatives” to the seemingly carved in the stone of history liberal order. It’s not as if we shouldn’t do these things, if they seem useful—my point is that these are not rules we need play by. Liberalism thoroughly saturates today’s media-scape, and a lot of what we can do is facilitate liberalism’s own self-dialogues, its incessant, narcissistic babblings. It’s helpful to point out that the truth of the matter is almost always pretty much exactly the opposite of what the liberal says; indeed, what liberals say is almost invariably a way of avoiding some damaging truth. My own approach, which I of course hope others will find compelling, is to keep asking about origin, center, power, deferral and discipline, questions liberalism must avoid under penalty of brain death.

As usual, Adam snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent and important work.

Free Northerner goes pretty koanic in his clarifications of Power, Rights, and Illiberal Freedom:

True freedom is a form of power, and, therefore, comes from, at base, a capacity for violence.

True freedom is a reality, not a right.

The reality of whether a person or people has the capacity and will for violence to stay free.

“Bad” Billy Pratt checks in from a busy summer with another of his Astute Social Commentary Mashed Up With Classic Movie™ articles: Homosexuality as Suburban Invasion in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” (1985). This one is epic! First, Pratt sets us up with tales horror stories from OK Cupid:

The bugman has a complex relationship with homosexuality.

He can’t be gay, because duh. And he can’t be anti-gay, because that would be interpreted as repressed gay.

This leaves only one option for the bugman—to signal that he’s so comfortable with homosexuality, and so masculine and so heterosexual, that he can playfully joke about being gay—and, because of this, no one can suspect that he is either anti-gay or closeted gay. Sure it seems like an unnecessarily complex way to signal what should be considered the default, but this is what a culture who promotes homosexuality creates when it’s under the moral authority of a matriarchy.

Which is, of course… Totally Gay. But what’s that got to do with Freddie Krueger?

The film was a sleeper hit at the box office, grossing over 25 million dollars, and just one year later a sequel was released: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” (1985). While Krueger was written to be an implicit sexual sadist, it wasn’t unusual that the main character of a slasher movie was cast as a woman. Just like real life, in horror movies men are disposable and women are inherently valuable. To get the most anxiety and suspense out of an audience, the story comes down to the monster stalking the last remaining woman (so much that the horror trope has its own name). The first thing that should stand out as unusual about “Freddy’s Revenge” is that the main character is male.

Read on to see how that turns out. This was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention

This week in Sovereign Exceptions, B. D. Matthews sketches The Prince and (Michael Anton’s) The Suit, in which he claims Machiavelli as “the world’s first neoreactionary blogger”.

Machiavelli is worth reading, not for any one interpretation, but because his context is oddly close to our own. At the time that he was writing, Northern Italy was one of the richest places in the world, albeit one that suffered from persistently dysfunctional politics. The economic ground was shifting beneath their feet, though, as seafaring traders found cheaper trade routes to India and China. Like us, Machiavelli is setting down the rules even as the economic and technological fundamentals underpinning those rules are undergoing unprecedented changes.

As for Anton…

The irony that a Straussian wrote the best straightforwardly conservative defense of Trump is not lost on me, or on anyone else.

Matthews contends Anton’s The Suit is a Weird Al level parody of Machiavelli’s classic. Apparently, it’s even convinced him to dress better. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Also there, at the 11th (and a half) hour, Matthews drops The Truth About Theranos. So when did Theranos become a fraud?

There’s not a clean answer. It’s like asking when someone became an alcoholic, or when a marriage fell apart. At some point, you can look back and say it happened, but at the time it’s such a slow slide as to be imperceptible.

Read the whole thing! Fantastic work from certified rising star B. D. Matthews this week. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award from The Committee.

Alf is rather vexed over Christianity—and understandably so… I think it’s because he wants it to do something that it cannot do, and never has done: bring order to society. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: we don’t suffer from too little religion these days, but a poisonous excess of it:

We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy.

The problem is not that the role of religion is too small in the government, but that it has gobbled up the entirety of the government as well as its training and propaganda organs. It has become totalitarian. Christianity is supposed to be about eating God. Not tranny bathrooms in North Carolina.

At Jacobite Mark Lutter ponders urban planning in
SimCity in Real Life.

Also there, our good friend Robert Mariani gives a thorough analysis of the Sarah Jeong brouhaha in
Sarah Jeong and the Only Direction. Mariani starts off by chiding the conservatives for thinking this is all some sort of game.

The conservative-media response is one of asking where the ref is—there is supposed to be a neutral referee that makes both teams play by the same rules. Forced to play the bigoted jester, conservatives are always raring for an opportunity to share their perennial humiliation with progressives. It never works; the transcendent arbiter somehow always misses call.

The Washington Generals are supposed to lose. There is no referee, and this is not a game. Mariani goes on to discuss the actual ideology motivating Jeong and her masters.

Brooklyn left-neoliberalism is absorbing what it needs to secure the status of its adherents. This post-Marxism is becoming the religion of the elites, kind of like how Episcopalianism was a century ago. Alarm about white males “claiming to be oppressed” when no such claim was made, as strong as ever during the Jeong controversy, is the perfect illustration of why this ideology is so useful to the powerful. That such a specific phantasm is automatically generated by our shitty aristocrats tells us it’s something that they are worried about: white males having a claim to oppression is a threat. Nominal oppression is jealously guarded because it’s understood to be the gate and key to legitimate social domination.

Only those without Power are allowed to hold power. Mariani snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his superb work here.

Ron Unz continues American Pravda with Jews and Nazis. Unz explores cooperation between Zionists and Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s.

Anatoly Karlin had a nuclear theme going this week. First, he considers the ethics of nuking the USSR. It was well within American might to destroy the Soviet Union at any point before the Soviets developed a nuclear deterrent capability, but the will was lacking. One consideration that weighs heavily on me, which Anatoly does not consider, is what effect destroying the USSR externally would have had on future communist movements. Does it make communism less unattractive because people never see the horror of communism in full swing? Does it even make the Soviets into martyrs?

Continuing on his nuclear theme, Anatoly points to a study showing what we all already knew, namely that radiation is good for you. If a reactionary is nothing else, he is a man with a healthy atomic glow. The irrational fear of radiation and atomic fission has likely contributed more misery than any other phobia.

The conservative, strongly atomophile society portrayed in prewar America in the Fallout world is the gold standard of civilization that we must all unironically strive to attain.

Fully endorsed, completely unironically. If you don’t want your kids zooming around on nuclear powered rollerskates, can you even call yourself a man?

So what’s Isegoria been reading? Ray Dalio on close-minded people. Tyler Cowen on (non-technical) problems with tech. Asian historical adventures inspired by Shogun. On the “butt-eating powers” of the fungus Massospora—if yer a cicada that is. The disturbing case of the Right Whale. Eugène Dubois on how how Primates managed to keep most of their neurons the same size. Die Weltwoche’s interview with Peter Thiel. Finally, a 1997 interview with Nick Land—from “Wired UK”.

Finally, Cambria Will Not Yield’s Saturday epistle inveighs against Democracy—The White Man’s Covenant with Death.

This Week in Social Matter

Our old friend Arthur Gordian returns to Social Matter, with a take on Michael “Flight 93 Election” Anton’s WaPo “Citizenship Should Not Be a Birthright” editorial: Birthright Citizenship And The Machiavellian Moment. Anton does not quite go far enough. Along the way, Gordian deftly skewers David Marcus’ response to Anton at The Federalist.

Loyalty, as described in this previous Social Matter essay, arises in connection to real human relationships in a community sharing reciprocal obligations, not liberties, which are non-voluntary. Loyalty cannot be given to an idea because it is impossible to be obligated to an idea. Loyalty cannot exist on a voluntary basis because freedom to enter and exit would mean that there would be no obligation to honor the reciprocal needs of the community after receiving the benefits of membership. Likewise, the nation must be a body of real human beings to whom obligation is owed in order to be an object of loyalty. These obligations form on the basis of a commonality in the form of familial bonds and extended communal relationships by which the individual has accrued unearned benefits over the course of his life which he is incapable of easily repaying.

We know what libertarians get wrong, and that’s where Anton comes in:

From here, the weakness of Anton’s article emerges: the end of birthright citizenship is too little and too late to preserve the Republic. If the American nation existed as a strong, national community and the immigrant communities were merely isolated outposts surrounding a strong civic culture, then his policy prescription would be a reasonable stopping point to preserve the social capital of the community. However, even ending all immigration will not change the fact that the former American community has already been shattered by the forces of the managerial elites in their desire to atomize and homogenize the nations of the world into a plastic body of passive, slavish consumers. With the collapse of the American nation, the United States has entered a Machiavellian Moment.

It may have been a Flight 93 Election, but we’re all still on that flight. We haven’t regained control, but we haven’t crashed yet.

Fresh out of girl smoking pics this week. Shall have to get to the Quick-Chek to pick up a pack.

The Machiavellian Reformer is the late republican counterpart to the Founding Father. Like the Founding Father, the Reformer is a great and gifted leader with a mind toward history and concerned with the perpetuation of his nation into the historical horizon. The Founder creates a nation out of nothing, but the Reformer finds his nation amidst the chaos of the Machiavellian Moment. The genius of the Reformer is that he takes the decayed foundation of the Republic and forms it into a new structure suited to sustain the weight of the nation, thus following in the Founder’s footsteps as a Second Father of the nation. The New Foundation will not be identical to the old and may alter or change many of the most cherished Founding principles but will nevertheless carry many of the names and symbols associated with it in new forms.

The mission: To reinterpret the work of Restoration as a reform effort, in keeping with the spirit, if not the exact letter, of the Founding Fathers. By the narrowest of margins, Arthur Gordian takes home the belt “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

And close on Gordian’s heels, Empedokles Papadopolous delivers the next installment of his systematic rejoinder to Steven Pinker: Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 3. Here Papadopolous smacks down Pinker’s sunny and poorly founded optimism, which the latter sets against the cynicism and nihilism of post-modernism. Post-modernism is an error, to be sure, but not because modernism got it right to begin with. Ironically, Pinker runs from the implications of his own Blank Slate, whereas Dark Enlightenment thinkers take no small inspiration from it.

I said that I would give my own explanation for the resurgence of the Right, and it is this: if you adopt liberalism, you go extinct, and the Right is fighting against leftist deathwish values. In Pinker’s barrage of charts and graphs, the most important one is missing: fertility rates. The birthrates of all modern, Enlightened, liberal nations are below replacement levels, and this trend will ultimately lead to the extinction of these peoples.

Values have survival value, and everywhere modern liberalism reigns, the people of that nation are on the path to indistinctiveness at best and extinction at worst. Isn’t it convenient that Pinker doesn’t look at the survival value of his Enlightenment values? Apparently, when it comes to evaluating Enlightenment values themselves, evo and entro are no longer important. Modern Enlightened nations are not being killed by enemies, eradicated by disease, wiped out by natural disasters, or devoured by predators; they are being wiped out by their own deathwish values. Enlightenment appears to be the worst path a people can take from a Darwinian perspective. Evolutionist X’s saying “Modernity selects for those who resist it” might best encapsulate this movement.

Of course, this resurgence of the Right has garnered nowhere near as much power as it did in the 1930s, or even 1950s. And we all know how those turned out. So much work remains to be done, but Papadopolous’ point that this is an existential struggle is spot on: The fight against leftism is a fight for survival, on a long time line.

It is not ignorance, superstition, bigotry, or irrationality that is motivating the Right. It is that the Right can see that everything the Left touches dies. Institutions such as businesses, the military, or entire national governments require hierarchy and they die if they become egalitarian. Ethnic and religious groups die as they abandon traditionalism and adopt Leftist materialism. On the other hand, the values of traditionalism are designed, in a very “evo” sense of designed, to prevent social problems and preserve nation, family, ethnicity, and culture. That’s what the new Right is fighting for.

This whole series has been fantastic, and this week earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Saturday Poetry & Prose took the week off.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane muses on Japanese strategists, or rather the lack thereof during WW2. The sad story of Economists and Merkel’s migrants. Finally, a biological parable: monogenic vs polygenic.

Evolutionist X has a theory to attempt to explain The Mainline Paradox: Memetics and Liberal Christian Collapse. If All Are Welcome™ in liberal denominations, why are they shrinking? And why are the less tolerant (or explicitly racial) denominations doing just fine?

I propose this is because functionally religious identity is about group identity, and a group identity that hinges on “openness to outsiders” is not a functional group identity.

Well, that is true, whether it explains the paradox or not. The paradox I was hoping Mrs. X would have a theory on is why do these declining denominations—or at least their ideas—remain so influential? I’ve only met one or two Unitarians in my life—although those COEXIST bumper stickers are everywhere—and I’ve never wittingly met a Quaker. Don’t even get me started on Seventh Day Adventists. So… get right on that one, Mrs. X!

The EvX Book Club motors along to The Code Economy, Chapter 11: Education and Death. Auerswald is surprisingly (given his patent unrealism on similarly charged issues) realist on the topic of education being the panacea his social class generally believes it to be. This was interesting:

It’s easy to imagine this future in which we are all like some sort of digital Amish, continually networked via our phones to engage in small transactions like sewing a pair of trousers for a neighbor, mowing a lawn, selling a few dozen tacos, or driving people to the airport during a few spare hours on a Friday afternoon. It’s also easy to imagine how Walmart might still have massive economies of scale over individuals and the whole system might fail miserably.

Apparently, believing in the orthodox panaceas are not required of Auerswald’s caste, so long as you have plausible different panaceas. His seems to be “peer-to-peer” everything, at which Evolutionist X takes some masterful swipes.

Anthropologyish Friday continues with Oriental Prisons pt. 4 Egypt. Griffiths’ History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons was written at a time where white-washing documentary history was not obligatory. So the sheer barbarity of… well… barbaric peoples is on full display.

By way of Audacious Epigone, the over-representation of white males among congressional Democrats—scandalous. It’s time to end white male oppression of the Democratic Party.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First this past week, Porter anticipates Trump unleashing Sherman on the tech giants. That being the anti-trust law, not the tank. But our God-Emperor would be well-advised to use both:

The left controls the monopolies, and monopolies aren’t in the business of platforming their competition. Ecumenical platitudes about non-existent principles are the things one utters while building a military infrastructure. In contrast, HATE is what one says when that infrastructure is deemed secure enough to form a foundation of attack.

Then, his trademark viciousness is on full display in Justice for Sarah Jeong. I’m spoiled for choice as far as tasty quotes go, but this one’s my favorite:

Perhaps more than anything her hiring left me wishing the Pusan Perimeter had collapsed before we got there. That because it requires the cultivated conscience of an insect to express fervent contempt and eradication fantasies about the same people who lost many thousands of their own saving you from a short life of stomach worms. That was our mistake.

Finally, he turns a critical eye toward the “research” that passes for scholarship at our most eminent university in Veritas Doesn’t Wear Crimson:

So if fondly disposed toward America, you are an “ardent” nationalist (as explained on page 10/35). Conversely, if one dislikes America very much, as for instance with the black panthers, that person is completely devoid of ethno-nationalist sentiment. The premise being that you can’t be a nationalist if you want to replace someone else’s nation (that you don’t like) with your own (that you do). I hope this lesson has been edifying. As our motto says here at Harvard: Veritas.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor feels The Unconscious Girds for War tugging at his passions. Then he explores What Tends to Happen at the End of a Vicious Cycle and how far we might be away from it.

The question is not whether the present wealth of the West is massively greater than it was in 1914—it most assuredly is—but rather whether our present wealth is as great as it would be, had we not in 1914 or thereabouts begun a precipitous descent into *moral* confusion and error. We are much wealthier and more powerful than we were in 1914. But we are much less wealthy and powerful than we might have been, had we made better decisions.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about the conservative revolutionary historian Gustave Le Bon on the World in Revolt.

J.M. Smith takes a sympathetic look at fantastic sleeping giants, Boiled Frogs and Beanstalks.

Bonald is over at The Orthosphere too, writing about the political IQ gap and The evolving narrative of conservative stupidity.

And over on his home blog, he takes a sober look at the dignity arguments on the death penalty and slavery.

I am not a magistrate with the power of life and death, and the Church has made it clear that she doesnít want amateur apologists like me picking fights on her behalf. So perhaps I should just leave it at that. I do not know if the death penalty is always immoral. I do not know what the Church teaches about it. The question of faithñdo I believe that what the Church teaches about it is true?ñdoes not even arise for me on this issue.

Matt briggs is glad Sarah Jeong, The New York Times & The Problem Of Whites is on full blast on Front Street. The truth will set us free. Then he affirms Despite What You Heard, The Death Penalty Is Legitimate. Feser and Bessetteís ìBy Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishmentî, a book review. And of course, there’s teachers failing math tests, mainstream pedo jokes, straight crossdressers and professional sugar babies, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVII.

Mark Richardson looks closely at what goes into A Jeongian analysis

Because you are present in elite spaces, your authenticity will often be called into question. So white-bashing becomes a form of assuaging internal and external doubts, affirming that despite ascending into the elite, you are not entirely of it.

Busy week over at Albion Awakening. John Fitzgerald reviews the book of essays that perhaps inspired his blog’s namesake in England’s Dreaming—Wayne Sturgeon’s ‘Albion Awake’.

Bruce Charlton asks, Why the recent suppression of conspiracy theorists?

And William Wildblood gives an answer to the question, What’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism?

Seriouslypleasedropit has some brief and well-constructed thoughts on Fulfillment and Metamorphosis.

Steve Skojec at 1 Peter 5 goes on a powerful rant here: “There is no such thing as conservative Catholicism”—as George Weigel reckons it at any rate.

And Cane Caldo takes “Equality before the law” out to the Biblical woodshed.

Finally, at Faith & Heritage, contributor “Adi” kicks off a promising series: Viktor Orbán: Christian Nationalism Is the Future, Part I. Here’s Part II.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and continues with the excellent Hopkins on Sunday.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce distinguishes between evil art, and art depicting evil, in Satan and the Art of Darkness. And Auguste Meyrate notes how Eliot predicted The Male Millennial.

At City Journal, Edward Short plugs a new book about the rise of Trump in Trump Contra Mundum.

Harper McAlpine Black shows up this week both to impugn Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien and lament the poor quality of illustrations of his work in general, in Mary Fairburn and the Visual Tolkien. To Harper, and to Tolkien, attempting to illustrate literary myth is a foolish exercise. Mary Fairburn, however, seems to have come close to capturing Tolkein’s mindset.

Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and also a rundown of Plato’s Dialogues: Euthydemus.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless publishes Part II of The Photographer’s Dilemma. He was also very impressed with the horror movie The Midnight Meat Train and gives a detailed review in two parts. And finally, a writing tutorial in video form: Keeping a Scene in Concord With Its Characters.

This Week in the Outer Left

Over at The Baffler, Tom Whyman has a lot of ink to spill in ire over how the media supposedly treats snowflakes. He sees the media breathlessly report on college campus disruptions where students aggressively protest the latest social justice cause célèbre and concludes it falls into the genre of “kids these days” reporting. He is also eager to contrast that with media reporting on Trump supporters, and the supposedly fair hearing they receive. Throw in some very badly misinterpreted Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is bullshit even when it’s not mangled, and you have this screed. Here’s the thing though: the media pitches stories in a “kids these days” mode because that pulls in the maximum number of clicks, simple as that. Those stories, no matter how minor, get news coverage not because the media just can’t stand these kids and their social justice, but because the coverage is a veiled threat. Every single time. It is a veiled threat to get on board with being outraged about cultural appropriation or trans rights or whatever other thing that does not real… or else. The supposedly sympathetic portrayals of Trump voters result in people losing their jobs and being internationally ridiculed in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. Whaddaya know? An even less veiled threat! Get on board or something bad might happen to you. Actively oppose and something bad will happen to you. That’s it, the media is a tool of propaganda and terrorization, and nothing else.

And over at Jacobin, they insist on being mustache-twirlingly evil by denouncing the recently passed federal right-to-try law. There are a couple points that need to be made here. Naturally, they are scandalized that money is potentially changing hands, but that is hardly even worth mentioning. They are valuing the supposed sanctity of a lengthy bureaucratic process—which has only existed since 1962 and been reformed several times since—over people’s lives and choices.

A young man of my acquaintance, a friend of mine, lost his father last year to a terminal illness. A degenerative neurological disorder… no cure, no treatment, nothing. Just five years of misery, suffering, and heartache. Five years watching his father decline mentally, a once sparkling wit reduced to monosyllables. And then a final week of seeing his father starve himself to death because the man had simply had enough. Who can look this young man in the face and say: “That needed to happen to safeguard the sanctity of the FDA’s Sacred Bureaucracy. Your terminally ill, dying-no-matter-what father has no right to try medications that the FDA has not blessed. After all, he could’ve died poorer!”? Well, apparently Jacobin can.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Salon tries another apologized for criticizing Dr. Peterson’s work without having read any of it (which
apology Dr. Peterson accepted), but also finds himself accused of unimaginable sins against Leftism by a disgruntled former graduate student. Oh dear.

Peterson himself publishes the transcript of his remarks and Q&A from the Aspen Ideas Festival.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA proposes a very illuminating thought experiment: To The End Of The World With A Friend. And… an encouraging word: Love In A Time Of Poz.

Gornahoor provides a strong survey on the History of Christendom in Hungary.

Tom X. Hart does Bro Science™—which is to say: self-experimentation. The Certified Bro results are in Month of meat: A month on the Mikhaila Peterson diet. Pros substantially outweigh cons. He notes:

The following observations are, of course, in no way scientific.

Au contraire, Bro… Bro Science is real science. Also from Tom: Ideological Analysis | The left has an Israel problem. Or Israel has a The Left problem. Or (most likely) both.

Arnold Kling reviews Lilliana Mason’s book Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became our Identity. Naturally, Kling takes Mason’s conclusions in a libertarian direction, but still, based on his consideration, Dr. Mason’s book does seem to be worth reading. Also Kling pooh-poohs Tyler Cowen’s pessimistic scenario with: Whose problems would you prefer?.

Spotted Toad has the data on what we’ve long expected: Too Rich or Too Thin—people just can’t afford to be thin anymore.

Ace lifts a line from Kid Rock: “I can tell you’re trouble but I still want a taste…”

Over at Zeroth Position Nullus Maximus offers a Book Review: The New Wealth of Nations. Maximus goes chapter by chapter through Surjit S. Bhalla’s book pointing out what the author gets right and what he gets wrong or ignores. In general, Dr. Bhalla seems to consider education the solution to all social problems and downplays or dismisses anything to do with biology or any desire or motivation that can’t be met with money.

Also there, Darien Sumner offers a critique of Mark Christensen’s award-winning article We Need Tremendous Government with the predictable libertarian reply: The Myth of Tremendous Government. For the most part Sumner misses Christensen’s point and gets himself wrapped up in libertarian autism, but he has a few good points sprinkled in.

Al Fin explains Donald Trump: China’s Great White Grandfather. Also there, an update and critique on Fusion: Far and Near, Slow and Fast.

This week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: The NSA—Signal vs. Noise.

Over at Heartiste’s, a superbly well put Comment Of The Week: American Identity.

And Dennis Dale examines Real Comedy v Fake Comedy.

Welp… it turned out to be a much fatter week that we initially expected. That’s about 115 links and 5500 words for your perusal. Try not to open all the tabs at once. My trusty staff did much of the heavy lifting this week: Many thanks to David Grant (who went above and beyond the call of duty), Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/12) appeared first on Social Matter.

Sources tell me that the digitally remastered version of Unqualified Reservations, freed from the chains of blogspot, is complete: Available at unqualified-reservations.org. It is beautiful achievement, marking the culmination of years of work by several unnamed and highly capable minions working in concert with Mencius Moldbug himself, and with his blessing. This is a great gift to us, our children, and to our children’s children. Read it and link it often.

In the news, the Smoke of Satan has officially been identified as having entered Holy Mother Church. Not that there should have been much doubt over the last 40 years or so. This would seem to cover it best from the (actually) Catholic perspective: a powerful screed over at 1 Peter 5 No Matter How Bad You Think the Corruption Is, It’s Worse. Just a taste:

The ring of criminal Nancy Boys is the same ring that has been sedulously working for decades to undermine the integrity of the doctrinal, moral, sacramental, liturgical Church. These men—McCarrick, McElroy, Wuerl, O’Malley, Mahony, Cupich, Tobin, Farrell, Lynch, Weakland, Paglia, Maradiaga, their lovable mouthpiece James Martin, Thomas Rosica, and far too many others, including ones who have passed on to their eternal fate, such as Lyons, Boland, Brom—are the same ones who have destabilized and adulterated catechesis, theology, liturgy, and most obviously the Church’s commitment to the unchanging moral law, as we saw in the Amoris Laetitia debacle and all that surrounded and succeeded it. We must connect the dots and not pretend to be shocked when we see, for example, attempts under way to “re-interpret” Humanae Vitae through a false teaching on conscience, or to do away with clerical celibacy, or to introduce female deacons.

To treat the sins of this ring of conspirators as nothing more than a recrudescence of the sex scandals of the past would be to lose sight of their real enormity. These are not just men of bad moral character; they are apostates, and they are trying to remake the Church in the image of their own apostasy. The Church has been smashed up in front of our eyes in slow motion for decades and few can even begin to admit that we are now faced with a Church in actual smithereens. The Nancy Boys have conducted their campaign of demolition with a kind of imperial sway. It is not this or that aspect of the Church that is corrupt; the rot is now everywhere. It is a rot on which the McCarrick Ring still sups, like maggots feasting on a corpse.

And there’s more where that came from. Phew! Justice cannot come soon or swift enough to many heirs of the Apostles. Satan Plays the Long Game.

I usually feature a smattering of stories from American Greatness near the top. After all they are our nearest allies who still get invited to cocktail parties. But with the midterms looming, it seema AG focus has turned increasingly to that most degenerate of subjects: Electoral Politics. This was a nice little non-degenerate gem: A bit of historical sleuthing from Steven Allen: When LBJ Warned Us About Southern Republicans (Not Really). VDH comes to the rescue, maintaining his focus on the real enemy (NYT) and The Double Standards of Postmodern Justice. And their own, pretty solid, take on The Shame of the Church.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Ron Dart returns to Northern Dawn with a superb overview of George Grant And The Orthodox Tradition. Grant, it turns out, got close to Russian Orthodoxy by way of marriage—his sister’s to George Ignatief, son of the Tsar’s last Minister of Education (Pavel Ignatiev), who fled to Canada when the Bolsheviks came to power.

Grant’s more catholic form of Anglicanism made for many an affinity with the Orthodox way, and in England at the time much work was being done on Anglican-Orthodox dialogue (the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius was on the cutting edge of this deeper ecumenism).

As usual Dart writes with profound ease and familiarity with his subject. I don’t that he knew George Grant personally, but it wouldn’t surprise me. He snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent contribution.

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf seeks a rectification of names on “The Intellectual Dark Web”. Well… it’s intellectual… sort of. As for the rest,

The thing about the IDW is that the name just does not apply. ‘Dark web’ implies anonymity, implies speaking truth to power, implies that if you took the dark web into the light of day, you’d be in jail. That members of the supposed IDW enjoy prominent media positions, big posters with their faces plastered on them and sold-out venues tells us they are the opposite of the dark web and that we are once again being conned by the media.

Of the supposed “web”, Peterson has stood out for his intellect (and I’d add surprising level of charisma, for a guy who speaks like Kermit Thee Frog). But Alf’s got some humorous slings to… well… sling at him too:

Jordan Peterson stood out as a man of some eloquence and intellect, lending most credence to the IDW, therefore it is the saddest to see him fall so fast.

The earlier linked interview, titled ‘an Invitation to the Intellectual Dark Web’, is a 90 minute interview between JBP and an incredibly stereotypical virtue-signaling leftist, whose main point seems to be that he is incredibly empathic for the disaffected. In fact he is so incredibly empathic that he can’t help but hate happy people and wants them to suffer as much as he himself suffers for the poor.

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

This too at Alf’s… a perspicacious analysis of the Male chain of command.

Over at GA Blog, Adam writes in defense of Narrative—his own, as well as in general principle.

Fresh out of smoking girls, so here’s one with a pretty generous glass of wine.

[N]arrative is the primary way of exploring and representing mimetic desire. Whatever kinds of “communication” can be attributed to animals, what is certain is that they don’t tell each other stories. Hitchcock’s dismissive reference to the goal sought by the protagonist as the “MacGuffin” is correct, because the object is less important than the structure of rivalry itself. I think everyone has had the experience of choosing a side, in politics or any other form of competition, for what seems like a good, justifiable, limited, reason, and then finding that the act of choosing sides and engaging in the competition itself generated goals that seem urgent but would not have even seemed important without that initial act of taking sides. A narrative “hooks” us by getting us to take sides, to see the agent’s actions and goals as our own. But, looked at this way, narratives generate delusions by inflaming and providing new pretexts for our mimetic desires and resentments. We can easily see how this is the case with political narratives, where people can find themselves convinced that the future of the republic depends on whether some tax bill passes, or an executive order is overturned.

Adam explores ways not so much to escape the narrative, but enter and subvert it. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Our good friend Neocolonial retires from public life: All things come to an end. We’re certain he will remain quite busy in his private life.

Alrenous is now editing the news for accuracy: Muslim Norms Overrule Local Norms, Swedish Court Declares. He makes it a two-fer: Heretic Alex Jones banned from Facebook, Apple, Google’s Youtube, and Spotify .

Giovanni Dannato explains why There’s No Real Freedom Without Authority.

Anti-Gnostic finally “thought of something to write about:” Darwin is a jealous god. Inspired by the unfortunate (but probably inevitable) murders of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan.

By way of Isegoria… Technical commentary and unanswered questions about Sky King’s final act. Robin Hanson giving a rather mixed review JBP’s Maps of Meaning. Amazon Prime offers Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! for free… while that lasts. Has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war? A highly Menciian moment from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This moment: more Chestertonian I think. A century of findings on intellectual precocity. Psychological stress apparently induces neural inflammation and thus depression. When the west started losing wars. Not just the when—which seems just about right—but the who is important. And finally more Feynman: Highlights from James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. A whole boatload of ’em.

Finally, Saturday’s missive from CWNY: Who Follows in Their Train? On the legacies of John Tyndall and Sam Francis and where even they came up short.

This Week in Social Matter

Sutton Coldfield kicks off the week here with Reflections On Reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sea Of Fertility. Long a meme in reactionary circles, Mishima is too little read, and even less understood. Coldfield’s is a big first step in remedying the situation. A taste:

Mishima demands attention to several principles of a real Right: the sanctity and designation of authority; the nature of history; and the price of authenticity (and the cost of not paying that price). We as moderns feel that we do not have a clear notion of purity: we are compromised by our inheritance and the system we are embedded in. (This is a clearer notion than white guilt or white privilege, which imply complicity.) Mishima correctly identifies humanism as a river to be crossed (Runaway Horses, p. 292).

Coldfield gives only a small taste of the 4-volumes comprising Mishima’s last work. Take this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention as an invitation to dive in.

Empedokles Papadopolous’ onslaught on Steven Pinker continues apace in Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 4, wherein he is found to be a rather inconsistent “utilitarian” at best. To say nothing of actual human nature…

As with his discussion of reason, despite only making a modest point, he then goes on to act as if he’s proved a major one. He acts as if he’s made the larger point that human flourishing means the maximizing of pleasurable experiences over the course of one’s life and avoiding unpleasurable ones. But maximizing pleasurable experiences is not what humans did that was selected for. Something like fear of ostracism was selected for precisely because being in a cooperative community was advantageous. The benefits of cooperation were the ultimate effect of the fear of ostracism or loneliness, not the acquisition of pleasure. If people could take a pill to get pleasure whenever they felt fear of ostracism, instead of actually working to get the benefits of cooperation, they would eventually be out-competed by those who did actually get the benefits of cooperation.

What Pinker is missing is that these mental states all have distinct etiologies and intermediate functions before the ultimate function of survival and reproduction. In writing “pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end,” Pinkin jumps straight from pleasure to survival and reproduction. Pinker says that “They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being” but doesn’t look at the individual chain of each mental state. It’s not that the desire for food directly produced more people, and the desire for camaraderie directly produced more people, and the desire for comfort directly produced more people, as if when you experience comfort a baby pops out of you.

Emphasis mine. That particular sentence is worthy of @WrathOfGnon meme. Papadopolous is really in his wheelhouse here, and absolutely on fire throughout. Arguably the best installment yet and earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. Part V is on its way! [Hint: it’s already here, but we’re supposed to pretend it’s still Sunday night.]

Finally, for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose column: the talented Carl Hildebrand pens The Holy Investiture Of Shah Khosrau Parviz.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran permits himself some speculation on a Gaussian anomaly or maybe not. Related: Notes from the class struggle. Also… why PTSD probably shouldn’t exist.

Evolutionist X kicks the week off tackling Liberal vs Conservative “Essences”, and the failure of psychology experiments to replicate. A tall order.

EvX Book Club continues with Auerwald’s Code Economy ch. 12: How do you LVT a Digital Land? LVT stands for Land Value Tax. (Took me a while.) The implications are tremendous, even if you don’t live in (or ever want) a Georgist System. My $0.02, there’s always bandwidth. In fact, taxing bandwidth would greatly improve the quality of what passes across Teh Interwebs. And if people had to pay $1.00/mo. to use Twitter? Well, I’d pay it. (But not $10.)

Finally a Guest Post (from an unnamed guest) on Professor Dwayne Dixon and the death of Heather Heyer. Dixon’s quite probable role in the death, that is.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Whites in Iowa and New Hampshire hold back racial progress—Dems should respond by holding their earliest primaries in CA, Manhattan, and DC!

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up, Porter uses a recent incident of #MeToo to hammer home what is perhaps the core message of his blog in My Astounding and Beautiful Nimrod. And it’s a message that deserves repetition, loudly and often:

Hate, Raysis, and Nazis are not and never have been principled positions in any of our lifetimes. They are only and always tribal vehicles. The purpose of which being to turn you into petroleum and your children into janissaries. That means you, you relentlessly dull conservatives. The left doesn’t actually care about nazis, because there are no nazis. They care about destroying you. Your history, your culture, your traditions, your future, your family, you. That is their operational principle.

However, he’s not too optimistic about the likelihood of an American Civil War. That is, he doesn’t think conservatives have the will or ability to mount a defense. He lets an anonymous commenter from the Unz blog take it from there in Falling Down. In other words, decline; none of these likely futures look too good for America barring a Trump coup.

And finally, he pokes a little fun at (i.e. applies to actual reality) some amusingly un-self-aware science from a leftist newspaper (but I repeat myself) in The Possum Brain. A major function of the brain, of course, being to predictively model reality based on our sensory inputs. And, of course, to turn itself off when status need be signaled.

And while your model is ingesting that input, you’re negotiating a future model that asks ìWhat if everywhere was East St. Louis?î This inducing a motivation that everywhere not be East St. Louis. Fortunately, your predictive brain alerts you to the fact that expressing this preference for a non ESL world is likely to result in social shaming, harassment, and unemployment. So your brain negotiates this hurdle by accurately predicting that parroting false platitudes about diversity will enable sufficient income to subsidize a life far away from it.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews Pierre Manent: Beyond Radical Secularism. Then he does another fake write-up no less ridiculous than what might actually be printed by Universities today: Upstate Consolation University Extends Diversity Recruitment Policy to Triffids.

Kristor suggests the purpose of the Enlightenment was to kill metaphysics, or as he puts it, The Sorts of Liberalism Are Attempted Implementations of Nominalism.

JMSmith exhorts us to approach our fallen nature With Fear and Trembling, not Pique and Grumbling.

Modern Christian thought is mostly modern thought with candles. In the case of human dignity, it accepts the cosmic degradation of men to cyphers and hollow men that float on the surface of deeper social forces. This is why its men are not so much sinners who have fallen as they are victims who have been pushed.

And when nativist Americans are routinely condemned for their culture and heritage, Smith asks How Many Generations Will It Take? Lastly, he takes a look at yet Another Plague of Pederasts.

Richard Cocks pens a rather thorough critique of Sam Harris: The Unconverted

Harris has a moral project—to reduce suffering and promote happiness. His starting axiom for this quest is that the worst possible state of affairs is one where people would be maximally miserable; an ultimate hell for all conscious beings. The goal then would be to move in the opposite direction. This has an arse-backwards quality to it. Keeping one’s eyes firmly on the hellish, one backs one’s way towards the heavenly.

Bonald notes that with a Church in crisis, it’s laity to the rescue, again.

Matt Briggs says it’s time to Regulate Information-Monopoly Tech Companies Before It’s Too Late. Then he opines on Priests Oriented Toward Males & The New Crisis.

There are no such things as “gays”. There are no such as “heterosexuals”, either. There are men who have properly ordered sexual desires or, at times or for long periods, have intrinsically disordered sexual desires—of every kind, not just toward other males.

Equally controversial are Briggs’s opinions On Israel’s Jewish New “Nation State” Law. Finally, it’s LPGA girls in the clubhouse, Jimmy Carter speaking for Jesus, and China’s AI economists, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVIII.

This week in Albion Awakening… Regarding the culture wars, Bruce Charlton says You are too late – I told you so. He also argues why School history teaching about Albion should start with the Mesolithic. And William Wildblood writes about Sunset in the West and how to cope with our decline.

Dalrock chronicles a young female blogger who countersignaled against debt free virgins, got flamed for it, and Mama ain’t happy. As for girls who do decide to go the debt-free virgin route, A shortage doesn’t indicate a buyer’s market.

Cologero provides an excellent overview of Rationality and the Triune Brain. On the way the 99% argue…

[T]he real cause is the priority of passions and interests over rationality. In psychological terms, such a person is motivated by eros or thumos, corresponding respectively to passions and interests. Then, so-called debates become battles of partisans, more akin to arbitrarily rooting for the blue or the green team in a chariot race. Not only is one’s own position defined, but also the adversary’s. What follows typically are mutual accusations of inconsistency, often stated with great mirth and glee. Some snarky types will go a step further by posting an argument that, they hope, will upset equally both “sides”.

The end point can only be like kayfabe, a mock battle with no real winner. This is especially the case in the numerous televised debates between “both sides of an issue”. Never does one such side suddenly become converted to the other; were that the case, the show would be over and one of the debaters would be out of a job.

Colegero snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention from The Committee for his fantastic efforts here.

This was not what expected, considering Faith & Heritage is the source: The Puritans as Radical Reformers. Adi distinguishes between conservative and radical reformers, and finds plenty of the latter type to throw under the bus.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, the poem that Hopkins considered the best thing he ever wrote; to which many would agree.

Courtesy of Harper McAlpine Black.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Mitchell Kalpakgian runs down Chaucer and the Heresy of Courtly Love. The point being that romantic love is a heresy. Notice how, as your literature gets older and older, most of the stories of “courtly love” are cautionary tales that end in disaster. Lancelot’s cock ended a civilization. Renaissance writers were fools and degenerates who failed to understand the lessons their ancestors taught them. And the Victorians, reading them, were worse. Jane Clark Scharl explains Anthropological Architecture in detail; including a hint at what modern architecture says about the souls of those who build and tolerate it. But she could have gotten quite a bit nastier on that point. Joseph Pearce has a word on Faith, Reason, & Science Fiction: “The apocalyptic vision in science fiction is akin to the memento mori in mediaeval art. It reminds us of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell”. And Thomas Ascik investigates the Supreme Court’s discovery of the Right to Create Your Universe. I ctrl-F’d gnostic, and nothing. Boo.

Over at City Journal, filed under “restating the obvious”, Heather MacDonald explains why Gender is Not a Social Construct. Even using the word “gender” is playing into the Left’s hands. Gender is a property of language. Humans come in two sexes, period.

This Week in Out of Phase, Harper discovers a modernist he actually likes in Barzaga – Windows for Closed Doors. And offers this gem:

This is finally the great divide between modernity and tradition. A traditional order is essentially vocational. The great moving force in such a society is what we might call ‘karma yoga’—salvation through work. It was fully understood that a man might be justified to God and Heaven just by being a blacksmith or a scribe or a doctor or a soldier. Work was thus a spiritual path.

Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and also a rundown of Plato’s Dialogues: Menexenus.

Good heavens, but Logos Club was prolific this week. A bunch of videos, which you can go watch at the site, Kaiter Enless’ The Photographer’s Dilemma, parts III and on, a review of Hellraiser: Judgement, and his own weekly roundups, the Fiction Circular and the Philosophy Circular.

Thrasymachus takes a poetic trip to a graveyard to see how The Family Rests.

And Chris Morgan dons the prophet’s mantle on social media and The Sensory Apocalypse. Instagram in particular.

This Week in the Outer Left

The Outer Left took the week off. Or at least we did. With any luck we’ll be back to mocking them or taking note of where they’re accidentally correct next week.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale has a humorous take on Marginal Ross—in which Ross Douthat reads Steve Sailer with plausible deniability.

Al Fin is bearish on Russia, but on the bright side, he’s extremely bearish on China. And a plug for JBP’s interview with John Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Being Competent and Dangerous. Related: Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson? And an ominous review of South Africa Walking Down Zimbabwe Path of Ruin. Remember the bumper-sticker: “No white people, no food”.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast concerns: The Six Day War.

Fred Reed is just a bit off most of the time. Enough of the time that I rarely link him. This is not one of those times: Decline in the Fall (or Late Summer, Anyway): by Fred Gibbon. Just a random sampling…

Wild thought: Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by the government. Ours is a system in which the means of production own the government. Congressmen are commodities and Washington a Coke machine: insert your coins, choose your law, and pull the lever. Voila.

Demographics have consequences. Only whites and East Asians, mostly men, display talent for engineering, mathematics, scientific research, or organization on a large scale. Affirmative action does not put landers on Mars nor program computers. By now it must be obvious that racial gaps in achievement are intractable. Argument over causes changes nothing. The country depends increasingly on a declining number of white brains. The attacks on both whites and brains will continue.

Nope. Not one bit off there. Nor here:

Universities for the most part are no better. We suffer from an odd sort of civilizational autoimmune disease, eating ourselves. Shakespeare is racist, Mozart elitist, grammar a means of oppression. Two and a half millennia of Western civilization, forgotten by a sea of gilded peasants with no retirement plans. Monkeys chattering over the ruins of a forgotten society. Once the chain of culture is broken, it cannot easily be restored. Anyway, a literate population might cause trouble. We will not have one.

“Civilizational autoimmune disease” is a phrase worth canonizing.

Ace crafts a superb bit of commentary out of The Princess Bride: “…now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do…” “You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts…”

PA pulls up a devastating comment about the “Holocaust Industry”.

Heartiste features a delicious new meme: The New Jackboot.

At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus winds up Agreeing with Statists for the Wrong Reasons: Impeach Donald Trump. Maximus describes how impeachment would fall out in various circumstances. All things considered, the Democrats are unlikely to have enough support to remove Trump and, even if they did, that would simply put Pence in charge. If they could take Pence out too… now there’s an intriguing possibility.

For Congress to remove one President from office, let alone two in quick succession, would greatly diminish, if not work to delegitimize, the office of the Presidency. This may seem counterproductive in terms of weakening a powerful office that can be captured by outsiders to use against the establishment, but such actions would only reveal a paper tiger to be such. A Presidency thus weakened would signal an important truth to the American people: that they are governed by a faceless monstrosity unresponsive to their needs that they cannot bring to heel by placing a man of their choice behind the curtain. Eliminating ineffective democratic means of change is sometimes necessary to encourage effective anti-political solutions.

Arnold Kling explains Why I Favor Vouchers. The short answer: to break troublesome teachers unions.

That’s about all we had time for, folks. Thanks to our excellent TWiR Staff: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler. Egon Maistre took the week off and his absence was sorely felt. Tune in next week for all the news and old books fit to print. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/19) appeared first on Social Matter.

The big story this week was, of course, Former Papal Nuncio: Pope Francis Knew about McCarrick, Covered for Him “to the Bitter End”. Hadn’t we all been thinking this was the case anyway for the last 5-10 years, anyway? Well… I guess it’s good to get it out in the open. The trial balloons sent up by the left-Catholic press in the aftermath have thus far been amusing. Pass the popcorn!

In other news, John McCain passed away. (RIP) I hadn’t realized he was still alive.

Over at American Greatness, a heart-warming analysis of The Untouchables vs. The Deplorables in American politics. Also Pedro Gonzalez on The Institutionalized Race War. I’d call it a “scripted scuffle”. An actual race war wouldn’t last 15 minutes. And since all races know this, it would never get started.

VDH, native Californian, is over at the august Hoover Institution with more memoir than history: The Diversity Of Illegal Immigration—or rather the lack thereof.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Anti-Gnostic checks up on The other anti-gnostic. By whom he means James Howard Kunstler, whom I simply cannot stand, despite his great talent and many quite correct ideas. I can’t stand him him for the same reason I hate Neil Young—pompous ass who despises ordinary people. Nevertheless, Kunstler is very consistent; and hates the neoliberal establishment—and their shibboleths—at least as much as I do. Our Anti-Gnostic is inspired to note:

Our forebears derived spiritual truths from harsh reality and passed them down in the form of Tradition. All the world’s spiritual traditions deal with the cruel world, and they all generally say the same thing: love God and your neighbors, get married and stay married, be fruitful and bear children, venerate your ancestors. Failure to follow these laws for living puts you outside the Tribe on a very uncaring planet. But now that we generate sufficient wealth to indulge all manner and number of sins (forgive my brevity–the Internet only has so much bandwidth), the wages of sin are not death.

Not death as the fleshly man accounts it, at any rate. But then again…

Also at the Anti-Gnostic, a rant: The Independent will not be appearing on my blogroll. The charge? Relying upon the Post-WW2 think tank archipelago—a phrase new to me (not being a regular enough reader of AG until recently), but one which begs for wide circulation immediately!

Alrenous continues his Herculean task of rectifying the language of news articles for scrupulous honest. Here is Opposition speechwriter purged amid scrutiny of appearance with heretics.

Darren Beattie, who was a visiting instructor at Duke University (now under investigation by MiniTru) before he joined the Opposition House speechwriting team, was fired Friday after low level party operatives were ordered to notice he appeared at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference, where Beattie spoke on a panel alongside heretic Peter Brimelow.

Brimelow, founder of the mainstream-heretic website Vdare.com, a publication which “insolently agrees with the majority” and “signal-boosts their viewpoints,” according to the Semetic Prosperty through Lies Centre, a MiniTru anti-science group that tracks heretics.

“Speaking in a room near a person constitutes endorsement,” the SPLC added.

The guy has a gift!

At university, Beattie dared pay attention to Martin Heidegger, who was a member of the Evil party of Evil. Beattie has called Heidegger’s Evil affiliation “highly troublesome” but maintained that his heresy is worthy of priestly attention, according to a report by Forward magazine.

The Post very loyally did not contact anyone who would know why this heretic was allowed to run free for so many years, and only purged this week, as questioning Party decisions is itself heresy.

Fresh from a new batch of girls smoking pics.

Another one: Austria’s terrifying-Oppositional government ordered a raid on our embedded Party organ. Now Loyalists are freezing the country out. Delicious! And: NEW YORK TIMES MISREPRESENTS SANCTITY STATUS OF MOLLIE TIBBETTS’ KILLER IN HEADLINE .

This week at GA Blog, Adam examines Fraud and Force in human psycho-social systems. Very deep.

Alf shares some brief thoughts on Youtube, and some surprising features of the internet in general.

Late in the week (as his wont), Shylock Holmes pens an explanation—and advocacy—of Mudita, or Sympathetic Joy . Mudita is a Pali word translated as “sympathetic joy”, which is a pretty close antonym to “envy”, which antonym Holmes says English lacks. (Contentment, to me, comes closest, but I agree it’s not a close enough antonym invert back to envy, directly.) Anyway, a good read as always, and something quite positive, in comparison to the rather dismal fare we specialize in around here… and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Over at Jacobite, Jacob Phillips meditates upon festival and play in Game Over.

By way of Isegoria… A bit from our good friend Travis Corcoran: The inspiration for his novel was not, actually, the American Revolution. Pretty cool firefighting tool: PyroLance. May have uses not indicated. On Cresson H. Kearny’s survival skills—an impressive resume. An ethnographic approach to studying how partisan groups interact with media—they’ll make better judgements without media “interpretation”. John Durant’s Paleo Manifesto is “neither paleo, nor a manifesto—and that’s not a bad thing”. Doomsday prepping for less crazy folk. Finally, filed under that’s just gross—but pretty interesting nonetheless.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, praise for The Gift of Sight.

This Week in Social Matter

Arthur Gordian articulates what many of us—natural conservatives—have felt and hinted at for a long time: characterizing the Pro-Life Movement As False Opposition. Not that he’s coming down too hard on little old ladies who feel strongly about abortion, or even young ones. His fire is for “Pro-Life” Leadership. A lot of money quote here. This is certainly one of them:

The pro-life position, on the other hand, fails the test of internal consistency. It argues that human life begins at conception, and that abortion therefore is the termination of a human life, i.e. murder. At this point, however, the pro-life position falls to pieces. If an abortion is the murder of a child, who is the murderer? Pro-life leaders have been explicit that they do not consider women who pursue abortion to be murderers. It is the mother whose action instigates the chain of events which lead to an abortion, and her agency which primarily wills the abortion. The rise of informed consent laws merely highlights that the act of abortion is not due to the will of the doctor or clinic but the mother who freely chooses abortion after clearing the high hurdle of understanding the procedure and all alternative options. This makes her ethically responsible for the action, thus logically she must be a murderer if abortion is murder. If she is not a murderer, abortion must not be murder.

“Pro-life” leadership has capitulated to the liberal poison at the root of “Reproductive Freedom”.

Good lookin’ guy.

[L]iberalism is no different from its other universalist ideological siblings, communism and fascism. In invoking a world-immanent universal community, they must resort to paradigms which are inherently limited and constricting, thus incomplete. When people appear who cannot fit the paradigm of the world-community, the very existence of these people demonstrate the lie at the center of the ideological construct. While the threat may not be immediate, eventually all of these ideological systems will find it necessary to remove these inconvenient people. Unfortunately, as universalist creeds, simply deporting them is not sufficient. The universal world-community has no border over which deportation is possible, thus make mass-murder the logically inevitable and ultimate conclusion of the ideological regime.

There’s much much more there. RTWT! As always, a very strong outing from Mr. Gordian, and and “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

And Empedokles Papadopolous returns for his much anticipated finale: Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 5, in which the meaning of “human flourishing” comes to the fore—our views versus Steven Pinkers’. Papadopolous draws a bright red line between human flourishing and the mere “pursuit of happiness”…

Flourishing—doing well at school and work, attracting and keeping a mate, having children, providing them with a good environment in which to grow—normally does produce happiness. In fact, we are designed to receive happiness for accomplishing these things. But this phrase has been subjectivized and relativized and captured by the ego, so that today the culture teaches that happiness entails not having to repress a single desire out of concern for its effect on others. (See: “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness Of The Human Soul.”)

Our selfish and social natures are in constant conflict about how to act. Selfishly, we wish to be able to defect yet receive the benefits of cooperation: to be fat yet still be found attractive, lazy and not have to work yet receive wealth, liked without having to be likable, loved without being lovable, and so on. It is the preferences of others which motivate us to put in the effort required for virtue, not pure reason. But popular culture, as I have mentioned, urges us to defect and listen to our selfish nature; it pronounces repressing the urges of the selfish ego to be weakness or inauthenticity and calls success at avoiding this happiness.

For those of us who’ve been reading Papadopolous for years (at Darwinian Reactionary), many of the themes he brings to this critique will be familiar. It has been a supreme pleasure to see these ideas finally shine under the bright lights of Social Matter.

A civilization is a large-scale teleofunctional institution designed to solve the problem of how to allow the living of a good human life in the abnormal state. Thus, church and state are separate in the way that the State Department and the Defense Department are separate—yes they’re separate but they are not ultimates. Rather, they are both part of something larger, namely the United States government in this case. Similarly, the cultivation of human flourishing in the abnormal state is the purpose of civilization, and church and state are its two great arms serving this one shared purpose.

America has no official state church, of course. Which begets the insoluble problem of having an unofficial state church; one beyond the reach of any executive or constitutional law. And the unofficial state church is antinomian—as befits whig fervor—with an absolute stranglehold on virtually all organs of information.

Lincoln Center

We will always be torn between our selfish desires and social needs. In order to balance these conflicting impulses, we need the message to be about restraining our appetites, cultivating attractive masculinity and femininity, overcoming inertia so as to thrive in our education and work. We need to see that the culture praises the loving family, not the individual career, as the highest expression of human flourishing, while illustrating how to detect and avoid omnipresent negative influences—promiscuity, drugs, vice, crime, careerism, envy, vanity—which lure us away from the living of a good human life. What motivates virtue is the prospect of producing negative social relationships through vice. But our current liberal culture wants to practice vice yet receive the benefits of virtue; they demand the right to not repress a single urge and yet receive the benefits of virtue. The desire to defect and yet receive the benefits of cooperation exists in all time periods, but some are better able to inoculate against it, to teach the people to detect and shun it in others and themselves, unlike ours, which manufactures rationalizations on an industrial scale so as to justify it.

Just tremendous, canon-worthy work from Empedokles Papadopolous. And another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. We hope he returns soon to these pages.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane looks at assortative mating, genetics, and Natural Aristocracy. He muses on Big Science and it’s economic returns—or lack thereof. And a pseudo-scientific comparison so ludicrous that Cordelia Fine must be Cochran’s sock puppet.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with the Nerd Girl Challenge: Survey: What are your hobbies? Like most highly intelligent, scientifically-minded people I know, she has diverse interests and pursuits well outside the scientific realm. (Obviously an overachiever, too, but that’s probably sample bias for the survey.)

The EvX Book Club wraps up discussing the final 3 chapters of Auerswald’s The Code Economy and The Blockchain. Which has to be capitalized because it is a proper noun, apparently. Or… A Metaphor.

And back to real Anthropology Friday (no -ish qualifiers): Our Moslem Sisters pt 1. Which you can tell from the spelling is old: Published 1907. A missionary account of the Middle East.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First this week, Porter thinks over the impending Zimbabwification of South Africa, and ponders the need for a little Aid From Tennessee:

So in the midst of their disease and famine, I’d paradrop pallets of Tennessee Coates books into Johannesburg. I’ve been told black uplift is contingent on maintaining their high self-esteem, so surely those pages would provide succor. If not cellulose does make for a high fiber diet.

Ta-Nahisi Coates, after all, is a great proponent of the benefits of blacks living without whites. Not realizing of course that they will take their civilization with them into the cannibal’s pot, but a little insult makes good seasoning for injury.

He also has a few comments on the Mollie Tibbets’ murder in Where Predictability Becomes Intent. In which he raises the topic of Mollie’s own unfortunate submission to leftism:

She likely believed her conspicuous racial self-flagellation and openness to uncomfortably forward Mexicans in the middle of a desolate road would move events favorably. That’s the logical conclusion of progressive ideals. But who caused her to embrace an idea that would treat her life so frivolously?

Now, I’m personally tempted to savor the delicious irony here. Part of me would like to see every leftist disappear into the maw of their swarthy clients. On the other hand, it seems slightly cucked to ascribe our brainwashed women enough agency to make them responsible for their actions. We should consider them infected by a disease—or does the defection to heresy warrant the punishment it once did?

At any rate, this next one really riled him up. The Rusty Toggle. I.e., the (atrophied) ability to actually fight back against the people attacking you. In this case, the failure of a nominal Republican on the Manafort jury to stand her ground:

If Mueller proceeds unimpeded, and Trump gets impeached, and the dems win 435 house seats, and black South Africans are granted refugee status for fear of contracting disease from white corpses, Ms. Duncan can take smug satisfaction at her informed and intelligent decision. It was as clear as the end of her nose.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith points out how diversity studies might be beneficial For the Education of White Girls. He recounts some of the embarrassingly paternalistic (and totally rayciss) charter and history of the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences (now known as Texas Women’s University—Go Pioneers!).

Richard Cocks writes about The Schizophrenia of Strong AI and the unlikelihood of it being a realistic possibility.

Bonald writes On the media being the enemy of the people.

Why will the media consensus always be Leftist? The possibility of ideological intolerance and holiness spiraling are not limited to any political persuasion, although Leftism may be better able to accommodate those who have misplaced their religious devotion onto this world. The ranks of journalists and their audience are disproportionately urban and middle-class, groups naturally more attuned to liberty and equality than throne, altar, blood, and soil.

Bonald considers the provincialism of the philosophers, particularly non-western ones.

Ianto Watt, invoking the legacies of the communisms, instructs Do Not Fear Being Called An Isolationist.

The Blonde Bombshell says Let’s Talk About Q Again in a favorable light.

Matt Briggs does double duty this week with changing anatomical terminology, the loosening of the bible belt, pedophile dark webs and mouse/human chimerae, all in the
Insanity & Doom Update XLIX—Special Midweek Doom! Then it’s trans pronouns in the Aussie military, firing gender essentialist doctors, and LGBT teens on the rise, all in this week’s second Insanity & Doom Update L.

Mark Richardson covers The Anning speech, where an Australian senator challenges that country’s status quo. Then he brings some nuance to the question, Is the left really collectivist?

There are at least two types of individualism. The first relates to individual responsibility, and here left-liberals do seem to be more collectivist. Whereas a right-liberal will stress the ideal of self-reliance and the aim of successful competition in the market, left-liberals are more likely to claim that “it takes a village to raise a child” or to stress the need for social security.

The second kind of individualism relates to identity. Right-liberals often strongly oppose the notion of collective identity (think Jordan Peterson), seeing it as an affront to the sovereignty of the individual. They see themselves as defenders of individualism against the collectivism of leftist identity politics.

Sydney Trads give us the rundown on the most recent Australian power shift in Recently, on the “Bip & Bap Show”. That is, apparently, the official name of Aussie Electoral Politics.

Over at Albion Awakening, William Wildblood calls for a reconciliation between men and Women Readers.

And John Fitzgerald introduces The Robin Hood Option, which seems to involve withdrawing from the world and taking mutual oaths.

Dalrock analyzes the US Marital Status Data Through 2017.

Seriouslypleasedropit finds one thing that’s worse than Change. This too: Long Live The Fathers, The Fathers Are Dead—rambles a bit, but good stuff in there.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, more Hopkins; this being a more personal prayer.

This week at the Imaginative Conservative, E.J. Hutchinson remarks on the Hedonism of Reading Good Books. Good books being old books. And a positive sort of hedomism at that— though one wonders if he would ever dip into the heresy of old books about politics; ones a little more darkly enlightening than Burke.

Over at City Journal, Milton Ezrati runs the numbers on Medicare for All. And Bert Stratton puts on an embarrassing display of public cuckoldry by lamenting Locking my Bedroom Door. Because this so-called conservative lets his wife run an AirBnB out of his house. And then lets her go out and drive Uber for hours.

Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and resurrects an ancient (2012) writing of his own: Of An Estranged World: Flannery O’Connor and the Grotesque.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. And continuing his fascination with horror, reviews of Shin Godzilla and The Bone Snatcher.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale shares quite apposite thoughts on Hegemony and Harmony. As with politics (evil) and democracy (holy), you can’t really have one without the other. The question is not whether hegenmony, but who? (And whom?) This too: “Calling out another man’s racism is like calling out his bipedalism”.

Ace turned 46: “Let down for no good reason, chose to walk the way I did…” 46 isn’t old… if you’re a tree.

N. T. Carlsbad seizes an interesting bit of history of Benjamin Kidd and the decline of left-wing Social Darwinism. A lot there. A taste of the conclusion:

If Darwinism once more grips the imagination of the elites, we may expect it will be the self-serving, pigheadedly triumphant social evolutionism of a Benjamin Kidd. For any biological argument favoring conservatism, several more just as convincing can be made for liberalism. “Evolutionary conservatism” is an oxymoron. The selection-driven accumulation of congenital variations cannot be the foundational, first-principles basis of anything, but merely a moving target for enterprising rebels to read their tarot cards the way they want to.

A conclusion with which we wholeheartedly agree. The Committee gave this one an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention. This too was a nice piece: Hyphenated Americanism and the sense of place.

Al Fin is pretty bearish on electric cars. The technology is premature. Hybrids would seem to be a sweet spot right about now. Diesel-electric hybrid even better. And Fin looks at Singularity University’s Global Startup Program. Definitely need some “disruptive innovation” in social technology before we can handle (or probably even expect) any more in material technology.

The Myth of the 20th Century podcast delves into The USS Liberty—Adrift Over Troubled Waters.

Heartiste scores some excellent points on Defanging The “Hate Speech” Sophistry. “Hate speech” doesn’t real. It must be ridiculed as a facile, low-status myth; never argued with. This too worthy of note: Activism From A Position Of [relative] Powerlessness:

So if I were Head of Counter-Narrative Activism, where would I start?

I’d start with a protest at the foot of the Yarrabee Farms property, owned and operated by CEO and Boomercuck Craig Lang. That’s his company which illegally employed the churlish chalupa Cristhian Rivera (undocumented immigrant née foreign invader) who murdered American White Girl Mollie Tibbetts. Banner? NO CHEAP LABOR NO CHEAP VOTES GOP CUCKS GET THE R0PE

Actually an excellent idea… ‘cept for the rope part. Which doesn’t match up with powerless bit.

Arnold Kling elaborates on his position concerning Public Money and Schools. And… filed under Duh!… Virtue signalling may be a signal of less virtue.

At Zeroth Position Benjamin Welton attempts to cull some lessons from The Rise and Fall of the Sturmabteilung. The main takeaways are the necessities for discipline and institutional support for a right-wing movement to gain lasting power.

Jordan Peterson conducts his monthly Q&A session with his Patreon supporters.

And PA considers Relearning The Lessons, i.e., of Western Hegemony, that everyone pretty much took for granted a generation or two ago. A civilization that has lost confidence in itself pleads, does not demand; it does not act, but is acted upon.

That’s all we had time for folks. As always, many thanks to the Expert TWiR Staff for helping me throw this all together: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/26) appeared first on Social Matter.

Our old friend VDH is up over at American Greatness analyzing The Ideology of Statue Smashing. It’s always the 8th century somewhere in the world! “History is also not kind to statue smashers,” Hanson notes.

The Romans defaced the statues (“damned the memory”) of unpopular emperors (albeit safely when dead) up to whom they had once toadied. Cadres of frenzied French revolutionaries sought to wipe out all Catholic iconography, clergy, churches and monasteries, and are now condemned by history for their destruction. Joseph Stalin eliminated all pictures and even printed references to renegade Communist rival Leon Trotsky.

Not unkind enough, we think. Also there: Morrison on Tucker Carlson and the Alex Nowrasteh’s Procrustean Bed. And Pedro Gonzalez explains the explainer behind the curtain and How Vox Misleads the Public About Immigrant Crime.

Arnold Kling wonders just where are the profits in health care? Kling argues that if health care were expensive because of greedy health care providers, they would be raking in astronomical profits, which don’t seem to exist.

If you think that America overpays for health care by $1 trillion a year (a figure that Silver and Hyman toss around), then show me where that money goes in the aggregate. Add up all the excess returns on capital at hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical supply companies, etc. I bet you won’t find anything close to $1 trillion.

Good point. But the inflation always goes somewhere, right? My guess: “Administration”. Healthcare is a jobs program. Kling also asks, “Is internationalism liberal or imperialist?“, and, in a snarky mood, provides another way to describe the contemporary political divide.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Spandrell kicks off the week around the sphere with some good history-telling, mashed up with some cask-strength BAP: The BAP Trap. As always, jam-packed with bon mots. Like…

Never before in the history of the world, homosexuals, men and women, were given each a name, an identity. Names are no laughing matter. Names are socially approved categories. They are a social license to exist. Gay men now exist. Lesbians now exist. They never did before, but now they do. And since we gave them a name, Western society created categories of people where none existed before. And that has had very notorious consequences. Perhaps fatal consequences.

Alf has a movie review PSA: The Adjustment Bureau is crap. I didn’t even know it was a movie.

Then Alf explains how Content is downstream from power. “Content”, by which he means art.

Slumlord is tantalizingly close to accurate in his Thoughts on the Clergy and Christian Revival.

It is this blog’s contention that what primarily ails the West is the collapse of the Christian value system and empozzment by both the modern secular project, a radical branch of the Enlightenment and the decay in quality of Christian thought. Secular has attacked Christianity from the outside but theological developments within Christianity have undermined it from within.

Secularism is not a doctrine foreign to Christianity, but one which could only arise within and under its protective care. Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a heresy. It’s one of the worst ones for this very reason.

A healthy dose of history from Кирилл Каминец over on Medium: Ферганская Одиссея, ч. I: Игра Наркомов. Which recounts the little advertised front of Turkestan in the Russian Civil War.

Over at GA Blog, Adam’s treatise this week concerns Money and Capital as Media and Power. Therein, he comes as close as I’ve seen him come to tackling Nick Land’s vision of capital as alien super-intelligence, thus algorithmic government. This seems to be key:

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

[C]apital must grant the disciplines some “relative autonomy” in doing so. It must allow us to pursue our interests if only in order to capitalize on those interests; within the more paranoiac streams of “oppositional” thought we could imagine that capital has “always already” channeled those interests in ways guaranteed to flow back to capital in full, but how could capital know how to do that without granting its knowers some leeway in the first place. Someone must plug the variables in the algorithm. Now, liberalism can only accelerate capital’s “logic” by trying to access some level of freedom yet unpenetrated by capital. If the medium of capital can be interfered with, it will be through the power medium, first of all by pointing to capital as a power, or a network of powers, rather than an amorphous monster. Power is more of a retardant than an accelerant.

As always, challenging and thought-provoking work from Adam, and another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Our good friend Bill Marchant saw fit to interrupt his long hiatus to drop a few buckets of ice cold Hudson’s Bay seawater on this article at Vanity Fair, which breathlessly fears “The Supreme Court is in Danger of Losing a Generation of Voters.” So now you know what keeps SCOTUS justices awake at night, eh?

Free Northerner has some straight, drama-free talk about The Trump Realignment of the GOP. The key is Middle American Radicals (MARs)—elsewhere termed Amerikaners or Kulaks where it suits the rhetoric.

The interesting thing about the MARs, is that despite being by far the largest constitutency in the US, they have minimal political power. They vote inconsistently, have no coherent ideology, and have no real political organizing (before the Tea Party) which makes it difficult for them to influence policy. MARs control only one notable institution, the NRA. This is why the NRA is so outsizedly powerful, because they are the only real interaction node between the MARs, the largest bloc of votes in the US, and the federal government.

Except now, they’ve got Trump. Much more there in a superb bit of analysis in this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

After taking lengthy break, Ron Unz returns to his American Pravda series by touching that thirdest of rails: Holocaust Denial. Unz makes his case with his trademark fearless iconoclasm. Anatoly Karlin replies and elaborates.

By way of Isegoria… Incentives boost effort on IQ tests—effort, not necessarily scores. Some… Call it moxie. He’s reading Sailer on A Golden Era of live-action sitcoms for six-year-olds—Land of the Lost FTW! This comports with my own engineering experience: Collaborate on complex problems, but only intermittently. It’s actually hard to believe Stratolaunch is real. How much carbon dioxide is on Mars is not nearly as important as how much Nitrogen there is—almost none apparently. Finally how Missile lock-on! actually works.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield… For God So Loved the World.

This Week in Social Matter

Summer doldrums continue unabated here at Social Matter. Only one article here (other than my own) this week: A contribution from newcomer William Mason on Ecology Viewed From The Right. But it was a strong piece worthy of Social Matter…

The Met.

Whatever its current associations, the natural home of political ecology lies on the Right. Not the false right associated with the Republican Party, of course, whose conservatism is little more than a desperate and self-destructive attachment to the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, but what Julius Evola has called the True Right: the timeless devotion to order, hierarchy, truth, and justice, entailing implacable hostility against the anarchic, profane, and disintegrating principles of modernity.

With which we fully agree.

To many of its earliest prophets, such as the Romantic poets and New England Transcendentalists, as well as nineteenth-century nature philosophers and wilderness advocates, ecology rightly understood was the contemporary expression of a primordial doctrine, one that emphasizes natural order and a devotion to forces that transcend mankind.

Which is pretty hard to justify if you’ve given up on transcendence generally. Which the left has. Because transcendence is nothing if not the privileging of a certain narrative over others. And everyone knows… That’s racist! Mason snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his superb work here.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane muses on the possibility of North American Neanderhorse. And this one made the rounds: Nits Make Lice:

You might think it would be difficult to induce parents to have their daughters spayed, but apparently you can convince bien-pensant liberals of absolutely anything, as long as it’s false. Gotta keep up with the Jim Joneses. They even pay for it!

“Modernity selects for those who resist it.”

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another in her fine series of “Cathedral Round-Ups”: It’s about territory. It’s always about territory. Maya Angelou (Good Person) vs. Rudyard Kipling (Evil Villain) Edition.

Handsome guy.

It takes some special variety of gall to major in English at a British university and then complain about reading one of Britain’s most famous poets–and a great deal of stupidity to put up with it.

Angelou’s words were written in a specifically American context, responding to the way she and other African Americans were treated here in the US. Her poem has nothing to do with Kipling or things Kipling or other Brits have done. It was selected in this perverted sense that all whites are equivalent and interchangeable, as are all non-whites. Any non-white poet will do for replacing white poets.

ISWYDT…

Mid-week brings Mrs. X’s 800th post: an Open Thread and a graph on farming around the world. A pretty interesting graph, but you’ll need to click for embiggening.

And for Anthropology Friday: Our Moslem Sisters pt 2. It’s as much a window into the soul of Calvinist missionaries as it is to Middle-Eastern social conditions. And by Calvinist, we mean “Cathedral”.

By way of Audacious Epigone… A trip to the GSS data in Electoral behavior of white Hispanics and non-white Hispanics. Would you stay thin and healthy for a million dollars? Of course you would. And it’s probably worth more than that. Finally, praise for Trump on McCain: Senator, you’re no Vespasian.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter weighs in as usual on the ongoing saga of our corrupt judiciary; all Muller needs is to find A Few Honest Men:

You see, when Mueller offered to pay Rick Gates with years of his life for testifying against Paul Manifort, that wasn’t suborning perjury since Gates was only being hired to tell the truth rather than lie. So if, for example, Manafort had handed a $100,000 check to the presiding judge while urging him to conduct a fair trial, you can imagine the shrugs all around—didn’t everyone want the trial to be fair? So what’s the problem?

This is in the context, of course, of the “plea deal”. For our readers outside the US, this is the process by which a judge bribes a defendant with a lower sentence in exchange for, not to beat around the bush, telling the judge what he wants to hear. Usually by indicting the guy that the prosecutors really want to get.

And then, in Hell is Other Liberals, he takes a look at familiarity bias:

So when exposed to conservative opinions liberals became slightly more liberal, while conservatives exposed to liberal opinions became much more conservative.

To summarize many words, conservatives generally don’t understand that, or how much, leftists want to destroy them until they’re actually face-to-face with them. Or at least watching them talk to each other on Twitter. Is it any small wonder that NRx was birthed in the Bay Area, or that TRS is a product of New York City? If you live out in rural America, you might be fooled into thinking that things are pretty alright.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith kicks off the week over at The Orthosphere, with Professors of Despised Rival Truths Must Fight or Fold—a solid bit of analysis on Oliver Wendell Holmes and his role in the History of Liberalism. He is credited with the “marketplace of ideas” meme idea, but battleground of ideas is much closer to his real vision. Professor Smith snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his troubles.

Thomas F. Bertonneau channels Voegelin in his literary critique of Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen on Ideology and Violence.

Matt Briggs explains that Homosexuality Is Abnormal, Unhealthy & Unfortunate—In The Church & Everywhere.

A two-fer this week in Insanity & Doom: Special Midweek Doom and your regularly scheduled: Insanity & Doom Update LII. Sometimes one black pill just isn’t enough.

The irrepressible Ianto Watt covers the Chaos & Outrage In The Church.

And Briggs offers the chair to The Cranky Professor who discusses Leibniz’s Problem with Materialism.

Bonald spots himself in a movie—figuratively speaking.

Sydney Trads have an excellent bit of commentary on Victim Privilege and its Consequences. As it relates to Australia, South Africa, the Anglosophere, and the World.

Over at Albion Awakening, And Wildblood explains how the world is run by Demons, even though real demonic possession remains rare.

What is the left actually based on? Stripped back to its fundamentals, it is based on hatred of the good and resentment of the superior. That is why leftists will ally themselves with anyone who is an opponent of the Christian West. It is the Christian West that the demons behind the left wish to destroy, and you have to admit that they are doing an excellent job. Their long-term strategy has been most professional. They have used lesser truths to attack greater ones, for instance putting material improvements above spiritual priorities and then using the excuse of love and freedom to justify constant attacks on the natural order.

A very perceptive and nuanced take, especially given the subject matter. The Committee were impressed with this one and gave it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Continuing that discussion, Bruce Charlton ponders The work of angels in Modern Man.

Dalrock has the data: Percentage of US population over 15 who were married by sex and race, 1950-2017. It’s actually not as bad as you might think. Or is it?

I had no idea August 26 was Women’s Equality Day. Faith & Heritage explains one way you can celebrate. With particularly poignant cover art.

One Peter Five sets its gaze on upcoming Columbus Day with Burn the Ships: Hernán Cortés and the Order that Changed the New World. A nice bit of history—worthy of sharing now that boring old Columbus Day has taken on so much deeper a meaning of late.

Cane Caldo has some interesting historical tidbits on The History of Cheerleaders, the Future of America.

And Cologero takes a properly philosophical assessment of The Future of Intelligence.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, more Hopkins.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Dwight Longenecker draws inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ writings on conspiracy to describe The Lavender Inner Ring of the Catholic Church. And Mitchell Kalpakgian opens some Samuel Johnson to contrast Utopian Fantasies Versus Real Happiness.

At City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple raises the point in Fever Line that the distinction between Muslim terrorism and ‘mental illness’ is blurred, since the Muslim’s psychosis often takes on a religious flavor. And Samuel Malanga argues that the Catholic Church’s credibility as an institution could be destroyed as a result of the sex scandals in Days of Wrath.

Richard Carroll has just his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. He also tries his hand at a little abstract poetry: Distal Sky, and another horror short: Scalegrave.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson sits down with Democratic party strategist Gregg Hurwitz to discuss political polarization. Hurwitz is trying to make the Democrats seem less insane. We can only wish him the best of luck, considering that he’ll need it. (Can he help neocons?)

This Week… Elsewhere

Al Fin has not a few unkind words for Social Justice in Engineering—or Engineering +, as we like to call it.

Thrasymachus pens the obituary: White Nationalism is Dead. It’s not entirely clear it was ever alive, but… now it is definitely dead… Or Ace checks in midweek with “…crawl on hands and knees until you see you’re just like me…”—a meditation on agency and how to use it. And how not to.

Tom Hart is back with a vengeance. He must have been reading GA Blog, because this Philosophical Analysis evaluates Capital as consciousness. Somewhat surprisingly, he seems to come down on the affirmative side…

P1: Capital is the sum of self-interested actions expressed through the market place.

P2: The sum of self-interested actions, each a calculation, is analogous to the actions of neurones in the brain that, acting as individual calculators*, form consciousness.

…

P3: Therefore, capital is a global of consciousness with its own intentions and purpose.

Several errors there hiding in plain sight. Perhaps Mr. Hart was trolling us. Also up at Medium, more in Hart’s Analysis series: Ideological Analysis | Why do social justice themes predominate in advertising and the media?; Logical Analysis | The pseudo-Jungian fallacy, and Moral Analysis | Christians must support the death penalty.

This week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Common Cause—Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism.

Heartiste gives due reverence to Gnon in The Masculinizing Effects Of The Birth Control Pill.

PA explains the good and bad of America accepting Afrikaner refugees. Also more translation work: “The Flowers Of My Land”.

That’s all folks. Vacation Season and excessive heat continue to suppress output around the sphere: Only about 80 links and 3000 words. Still plenty to see, and too much to drink all in one gulp. To my trusty TWiR Staffers: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler, many many thanks for your help. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/02) appeared first on Social Matter.

So this week Nike decided to make the uncommonly privileged Colin Kaepernick an even richer civil rights martyr. Thus far an abysmally unpopular ad campaign. But can any company really ever put a price on holiness? You gotta pay to play!

This week in American Greatness, VDH rates Trump on the Ground… in California, which is by no means an ideological monolith. It only plays one in Presidential Elections. Roger Kimball has post-game coverage of the Aretha Franklin and John McCain funerals. VDH chimes in on that subject too. And a hopeful: Coming Restoration of the Constitution by way of Justice-elect Kavanaugh. Probably too hopeful.

This too was interesting: Mytheos Holt on The Rise and Fall of the Alt Right, a movement he pronounces stillborn. Yet he remains transfixed on the need for something very much like it to plug a very large hole in representative politics. Hmm…

Arnold Kling offers a light critique of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Coddling of the American Mind Kling has not read very far yet, but he nonetheless has reservations about the authors’ narrative approach and presuppositions. Hopefully more details to follow.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Anti-Gnostic has a profoundly affecting piece on The two deaths—or “The Peaceful Repose of the Rightous American Nun Theocletia”. Two deaths: each somewhat sorrowful, yet also beautiful. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Alrenous continues to translate the news for discriminating readers: Sweden’s Loyalist Party fear once-in-a-century election setback. Also: Muslim ‘takeover’ fuels German Apostates.

Setting aside the editorial pen, Alrenous explains, quite rightly we think, Slavery is Inevitable: the Commons of Individual Revenue.

Over at GA Blog Adam aims for liberalism jugular in Moral, Ethical Governance. Opening bite:

No theory of government could be more insistent than liberalism that government must be morally neutral, and not choose between different versions of the “good life.” And no form of government is more perpetually frenzied by moral panics than liberalism.

Of course liberalism’s true allergy is to state religion, the histamine response to which itself becomes a state religion, made all the more ferocious because it does not concern itself with rituals or eternal souls, but purely worldly outcomes. The fact is, of course, no government can rule without positing a vision for the “good life”, and Adam turns to the irreducible anomalies that lurk therein. Better off feature than bug. The Committee liked this one and handed it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Free Northerner is firing on all 8 cylinders here: Amerikaners and The Authoritarian Power Base. He chronicles the ways in which legitimacy in America and for it’s “democratic system” is crumbling. It’s all good, but this bit stands out:

The MARs [Middle American Radicals] are effectively an occupied people ruled by an essentially foreign establishment. The Cathedral is run by people with different values who hate them, or at best condescend to them (“why don’t those rubes vote for their own best interests?”). Given the vicious reaction to Trump’s appeals to the MARs (and to the Tea Party and NRA), it is clear that the current American ruling structure will attempt to destroy any attempts by the MARs for democratic redress of their concerns. Their lot is to ground down for the system.

A large, alienated, armed, directionless, occupied group is sitting there waiting to be led.

Not that others haven’t noticed this before.

It also seems questionable whether a populist MARs movement outside a democratic framework will spontaneously arise. Despite the rhetoric, the MARs have proven to be overly long-suffering and law-abiding for us to expect 2nd amendment solutions in time for them to be effective. The current South African situation suggests that this long-suffering may last well beyond the point of no return.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to find Northerner’s way out of this conundrum, but let’s just say it rhymes with grassivism. And he does a fantastic job of articulating the long-term strategy of it. This wins the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

“So. Some guy wrote the most scathing Glassdoor review of all time, and the New York Times ran it“, begins B. D. Matthews’ scathing review of that review: “Mr. President, Do You Know Who I Am?” Matthews has a high power level:

Girl smoking.

I think all Trump fans can acknowledge that as a day-to-day operator, The Donald leaves some things to be desired. But a great leader isn’t defined by his flaws; he’s defined by the areas in which he excels. And Trump has excelled in two important areas.

First, he spent half of his career cultivating the skill that a modern democracy demands of the head of state, but usually doesn’t let him cultivate until he’s close to high office—Trump knows how to play himself on television.

Second, crucially, Trump has identified that something is going wrong in America. You can’t quite put your finger on it, although in his “American carnage” inaugural he came close. But it’s there. America has taken on too many responsibilities abroad, and neglected too many at home. The DC assembly line produces politicians who will make gentle course corrections, but that’s not what we need when we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Quite so. Matthews snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

Ever the contrarian, Sara Perry has a few buckets of ice water to throw on the supposed ill-effects of Social Media Consciousness, and some measured praise instead.

In theory, one could write up a phenomenology of every piece of technology: refrigerator consciousness, for instance. How does in-home refrigeration change how you relate to food, or feel about decay, or think about animals? Probably there is something interesting in every one. The transition that seems most salient to me, however, is the transition from movie consciousness, which began to dominate early in the 20th century and inform all aspects of life, fantasy, and even memory, to social media consciousness, which is informed by movie consciousness but represents a departure from it. The transition from movie consciousness to social media consciousness represents a move in the direction of greater involvement, greater complexity, and greater risk than was previously experienced. In many senses, social media consciousness is more of a direct involvement with reality than movie consciousness.

Worth your time.

Alf chronicles the Age of Stupidity. There is, of course, far too much of it; much of it, not even fatal. Caution: If you stare too long into the Stupidity, it stares back into you.

Late in the Week, Handle (surprise!) drops a thought-provoking and beautifully even-handed Excerpts and Discussion of Rod Dreher’s “The Benedict Option”. This is the sort of Dreher criticism we need: based on his actual words, deeds, and crime-stop circuitry. Not speculations about evil hidden evil motives, as is so popular in certain circles. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention. (Just imagine what Handle could do with an editor!!)

Over at Jacobite, Ted Blackman wonders whether the Uncertainty Principle might be God’s Own Cryptosystem.

Malcolm Pollack offers quite astute commentary on the Kavanaugh hearings media circus.

By way of Isegoria… Fitbits are creating a treasure trove of information. The tech is young, but it seems bulk metallic glasses can now be readily extruded and 3D-printed. How does this even happen: Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro burned down? Scientists identify a new kind of human brain cell—possibly unique to humans. So Ancient Aliens should be able to spin up a whole new season out of that. Finally: Hamsters really do love wheels—No, really!

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, Our Hope and Our Faith. The appetizer:

No French king, not even Louis the XIV, was as bloodthirsty or tyrannical as Robespierre. No Russian Czar was anywhere near as bloodthirsty and tyrannical as Lenin and Stalin. No British monarch ever taxed the American people like the native-grown democratic government taxed them. No war in the non-democratic age of Europe was ever as bloody and terrible as the American Civil War and World Wars I and II. And no white South African president ever called for the liquidation of the blacks of South Africa, nor did the white South Africans allow blacks to slaughter other blacks as well as whites. But the liberals of the West wanted democracy in South Africa. Then, and only then, did we witness bloody barbarism on an epic scale. Democracy is Satan’s form of government.

This Week in Social Matter

Things were excruciatingly slow here at Social Matter this week. But Poet Laureate of the Restoration, E. Antony Gray turned quite a few heads with some fresh an provocative verse: Amends. Which seems to allude to white peoples’ fall from glory to cuckitude.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran contemplates the Landscapes of nature and nurture.

Courtesy of Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with A Little Review of Big Data Books—three Big Data books to be exact. So the review is not that little.

She announces the next sprint for the EvX Book Club: How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil. This oughta be interesting.

Mrs. X spent some time poking a great deal of fun at Nike this week with some cask strength memery. She’s archived the stash at: Sacrifice Everything Memes.

And this week in Anthropology Friday: Part 3 of Our Moslem Sisters.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Are there any Democrats running on immigration restriction of any kind? Even one? Somewhere? (Apparently not.) An interesting graphic: Campaign contributions per vote received, 2016 US presidential election. Did Charlottesville kill the alt right? And, for those needing empirical evidence: Don’t allow buggers unsupervised access to boys.

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this week, Porter opines on the topical and much-beaten horse of Kaepernick and his recent promotional deal in Going Woke. And likely broke, or at least a hell of a lot less profitable than they used to be. And some points bear repetition:

In many ways I think of the Republican Party as a conduit used to convert conservative votes into liberal profits.

Porter, as usual, does good work in bridging the divide between the merely conservative and the reactionary.

For example, I’m With Democracy And I’m Here To Help. Of course, democracy never really functioned according to conservative nostalgia. But the #Resistance made it blatantly obvious. The subject here being the Trump admin insider op-ed:

Forget the flapping tongue and simply take note of his own admitted acts of subversion. By these he is advising the public that there is no peaceful mechanism by which a nation may alter the course of its state… Because bureaucrats buried in the deep fat of government and political ticks riding into the administration by their mandibles will simply judge your hard-won presidential selection as uncouth and substitute the policies you voted for with their own. Your input into the matter is not solicited. And this defenestration of electoral results will be done for the sake of democracy, you see.

Then, an example of how the Left controls discourse through the power to define words. An execrable example: Shine On. I can’t properly quote this thing; give Porter some clicks and find out what what the NYT is signalling for for yourself. Afaik, people like Roosh called it years ago. In 10 years, it’s probably going to be ‘settled law’.

And finally, The Task to Grasp. In other words, the media’s feigned surprise at why such a kind, caring people as Swedes would turn (marginally) right-wing. But he gives them a little help anyway:

Specifically the scale of Swedes to the demographic they would grant quarter. Consider that there are over twice as many people living in Lagos alone than there are ethnic Swedes in Sweden. That;\’s one city. The global masses beyond that being effectively limitless in comparison to the supercilious “moral superpower” Swedes.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith reflects on what it might signify when a man intends To Spite the World. And when the education system considers “heroism” a “value-charged” word, it can only mean You Are the Alien Now.

Matt Briggs roundly condemns The Odious Ideas Of Father James Martin—SJ of course.

God did not make necrophiliacs. God did not make a man want to simulate sex with dead bodies. God did not make zoophiles. God did not make a man want to simulate sex with animals.

Then Briggs takes apart Pew’s Materialistic Mix Up, a survey that attempts to correlate prayerfulness with wealth. Next, he treats us to some wholesome oom-pah music. I Defy You To Watch This And Not Smile. Finally, students pick their grade, zoophilia in Pennsylvania, and rapid onset gender dysphoria, all in this week’s edition of the Insanity & Doom Update LIII.

Mark Richardson writes about the problems coming to the forefront between South Africa & libertarianism. Also, when The swamp speaks through the anonymous “resistance” within the Trump administration, even (perhaps especially) an Australian can tell what the mainstream US Republican party really stands for.

Trump is moral, claims the official, when he focuses on life within the free market, and amoral when he does not. A Republican should only have a view of human purposes that fits within the ideal of homo economicus—if not, the official intends to try to shut them down. There is no room within this view of morality for solidarity with one’s conationals, or for a desire to maintain one’s own culture and traditions, or even for a pragmatic concern for the future viability of one’s own political party.

Bruce Charlton ponders the question, Were the Romans in Britain a Good or Bad thing? Perhaps they were better than the Normans, but he nonetheless favors the Celts.

Dalrock analyzes the 2017 Never Married Data; To everything a season.

When these women reach their 30s marriage and motherhood are essential in order to frame their previous choices. If they marry in time and have children, in their mind it was just part of a long, wacky adventure on their path to respectable married motherhood. But if they fail to marry and have children, if they wait too long, their wacky adventure, their decade plus of extended courtship, looks instead like a path of sad, slutty failure.

I don’t always link One Peter Five, but when I do… you should read it. Of note: Pius X Condemns Modernism: Relevant Then, Relevant Now—Amen! And Let’s Say Pope Francis Resigns. What Next? No one actually knows, but we think the Holy Spirit deserves another chance.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, more Hopkins.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Eva Brann suggests that Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, in an epically long review, should be held in the same esteem as Tolstoy. It made me want to pick it up at least. And Bruce Frohnan strikes some reactionary chords and asks: Is America Devolving into Soft Totalitarianism?. The answer of course is yes. I think they still believe in democracy over at the IC, but he makes the point that a democracy is only as good as the moral character of the citizen. Which has degenerated to lows that would have shocked the Victorians. He offers, of course, little in the way of solutions other than praying for apocalypse. It’s cathartic at least, and it’ll solve the problem. Bradley Birzer also offers a much-appreciated Defense of Andrew Jackson. Now that’s a Broadway musical I would have shelled out for.

Richard Carroll has just his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week. I do recommend checking it out, it’s an interesting exercise in techno-futurism. I’m sure Nick Land probably watched it at some point and enjoyed it.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. He was all about the flash fiction this week: Kybernan (I), Permitless, and Brightburner. And finally, he’s begun offering daily writing prompts in case you want to stretch your creative muscles.

Chris Morgan is almost always bizarre. This was just the right sort of bizarre: No Whipped Cream For the Extremist.

This Week… Elsewhere

Real Gary has solid explainer on how Globalism is actually Chinese Nationalism. At least so long as the CCP continues to get a Little Yellow People Pass.

Over at The Medium Tom X. Hart is going on an absolute tear with his Analysis Series. 31 flavors now appear to be within reach. This week it’s Sexuality Analysis | Homosexuality and the hard right—he’s probably correct there, so take it as a cautionary tale. Cafe Analysis | The passive aggressive patron, or similar variations of the rankest hypocrisies. Here’s Org Analysis | Alcoholics Anonymous is a model for reactionaries—he makes some very good points, but never trust teetotalers. An almost too hot to link: Sex Analysis | How to tell if a woman has orgasmed, but worth it for the punchline. This carried some surprising heft: Media Analysis | Rajneesh was a neoreactionary, for very small values of “neoreactionary” perhaps. More and more analysis flavors: Political Analysis | Why you are a reactionary—“You can’t not be a reactionary.” Social Analysis | Divorce is futile and should be difficult to obtain. Knowledge Analysis | The limits of knowing about humans Life Analysis | Tuesday’s Aphorisms—a lot of good stuff in there. Briefly: Philosophical Analysis | Deleuze and Guattari. Finally: Future Analysis | The world in 2028, wherein he makes a boatload of predictions. Some of them pretty actionable… if you know the right bookie.

Hart also presents a, possibly quazi-autobiographical, fable: The master and the young progressive.

PA relates some heartening news (and pics): Germany Has Had Enough. An praise for the latest Murdoch Murdoch episode… before it’s zapped.

Ace checks in with “Tillin’ my own grave to keep me level…”. He has some advice on what to do before tackling “self-improvement”.

The Myth of the 20th Century podcast taps a rich and underexplored vein of Cathedral History this week with The Progressive Era—Roots of American Bureaucracy.

Fred Reed pens an enjoyable trip down memory lane: How We Were: The Years of Hitchhiking: Recollectons of the Social Cryogenian.

Al Fin goes there: Half the Sperm of Our Grandfathers. He discusses an explanation for secular declines in free testosterone and sperm counts among reproductive age men, that is even more disturbing than precious bodily fluids-style arguments (which are almost surely true as well).

Rebbe wonders (and hopes) Is the Left doomed in the West? I.e., like it is/was in Israel.

Could Israel’s reversal of fortune play out across the West? If the UK follows Israel’s example, the core population will slowly begin to get a clue, notwithstanding the Left’s gaseous self-righteous rhetoric and control over most mainstream media outlets and institutions. First, it’s a steady drip of crank far right-wingers; later comes the avalanche of normies.

After that, you get a cultural revolution with nativist women bearing children as an act of demographic warfare. So, those formerly debauched and feminist Israeli secular girls now have 2.6 kids. Then welfare subsidies get cut for minority fecundity, and the birth rate of the Left’s ethnic proxies collapses. The Battle of the Babies ends in victory for nativists.

Hopefully, we have that much time.

Heartiste spots an Iron Age Convert at The Gym. He stuck with it and shows marked improvement.

N. T. Carlsbad reads old books… and old periodicals. He has a very interesting paste from The Old Guard, wherein Copperheads go where no #Liberalist dares tread. 1863:

The crimes of the secessionists are territorial and external—those of the abolitionists are fundamental, striking at the heart of the Constitution, and sweeping away the whole edifice of popular self-government.

Prophetic. Then he gets his toes wet in an “Underexplored area: role of foreign policy in the assembling of the civil rights therapeutic state.” Paris Peace Treaties (1947) and the civil rights revolution. Astoundingly progressive progress getting shoved down Hungary’s throat at the time, courtesy of Foggy Bottom. It would take Americans at least a generation to catch up.

That’s all we had time for folks. Terribly sorry this was late. It was on me. My staff was more timely than usual in fact. Many thanks to David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear for their excellent help. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/09) appeared first on Social Matter.

The Kavanaugh hearings were very much in the news, fake and otherwise, this week. VDH samples The Circus of Resistance, which is about all you can expect in Clown World. And Rachel Bovard is All Out of Eyerolls. Whether Kavanaugh supporter Zina Bash was really flashing exosemantic gang signs is almost immaterial at this point.

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Our own Aidan MacLear debuts his shiny new blog: Setting the Record Straight just before the Sunday time bell. He has some historical nits to pick with Jim’s Stationary Bandits Theory of governance.

Arnold Kling thinks he sees the source of entry barriers on the internet: experience.

The knowledge that managers accumulate while operating a business becomes a big entry barrier. When I was the “chief scientist” of an Internet-based business in the 1990s, we were periodically spooked by VC-backed competitors who had enough capital to bury us—if they had our experience. But time after time they squandered their money trying stuff that we already knew didn’t work.

Experience is one of those intangibles, something whose specific effects you can’t identify a priori but which is nonetheless indispensable. Kling has also started reading Yoran Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism and offers some preliminary thoughts.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Shylock Holmes looks at The other counterfactual to wasteful childhood spending. There are two ways to spend less per child and you’re only thinking about one of them, right? (Til now, I mean.)

[T]here is a group of people for whom the alternative counterfactual is crucially important. These are the couples who feel that they might like to have one more kid, but they just can’t afford it. Those are the people who are making the wrong choice. The piano lessons and the maths tutoring don’t matter. If endless driving the kids to weekend soccer is too hard, just don’t put them on the soccer team. They’ll survive. If you don’t have a huge house, then maybe they’ll have to share a bedroom. People have turned out just fine, starting with much worse.

Have one more child, and spend less on each one.

The spending doesn’t matter. The child does.

Pretty much describes my life thus far. Holmes snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.

Anti-Gnostic shines a light on “The economy’s biggest mystery”. And he has commentary on Dreher’s Benedict Option (and Handle’s commentary on the same): Be of good cheer. A-G recounts some of the latest news not to be cheerful about. Faith, it is said, is the substance of things unseen.

Speaking of exosemantic gang signs… This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam presents a more complicated essay than usual (which is saying a lot) as he sketches, and expounds upon, the development of meaning in human language: Signing Up. Why is this significant to us?

This kind of “parrhesia” provides for a convergence of GA with much of the alt-right and neo-reaction, both of which similarly wish to map out, openly and honestly, the “mechanics” and rules of interaction between individuals and groups. It is only such a peeling back of illusions and ideologies that can make a “formalist” political project, in which actual power relations are formalized, possible. (Without a disciplinary space trained on all the various articulations of power, how could the actual relations be formalized?) Pursuing such an inquiry is the highest vocation of the human sciences.

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

Alf explains Why Jimianity. The only problem is that Jimianity doesn’t explain how to eat God.

Moose Norseman checks with an aphorism on The hidden secret of feminism’s success.

After the last American Pravda installment, we were wondering where Ron Unz would dare to go next. The answer: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. Unz indeed never fails to give us something provocative to think about.

By way of Isegoria… Seems like textbooks on how to teach teachers are primarily indoctrination, which is how teachers get so good at it. It’s not just your imagination: life expectancy of refrigerators is falling—but, hey, it can turn on your coffee maker, so there’s that. A quick dip into Heinlein’s Juveniles. Time marks for the “highlights” of Google’s All Hands video after the Trump election. The dirty, and quite expensive, underbelly of knowing more about your health than is healthy to know. Introducing: the Kitty Hawk Flyer. Finally: Lord of the Rings is still under a vigorously enforced copyright.

Finally this week’s missive from Cambria Will Not Yield… The Forgotten and Condemned Europeans. In which he reveals more than usual about his idiosyncratic version of Christianity.

This Week in Social Matter

Business perked up a bit this week at Social Matter. Newcomer Daniel Miller speaks of Progress And The Voodoo Gods—a review, of sorts, of John Cussans’ recent Undead Uprising. Plus a meditation on exogenous forces acting in human souls. An unusual, but not unwelcome perspective in these parts…

“History,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “is our myth,” but what creates the myth, and who are we? Suppose that the voodoo gods, or lwa, or entities resembling their descriptions, reach into our dimension and demand things, possess human beings and compel behaviors, including speech, or transatlantic quests, for their own aims, what would that look like? Land’s “right-wing Marxist” theory of accelerationism enters the story at this point as a theory of a Capitalist Lwa, on an adventure of intelligence, beyond the sunset of the human brain and human time.

There’s definitely something there, but r/acc strikes me as a sort of an intelligent design for edgelords.

And William Mason returns with an analysis and microhistory: Rightist Ecology, Leftist Entryism, And The Tragedy Of Earth First!. And defeating Conquest’s Second Law of Politics may only be possible by defeating politics itself.

These groups often begin, sincerely enough, as a collection of like-minded individuals engaged in a project of mutual interest. However, as seemingly innocent and apolitical as their cause might seem (playing video games, saving old-growth forests, drinking Scotch, smoking cigars), once the group achieves a certain mass and visibility it is only a matter of time before the Left takes notice. Mortified that a group of people could be going about their lives unfettered by his neurotic obsession with righting historical wrongs and destroying the last vestiges of traditional culture, the leftist will begin by critiquing the organization from outside, drawing fellow-travelers to his cause, demanding to know why the organization isn’t more diverse or active in campaigning for social justice.

Those possessing a vague familiarity with the group in question will insinuate themselves into the membership and ultimately the inner circle, exacerbating tensions in the organization that had previously been minimized by their common cause, throwing a little petty personal rivalry into the mix, and thereby sabotaging the group’s ability to accomplish anything without taking a “hard look” at their inherited privilege first. They will browbeat a few of the weaker and more insecure members of the group, cultivating a small but substantial Fifth Column within the organization. They will call for greater democracy and transparency and inclusivity in the group’s leadership, using their newfound power to subtly undermine some of the more uncompromising earlier positions.

(Emphasis mine.) And, boy, hasn’t everyone had more than their fair share of that.

As I outlined in a previous article, the worldview of ecology, in its metaphysical, scientific, and political manifestations, is a contemporary iteration of the perennial doctrine of holism. This tradition of thought regards the cosmos as an interconnected whole whose integrity takes precedence over narrow human concerns, and entails a concomitant rejection of narrow anthropocentrism in the service of the natural order. In other words, rightly understood ecology shares the transcendent and hierarchical ethos that the Left has been rebelling against since the days of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

The greater the moral signaling attached to your conversation effort, the less effectiveness you will be in accomplishing your ostensible policy goals. For the Left, this is a feature, not a bug.

“Nature is the ultimate fascist.” It also corresponds to the reactionary concept of “Gnon,” which regards Nature itself—whether consciously or not—as an implacable order that mankind contravenes at its peril.

Very strong showing from Mason and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochrane has an uncharacteristically worst take on Ron Unz. But give him credit, he does it with aplomb.

Handsome guy.

Evolutionist X (with uncharacteristically bad formatting??) ponders Political Inconsistency? It seems to her that the answer whether or not to spend blood and treasure to secure the loyalty of a far off imperial province depends not on principles but on which tribe happens to be occupying the oval office. Political principles have never not been a club with which to smack ones enemies. It’s just that the American Founding Fathers were so good at it, they convinced almost everyone “political principles” were real.

Solid formatting returns in Homeschooling Corner: Summer Fun.

And a finale for Anthropology Friday: Our Moslem Sisters pt 4/4.

By way of Audacious Epigone: Running the numbers on the Pennsylvania Abuse Cases: It’s the Sodomy, Stupid. And GOOG employee Presidential campaign contributions in 2016. And my… aren’t you surprised?! I sure am surprised!!

This Week in Kakistocracy

First up this week, Porter extrapolates the trend of corporate censorship and ‘hate speech’ monitoring in The Freedom to Destroy You. And no, you likely can’t just “Build Your Own Platforms:”

And if you don’t like what corporations are doing to you then just build your own Internet backbone, data centers, payment rails, and global logistics chain. I mean did it stop Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, or Jeff Bezos when they were denied income sources, commercial outlets, and marketing platforms?

Then, he has a great deal of fun biting back at a Twitter firestorm that erupted when he was retweeted by Ann Coulter or something, in Diversity Dogma. Lots of good quotables this time. Diversity is Our Strength. That is, it’s a powerful weapon for destroying You.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Echoing President Lincoln, J. M. Smith prophesies that just as a house divided cannont stand, It Will Become All One Thing or All the Other. In other words, Leviathan endures forever. He has a very fine piece on The Handmaiden of Leviathan. It is “university” synonymous (originally) “corporation.” This one earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Professor Smith was on a roll this week… He also asks what is the difference between a Bystander or Busybody? At issue is the standard litany of “hostile environment” feminist mumbo-jumbo. Who’s hostile to whom? Smith amplfies:

The prudent rule would seem to be that one should step in whenever a woman is suffering a reverse, but step aside whenever she is advancing. It should be needless to say that the methods by which a woman advances are nobody’s business, but her reversals are every white knight’s cri de cœur.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

Bonald briefly weighs the common man’s intuition of God against rational arguments for His existence.

Briggs writes about an academic Math Paper Scuttled By Angry Feminists & Frightened Effeminates: With Critique of the Paper Itself. Then he urges readers toReport Me To The Wanker South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet), who solicit their jurisdictions to report “hate speech.” On the surveillance front, Governments Demand Encryption Backdoors. Then it’s silicon valley’s anti-trump rebellion and Beatles circle jerks (seriously) in the Insanity & Doom Update LIV—Big Tech Midweek Special Doom Edition. On the academic front, UK Universities Threatened: Give Blacks More Degrees Or Else. Finally, sins of the fathers, GOP boycotts, record-breaking STDs, George Soros’s social media, and “Catholic” Colleges rebelling against the Church, all in this week’s second Insanity & Doom Update LV.

Mark Richardson asks, Has the left resisted market values? Of course not. They have to earn a living here just like everybody else.

Bruce Charlton writes about Finding the hidden Albion.

If hidden Albion is certain people, places, and things—then you could take 99% of people to them, show them, pick up and handle them, speak with them… and the average person would see nothing except the usual disenchanted, normal, mundane ordinariness…

Dalrock gives good advice to young women seeking a husband: Don’t let yourself become Empowered to avoid responsibility. He gives an example of how to make good use of natural Feminine wiles.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, Hopkins. Whose syntax can be a bit difficult to unpack if you’re reading it like prose. Read it like he’s preaching to you instead.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

At The Imaginative Conservative, Mitchell Kalpakgian writes about, who else? Gerard Manley Hopkins. Who brought a bit of God’s light to a literary world of Victorian doubt. Speaking from experience, it’s a lot harder to write poetry about joy and goodness. And throwing the Benedict Option aside, Casey Chalk brings up the Augustine Option. Which the author admits is ill-defined. It seems like he’s advocating standing strong against the coming ‘Fall of Rome’ if only to inspire the generation who rebuilds.

Over at City Journal, John Tierney digs deep into the filth of the modern University in Reeducation Campus. Which is actually a pretty good pun, and more than a bit accurate. I see a lot of reeducation camps that could easily be appropriated to brainwash our enemies with a few changes in staff.

Richard Carroll has just his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week.

At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. Or slightly more often than weekly; he also published a second Fiction Circular. But it was a quiet week for Logos CLub, excluding the daily writing prompts that I encourage you to go check out if you’re into that sort of thing.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Over at Heterodox Academy, they’ve an update on The Evergreen State College—the “The” (pronounce “thee”) always cracks me up. A rather extensive (cliff-notes size) review of Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind. And an actual scientific study on Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead . Or about as scientific as that sort of thing could be, at least. I think they should call them “Heresy warnings”. That is what they are. And then, hey, maybe Universities shouldn’t be going around spreading heresies. Or maybe they should. But at least we’d be having an “honest conversation” about them.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale fisks Bernie Sanders’ Guardian Op Ed. Bernie’s heart just wasn’t in it: He knows darn well that Trump represents a rejection of Billionaire Caste than a capitulation to it.

Our favorite demographer, rueful liberal Lyman Stone, looks at the RFP for world’s second biggest retailer and concludes No Room at the Inn for Amazon.

More “Analyses” from Thomas X. Hart. Short but sweet about the longer the better: Psychological Analysis | Seduction, comedy, storytelling, and orgasms. Another Psych Analysis | The psychology of explorers and adventurers. And some self-experimentation (the best kind): Psych Analysis | 8 hours staring at a white wall. Fascinating. Hart would be an interesting addition to the Bro’ Science Laboratory.

And Hart has Big Think Essay as well: Fascism before fascism: Lenin’s genesis. Here is but a taste…

Lenin had contempt for intellectuals and people with moral qualms, and dismissed these as mere “wets”. This attitude has a Nietzsche-like or fascist tang to it. The intellectuals were weak and out of touch with the vital spirit of the age, and they had no national loyalty – only loyalty to ideas. They had to be pushed aside, if the revolution was to succeed. And such thinking is precisely fascistic in nature—or perhaps we should say it is precisely Bolshevik in nature, and that fascism is a poor imitation of Bolshevism.

Lenin was, in this sense, the first fascist. It was merely that his revolution still played lip service to Marxist internationalism and the working class. But neither figured heavily in the Russian revolution, and the system’s true form quickly cemented under Stalin: nationalistic, socially conservative, authoritarian, and so on.

The Committee were impressed with this one and gave it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

To the strains of the amazing Lzzy Hale, Ace files some observations: “I don’t wanna be saved, I don’t wanna be sober; I want you on my mind…”

Al Fin spots some rather glaring trends in prices over the past 20 years. Why is it That They Can Only Destroy? And by “they”, Al doesn’t mean us—at least not yet. And Just One Reason Dangerous Children Avoid Degrees in “Fine Arts”. Not advice we’ve heeded thus far, but then we’ve never had illusions of our kids making a remunerative career out of music.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Nationalism in the Shadow of Empire—Nick Griffin.

At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus dons his lab coat and proceeds to offer a diagnosis of a political disorder with An Overview of Autistic Conservatism. Dr. Maximus’ psychiatric credential list is short, so he calls upon some keen insights from the late Charles Krauthammer.

Maximus also provides Eleven Observations on the Brett Kavanaugh Hearings. The whole confirmation spectacle is a lot like a boxing match between two feeble, old men—each is sent reeling by soft punches but neither can muster even the small degree of power required for a knockout.

Heartiste gets his Kipling on: The Sass of the Pupating Bugman.

PA poses his The Fundamental Question. Much more fundamental still: the power to pose it.

Welp… that’s about all that was fit to print. Many thanks to David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear for making this possible. Congrats Aidan the birth a fine new baby blog! We know there’ll be plenty of good stuff to come there. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/16) appeared first on Social Matter.

Last Tuesday evening, Zippy Catholic, was killed in a tragic bicycling accident in Northern Virginia. Details about what may have caused the accident remain sketchy at this time, but hit-and-run seems a possibility. Zippy was instrumental in establishing what we now know as the Catholic Blogosphere in the early 00s, and a giant even among the very tall in his defense of traditional Catholic doctrine and practice. I was inspired to write the following on The Ask.fm a couple days ago, and it came out pretty good:

“Stubbornness and disrespect, [Catholic doctrine] and [Thomistic] systems, obsessive epistemology and [legitimist] propaganda.”

Zippy was the Mencius Moldbug of Catholic Thought. Too bad I could never get them in the same room. Perhaps this was for the best, as the sheer brain power alone might have caused a gravitational singularity.

Zippy was profoundly influential. Ironically, many who were influenced by him went on to even greater fame with only half the brains. In some cases, only a quarter of the brains.

When he was right, he was very very right, and when he was wrong he was horrid. But he was almost always right.

A towering intellect, and instrumental in the development of Legitimist Catholic blogosphere.
Prayers are appreciated for the repose of his soul, for his family in this shocking and sudden loss…

Zippy was as immodest online as he was modest and generous in real life. His internet legacy will I think be similar to that of Lawrence Auster: Status Legendary. Purveyor of a trove of wisdom we’ve barely begun to plumb. He was almost precisely my age. Zippy is survived by his parents, a wife and children, a brother whom I’ve met a couple of times, and many, many nieces and nephews.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.

(Not exactly from “this”, i.e., last, “week”, but Kristor’s eulogy is a must read.)

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Fritz Pendleton returns to his role of Official Week Kicker-Offer with an Ode to a Dying Youth. A heart-wrenching look at “gender reassignment therapy”, which is, of course, child abuse to any sane adult. And an even more heart-wrenching libertarian response.

Obligatory girl smoking.

I’m not going to say anything as radical as children are the property of the state; nor will I go so far as to say that children are the property of their parents. The problem occurs here because both the Marxist and the libertarian are obsessed with dollars and cents. Ultimately, to a materialist, people are always property and life is about living to accumulate pleasures and to reduce one’s pains before they are all buried in the great void of death. It’s a grim view. Materialism seems joyous and hopeful at first, but the emptiness of its ideas eventually point back at nothing, like a mirror reflecting nothing in the dark. It’s telling that the Marxist who encourages children to revolt against their own bodies, and the libertarian who condones the act in the name of freedom, each care nothing about the children and their welfare. The two care more about upholding an ideological principle.

Fritz earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

News and noise about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination was ubiquitous within and without sphere. VDH is always worth a read, who is American Greatness, opining on The New Refuge of Scoundrels. Who lands scoring blows on the execrable Bob Woodward while he’s at it. NB4, we knew they were scoundrels 50 years ago. So too does Dr. Hanson. And he’s over at the venerable Hoover Institution explaining how Trump Buries The Old-World Order, tho’ VDH is far too sanguine about American involvement in WW2.

This was also the week that an heroic (and virile) Fr. Paul Kalchik, of Resurrection Parish in Chicago, defended the Faith (and the Natural Law) by burning a gay pride flag. Gay grooming among priests and bishops may call for decades of pensive dialog proceeding at a glacial pace, but this infraction called for swift decisive action by the Archdiocese. Quite clear where Cardinal Cupich’s priorities lie.

This post from Slumlord did not drive me into a seething rage: Luther’s Knocking. He’s right that protestantism, in contrast to the Catholic Church, doesn’t tend to create the sort of institutional inertia that’s hard to fix. Left unanswered is why? And the why is… because protestantism creates little or no institutional cohesion, i.e., it explodes, i.e., it isn’t Catholic. Nor, realistically, catholic. Which seems a strange thing for a Catholic to praise it for.

Over at GA Blog, Adam has a weightier tome than usual, but his consideration of Constrained Economies is quite excellent and represents some fundamental thinking on markets uncluttered by modernist ideologies. A “market” in Adam’s telling is simply “a network”, a common-sensical gradient between the (highly socialist) gift economy of families and close relations, and the frictionless free market imagined by libertarians.

Handsome guy.

[I]t also makes government involvement in markets less intrinsically fearful. A de-politicized government, one which didn’t need to be elected, and which therefore doesn’t need to buy off members of one network while being bought off by members of another, which doesn’t need to take sides within the various networks, could simply be part of the networks. Some working members of all the networks would simply be government agents—this would be known to all, and some of the actual agents would be known to be such, while others wouldn’t. And, of course, the government itself needs to buy lots of things, and would therefore be present in many networks. The government’s one demand must be that no network resort to settling disputes by violence that falls below the threshold set for a recognizable justice system.

A government can’t not affect the market. Trying not to is absurd. Of course, that doesn’t mean we want government bureaucrats prescribing wheat production on a farm-by-farm basis either. No ideology to see here. Adam devotes attention to the supposed demigod of Capital:

The most common complaints about capital and capitalism today provide us with a frame for speculating on ways of doing this. First, capital eviscerates communities and even countries by exploiting its mobility so as to first, undermine living standards at home and eventually leave those affected devastated by exiting the country in search of cheap labor, lower taxes, less regulation, etc. Second, capital homogenizes by replacing local cultures and norms with standardized national and ultimately global ones; while what is lost in the first case is extremely palpable, the losses in this second case are more intangible….

He is quite right not to see this process as an eerie alien intelligence, but a direct result of powerful humans implementing policies favored by other humans. Which can easily be turned around by powerful humans. Anyway, much to see here. Do RTWT as this was a very solid “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Aidan MacLear gets about Setting the Record Straight on Correcting Thots: “I’ve begun to think that if you can’t correct a fallen woman, you can’t restore a fallen civilization.” Sounds about right. This would be Step Two, I guess.

Alf makes a brief Return to the Left just to see what’s happened to the neighborhood.

Validis Silins’ inaugural entry at Jacobite is After the WEIRDing. “WEIRD” referring, of course, to the predominantly western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations that dominate social surveys, and the culture war. Silins ponders the responses of Rod Dreher and Peter Sloterdijk to the challenges of rootless modernity.

The diagnoses of both Dreher and Sloterdijk signal to us that a frictionless society, one in which individual passions are designed to be indulged, is one devoid of meaning. Too much comfort and not enough prohibition, in the one case, or effort and discipline, on the other, lead to decline. But in their opposed prescriptions for how to remedy the ills, they highlight alternative trajectories for fragmentation: sacred collectivities or transformative individuations.

Malcolm Pollack pens apposite thoughts on the shrinking social ecosystem. Regarding Kavanaugh: Enough Already. They’ve gone, alas!, much farther since last Wednesday. On the plus side… it’s led to some quite excellent memes.

By way of Isegoria… The Communist Manifesto: A Graphic Novel—No, really! A review of The High Frontier: An Easier Way, whose ideas are Not as outlandish as the concepts from the 1970s. On Giving Mars a magnetosphere. Did you ever wonder… Where did ranch dressing come from? Why not??!! Research suggests choosing between exactly two options yields best results. Finally, How fighting wildfires works (video).

By way of Arnold Kling’s combox, Handle explains What “neoreaction” ought to mean. (HT: Isegoria next week.)

Finally, this week in CWNY: The Beautiful Gate—Dalai Lama Edition.

This Week in Social Matter

Not a whole lot going on around at Social Matter this week, but Saturday Poetry & Prose did make a triumphant return. Our own Aidan MacLear got some original verse up in lights: The Devil’s Chair.

At least a couple full essays out of the pipe for next as you can already see.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Beautiful interior.

Evolutionst X runs in a study “Openness” and Cortical Thickness. Turns out openness to experience, a trait strongly associated with liberals, is correlated with cortical thinness, an excess of which is a sign of Alzheimers. Before conservatives go doing the End-Zone Dance, pathological cortical thickness is also not so great. Presumably the study wasn’t including pathological cases in either direction. Still, the association is interesting.

Next, Mrs. X looks at the downsides of The Shrinking World. Actually she sees it as all downside, which is a little surprising. The bad sides of division of labor, dense living arrangements, trans-ethnic cooperation (good things) do not stem principally from those things. Abusus non tolit usum. An increase of material technology requires an increase of social technology to keep up. Which hasn’t happened over the past 150 years. The fact you cannot get along with your vibrant neighbor has less to do with his nearness than a failure to properly incentivize his socialization to prevailing norms (or provide draconian punishments should he fail). A problem uniquely solved by… Good Government.

On the bright side, the aforementioned complaint does inspire a great yowl in verse: Because I am a Barbarian.

By way of Audacious Epigone: Trait variability by sex in the General Social Survey. The closing of the matrimonial mind—while the premise is sound, I’m not sure his data is saying what he thinks it’s saying. And geeking out on the Racial distribution of 2008 and 2016 Democrat presidential primary votes in two-way races. The Dems are the “We Black” party nao.

This Week in Kakistocracy

In his first and only post this week, Porter explains rape accusations as a military phenomenon. That is, as a weapon utilized against, well, pretty much anyone they don’t like. Don’t Show Me The Time and I’ll Show You The Crime:

It is said that rape is one of the oldest weapons of war, and so it remains today. Well not so much the act itself, as that’s more the purview of our migrant moral exemplars. Soon-to-be formerly civilized societies tend to instead deploy the accusation of rape as a weapon in our internecine conflicts.

Sadly, I think the weapon of accusing literally everyone we don’t like of rape won’t work against our enemies. Because when our side makes them, they’re ‘unsubstantiated conspiracy theories’, and being interested in those makes you a weirdo.

Expect more outrage next week!

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith agrees with the Englishman Ruskin, and Parkman, an American, that we are Lost for Want of True Kings.

Monarchism cannot be separated from manliness, and there can be no manliness where there is no true nobility. Not just titular or putative nobility, but the genuine article, the real McCoy. These reflections are prompted by the most recent eruption of effeminate eye scratching by the courtiers our own “silken nobility,” a tawdry spectacle that must raise, in the breast of every Tory of the old school, feelings of the most violent revulsion.

Kristor has a nice bit of analysis in The Sufficient Conditions of Social Trust. In synopsis…

An ethnically homogeneous K selected intelligent population with low time preference under a strong national cult of the Ultimate who imposes upon all men an absolute moral code of conduct is sufficient to foster and maintain a trusting society. Nothing less can do.

Even that might not do. But it’s a solid start. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for Kristor here.

Bonald correctly observes Becoming a reactionary is only the beginning of thought. After some optimism regarding the limits of human knowledge, he suggests a healthy relationship between laity and clergy:

A better way to promote the dignity of the laity, instead of simply flattering them for being so very educated and moral, would be to rediscover the importance of their distinctive role in the Church Militant. Part of that is political; it involves fights over culture and over control of the coercive apparatus of the state. Pope Francis is right to say that these fights cannot be one of the clergy’s main tasks; the other side of this truth is that they are the one of the laity’s main tasks. Fighting is one of the things we do; it’s good, holy, and necessary work.

Bonald is always either good or fantastic. This time he was the latter and snagged an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award from The Committee.

Richard Cocks continues his in-depth essay, Social Justice: an analysis Part 3.

Briggs reservedly states his case On Supporting Trump. Then he elaborates on A Joke About Race As Social Construct.

Sometimes whites are said to be doing especially white things—like inventing calculus or transistors or philosophy or rockets or moral theology or vaccines. Kidding! I’m kidding. No, the kind of whiteness they mean is whites acting like goofballs; dancing badly or whatnot (and always forgetting the greatest dancer of all). But, as the description says, because these activities are only ascribed to whites, it is an acknowledgement of the white race by those making the claim.

And of course, AI on the terrorism list, anti-gay colonialism destroyed in India, and softcore porn on BBC primetime, all in this week’s edition of Insanity & Doom Update LVI.

Ianto Watt reports on The Other NATO: An Orthodox Schism?

Mark Richardson makes helpful recommendations to aging women to help them avoid Digging a deeper hole into their fertility.

At Albion Awakening, William Wildblood muses on Troubled Times and What To Do About Them.

It’s an amusing irony that many people on the left currently think we live in terrible times because of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, quite failing to see that it is their excesses and zeal for destruction that have caused these things. On the other hand, people who might be interested in the themes of this blog also think we live in terrible times but for completely different reasons. They see that humanity has turned its back on spiritual truth and substituted for that a secular version.

Moose Norseman shares some Notes on veils, which is a particular hobby-horse of his, but a pretty darn good one. In the Institute of Christ the King (TLM) parish we attend (often), fully 90%+ of the women are veiled.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet. And Sydney, despite his lovesick melancholy, was actually an accomplished man in his public life. On Sunday, more Hopkins, sublime as ever.

It was a good week at the Imaginative Conservative, starting with Mitchell Kalpakgian on The Odyssey. Specifically, the familial joy of Odysseus’ homecoming. The restoration of which at the climax of the narrative is nearly as important as his Bow, and the restoration of divine sovereignty. The old Greeks, for their faults, nevertheless understood the basis on which civilization rests.
Anne Farmer publishes some original poetry: The Ballade of the Modern Female. And Emily Klienhenz on Poetry and Scripture, apprehending the Divine through aesthetics. Finally, Joseph Pearce writes on the Christian revival in classical music, with a review of Micheal Kurek’s New Symphony.Which apparently “has a heroic and victorious feel, which reflects the Christian fairy-tale genre and spiritual battle, or the Church Militant generally”. I like the sound of that, and it’s probably worth a listen. Preferably with a good smoke and a glass of wine or two. Two.

At City Journal, Heather MacDonald on Feminist Narcissism and Brett Kavanaugh.

Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week, and continues reposting material that was lost in the Thermidor implosion: G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless announces the construction of a new site dedicated to Investigative Intelligence. The goal being to ‘expose’ the enemies of civilization, starting with the good old SPLC. He also has the weekly Fiction Circular and his usual writing prompts.

O 

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Not this week (nor even this year), but a Quillette piece came to my attention and is certainly worthy of note:oThe Blank Slateism of the Right—a normie-accessible take on how myths about human nature feed into bad policies, in some cases criminally insane policies, amenable to folks on both the left and right.

Jordan Peterson provides a summary of some material from his book Maps of Meaning with On facts, values, rationality and stories: Part III of Response to Harris.

This Week… Elsewhere

PA offers a rather gruesome but effective warning: Marry young.

What is never pointed out is that young men are at peak access to pretty girls with unspoiled personality. You’ll be more attractive at 35 and possibly even at 50 than you are now but you’re not gonna be swooping high schools at that age. There are trade-offs in life: you can have a healthy start on building your family as you enter adulthood. Or gamble with fortunes as you put off your search and commitment to a quality woman in an environment that corrupts girls as they enter adulthood. Choose one door or the other.

My wife and I were 22 and 21 when married. We both worked menial jobs. By the numbers, objectively, we had no future. Best decision I ever made. YMMV, but not by as much as you think.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

Al Fin covers Density—of various kinds. And he comments on an imbedded video of besieged liberal Jordan Peterson interviewing besieged liberals Haidt and Lukianoff about their recent Coddling of the American Mind. Also there, Al looks at state by state GDP per capita and compares it to Europe. The latter not looking too hot. Except for Switzerland. My advice: Get ye to North Dakota! (Or Switzerland, if they’ll have ya.)

The indispensable Myth of the 20th Century podcast this week covers Cold Brotherhood—The Reunification of Germany.

Speaking of podcasts, I’m not a regular listener but Borzoi’s Much-More-than-Movie-Reviews Movie Reviews podcast The Poz Button featured M20C alum Nick Mason and covered the 1979 film Hardcore. It was more Much-More-than-Movie Review than usual.

At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus reviews One Nation Under Gold favorably.

Ace ponders Fight or Flight: “But I already left you and you’re better off left behind…”

In-house demographer, Lyman Stone, has more data than you can shake a stick at in Where Migration Changed in 2016. And more ways to look at it.

Heartiste presents a completely non-ironic Prayer For President Trump.

Arnold Kling starts off the week with a brief consideration of influential books. He also offers some words of defense for nationalism. Finally, to the surprise of no one, adults with lower time-preference make more money—though the Devil is still in the details.

Filed under The Onion’s Days are Numbered, Dennis Dale talks about the time he tried to write a parody of “black studies” professor complaining of merit as a tool of oppression. He was too late. Also there: Hate in Context. “Hate”.

That’s all we had time for. As usual, the trusty TWiR Staff contributed about half of these words. Many thanks to David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear for their dedication. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/23) appeared first on Social Matter.

The Circus that has become of the Brett Kavanaugh SC Confirmation Process loomed large this week. And as of this writing, the good news is he seems to have weathered the storm; the bad news is, his confirmation is by no means a sure bet.

This week in American Greatness, VDH explains Obama Won—i.e., on the cultural front. And the always articulate Angelo Codevilla chimes on the Kavanaugh hearing: Cowardly Republicans Grant a False Premise—the premise that Ms. Blasey-Ford is remotely credible. Also there: The Opening Statement Kavanaugh Should Deliver—which he pretty much did. He’s probably a reader.

Michael “Decius Mus” Anton has a field day The Gillibrand Standard. Which apparently is: a mere allegation of sexual assault is sufficient to convict. You really can’t make this shit up.

Arnold Kling reads accounts of Hungary from Anne Applebaum and David P. Goldman and asks “Did you two visit the same country?” He follows up with his considered commentary on the Kavanaugh brouhaha.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf tackles Thomas Piketty and his wealth inequality thesis.

Piketty’s solution is a non-solution. You cannot stop the poor from being poor by giving them money. I’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that that which is not earned is never owned. If your sugar daddy gives you a free iPhone, you will not take care of that iPhone, you are prone to break it, because in your mind it was never really yours. Same with lottery winners; the money they won was never really theirs, they have no clue what to do with it. Same with the poor: give them money and they’ll spend it on exactly the same things they normally spend it on: tobacco, alcohol, drugs. Wealth redistribution doesn’t work, works only to create chaos.

Girl smoking pic.

Quite so. Worrying about the morality of wealth inequality is like worrying about the morality of local rainfall averages. There’s nothing you can do about it anyway. (Hint: Therefore it’s not a moral question.) Also from Alf, commentary: Batman is a failed loser. Well, he would be… if he were real. Which Alf more or less admits in his follow up in which he casts his iconoclasm upon Taleb’s limitations. Specifically limitations on the concepts of anti-fragility and “black swans”. In which, Alf is basically correct. We like Taleb mostly because he’s grumpy as hell.

Our friend Helen Andrews has a review of The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class: Inconspicuous Consumption. The book makes some very interesting factual observations, but Andrews isn’t buying the moral spin author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (hoity-toity name) puts them.

Moose Norseman has a review of the Victorio Deluxe Grain Mill (as well as several of its competitors).

Aidan MacLear recommends A Few Minor Reforms for the Catholic Church in Thee Current Year. Some of which I agree with and some of it definitely not.

This week in Generative Anthropology explains the development, from the “originary scene”, of Moral Modeling and Ideology. Along the way he slides a warm butterknife through the pseudo-concepts of “social justice” and “moral equality”. He takes substantial issue with Gans’ (not un-progressive) explanation of morality in society. Ironically Adam is willing to ride Gans’ anthropology to its fullest extent. Hard to summarize, but still the best fundamental socio-political theory out there right now. And an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Nigel T. Carlsbad doesn’t just read old books. He reads old newspapers. The NYT to be exact regarding Napoleon III’s proposals for a European Union in 1863.

Neovic sees the Kavanaugh Kerfuffle as a prelude to The Spanish-American Civil War. Given that there aren’t two (plausible) armies to fight such a war, we assign a very low probability to that in the short and intermediate terms. Of course democracy will be managed. It’s been that way for quite some time. Possibly forever. Bernays was quite explicit about that in the 20th Century. Real democracy would violate the Iron Law of Oligarchy anyway, and we at Social Matter are quite skeptical that that’s ever happened.

Ryan Khurana returns to Jacobite to comment on how technology has our society all Whigged Out.

Malcolm Pollack has an update on the current situation of our (temporary, largely ceremonial) government: The Court Of Last Appeal.

By way of Isegoria… Victor Hanson on how Tribalism is the new American norm. Surprising: How and why Taiwan can win a war with China—uncertainty alone should keep it from happening. An inventor who plans to build a city under the sea—well at least that takes care of the gravity problem. Thor Ragnarok and Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”. And a dive into the imaginary worlds of childhood—I remember having one or two.

Finally this week in CWNY, His Europe Shall Not Pass Away. In which he explains more about his faith.

This Week in Social Matter

Business picked up a little bit here at Social Matter this week. William Mason, who of late has been hitting everything out of the park, does so again The American Kshatriya. In contrast with the Brahmin (priestly, influencer) and Vaisya (small business owner, skilled worker) castes…

[T]he Kshatriya is the most inherently reactionary of the castes in its orientation towards order, hierarchy, and justice. It is clear that understanding, identifying, and cultivating the Kshatriya among us is essential to the work of Restoration.

Essential—but exceedingly difficult, especially in the present age. While the contemporary Brahmins are easy to find in the halls of academia or the media, where they serve as the priests, apologists, and inquisitors of our secular liberal religion; and while the respectable Vaisya caste also clearly corresponds to the bourgeoisie that comprises the economic backbone of American society, the 21st century American Kshatriya is more elusive.

Mason has a lead on a few:

Handsome guy.

“What is the true object of the Kshatriya’s life and his true happiness?” asks Sri Aurobindo in his commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. “Not self-pleasing and domestic happiness and a life of comfort and peaceful joy with friends and relatives, but to battle for the right is his true object of life […] to find a cause for which he can lay down his life or by victory win the crown and glory of the hero’s existence is his greatest happiness” [1]. Our Western prototypes include the Spartan warrior, the Roman legionnaire or senator, the medieval knight, the Renaissance courtier, and the Prussian soldier.

With this ideal type in mind, we might begin by seeking our contemporary Kshatriya among the Amerikaners, heritage Americans of European stock but deeply rooted in their native soil, loyal to its people and traditions rather than abstract ideologies or material acquisition. He is also more likely to be attached to the Red Empire—the empire of military bases, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the ‘military-industrial complex,’ the NSA, the FBI, the Amerikaners, and the Republican Party”— rather than the Blue Empire of consulates, NGOs, academia, the media, Wall Street, the State Department, urban liberals, and the Democratic Party.

Might you be a Kshatriya? He provides a checklist for vocational discernment—vocation in the “Catholic” sense of spiritual and life-long calling. Simply fantastic piece. Please do RTWT! Mason snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his work here.

An on Tuesday, Henry Olson returns with a superb bit of analysis on The Death And Tragic Rebirth Of Libertarianism

For those of us who called us ourselves libertarians in those halcyon years of the Ron Paul movement, the death of our ideology was sad. But in retrospect, this was only the sadness of a vanished childhood, where we realized that the dreams we once believed so deeply were only dreams. The real tragedy is that, since in the years since its death, libertarianism is reborn—not, as before, as an idealistic attack on a corrupt establishment, but instead as the servants of a corporate, technocratic elite that through its control of social media and other vital institutions of the Internet threatens to impose a new totalitarianism more insidious than anything the old libertarians fought.

If only it could have stayed dead…

For me, the libertarian dream died with the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri. I watched as black rioters looted and burnt an entire city on national TV, based on lies that media elites (in private companies!) fed to them about racism. When the police rolled in the tanks in to stop the mob and impose order, the typical libertarian reaction was to decry “police militarization.” But in reality, it was the militarized police force—what Albert Jay Nock called “our enemy, the state”—that stood out to me as the true hero of Ferguson. It was only through their use of force that normal people’s lives and property would be protected from a frothing underclass stoked to violence by our own “free press.” I came to realize that, if I had lived in Ferguson, only the police would have taken my side.

Non-aggression works great so long as someone aggressively enforces it. Olson goes on to skewer how libertarian apologetics are now being used to defend establishment censorship through “private” companies (“not technically the government!”, “build your own platforms!!”). The Committee bestows an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for Olson’s excellent work.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran is over at Quillette this week with a review of Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are: Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won. He finds Plomin’s work competent if timid. I guess it won’t make you stupid, at least. Cochran is never timid, and that’s what makes him an entertaining read.

He follows that up with a post over on the home blog, musing on the likely Sources of group differences.

Over at Evolutionist X’s, the EvX Book Club cracks open a new title: How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil (2013).

Mrs. X offers an inspiring look at The World Written in Beautiful Maths. The map is, of course, not actually the territory. But our maps (in certain endeavors) sure are starting to look like it. It is my belief that every question answered by science will unveil approximately two more. Which guarantees the potential for a sense of wonder for all future generations. Should they choose to accept that mission, a retain the capabilities to do so.

For Anthropology Friday, she takes a moment to pause and reflect on Modern “Anthropology”. She deconstructs some all too representative latter day anthropological abstracts, and finds a whole lotta nothing-burger.

Many (if not most) modern anthropologists are deeply motivated by political concerns that have nothing to do with describing varieties of human cultures (an anthropologist’s job) and everything to do with the deep culture of academia (the institution that pays them and publishes their work.) So of course modern anthropology must be written to support the anthropologist’s own cultural norms, even if those norms are at complete variance with their ostensible goal.

Her punchline is the Defenestration of Napoleon Chagnon. As we’ve often mentioned around here, since the “social sciences” came to be recognized as that, they have never not been agitprop for revolution. Which is why almost all the good stuff is very old, often only accidentally scientific. We recommend a reboot! Superb article from Mrs. X here and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

HBD Chick quite inexplicably got suspended from twitter. Evolutionist X takes note. But it was only temporary. She seems to be back up and running. Phew!

By way of Audacious Epigone… Kavanaugh’s support gaps—the “marriage gap” far exceeds the “gender gap”… as usual. Also cracking the correlation nut of Blue state bums.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter packed all of his outrage into a single post this week. Nothing if not efficient. He gets a bit nostalgic for the yesterday in which leftists would merely call you a racist in Next R Up:

But with the Kavanaugh Karnival, dopey feminists are reading the subtext. And that subtext is Rapist is a name for Bad Men. Bad men want you to have your babies when you get pregnant… And bad men violate women. Does it matter if a bad man actually did violate a woman? Did it matter if a bad man actually did ‘oppress’ blacks?

And while I find grim hilarity in a modernity in which the principal tool of social and political warfare is the accusation of rape, Porter’s brutal wit could certainly be euphemized using that other “R” word. Let’s hope it never becomes a prosecutable offense.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith was on a roll this week. He writes about kicking the habit, so to speak, using The Restorative Remedy of Cultural Secession. Cold turkey works best, he thinks. Then, he muses on how a woman’s cry of He Did Me Wrong! has morphed from a rally to protect her virtue into quite the opposite.

Time was when a “damsel in distress” was a virgin in urgent need of assistance to preserve her virginity, and a “knight in shining armor” was a man who offered such assistance without expectations of carnal compensation. But nowadays, a Sir Galahad is expected to wait beneath the bug-light outside every motel room, listening for the lassie’s cry of dissatisfaction with her lunging lad.

Using pure toilet humor (quite literally), J. M. Smith explains Why I Write: Gravidum Cor, Foetum Caput. Also, he explains, for the benefit of a benighted ACLU, the difference between “credibility” and “comprehensibility” in Dr. Ford’s Poetry.

Kristor writes An Eu Logos of Zippy Catholic. May he rest in peace.

Zippy’s unblinking, unsparing honesty was but one aspect of his aweful fidelity to his Lord. He could not love Christ and also anywise at all corrupt the pure doctrine of his Body, so far as Zip himself yet reckoned it. He could not insult and wound his Master, by holding his tongue for fear of insulting anyone else, thereby betraying Truth himself.

We linked it last week, but it belonged in this week. Really the best parting words we’ve seen for Zippy. We’re all gonna miss him. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.

And Kristor meditates upon The Inexorable Internal Logic of the Fall and The Drama of the Fall.

Bonald offers a confession of a defender of clericalism. He, apparently, is “The last, the only clericalist”.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

In a sense, I am a “clericalist” for every profession. I think it’s normal and healthy for each person to take pride in his work and to slightly over-estimate its importance. It’s all to the good if your dentist thinks teeth are the most important organs, your eye doctor thinks eyes are the most important organs, and your dermatologist thinks skin is the most important organ; they’ll do their jobs better that way. Nothing good has come of telling men not to take pride in their distinctive roles, and nothing good comes of forcing priests to think their roles unimportant.

It’s not so much that I wish to maximize the power of the clergy as that I wish to minimize the power of the laity. And power, you see, is a zero-sum game. Call me an anti-laicist. I try to imagine what a Church with lay power would be like, and I look around at the world that the laity do control.

Superb piece. And an .“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention

Matt Briggs boldly declares I Am About To Destroy The Government ó And You Can Be A Witness!. Then, there is more development in the Church scandals when Cardinal “Soupy” Cupich Tries To Wrap Straight Jacket Around Faithful Priest For Burning Pervert Pennant. Next up, more analysis on Why “I Believe Survivors” Is Asinine: Kavanaugh vs. Ford, Realists vs. Fantasists. Next, when a best-selling author gives Briggs a citation, he brags I’ve Been Promoted! Also, he analyzes statistics suggesting a trend in The Getting Of Bastards. Finally, more kindergartners being taught about homosexuality, infertility advertisements, a problematic saint, and a conservative college made a new target for the left, all in this week’s edition of the Insanity & Doom Update LVII.

Mark Richardson demonstrates, through a series of tweets, the insanity involved in Debating morality in a liberal age. And can we be surprised at such confusion when, for example, kindergarten picture books teach kids that, because the baby can’t talk, Grown ups make a guess? regarding his or her gender. Next, Richardson shares this video of a young girl describing Living in fear in South Africa. Lastly, he praises Trump’s homeland speech.

By way of One Peter Five… Pope Francis: The Gaslighter. And Why Conservatism Is Part of the Problem, Not Part of the Solution.

A conservative is one who wishes to conserve the good at hand, which means maintaining the status quo while correcting notorious deviations. But the conservative has no principled motivation to return to and recover what has been lost, for he has no compelling reason to see it as more precious, more valuable, than a constellation of goods that happens to exist right now.

And over at The Junior Ganymede, the drumbeat for early marriage and family for women and men continues apace: The Right Time to Marry and Have Children… “is like the right time to plant a tree. 20 years ago, but failing that, now”. Analysis and inspirational anecdotes ensue.

Finally, Seriouslypleasedropit crafts a tale of The Wooing.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and notes that we should learn from him; if you like it, put a ring on it. And put some babies inside, while you’re at it. On Sunday, more Hopkins, together with Pound on the value of humility. Which I would not have expected of Pound, but being kept in a cage probably does wonders to heal the ego.

Cool bridge.

At the Imaginative Conservative this week, Mark Malvasi has a few interesting things to say on Nature, Science, and Civilization. I must complain that he mischaracterizes the medieval perception of nature, which was one of awe and apprehension. Nature was a thing to be tamed back then, and Hobbes did not invent this perspective but reintroduced it after the ‘noble savage’ myth fell flat. Paul Krause hits the nail on the head with a defense of Christianity as definitive of the West in Christianity and the Radical Transformation of Culture. And Jessica Wilson recommends Three Dangerous Philosophical Novels. I think she’s writing to college students, so take that as you will.

Richard Carroll recaps the finale of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week, and continues reposting material that was lost in the Thermidor implosion: Aristotle’s Poetics. As a fellow lit major, I can confirm the awful quality of the education on that front. Always best to reeducate yourself from the basics.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless follows through on his promise of investigative intelligence with an expose of the SPLC: Defamation Factory. I think he’s gearing up to enter the political realm, too, with a review of Hate Crime Hoax, and a new manifesto outlining his transhumanism: Man Above, Beast Below, in which he lays out his gripes with extant political philosophies and the direction of what is more or less cyborg Nietszcheanism. He also has the weekly Fiction Circular and his usual writing prompts.

Over at Ex Urbe, Ada Palmer pens a punchy Brief History of Book Burning and announces a new project: Censorship and Information Control during Information Revolutions.

This Week… Elsewhere

TUJ makes an impassioned and well-argued case for protectionism in Robber Baron Capitalism in Four Lessons—Part III: The Report on the Manufactures Revisited. I have no recollection and I can find no links to Parts I or II. But Part III stands firmly on its own.

Tom X. Hart has more Analyses—mostly self-experimentation, i.e., “Bro Science”. Meditation Analysis| Meditation techniques. In Psycho-Political Analysis | Trump spikes British envy, Hart explores Brits’ irrational hatred of Trump. And a Country Analysis | Americans do not belong in America. I’m not sure he’s being serious in that one. Hey, you don’t always get The Empire you want, but the one you deserve.

Ace checks in with one of Ozzy’s best (solo) tunes: “Who can we get on the case?… Someone to put you in place”. Not a huge Ozzy (solo) fan, meself.

PA has an interesting video on how Nuclear tests were often performed on a country’s own servicemen. Not “on” as in killing them, but close enough to do a lot of predictable damage. Also there, he uses the occasion of his 400th Post to look back at his ten best posts.

House Demographer, Lyman Stone looks for the Next Puerto Rico. Could it be NJ?

Heartiste features a short but very sweet meme: Watch What Women Do… Also The Divorce Rate Is Falling, And It’s Not Good News. Which was my initial reaction upon hearing about the article. There’s enough self-selection in those stats to drive a cultural apocalypse through.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast The Teamsters—Driving Sideways in an age of Disorganized Labor, an even catchier title than usual.

Over at Al Fin’s… China Retreats from Green Abyss, Re-Embraces Coal Power. The rest of the world may be sheepishly following.

Ed Realist has a part IV in The Case Against (Caplan’s) The Case Against Education: How Well Are Americans Educated?

Well… That’s all folks. About 3700 words and ~85 links. A slow week for everything except the Orthosphere, which was really hopping. As always, this column would simply not possible without the contributions of our excellent TWiR Staff: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear, many thanks to you guys! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/30) appeared first on Social Matter.

In light of the Kavanaugh hearings, along with every single thing else, VDH pens a particularly poignant Epitaph for a Dying Culture.

In an iconoclastic age, when statues are toppled, and when street names at Stanford University are renamed (but, mysteriously, not the politically incorrect name Stanford itself), the past is captive to the present. Realities are erased according to current ideological agendas.

Our pastime is to blame those of the technologically backward and impoverished past. In most cases, they accomplished things that our present generation lacks the courage and resilience to do—whether navigating the Atlantic in a leaky boat without accurate navigation, homesteading on the prairie in an age without machines or modern medicine, or flying a B-17 without fighter escort over 1943 Germany. Is it our envy of their courage or own self-hatred for our manifest inferiority that forces us to judge figures of the past in our modern courts on the basis of their purported race, class, and gender crimes?

So, history has become melodrama, not tragedy. Figures of the past who were human and not perfect, and who prove, according to today’s value systems, not good progressives are thus deserving of historical annihilation.

At the venerable Hoover Institution, he contemplates America’s New Jacobins. Don’t know how “new” they are (Sam Adams was certainly one), but point taken. Interestingly, Hanson thinks the Jacobins may be facing “their own Thermidor reaction”. Let’s hope it’s a good bit stronger than that.

Arnold Kling observes that now Andrew Sullivan is a candidate for membership in the Intellectual Dark Web. He argues that, contrary to Democratic protestations, it was mostly partisanship driving opinions concerning Kavanaugh. (We’re glad someone noticed.) On Econlib, Kling criticizes the “rational expectations” approach to economic theory and favorably reviews A Crisis of Beliefs by Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

New poast from Those Who Can See: So, Where Does Multiculturalism Work? As always, magisterial, and as always, a must read. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Our own Aidan MacLear sets the record straight on Mother Government and Father Government. He notes the old model of GOP gov style as “the strict father who wanted you to be self-sufficient” is no longer around, except perhaps as a nostalgic flourish.

And we don’t have male and female styles of governance today, we have two competing mommy governments. It’s ‘single mother’ government. And single moms are bad. Real bad. The #1 predictor of childhood delinquency isn’t poverty or race; it’s whether the kid has a father or not.

In constrast…

True paternal government is monarchy. Filmer goes into this in Patriarcha. If you want to really educate yourself, read the old masters and not the blog of a young reactionary who has better things to do than wax poetic. But government by father is qualitatively different from any kind of maternal government. Mommy cares about your thoughts and feelings. Daddy doesn’t. Your soul is your own, and his rules are designed to develop your agency and let you live the best life you are capable of. Not coddle you, promise you the world, and tell you that you’re a victim.

Quite so. The Committee were impressed with this one and gave it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

MacLear follows that up, grumpy beyond his years, with: Love is Bullshit, Arranged Marriage is Good. The title overstates the case just a bit, but very good stuff along the way. Like:

Authentic Amish clothing and possibly authentic Amish girls. (Toenail polish?)

I’ve had the opportunity to observe Amish girls ‘in the wild’. They are completely unpretentious and unjaded, their interactions with men modest and cheerful. And they look forward to their marriages with giggling anticipation. The eldest one, who was engaged, was the envy and admiration of her younger friends. She, herself, was relieved that she managed to find a husband. She was getting old after all; almost twenty. If I had known then what I do now, I would have converted immediately. You really have no idea how happy women are under the patriarchy until you’ve met Amish girls. And they work hard. Really hard. Does it crush their femininity? Not a chance. The Victorians were retards. A farm girl singing a song while she prances ankle deep through horse manure with her dress hiked a few inches up manages to be more feminine than a thousand of our dolled up sluts put together.

And yet another plug for early marriage for both men and women. A trend. And Good Heavens MacLear was busy this week. He pens a valuable primer on Primogeniture, showing that, as is the case with almost all ancient social technologies, it was anything but arbitrary and superstitious.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam frames Deferral as Media. The setup is (as usual) complicated, so you’ll have to read it. But it leads to the question of how best to utilize “media”—i.e., technological deferrals of direct/physical experience—to improve the “disciplines”.

If computer programmers know what people need to fulfill their disciplinary assignments, they could design the algorithms most helpful to them, from the sovereign on down. We would all learn, unevenly and in accord with necessities, to think probabilistically, to project probabilities further and further into the future, albeit with declining degrees of certainty as we go further ahead. That is really the essence of deferral: if we don’t think primarily of how to kill each other right now, we can occupy ourselves with more profitable uses of our time; if we extend that period for ten years, yet further vistas open up; for a hundred, and we can imagine civilization building. Then all our thinking would focus on what builds trust and what minimizes resentment, and our practical activity would focus on deploying resources and energies so as to build that trust and neutralize and redirect that resentment. How would we know we have another hundred years (perhaps to then be renewed indefinitely)? We really wouldn’t, but we’d be able to speak in terms of which activities and which ways of thinking made it either more or less likely. We could be wrong, but then we could study the source of such errors as well, and seek to minimize them.

That would be the Truth Engine, I think. After solving the contentious problem of… Who’s “We”? This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Empedokles, Darwinian Reactionary, waits an extraordinarily generous amount of time before republishing his epoch-making rejoinder to Steven Pinker Dark Enlightenment Now series over on his home blog. That multiple award-winning series appeared at Social Matter in 5 parts starting here.

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf confirms some physiognomy on Paul de Leeuw—apparently a big fish in a very creepy Dutch pond.

Seriouslypleasedropit chimes in with a meditation on time preference, the actual title of which I don’t quite get. Baffling title or no, pretty solid stuff:

Most people, when they seek to affect the world beyond the scope of their lifetimes, aim to do so through their children. Why do people work at jobs they hate? It ain’t so they can donate to medical research.

An unthinking hostility to inherited privilege, therefore, looks suspiciously like a boxing-in of human ambition to the short-sighted, the fleeting, the momentary.

Horribly, child-bearing and long-term planning are complements in the economic sense. When you have children, the distant future becomes suddenly very relevant; likewise, the raising of children becomes a much more attractive pursuit when you grasp the reality of mortality.

Girl smoking pic.

We do hope, however, that children will be taught to reject both candy and vegetables in favor of meat—the acceptable sacrifice of Abel the Just. In spite of the vegetable dangers, The Committee liked this one and gave Dropit an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his effort here.

Anti-Gnostic says his peace on the Kavanaugh Circus and what it means, viz., The adults have left the room. And he permits himself a bit of optimism in the return of Smashmouth politics. Not unfounded, I think.

Malcolm Pollack pulls out a Kipple. And it smacks you in the face: If. Do read it aloud. He’s also got a helpful Bleeding Kavanaugh: A Roundup Of Reaction From The Right. The (more or less) respectable right, which doesn’t always get a lot of linkage around here.

At Jacobite, Evan James ponders the NPC meme in Empty Realism. The idea has a surprising philosophical pedigree—in particular the philosophical zombie—and James considers connections to the more insightful notions of the Frankfurt School. This snagged an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Just before the TWiR closing bell… Alrenous tackles Consciousness and Encoding, or rather the impossibility that the former might arise from the latter. Which, tho’ he articulates it extremely well, is not a surprising conclusion to me. But it’s surprising to hear it from him.

By way of Isegoria… Mad Dog Maddis pussyfooting around women in the infantry, but not exactly lying. Several untold (and not terribly flattering) stories about Bruce Lee. Russians looking at a semi-catamaran aircraft carrier. A deep dive into the psychology of strategy: We are willing to suffer more to keep what we have now. Military experts think the Battle of Hoth was winnable—if only the rebels had had their shit together. Saw this on The Twitter too: Did China use a tiny chip to infiltrate U.S. companies? Finally, how the Germans accidentally created Escape University back in WW1.

Finally, this week in CWNY… Liberaldom is Hell. Inspired (and inspiring) as usual:

The incredible hatred the liberals have for Trump, which is a maniacal hatred that goes beyond any political invectives of the past, is the result of Trump’s attempt to go back, not to Christian Europe, but to a more moderate place on the road to Utopia, a place where white people are not demonized and babies are not slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs. But we cannot go back to that moderate place, because the devil is not a moderate. He will fight through his liberal minions to preserve his kingdom. Burke should forever be our guide on this crucial point: You cannot have just a little bit of liberalism; it is an all-devouring, reptilian monster that must consume every last vestige of Christian Europe.

This Week in Social Matter

Arthur Gordian makes a triumphal return to the page of Social Matter diagnosing The Rise Of Cultural Anarchism. He traces the by now familiar pattern of revolutionary radicalism denatured and deployed for the consolidation of elite power structures.

Cool lighthouse.

The anarchist movement was defeated throughout the West by the actions of law enforcement and nascent national security agencies, but their tactics did not die. Islamic terrorism is inspired by Bakunin’s work. More importantly, however, Bakunin passed into the modern radical Left through the Frankfurt School, undergoing the same social transformation that turned Orthodox Marxism into so-called ‘Cultural Marxism.’ The latest manifestation of Bakuninist terrorism in American politics has been the #MeToo movement, which takes Bakunin’s basic approach and transforms its symbols into the culture war manifestations most famously described by Herbert Marcuse.

Anarchism changes from an attempt to destroy the institutions of government to one which attempts to destroy the principles of moral and social life. At its root has always been egalitarianism: the belief that every person was created equal, and therefore any authority of one person over another must be illegitimate. By changing the terrain of battle, this equality is now centered on social life. A moral person must be made equal to an immoral person, regardless of the real-world consequences of their actions. A person who made good choices in life must be made equal to one who made bad choices. If people are equal, then their choices must therefore also be equal, else one person has demonstrated an intolerable superiority by prospering while others failed. The success of the moderate, courageous, prudent, and just man is a stinging affront to the equality of the immoderate, cowardly, imprudent, and unjust person. Therefore, by transvaluing the principles of Western society, the cultural anarchist enforces equality between the moral and immoral person, bringing to life Bakunin’s famous quote that there is no sin except the belief in sin.

Much more there, of course. As usual, Gordian is simply superb. And waltzes to an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran comments on The Fundamental Attribution Error. And why aren’t Polygenic risk scores used for any (known) selection purpose. Just a guess, but I think there are some strong proxies in widespread use.

Over at Evolutionist X’s, Book Club continues with Kurzweil’s How to Create a Mind, pt 2/2. Regarding Jeopardy-winner IBM Watson (which Kurzweil makes too big a deal about), Steve Sailer pointed out it was due primarily to it’s machine-like buzzing-in ability. Watson for College Bowl, sadly defunct, would be a far greater “AI” achievement.

Next up, news on the discovery of Denny: the Neanderthal-Denisovan Hybrid—an extraordinarily rare find.

For Friday, something completely different: The Endless Ratiocination of the Dysphoric Mind. It seems a bit of a ramble, but Mrs. X is often at her tip-top best when she rambles. It’s a very very good ramble.

A notable absence of gender dysphoria here.

[F]or the first 299,945 years or so of our existence, most people were pretty happy dividing humanity into “men” “women” and the occasional “we’re not sure.” People didn’t understand why or how biology works, but it was a functional enough division for people.

In 1955, John Money decided we needed a new term, “gender,” to describe, as Wikipedia puts it, “the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity.” Masculinity is further defined as “a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with boys and men;” we can define “femininity” similarly.

So if we put these together, we get a circular definition: gender is a range of characteristics of the attributes of males and females. Note that attributes are already characteristics. They cannot further have characteristics that are not already inherent in themselves.

That’s the first clue you’re looking at a pseudo-science: Grammar gets violated. She pulls on the strings of mind-body dualism and lays bare the old gnostic heresy. Very Catholic!

But whence this tendency toward ratiocination? I can criticize it as a physical mistake, but does it reflect an underlying psychological reality? Do some people really perceive themselves as a self separate from themselves, a meta-self watching the first self acting in particular manners?

Well… they do. But it’s a disorder to be remedied, or at least pitied. Not celebrated. Really superb ramble here and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award. RTWT!

By way of Audacious Epigone… Jews are “not just Gentiles with a lot of money”. I.e., The privileged two (percent), and shrinking.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter has been busy, lately, with real life, and as such has only one post for us, a final comment of sorts on the Kavanaugh confirmation. Democracy Dies in a Society Not Ruled by Slogans. Democracy, of course, means the rule of those who make and enforce slogans. Like “Bereave Women”:

Since incentives do work, we can always count on having more of what generates high yield social status. And right now nothing produces more output than pronouncing I’m a survivor! The mere act of self-proclamation now coats the speaker in a moral Teflon that displays quite profound social properties.

Indeed, this “democracy” is dying. Has Trump resurrected real two-party politics? The GOP did not Bereave Women this time. And neither did a lot of people. Real democracy means real civil war.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

At The Orthosphere proper, J. M. Smith explores The New Priestcraft of progressivism. Demon rum has given way to demon structural oppression and demon toxic masculinity. How silly of our simple ancestors to believe in demon rum. Religious charlatanism has come a long way, Baby! 17th Century Masons and freethinkers should have been more careful what they wished for.

Also there, Smith explains Why There Must be Chains and the Lash for the Scowling Id, rendering a utopia psychologically impossible.

Kristor provides A Concrete Exemplification of the Inexorable Internal Logic of the Fall while responding to a comment from a reader of the essay he published last week.

Matt Briggs argues with an atheist about the probability of the Jesus’s historical existence when Poor Richard Carrier Goes On The Offensive. Then it’s academic hoaxes, law professors abandoning due process, corporate gender quotas in California, a dead pedophile on a judge’s doorstep, and more in the Insanity & Doom Update LVIII ó Special Midweek Doom. Next, climate science gets a little more ridiculous as Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Outside, It’s Gaia 2.0! And lastly, a student editor loses her job over reporting basic biology and drug companies make a new push to sell blood pressure medicine in the end-of-week edition of the Insanity & Doom Update LIX.

Mark Richardson shares some of his Thoughts on freedom.

In one of Chesterton’s books, a character is asked to define freedom and he answers “First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself”.

William Wildblood channels his inner Augustine for these Confessions of a White Male.

When military wisdom flows from the mouth of babes, Dalrock astutely observes that You can’t argue with the boy.

The fundamental goal is to mark the military as a feminine space, to make it impossible for men to associate the military with manly pride. But how can a man take pride in his daughters invading a male space once other men’s daughters have already made it a place for women? Such a father needs other men’s sons to still believe that the military is a male space, so his daughters can prove them wrong. Otherwise, what is the point?

And when progressive men are falsely accused of rape, They mean no offense to the Red Guards by claiming their innocence.

At One Peter Five: “That’s Not Who We Are Anymore”: Pre- and Post-Conciliar Catholicism Are Not the Same Religion. A conclusion I have strenuously resisted for many years, but for which my strength is wearing out.

Why does it so often seem to be the case that the same bishops who are allowing sexual license so much latitude are the very same who find their inner disciplinarian when it comes to the Church’s traditional expressions of worship and piety? These men are not, as is demonstrated by the growing demand for the Church’s venerable liturgy, populists. They are not merely expressing the will of the faithful.

They are giving the faithful what they want them to have, and they’re giving it to them good and hard.

By way of Junior Ganymede, advocacy of Skin-in-the-game-archy, and how “democracy” doesn’t measure up.

Over at Gornahoor, a trip back to Greek Myth and The End of Patriarchy.

Final, Donal Graeme offers a belated, but quite worthy, Farewell And A Remembrance for Zippy Catholic.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale seems to be having a few problems with his blog, and thus no weekly Sonnets.

Handsome guy.

At City Journal, Heather Mac Donald takes on the mythology of campus rape in Trauma and Truth. And Henry Miller advocates for the psychological testing of politicians in Fit to Serve. Which is so naive that I’m nearly floored. Who is testing Whom? And what are the political persuasions of the psychiatric and psychological fields exactly? Hey, it worked for the Soviets!

Over at the Imaginative Conservative this week, Regis Nicoll publishes a piece on Modeling Manhood. Which I link to as a list of ways not to run a Christian household. Edgar Allen Poe’s Lines on Ale. Paul Krause with Aristotle and the Culture of the Meal. And finally Joseph Pearce recommends the best Contemporary Christian Fiction.

Richard Carroll continues reposting material that was lost in the fall of Thermidor—this time, Hesiod’s Works and Days. Which, despite Hesiod’s competition with Homer, was not remembered quite the same way. In fact, its homey folk wisdom is almost the perfect opposite of the epics. Tellingly, Hesiod was considered the greater poet at the time.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless on the futurism front with Notes on Mobile Platform-Cities. Which, if you start by thinking about an aircraft carrier, seem a bit more plausible. He also has the weekly Fiction Circular and his usual writing prompts.

This Week… Elsewhere

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

Dennis Dale conveys the Pozland Dispatch—Portland, that is. Held hostage by antifa morons.

PA provides background (and video) of The Oldest Living Insurgent. Yet more on Kazimierz Klimczak and his First-Person Account of The ’44 Uprising.

Ace’s cold read on Robert Heinlein proves correct: “I’m a tiger when I want love…”

Al Fin explains Why President Trump is Determined to Spank Chairman Xi. Xi’s a big boy; he can take it.

A carefully prepared plate of news and views: Deep Thots, By Jackbooted Heartiste. And a stereotype confirming bit of ¡SCIENCE!: Women Are Most Racist When They Can Get Pregnant.

This week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Hanoi’s War—Vietnam and the Struggle for Independence.

At Zeroth Position Nullus Maximus makes the Case for Executing Pedophile Priests. Maximus reassures us all that molesting children is contrary to the tenets of libertarianism and goes on to cross all the theoretical T’s and dot all the I’s in making his case.

That was all the news fit to print. Many thanks to my vigilant staff for their invaluable contributions: David Grant, Aidan MacLear (who is not permitted to vote for himself), and Hans der Fiedler. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/10/07) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well… this was the week the NPC meme hit. And boy did it hit! A Memetic Killshot. Even the Grey Lady noticed. Breitbart is fairly authoritative on the matter.

Venerable Victor Davis Hanson is over at Amferican Greatness predicting A New Era for the China-Russia-U.S. Triangle. Which are, of course, the only three truly independent states in the world. “Being friendly with a big stick [Trump] is far wiser than being obnoxious with a twig [Obama].”

Arnold Kling suggests that hysterical sociologists write as if Mrs. Clinton had won. Kling also offers commentary on the 2008 Financial Crisis and makes some replies to Eric Weinstein’s thoughts on immigration and Bernie Bros.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Titus Cincinnatus, who has the habit of posting very late in the week (as demarcated by the TWiR schedule), managed to post late enough last week to lead off the next! He takes an optimistic view of the fallout from the Kavanaugh hearings, inter alia, predicting: The Spell is Broken. Well, we certainly hope so, but this wouldn’t be the first time The Left have overplayed their hand. Cincinnatus has his reasons…

[D]espite the occasional aberration from the general trend, the American Left has had an increasingly difficult time obtaining true electoral success since the mid 1990s. Yet, this has obviously not proven to be much of a hindrance to the Left obtaining and using power to push through its own agenda. Even though the Republicans have had near-continuous control of Congress since 1994, and occupied the presidency for a good share of that same period, the tendency in American policy (especially social policy) has been ever leftward.

Why is that?

It’s because the Left has been able to gain control over various institutions which allow it to shape public policy directions even without control over the formally-defined legislative apparatus. One of the primary institutions for doing this is the judiciary.

The judiciary, he notes, is “uniquely suited to procedural subversion“. Certainly true, but I suspect this was more important in the Warren Era. These days, most of Cthulu’s water gets carried by academia, media, and permanent government. But back to the significance of Kavanaugh:

The procedural system for doing end runs around recalcitrant legislatures has suddenly fallen into the “wrong” hands.

And that’s why Vox, among others, is focus grouping various workarounds to their readership: How to appear to be principled while violating principles? A popular game among the verbal elite… Much more there, including what he thinks is the key to “breaking the spell”, but I don’t wanna spoil it for ye. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

And Titus offers something completely different: A second article for the week about something completely different: Why the Democrats Want to Outlaw Time Travel. A bit of speculative fiction about a cranky old Hungarian physicist and his invention which would permit unfettered forensic investigation of the past. You can probably guess why that would be unpopular.

Our friend Helen Andrews reprints A Loving Ambivalence, which appeared in this month’s First Things. If you’re not a subscriber, this will be new to you. She shines a lot of light on Spain’s own ferocious debate on the moral rectitude of Spanish Conquest in the Americas. Very worthwhile read.

Alf writes a full-throated defense of Paranoia. The fact that Mao and Stalin died natural deaths lends not a little credence.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

[P]aranoia is healthy. Keeps us alive and kicking. Should be cherished and respected.

It is a lonely emotion. With whom will you share your paranoia? Surely not your enemies. Probably also not your in-group, for paranoia concerns your safety in relation to your in-group, so if they assure you nothing is wrong, you are stupid to take it at face value. It is all the more dangerous because professing paranoia to your in-group professes doubt, insecurity, weakness, which heightens the possibility of betrayal.

Paranoia deals with the unknown. You don’t know everything that’s going on, you can’t know everything that’s going on. Your enemies will often feed your paranoia as to make you fear them more than you should, but other enemies might downplay your paranoia as to make you fear them less than you should.

Alf earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam asks, “What would a market, built into which is an acknowledgement of the market’s dependence on central power, on the one hand, and the long term moral and ethical life of workers and consumers, on the other hand, look like?” This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Right Scholarship announces a leap forward in his translation project: Ketteler and the Kulturkampf. His work is here. Those fluent in German are invited to critique.

Our own Aidan MacLear sets about propagating his pet heresies by Disowning the Greeks. I prefer the hermeneutic of continuity to that of rupture, but MacLear’s case will have to be answered by someone more capable than me.

Sarah Perry returns to Ribbon Farm with a deep dive into the problem of map scale: Light of the American Whale. She focuses on “the nineteenth century”, but I think the scale problem applies to any time or place.

Some views are better than others for different purposes—obviously! But here is the question: if we managed to somehow add all the views together – the zoomed-out globe/satellite views, the costume drama views, the recorded views of novelists and diarists, history and science papers that sift through the fossilized traces of an earlier time—if we somehow fused, summed up, superimposed, or otherwise managed to merge all the sources—would we wind up with a true view of the nineteenth century? Of any part of reality?

A fortiori, if we did all that, would we have a view of the nineteenth century that anyone living in the nineteenth century had? Surely not. Maps aren’t territory for a reason. As usual, Mrs. Perry is hard to summarize, but this is a very good read. Sarah takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.

Over at Jacobite, Robert Mariani uses the Kavanaugh affair to ponder Epistemology at Scale.

Malcolm Pollack finds the IPCC crying Wolf!! for the bazillionth time.

By way of Isegoria… Why Paul Romer and William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in economics. John McWhorter explains why English is so weirdly different from other languages. Dementia starts in the ICU, which is a darn good reason to stay out of ICUs. Probably file this under life hacks: Learn at night and relearn in the morning, for those with the discipline to practice at least. Finally, a “new tradition” courtesy of the San Fran school board.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: The Heart and the Hearth Fire.

This Week in Social Matter

Crickets…

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran notes that egregious examples of… erm… Y-chromosome replacement are commonplace. The Iberian conquest of the Americas barely ranks, for example, with Iberian conquest of Iberia.

Handsome guy.

Evolutionist X introduces Nandy, Neanderthal Skull for 3D Printing. Fun for kids of all ages, I think.

Next up, a very fine meditation on Invasive Memes, benign and harmful ones, and what, if anything can be done about the latter. I think one can be immunized against harmful memes, but you need to truly get a live dose of it. Immigrants from the former Eastern Bloc, for example, seem particularly skeptical of democracy and mainstream media propaganda. Many, perhaps most, have an immunity. Converts to one religion from another seem particularly immune to arguments from the perspective of their former religion. The Committee were impressed with this ramble and bestowed an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

And Anthropology Friday picks back up again with The Crackers of Apalachee, Florida. Excerpts, with commentary, from the doctoral dissertation Suwannee River Town, Suwannee River Country : Political Moieties in a Southern County Community (1976).

By way of Audacious Epigone… Support for affirmative action by race, surprising perhaps only in a general lack of support across all groups (even them). Percentages identifying “social issues” as most important for voting. Yes, it looks bad with the under 30 crowd, but what did the under 30 crowd look like 10 or 20 years ago? Or 50? Judaism is the whitest religion in America—“whatever white privilege is, Jewish privilege is it on steroids”. And: Is Twitter bad for your mental health? Answers may not surprise you.

This Week in Kakistocracy

With outrage enough to go around, Porter returns this week to full posting capacity. Leading off: the subject of tariffs in Protectionism for CEO Bank Accounts:

Ideally this would be a symbiotic relationship. Society shelters its merchants, and those subsequently profitable merchants then reinvest in society’s capacity to shelter. Instead, merchants avail themselves of American society’s shelter, and then reinvest in Chinese plants, Indian engineers, and inebriated Mexican landscapers.

He also has a final word (or maybe not) on the Kavanaugh hearings and ¡Believe Wamen! With a little tongue-in-cheek advice: Always Get It In Writing:

Though in the case of the unnamed complaintant [sic.], the prosecutors did have an iron-clad point in refusing to drop the case. Said a spokeswoman: “None of the emails show the accuser denying that she was raped.” See? Checkmate. She never said you didn’t rape me. And when women don’t explicitly offer that disclaimer in the course of their romantic communiques, an observer can only conclude that they were in fact raped.

It looks like even the accusations against Weinstein are standing on shaky ground. Not that he’s a man worth spilling much digital ink defending, of course.

Also, a look at the street anarchy (anarcho-tyrrany to be precise) of Antifa in the Red Metropolis of Portland in You’re a Little Whitey, Aren’t Ya?.

And finally, he shares a story relayed to him by a crypto-shitlord in West Coast tech about his encounter with the embodiment of NPC in Think Different:

In fact, you could see the seething rage in him when he talked about using his marketing to get back at the rednecks of the world. In his mind, anyone not to the left of Mao was a redneck and needed to be dealt with. It was good to be reminded that these people really do hate our guts and want to see us in prison or dead. They won’t stop until they get that.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith contrasts the values of right and left liberals, distilling them with the phrases Muh Merit and the Nepotists.

The left has always understood loyalty in a way that the right has not, and this is one very large reason for its success in our “civil broil.” The left has understood that it advances by boosting its friends and burying its enemies. Right liberals have operated on the contrary principle. Under the malign spell of muh merit, right liberals would promote their own assassins if those assassins were the best marksmen. This is why right liberals so often lose in the “civil broil,” why our institutions are now largely staffed by leftists, and why our cultural graveyards are filled with men of the right who have knife wounds in their backs.

Along the ways Smith sprinkles in some very choice quotations from the past. He’s one of our very favorite writers and he snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his efforts here.

The Prof. Smith goes on one of those whimsical fantasies, this one about Teaching Democratic Truth, that comes a little too close to touching reality. Next, he discourses
On Stuffed Shirts and Pushy Squirts, that is, the generational gap between men and boys. And in an uncharacteristic black-pill he asks (giving only two options), is Christianity in a state of Retreat or Route?

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes a sprawling essay contemplating the past and present of the national epic poem and it’s relationship to Identity—The Future of a Paradox.

Richard Cocks efficiently surveys the problem of Utilitarianism: a new kind of evil.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

A small minority of students remain in favor of killing the victims no matter what scenario is introduced. They want to kill the potential organ donor, to push the fat man and to pull the lever. But when these students are asked if every time a victim is needed they would volunteer to be killed, they always say no. They are willing to condone the murder of others, but not their own murder. This is a clear case of violating the principle of fairness—“do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” They want to be protected from immolation but not to protect anybody else. They are willing to murder, but not to be murdered—to sacrifice the victim, but not to be the victim. When this is pointed out, it puts an end to their willingness to voice their support for murder.

Matt Briggs reports that ìDoctorsî Suggest Hacking Up Live Patients For Their Organs, Then Killing Them. And regarding Road Rage: Paper Says Living Near Road Causes Dementia, but Briggs is skeptical. Then he gives us the statistics On Witch Hunts throughout modern history and suggests we come up with a better term. And new frontiers in social justice reforms at universities in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update LX

Mark Richardson notes how liberalism incentivizes Power without justice. A particularly pathological species of divorce.

Instead of men and women working together selflessly for a common good (e.g. the family, the nation), and thereby creating stability, trust and improving social standards, the left is pushing a vision of a “nationalized polarization” with men and women standing against each other in competition for power and social resources.

At Albion Awakening, Wildblood describes The Elizabethan World Picture and its conception of the condition of man. Then he meditates on the mysterious nature of First Principles.

Dalrock writes about male curfew laws agitated for by women who are Angry with God, envious of men.

Over at Gornahoor, Cologero offers a tour of the Spirit World with The Bondage of Spirits, with stops at human cognition along the way.

From One Peter Five, a very detailed primer On Deposing Popes: A Historical Review. Timely!

Hapsburg Restorationist has a Novena for the Canonization of Bl. Karl of Austria.

And by way of Faith & Heritage a rather bitter and surprising takedown: Good Ol’ Boy, Bad Ol’ Economist: Spare Us Your Lectures on Jobs, Mike Rowe. Not sure what to think about that.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale is still migrating his troubled blog over to a new host, and will be back with us before too long.

At City Journal, Bob McManus pens a piece that may be of interest to us: how New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has attained effective Kingship over his state. Though not necessarily as an example to be emulated.

By way of Imaginative Conservative this week, G.K. Chesterton’s A Ballade of Suicide. Which is excellent, as one who’s never read his poetry. Chesterton, it seems, had been quietly erased from the literary memory. Bradley Birzer recalls Anti-Catholicism in Early America and the Burning of a Nunnery, almost as if our great nation were founded by savage Puritan anarchists. Joseph Pearce publishes what seems to be a monthly trend of Imaginative Conservative: an introduction to Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”. Daniel McCarthy contrasts two Suicides of the West, one by James Burnham and the other by Jonah Goldberg. If the “West” according to Goldberg is liberal capitalist democracy, then it has decided to commit suicide after an astonishingly short life. And Dwight Longenecker with a review of the excellent Western, True Grit. The Coen Bros. one. Which was pretty faithful to the old one. Both were great.

Richard Carroll reviews Neovictorian’s novel Sanity, and approves. A novel by a reactionary must be primarily art, and not propaganda. And in the close, optimism about the ability of the Right to produce art.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless publishes an essay on Spectral Horror & The Insurrectionist Charnel House. As dense as the title suggests, it is about revolution and the specters conjured to incite it. And another, The Artifice of Always, seeking to break the lie of a dualism between “nature” and “artifice”. All of the natural is artifice, and all of artifice is natural.

Finally, University of Chicago’s Ada Palmer publishes her 2018 Campbell Speech, How New Authors Expand Fields. A pretty deep dive; fans of Japanese animation will certainly be interested.

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This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Over at Heterodox Academy, “moderate” coverage of the “Sokal Squared” paper: Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.

Jordan Peterson steps in some poo with his tweet about Kavanaugh. The good doctor offers some clarification of his thought process.

This Week… Elsewhere

For those with the stomach for it, Dennis Dale provides play-by-play expletive laden insult-by-expletive laden insult in the Portlando-Tyranny.

Al Fin offers a bleak possibility: You Want to Cry About Inequality? I’ll Give You Something to Cry About. A version of the Dire Problem, which I happen to think is more a problem of governance and social technology, than any problem with the laws of physics or economics. People without the ability to care for themselves are, by definition, wards and therefore do not have reproductive freedom. Problem solved, for those with the will to solve it. Speaking of solving problems: Columbus Brought Peace to the Violent Americas. Happy (belated) Columbus Day, everyone!

People, even of extreme right sympathies, have in the past complained of Columbus' excessive not niceness. Could be true, I'm not an expert. But the way to look at is: You conquer the world with the Army Ya Got, not the one you wish you had.#HappyColumbusDay

— Nick B. Steves, 2.9% Thal DNA (@Nick_B_Steves) October 8, 2018

Heartiste is not the first to notice the existence of LRV: Liberal Radio Voice, but one of the best to lampoon it. Also, the persuasive power of the word: Imagine. When it isn’t John Lennon singing, that is… And National Review Admits Shekels Come Before Nation, without even a hint of irony.

Real Gary poses a provocative koan: Have you ever noticed… I’m not sure it’s exactly correct, but I can’t argue against it without spoiling it. Food for thought, though.

Some guy going by (R/dec)inthefuture on The Twitter posts A Few Quick Thoughts On Individualism. Relatively new to the sphere. Still haven’t made up my mind about this guy (except obviously he needs an actual pseudonym). See what you think. This too: A Review of “Anarcho-Fascism; Nature Reborn” by Jonas Nilsson. The book sounds interesting despite its contradictory (and perhaps misleading) title.

PA is quite on point here: Natalism for your people: what you get when you have a country of your own. He relays some mildly optimistic fertility data from Poland, and sketches out a minimum necessary set of conditions for it. And analysis and and almost unbelievable video, to Anglophone eyes at any rate, of Bolsonaro Making A Feminist Cry. He’s like Trump Squared. Bra- si- lia! Bra- si- lia!

Tom X. Hart is back on Medium with Clash of civilisations: Donald Trump vs. Sadiq Khan; the latter being the mayor of London, a former British colony. Kahn’s principal role seems to be reassuring folks that terror attacks are now normal: Nothing to see here folks! And with that, Hart suddenly announces his retirement from Medium. Can’t say I blame him; Medium in the aggregate is a complete shit-show. We wish him well on those other projects. And if they happen to be public, we’ll link them here.

This week in Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Catholic Power in the American Empire.

We were pleased to see a response from Zeroth Position to item here on Social Matter about libertarianism. Nullus Maximus takes issue by claiming that Henry Oslo Misunderstands Libertarianism. Maximus admits where he thinks Oslo is right, but his critique leans heavily on his own good-but-idiosyncratic ideas about corporations.

Late in the week, Ace weighs in on the Men vs. Women vs. Cat vs. Dog debate.

Welp… That’s about all we had time for. And this is already very very late. The lateness was all on me. Many thanks to our faithful (and timely) TWiR Staff: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and (budding heresiarch) Aidan MacLear, we couldn’t do it without ye. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/10/14) appeared first on Social Matter.

Fast on the heels of the Killer NPC Meme, Elizabeth (“Injun’ Liz”) Warren engages in one of the greatest Auto-Pwn’s in American political history. Audacious Epigone weighs in. Elizabeth “Little Rounding Error” Warren. Whiteness levels unbearable.

Not that we weren’t still getting a few good laughs from NPC…

VDH explains Who and What Threaten the Constitution? Certainly not Trump.

Back at American Greatness, How Big Tech Will Swing the Midterms, Then Take Over the World. Not sure if this is prediction or agitation for Trumpian shot across the bow. This too: Why We Need a Cultural MAGA Movement.

And, of course, this happened. I have a lot of Orthobros. I’m purdy sure on both sides of this issue. Just as they have (mostly) not picked at late infected wounds of the Catholic Church, I won’t pick at this one. None of this, Bros.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam takes a deep dive into signs and things signified: Puppets and Probes.

Richard Greenhorn posts an epilogue to his A Few Things Broken at the Seams: Jason’s Woods. Powerful stuff.

Aidan MacLear checks in with a magnificent essay on The Spiritual Physiognomy of African Man.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

The centrality of possession to the African is a negation of human agency as the European understands it, an attempt to animalize (that is to say simplify) the nature of man and to place his complexities of extreme good and extreme evil, of extreme talent and crippling disability, into the ownership of a mysterious spirit world that is felt intuitively and never wholly comprehended. He considers himself inwardly always the moved and never the mover, the horse and not the rider. His inner humanity is without form and identity, a man of clay to be shaped by a mystical other. The aggressively bombastic individualism that we see in a Kanye or other rap mogul, or famous athlete, occurs only in the West, in an aping of the apparent spirit of its success, often with significant White admixture in the individual himself. If you begin to listen for this self-denial of agency in African culture, should you have the stomach for it, you will hear it everywhere.

To be fair, agency is down across the board. As usual: Women and Minorities Hit Hardest. I wish it were needless to say that NAAMALT, but it isn’t needless: NAAMALT. MacLear is quickly becoming one of the ‘Sphere’s best new writers, winning an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his work here. (No, MacLear is not allowed to vote for himself in The Committee.)

Social Pathologist offers A Little Eulogy for Zippy, with whom he was at nearly constant loggerheads. Like me, Slumlord shared a lot of similarities with Zippy. I think all three of us are more patient and generous in real life than online. Zippy Catholic, pray for us!

Alf explains why his blog is named AlfaNL and focuses on various facets of Strength. Chock full of solid advice. Can’t say I agree with every word of it. But most of it, like this:

As a rule of thumb, I don’t believe nutrition experts, physiotherapists. Doctors I take with a major grain of salt. Their advice is vague, contradictory and subject to silly fashions. For instance, when I experienced muscle pains, every paid expert advised stretching exercises which I was supposed to do for the rest of my life. Did them for a while. Didn’t really work. Then I went to the gym, did heavy compound exercises with barbells, and whaddya know: pain disappeared. I have yet to meet the first health expert who advised me to do heavy squats.

Until now!

At Jacobite, Logan Allen describes the vicious circle of Media Bias and the Mob. Also there, R. Cam offers up Invoking Liberation: A Review of Provocation, feminist-out-of-time Camille Paglia’s latest book.

Ron Unz returns to give commentary on the (lack of) response from the ADL to his provocative earlier articles. Unz also spends a good amount of time consider the Leo Frank case. Cf. Myth of the 20th Century.

Tom X. Hart picks up on Tumblr where he left off on Medium… His Ideology Analysis | Against new religions is simply superb, earning an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

By way of Isegoria… How experts get even better. On the power of external monologue for problem solving. I do this, a lot. Filed under Not Entirely Without Reason: We’ve all been planet chauvinists. Bezos meeting Neal Stephenson and Freeman Dyson and the Blue Origin team. The secret to legendary NCAA basketball coach John Wooden’s success, besides recruiting that is. Practice smarter, not harder, or intelligent laziness revisited. Finally, introducing: BolaWrap 100, coming to a denizen in need of non-lethal force near you.

Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, The Sign of Our Salvation.

This Week in Social Matter

This week was not entirely silent at Social Matter. Luka Markovic has some fresh poetry on offer: Lord Of Silence.

Already for next week there is a new essay up. And I happen to know of a couple of articles in the kitchen…

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran chats with James Miller about Blueprint.

Guy Madison, 1950.

Evolutionist X revisits one of her Greatest Hits: Can Ice Packs Help Stop a Seizure in Humans? I swear I saw “Ice Picks” when I first read that. Must have Trotsky on my mind. The good news is ice packs can help.

Next up, Mrs. X provides a definitive, and not entirely unsympathetic, take on The Unbearable Whiteness of Elizabeth Warren.

And for Anthropology Friday, part 2 of Crackers. Except it turned out to be more of ramble… about ethnonyms, the various white nations (plural) that settled America, Southern identity, however confused, her own Southern roots (which are rather Cracker-ish), the honor roll of HBD luminaries and what they’ve noted on the subject(s), and a promise to get back to Anthropology next Friday. Rambly EvX is best EvX.

By way of Audacious Epigone… interesting data on racial polling gaps, candidates versus issues. People are heckuva lot more tribal than Benny Shapiro would care to admit.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter, officially acknowledging the NPC meme this week, digs into the code of an NPC software update in This Update Corrects Improper Autonomous Behavior. Which underscores not only the creepy uniformity of thought among non-player-Americans, but the coordination of the programming with which they are provided:

At any rate, Yahoo has since maintained an astonishing cadence of white insubordination shaming stories. Typically they appear in couples every week, some weeks nearly one a day. Rest assured, someone views this mindset as a major service pack.

Blatantly advertising one’s own hypocrisy is, rather than a weakness, a signal that one is so powerful that they don’t need to play by the rules and can’t be held accountable. A certain leftist in Porter’s crosshairs seems to have missed the boat, however, and attempts to reconcile his cognitive dissonance in Identity Politics for Me:

That’s exactly right. Because nation and country are not synonyms. Nation is a people, not a state or geography. And identity politics—acknowledging and advancing one’s nation—is a step toward its fulfillment. Left unsaid, as always, is exactly whose nation they are wanting to fulfill.

In Porter’s eyes, it is not even necessarily hypocrisy. Both the white and nonwhite leftist see themselves as members of separate nations from the average white American they are attempting to destroy. It’s just war, plain and simple.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Holiness Spirals Week at the Orthosphere. Kristor maps out how the Church kept them under control for so long: by The Indispensable Political Primacy of Sacerdotal Hierarchy. Moreover, Christian Soteriology Proper Forestalls Specious Holiness Spirals. An astute commentator replies with An Hypothesis about the Origins of the Modern Sacrificial Cult. Taken together, these essays represent a superb synthesis of Neoreactionary thought about the role of religion and enthusiasm in social psychology. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award to Kristor.

Kristor also explains how Sovereigns Lose the Mandate of Heaven When They Promulgate Bad Laws. Although maybe slowly at first, then suddenly.

J. M. Smith offers a good history lesson in explaining how Christian Brotherhood is Universal Charity, and not French “fraternity.” His springboard is the 19th century correspondence of Mandell Creighton and Lord Acton, two very different sorts of liberal. One practices tolerance as a general (and secondarily virtuous) principle (Creighton), and one who practices it only as a strategic holding pattern (Acton). I suppose you’ll be able to predict which sort of liberal ended up winning.

Creighton had not, in fact, stipulated that Pope and King should be presumed to have done no wrong. He had said that the law of charity requires us to see these “great men,” not as monsters and fiends, but as brothers placed in exceedingly difficult situations. Creighton did not for a moment deny the truth of Acton’s celebrated line about the tendency of power to corrupt; but he believed that the corruption of a brother should make us feel charity towards that corrupted brother, not hatred.

If I must pity the man who is intoxicated with alcohol, surely I must pity the man who is intoxicated with power!

Lord Acton is often seen as a keen critic of power, but he seems to me decidedly inferior to Creighton. He did not, for instance, see that the historian’s authority to defame great men is a very considerable power, and that historians are therefore subject to the same inexorable corruption (and entitled to the same charity) as other men gifted with great power.

Well… if you wanna make an omelette… Smith earns an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his lesson here.

Next, Smith debunks Two Dangerous Nostrums of right-wing educational theory—first, that education should be limited to STEM, and second, that classes should be massive online open courses (MOOKs).

The man with the microphone in the MOOK will naturally be chosen through “peer review,” and since peer-review is mostly butt-sniffing, the vote for the professor who is the best the Left has to offer will be a landslide at nineteen to one.

Bonald writes about how, despite significant political formal victories on the right, the left is still successfully flexing their social muscles.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

In the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation to the Supreme Court, we have once again a formal victory of the center-Right, which one could now say formally controls all branches of the federal government. Again, it is stunning how this corresponds to no social power whatsoever. It’s Mr. Kavanaugh’s supporting senators who are getting screamed at and being targeted by donors. Myself, I cannot understand the strength of emotion on either side of that issue. To me, Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence is clearly a disputable question, one on which reasonable people may disagree. Then again, I would say the same about the exact value of the total climate feedback parameter and the exact body count of the Holocaust, so clearly I’m weird. That’s not the point, though. The point is which side feels sufficient control of the social space to feel free to express their anger. Is there anyone who needs be afraid to admit that he or she opposed Kavanaugh? In an alternate universe in which the Right held social power, I would expect us to scream and bully. People do what they know they can get away with.

“Neutrality will not be tolerated.” At least until power does not come from the barrel of a gun being aimed by those who control public opinion. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Briggs reports that Amazon’s AI Proves Men Better Than Women At Tech Jobs. Next, it’s quantum queerness, transalpine transphobia laws, and male athletes in drag, all in the Insanity & Doom Update LXI—Special Midweek Doom. Then he provides Proof Education Is Bad For You, at least if you’re a woman. Also, one would think the American Geophysical Union wouldn’t have much cause to take on a progressive agenda. Think again: The AGU Completes Its Transformation Into A Fully Political Organization. It’s not Geology; it’s Geology++. Finally, it’s the fireable offense of due process, more gay BBC propaganda, and the climatologist argument for veganism, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update LXII.

Sydney Trads write about Marxism and Secularism’s Cultural Overreach.

According to Nietzsche, man’s brief excursion into time—human existence—is enough to make the strongest people turn into gods. Hence, the aversion to the metaphysics of God in Nietzsche’s work is transformed into an attempt to become God itself. This proves to be an exercise in creating something out of nothing that, ironically, could never take place if man believes in God. Nietzsche understands belief in God to be detrimental for the will to power. Man, he tells us, must make himself into a God—or die trying—through the will to power over the self. While will to power over the self is not altogether a bad thing when coupled with other wisdom, Nietzsche destroys man’s ability to ponder and accept limitation in human existence.

Dalrock maps out the script for the stock feminist/white knight/misogynist scenario. His advice to the white knight? Do what she asks, but know in advance that she will take great care to protect herself from feeling gratitude.

By way of Jr. Ganymede, finding a geometric mean between cussin’ and prudishness.

As the centennial of Bl. Karl of Austria’s decision to “renounce participation” in state affairs approaches, Hapsburg Restorationist republishes Pope St. John Paul II’s Homily for the Beatification of Blessed Karl.

And American Dad has praise and a bit of analysis of the film: Private Life. (Which I’d never heard of.)

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale returns this week, albeit at his backup site. For Saturday, the thirty-third of Sydney’s Sonnet Cycle. On Sunday, moving away from Hopkins, we have a modern poem by Malcolm Guite, beseeching the Pope to do what is right and fix the Church. Also, a Spring Poem by one of his friends. Here in the Northern Hemisphere of course, autumn is just beginning to bite bitter. Something to look forward to in six months!

Braids, FTW.

At City Journal, Bob McManus writes about the street fighting that occurred recently between McInnes’ extremely phaggily-named “Proud Boys” and Antifa in Proud Boys and Pontificators. Notable is the extremely naïve belief that most urban riots are “generated by the routine frictions and tragedies of urban life” rather than “solely to gain political advantage through intimidation”. And Kerry MacDonald pens a fairly cucked, but still on-the-right-track defense of Homeschooling.

A thankfully slower week at the Imaginative Conservative, as Dave Benner plugs fellow imaginative conservative Bradley Birzer’s Defense of Andrew Jackson. Which is a bit of an exaggeration; say rather a ‘nuanced take on Andrew Jackson’. And Paul Krause goes in-depth on Homer’s Epic of the Family. Indeed, I’ve long held the belief that the relationship between the family and the civilization is the most useful lesson we can take from Homer.

Richard Carroll, in the Hallow’s Eve spirit, takes a look at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Which is not necessarily worth reading, unless you’ve somehow avoided spoilers. But it’s a good bit of seasonal atmosphere nonetheless.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless gets deep with an essay on the opposition between bioconservatism and transhumanism: Expanding the Technological Register. It’s a dense one as usual, and I’m sad that “bioconservative” has apparently already been coined. I thought it was an original construction of my own. He follows it up with another heavy hitter: Technodialogics. He begins with noting the irrationality of discourse surrounding, in his example, global warming, and proposes a new model for communications based on the emerging machine-learning practice of psychographics:

Combining these metrics with a specific study of network effects and the psychological effects of site utilization would then provide even further tools which could be used to determine what vector of conversation a particular individual or group is most amenable and at what time on what sites.

Needless to say, this should at least be of interest to our readers. Though perhaps not with the nobly humanist goals of promoting more accurate and truthful discourse. Its applications for propaganda are tempting to say the least. The Committee gave this one an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Chris Morgan indulges in Some Non-Prose. Always a dangerous thing.

And PA has Idle Thoughts on Pop Songs for the four seasons.

This Week in the Outer Left

Craig Hickman returns with a passage from Žižek: On Accelerating the World Disorder. Here’s more, this time with Hickman’s commentary: The Task of the Left.

Jacobin takes note of Bolsonaro’s Most Dangerous Supporters, but they make it sound like it’s a bad thing. Just don’t be a communist. How hard could it be? Also there an in-depth on Italy’s Salvini: The Resentful and the Damned.

This Week… Elsewhere

Bonus girl smoking pic.

Al Fin lays out the Good News and Bad News. The good news is that the bad news wasn’t as bad as expected. The bad news, well… Also this: Can Social Justice Build an Abundant and Expansive Future? That’d be a “No”. By way of contrast: Americans Plan to Populate Space with Billions of People. New frontiers is always what confident civilizations do.

Arnold Kling starts off by highlighting new research connecting genes and cognitive ability. He moves on to muse about exit and governance and to defend the Universal Basic Income. He also stops to observe that even progressives are noticing that public schools aren’t working out as well as they’d like. Obviously, we need to spend more money on education.

The superb podcast Myth of the 20th Century this week delves into Yamashita’s Gold—Spoils of War

Studied advice from Heartiste: When Cleverness Is A Liability. “Frame before wit”. Also: What Would It Look Like If We Had A Friendly, Kindred Corporate Ruling Class? We’ve got about 20-30 years to make it happen. Or it won’t.

Ace’s computer died this week, but he keeps his posting schedule anyway with an answer to reader’s comment.

That’s about all we had time for, folks. As always, we couldn’t have accomplished this without the help of our friends: Many thanks to David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/10/21) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well… Megyn Kelly got her Struggle Session this week. Was she coerced? Pretty sure that’s a purely rhetorical question. Her botox-constrained apology didn’t do her much good now, did it?

Victor Davis Hanson is up at Hoover Institution cautioning Yes, Be Very Worried Over Growing Polarization. In the abstract, this is a serious concern. Internal conflict is simply not tolerable for a sovereign. Growing polarization indicates the sovereign has lost control of the propaganda organs. Given our current crop of propaganda organs, those who fund it, and the opinions it attempts to instill in the populace, however, we at Social Matter cannot help but find this loss of control at least somewhat salutary.

Over at American Greatness, VDH views the Democratic Party as Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing, and offers some free political advice—which we hope they don’t take: Act sane and moderate for a few weeks before the midterms. Patrick Maines writes wistfully of Liberalism’s Death Rattle. He’s correct that the Establishment Left has ground principled liberalism to dust. Now if we could just get the Establishment Right to do the same: There is no social good ostensibly conserved by liberalism that is not better secured without it.

Also there: Pedro Gonzales on Pueblo de los Santos—“Camp of the Saints” coming to life in the “Migrant Caravan”. VDH, who seems to publish an article somewhere almost every day), considers it Midterm Optics Are Bad for Progressives. Again, good political advice we expect them not to take.

Heartiste points to Angelo Codevilla’s Claremont essay: Our Revolution’s Logic. And, as always, Codevilla is worth a read. He doesn’t quite say “holiness spiral” here, but “revolutionary spiral” is close enough. And he’s got the tribes correctly identified as well…

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation. It is an inherently endless pursuit.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Spandrell leads off the week by asking What do Bronze Age Pervert and Brett Kavanaugh have in common? Besides nothing whatsoever, that is. Spandrell expounds upon the Woman Question…

The WQ is the realization among a few select men of intelligence that female emancipation has been a complete and utter disaster for civilization. What started rather innocently with giving limited economic rights to women (having a bank account, inheriting property) has spiraled in less than two centuries into a full fledged war of the sexes, making life miserable for hundreds of millions. And most importantly, depressing the birth rate of the most valuable people on earth.

It used to be that genes for better strength and health, for higher intelligence, for physical beauty, made you leave more offspring, while the unfortunate carriers of genes that made you unhealthy, ugly or stupid were unable to reproduce themselves. Well not anymore.

He goes on to describe the solution, viz., patriarchy, and how maybe to get that back. Well worth your time. This Committee deigned to bestow an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for this one.

Also at Bloody Shovel, Spandrell kicks off a gofundme for his Xinjiang Expedition.

Make that a three-fer over at Spandrell’s. Late in the week he offers original translation of Qing Dynasty Patriarchal Sexual Law. An excellent follow-up to his award-winning WQ post above.

Over at Sovereign Exceptions, B. D. Matthews has a superb explainer on Team Trump, Trumpism, and Trump. Along the way, Russian “collusion” makes no sense from the get go:

[I]t’s abundantly clear that Russia’s geopolitical ambitions are defensive with respect to America, not offensive. Anything they can do to keep America weak is worth doing, and the two best things you can do to keep America weak, circa 2016, are putting Hillary Clinton in charge and giving Trump reason to think he deserves to be in charge instead.

Team Trump is more than just Vladimir Putin and a squad of spirited bot writers and for-profit trolls.

What is “Trumpism”?

I believe the core of Trumpism can be summed up in two lightly-contradictory precepts. First: America has overpromised in some broad, off-the-balance-sheet sense. And second: we’d be a great country again if we acted like just another country, instead of trying to rule the world.

American values are, in particular, oversold. America probably does need to be the world’s Policeman in some sense, but it certainly doesn’t need to be it’s Confessor. So what about Trump the Man?

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

Trump’s appeal is a huge validation of Schmitt’s Concept of the Political. Here’s a man who is indeed defined by his enemies.

How does Trump define his enemies? The intellectual wing of Trumpism tries to identify coherent principles behind the fights DJT picks, but this is just a way for people with high verbal IQs to show off, like when people try to find justifications in their religious texts for whatever the whim of the moment is (“Upon this rock I will build my church” is obviously a reference to the importance of guitars at mass.)

What’s actually going on is that Trump has an insane talent for bullshit detection, and he’s in a target-rich environment. Time after time, Trump picks a fight, I’ll assume it’s stupid, and then I’ll realize that—hey, now that you mention it, that guy’s right.

Please do RTWT! B. D. snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his fantastic efforts here. Switching gears from one type of social psychology of to another, namely economics, Matthews analyzes the The Great Mid-Century Sort. Also good.

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf explains What the left has going for itself.

Our own Aidan MacLear keeps up his regular posting pace at Setting the Record Straight. This week’s essay is on The Centralization Trap—a case study on Louis XIV who played HLvM against his aristocracy, which spelled the beginning of the end for the French Crown. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention from The Committee (in which Aidan, of course, was prevented from voting for himself).

The US midterms are next week and Bill Marchant takes note of a couple of temporary benefits from Election Fever.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam keeps the focus on markets, love ’em and hate ’em: What are We Talking About When We Talk About the Market? He posts that we are really talking about skunkworks:

A social order with no potential skunkworkers, with no executives willing to shake up organizations and no disciplinary networks they could draw upon to do so, would be an utterly stagnant and parasitic one. Markets are fields of overlapping disciplinary spaces. My hypothesis here is that we can measure the economic efficiency and long term viability of a socio-economic order (or any company or institution) by the qualitative presence of skunkworkers. This couldn’t be measured, in part because you can’t know it exists until you try to mobilize it. But I’m not interested in a new form of economic calculation; I’m interested in the development of public modes of thought and argumentation capable of swaying elites, and those who sway elites. And the best argument for post-liberal and post-democratic, or absolutist, government, would be singling out where skunkworkers are necessary, where they are present, and what interferes with their greater qualitative presence. Focusing on the skunkworker elicits images of the executive ready and willing to use them. All of the criticisms we might make of liberalism, progressivism, and egalitarianism can be reframed as identifying efforts to stifle skunkworks.

As always, Adam is difficult to summarize, but he’s doing the best sociopolitical theory in the sphere right now (at least in public), and so always a must read. And also… a “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Social Pathologist looks for People Like Us, and finds too few… even among whites.

Shylock Holmes is making his way through Moldbug’s Canon. Moldbug’s own writings (MM 101), but the books our founder recommended (MM 421). This week Holmes stops off at Ernst Graf zu Reventlow’s Vampire of the Continent, which he reviews as a sort of The Protocols of the Elders of Albion. Of course, he’s not saying that like it’s a bad thing. A thoroughly entertaining and edifying review. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Anti-Gnostic offers a eulogy for Poverty—the actual kind at any rate.

Mankind has accomplished an amazing thing in my lifetime, and that is the practical abolition of scarcity. We can grow all the crops the world needs in that greenbelt in the middle of the U.S., and float it down via gravity to the Port of New Orleans or truck it to every corner of the country. Nobody starves to death in the U.S. absent the most consumptive mental illness or addiction.

I’m willing to be proved wrong, but I don’t think anybody starves to death on the entire planet absent a deliberate human disruption of the supply chain.

Except for Vegans—who starve to death for completely different reasons—he’s almost certainly not wrong.

Ron Unz revisits his old The Myth of American Meritocracy in light of recent developments in Racial Discrimination at Harvard.

By way of Isegoria… It comes as no surprise D&D players test well. D&D’s Art & Arcana. A history of engineering and precision. For those with a Love-Hate (or Hate-Hate) relationship with Star Trek: TNG: The people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator. Praise for Schantz‘s Hidden Truth series. The value of practicing smarter and not dumber. Americans are good at working and terrible at saving.

Finally at Cambria Will Not Yield, the heart speaks With Better Knowledge than the head.

This Week in Social Matter

Xiang Yu debuts at Social Matter this week with a Confucian primer on The Rectification Of Names.

[N]ames are the building blocks of a harmonious civilization and require precision in their use, for flawed names lead to flawed actions. For the virtuous to be commended, we must first name virtue. For loyalty to prevail, we must first define loyalty accurately. To admire beauty, we must first label what is beautiful. For lies to be extirpated, we must first name the truth. Becoming worthy is the goal, but the goal cannot be met unless we name the traits and habits that compose a worthy man. Honor, loyalty, humaneness, justice and valor are therefore worthless if they are not identified as such.

“Linguistic nihilism” (a species of nominalism, I’d say), has been encroaching on the Anglo lexicon for decades. Not only do we not name virtues, but we call them “values”. “Sins” are not named so their effects may not be noticed. Unless those effects happen to “trigger” protected rent-seeking groups. Bad behaviors, when they exist at all are “problematic”. Confucius’ observations seem similar to those of the prophet Isaiah:

²⁰Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

²¹Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!

²²Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:

²³Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!

Mr. Xiang earns an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Just one post from Greg Cochran this week. On Stability, i.e., highly likely in the expression of polygenic traits.

Good lookin’ guy.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week replaying another Greatest Hit: Native Americans and Neanderthal DNA.

She follows that up with answers to a few dangling questions on the subject: Which Groups Have the most Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA?

Anthropology Friday appears to have been inspired, in part, by my comments. I am flattered as Mrs. X probes Mainline Paradox II.

Finally, not one to back away from controversy, Mrs. X explains that Jews aren’t your enemies. She’s mostly right. Most Jews aren’t your enemies. But the ones that are… hoo boy! We do note, however, that the Jews who are your enemies are the most likely to out-marry, have the fewest children, adopt the enthusiasms of progressive elites, and are… the least likely to be ever found in synagogues.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Like Steve Sailer always says: Gender doesn’t matter, marriage does. And… to the polling data: Race, gender, and marital support for 2018 congressional mid-terms. In marriage gap by age: largest among the young, more modest among oldsters.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took the week off. Gathering vitriol we presume…

This Week Around The Orthosphere

How does a society recover when it is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness?” J. M. Smith suggests we start by Listening to Lady Macbeth. After that, he reports on yet another recent human tragedy predicated On Shacking Up.

Kristor frames Our Present Crisis: Daddy Issues Writ Large:

The Social Justice Warriors project their own Daddy issues onto politics, because that is safer than confronting Daddy. It is also safer than confronting their anger at Daddy. And it is easier and safer than doing the hard, scary psychotherapeutic work, and indeed spiritual work ñ the work of growing up, at last ñ that is needed if they are to understand their Daddy issues the way that adults understand things, and so lay them at last to rest.

Ianto Watt has a skeptical analysis of the Kashoggi disappearance and other possible false flags in the news this week, ultimately concluding just that You Have To Laugh.

Matt Briggs reports Quack Quack: 25% of Students “Traumatized” By 2016 Election. Then it’s revolutionary threats, SQLite’s Benedictine Code, transgender antics, and abortion midwives in the Insanity & Doom Update LXIII—Special Midweek Doom. Finally, we get word police and weight watchers, hate police, and crimes of biological science in the endweek Insanity & Doom Update LXIV.

Mark Richardson reports back from Our first conference of the Melbourne Traditionalists.

Dalrock writes about a female football player who plays with men. Apparently, shortly after She joined the feminist brotherhood she proceeded to feminize the entire space.

Jonathan McCormack asks Why is the world falling apart? A sacramental answer.

Steal a ring. It’s just a bunch of atoms. It’s value is exclusively monetary. But, if given a ring, someone intending it as a gift to us, all of a sudden it presents itself as having “sentimental values” as well.

Both are symbolic, gold is just a rock, but phenomenologically, appears as something flushed with meaning when received as gift.

This is how we make the world meaningful—we gift things, and receive them as gifts.

Moose Norseman settles the question Can you keep ducks and chickens together? That, along with a passel of doing useful stuff, is less difficult than you think.

Nice piece over at American Dad: “Adam’s sin was not standing up to Eve and telling her ‘no’”.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Beautiful interior.

Chris Gale continues Sydney’s sonnet cycle on Saturday. And on Sunday, C.S. Lewis, who many might be surprised to learn wrote poetry as well.

At City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple takes note of modern architecture and its defenders in Rationalizing Ugliness. And Heather MacDonald on the Harvard anti-Asian discrimiation lawsuit: Identity Politics in Overdrive. Of note is the fact that many Asians threw their hats into the ring with the leftists, against their short-term group interests. Long-term, standing with the Cathedral is a path to power, or so they may hope.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Scott Beauchamp on Russell Kirk’s Ghost Stories. He makes the good point that horror can generally be divided into two camps. The materialist or nihilist horror is the slasher film; the fear of other people. But the supernatural horror can also act as a revelation of the spiritual. Continuing the Halloween spirit, Terez Rose with 10 Spooky Classical Music Favorites. And finally, David Levine on The Way of Great Books.

Richard Carroll republishes an old Thermidor essay on Confucius’ Book of Documents. Which if you didn’t see it at Thermidor, it’s new to you.

And by way of Logos Club, Kaiter Enless on the Accidental Perforation of American Sovereignty. Long story short, he sees the birth of a new priest class from the field of tech. Along the lines that those who manage USG’s data flows can effectively control USG. And thus the great self-encapsulated state becomes a “confluence of outputs of extra-national and intra-national forces”.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

You are all familiar with ¡Science! continues to empirically confirm what everyone already knows about race and sex. Over at Heterodox Academy, Julie Voorhes, et al., apply ¡Science! to the analysis of political correctness: Student Opinion on Campus Speech Rights: A Longitudinal Study

Jordan Peterson sits down with Dr. Oz to discuss Rules to Live By. Peterson also chronicles his harrowing expedition to the University of Amsterdam.

It was like The Night of the Living Dead inside—a zombie apocalypse. All we could see through the opaque glass were the outlines of shadowy figures, scratching and crawling, as it were, to broach the building and feast on the minds of those entrenched within (like the hypothetical educators of the protesters had already done with their activist student avatars). None of the 900 attendees at that talk will ever forget it. About half an hour in, some devotee of Che Guevara mounted the second floor balcony and yelled some predictable slogans at the crowd. Two girls mounted the stage, briefly displayed a banned [sic] trumpeting the advantages of “smashing bigotry” and then departed down the central aisle, sprinkling the audience in some apparently Wiccan manner with some liquid everyone devoutly hoped was water.

This Week… Elsewhere

Grey Enlightenment looks at Whether the Rich Work Harder. They do, but that’s primarily why they’re rich. This too was quite interesting: The genetics of university success.

Motherhood is beautiful!

Thomas Hart inveighs against psychologists and new religions, and pens a stout defense of Gender Segregation at the Office. Also: a handy guide on How to Start a Cult.

Al Fin, not a big China fan, thinks China is Riding the Storm Better than Russia. Also there: A pretty cool Flying Bugout Vehicle to Escape Zombie Apocalypse. In Dangerous Children department: Important Life Lessons from Playing Poker.

The essential podcast Myth of the 20th Century this week covers Aleister Crowley—Summoning the Demon.

“Success with women is more disillusioning than failure“. Heartiste also has a delicious bon mot regarding the “Conspiracy Theory” Conspiracy. And this: the State Of The State Department. Exactly the sort of thing we’ve been predicting since November 2016. Every politician wants to “Drain the Swamp”. Trump is the first president to actually mean it—since FDR at any rate. Trouble is: “The Swamp” knows it.

PA remembers The Greaseman.

TUJ takes a deep dive into geopolitics, yesterday and today: Returning the Preemption of Rogue Nuclear Programs Back to Constitutional Government. Also: Where Military-Industrial Power Counts, Trump is the Greatest Foreign Policy President since Reagan. Where the working class counts, he’s better still in our opinion.

Ace tells the Parable of the Whiskey Taster: “Cryin’ won’t help ya; prayer won’t do ya no good…”

Arnold Kling asks will population growth rebound? He also highlights a study on political polarization and disagrees with some of his commenters on immigration.

Finally… The incomparable talents of Clamavi De Profundis this week release their long-awaited version of The Song of Beren and Luthien. Be sure to check out their earlier pieces as well.

That’s all we had time for, folks. Many thanks to my sturdy staff who did a lot of the heavy lifting: David Grant (whom I met in person for the first this past weekend, great chap!), Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Happy Halloween everyone, and Catholics please remember: tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, a holy day of obligation in most jurisdictions. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/10/28) appeared first on Social Matter.

Birthright citizenship, and how to end it, was much in the news this week. Will Trump Grasp The Nettle? What about the 14th Amendment? The Editors of Claremont Institute’s American Mind make The Case Against Birthright Citizenship—i.e., without resort to simple (and popular) executive fiat.

VDH is up over at American Greatness with further Caravan Contradictions, and When Laws Are Not Enforced, Anarchy Follows—the whip doesn’t make us good, but most will not be good without the whip. This too was pretty edgy for AG: Democrats Have Become the Party of ‘Basic White Bitches’.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

A giant brain dump on Monday this week over at The New Statecraft Project. Beginning with thoughts, scattered yet poignant, on Truth, Power, Authority, and Corruption. For example:

If intellectuals consistently speak the truth, and others notice this, then others will come to trust that the utterances of the intellectuals are true, without checking the logic themselves. Thus intellectuals who have earned trust have the power to lie.

If they lie too much, they break a lot of things, and lose the trust.

Lies are a highly disordered form of power. Highly destructive. Violence is destructive, but is destructive of your enemies. Lies are destructive towards your friends. Lies are thus a more antisocial kind of power than force.

That was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention, BTW. Next: The Concept and Theory of Power—“power again looks more scalar than it actually is”. Also there: Considerations of the problem of Should-Statements. And more theory on Castes: Intellectuals, Warriors, and Productives.

Over at North Alehouse, Athrelon has a humorous short-take on Peter Thiel in Back to the Future.

This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf makes the point well: In war, propaganda is prioritized over truth. He is correct on every point but one: We are not actually at war. Had this been an actual war, either we or our enemies would be dead. Since we want it to be our enemies, we’d better hold off just a bit. With a bit of luck, we may not even need to kill our enemies. Most of them at any rate.

And then there was this at Alf’s: Rectifying names in psychiatry. And it is truly a great work.

Psychiatry deals with the intersection between biology and religion at the fringes. This means it is downwards from the state religion; it follows instructions from the state religion in its dealings with the poor, the lost, the loons. In the absence of an official state religion, psychiatry has become a tool of the unofficial state religion to give meaning to it’s patients, with predictable consequences.

Predictably: fancy names for new victim groups.

What should good psychiatry look like?

The overwhelming majority of psychiatric patients are not responding abnormally to a normal system. They are responding normally to an abnormal system. The cases where a disorder is caused by abnormal brain structure, such as fetal alcoholic syndrome, or, later in life, a very hard hit to the head, are outshone 95 to 100 cases where the disorder is caused by normal brain structure responding to abnormal stimuli.

Fix the stimuli—create a sane social system—and the patient should recover on his own. For the remaining 5% or so of cases, psychiatry is doing far too little. Alf then goes on to clarify the meanings behind the most popular brands of psychiatric “disorders”. For example:

Red head pic.

Attention-Deficit (Compulsive) Disorder

A particularly nasty one. ADHD, or ADD, is defined as the inability to sit still for 8 hours and listen to boring men talking, or the inability to, for hours on end, read books that are not interesting. To in response become restless and agitated is normal, not abnormal.

ADD medication is the frontline of subduing men, of telling them something is wrong with them as opposed to something being wrong with the education system. Simple truth is not everyone is cut out for sitting still for 8 hours on end, or for reading for hours on end. Different people, different talents.

ADD is like forcing a fish to climb a tree for years on end, and when it inexplicably fails to do so, diagnose it with Tree Climbing Disorder and force-feed it tree climbing pills.

Many more where that came from… Alf snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his excellent work here.

Richard Greenhorn is republishing his Thermidor articles that were lost when it got nuked. Here are: The Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, or the Catholics of Electric Orgyland Reaping What They’ve Sown, Empire of Hatred, and Day of the Lonelyhearts: A Defense of the Incels. And if you didn’t read them on Thermidor, they’ll be new to you! That “Empire of Hatred” was particularly excellent and won a Best of the Week Award when it came out back in May.

Adam poses some bind-bending thought experiments this week in Generative Anthropology: The Rhetoric of Mastery: An Inquiry into Silence and Irony. Is there any good not vulnerable to market forces? Similarly…

[I]s there anything, any imaginable individual or action, that is not vulnerable to irony?

Obviously, we’d like to think so on both counts, but to get there is harder than you think. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Right Scholarship kicks off a promising (and surprising) series: Pope Francis: The Seraphic Pope? (Part 1 of 2). He deserves a hearing, but I’m not sure where he’s getting these “traditionalists”—i.e., those who deny development of doctrine—from. Railing against a pope who fails to correct, flirts with, and seemingly encourages outright heresy (a denial of what the Church has always and everywhere authoritatively taught) seems quite distant from denying the potential, even the need, for doctrinal development. Quantum mechanics builds on Newtonian. Apples don’t suddenly start falling up.

Late in the week (but not as late as usual), Titus Cincinnatus publishes a big analysis piece: The Demographic-Structural Implications of Immigration.

Setting the Record Straight, our own Aidan MacLear tackles Socialism and Capitalism. A quick read, and he sums up reactionary aversion to the false dichotomy quite nicely.

The question of capitalism is not a question of ‘regulation’, or of state interventionism. The capitalist class is, to the King, a contractor hired by the King to make use of the physical and human capital that is the King’s property. The contractor is a capable man of considerable expertise, but his contracted use of the King’s estate does not and must not give him legal interest in said property.

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

Malcolm Pollack relays an ominous domino poised to fall in Northern Exposure. Anyone homeless in Anchorage has got to be crazy.

By way of Isegoria… If it’s free… you’re not the customer, but the product. For Halloween, an astoundingly large collection of past Halloween posts. Good news: It isn’t necessary to have a brain disorder in order to control one’s fear—but it probably helps. The difference between good and bad free throw shooters. For optimum recall: Stop when you’re almost finished. There’s something different about being blown up—at least when it comes to head trauma. And brief reflection on legendary animator Chuck Jones and when Your family pet is a secret badass.

Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, The Reptiles—our fear of them, and our becoming them.

This Week in Social Matter

Here at Social Matter, William Mason returns with a timely All Hallows’ Eve. This is superb meditation on the meanings hidden in the season, and not at all about trick-or-treating.

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

[T]here are times when nostalgia can be an appropriate and indeed wholesome emotion. The etymological root of nostalgia is an acute longing for nostos, homecoming. Home is not only a place. It can be a person, an object, a season, a song or a taste or a scent, even an idea. Tree limbs in the moonlight, forests and mountains shrouded in mist, Gothic churches and medieval castles. Memories of childhood—the happy ones, at least, hazy and sepia-tinted. Ringing church bells, Chopin nocturnes, falling water, the song of the mourning dove. Woodsmoke, incense, pine needles, autumn rain. For those of a traditionalist bent this desire for homecoming takes both a spiritual form, a longing for a timeless reality transcending mere human experience, as well as a more concrete manifestation, longing for the restoration of an organic and natural social order.

Some people (I would hazard to guess those with unhappy childhoods) are invariably forward thinking, and see the past—both personal and historical—as a diversion unworthy of much thought. Among those who do value the past, there are different means of approach. Some are simply nostalgic about their own personal histories, reveling in the fond memories of auld lang syne; at its best this is an endearing sentimentality and a reminder to be our best selves, at its worst a crippling fixation on our lost glory days. Some move beyond the personal sphere and take this nostalgia further into a yearning for previous stages in human history or social orders. Again, this can be restorative and edifying, expanding our horizons beyond the prejudices of the present, but can also be a paralyzing and merely antiquarian obsession. Both are manifestations of the same tendency, and both risk turning into futile reminiscence unless they are tethered to a vision of the future, a realization that we are preserving the memories of the past in order that they might inspire us and guide us in carrying on what is best in it. To defend tradition is not to preserve the ashes, but to pass on the flame.

Of course, that doesn’t nostalgia doesn’t have its dangers as Mason duly notes.

[W]hile nostalgia can indeed be paralyzing, remembering and honoring where we came from is essential to knowing where we are going. Reaction, even neoreaction, isn’t just about shining cities and space colonies. It requires learning and seeking renewal from the past, both social and personal. Like Nietzsche’s German philosophy, it must be a nostalgia for the best that has ever existed—for in truth our Restoration does not merely wish to turn back the clock to the 1950s, or the seventeenth century, or the twelfth century, or even the fourth century BC, but to combine all that is best in Western governance and culture going back to the earliest Indo-European societies. This is the meaning of the Golden Age, which exists not exclusively in historical reality but in those inherited ideals that persist in the Western collective unconscious.

I hope I haven’t stolen too much of his thunder. Mason can just flat out write and earns a coveted “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his efforts. Do RTWT!!

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Good lookin guy.

Greg Cochran offers a humorous anecdote, courtesy of the late (great) Henry Harpending, when You have to read between the lines.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another of her fine “Cathedral Roundups”. This time it’s The Harvard Discrimination Lawsuit—discrimination against Asians of course. She thinks the “Asians are boring” argument is bullshit. I’m not sure. I mean, of course, NAAALT, but the stereotype of soulless strivers exists for a reason. One thing seems certain: the discrimination case will be incredibly well-documented and probably reveals more than even Harvard wants to know about ethnic group differences. Adult conversations, anyone?

Next, Mrs. X tackles Identity Politics and Identity Voting. All politics are identity politics. It’s just become harder to ignore the identities.

And Anthropology Friday returns to the Florida of Yesteryear. That is to say, before all the Cubans and Jews moved in.

By way of Audacious Epigone… the execrable Kamala Harris. And, apparently, Gen Z loves Steve King!

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter took yet another week off. We believe he may be searching for the perfect—the Platonic ideal—outrage.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor, in his typically concise and considered way, discovers an hidden Corollary of the Golden Rule.

J. M. Smith pens a couple over at The Orthosphere. First, a deeper analysis of John Bradford’s Grace of God—the “but thereof go I” sort. He shows it probably meant almost exactly the opposite of what 19th evangelicals intended it to mean.

And Smith, often a surprising contrarian—Chestertonian I think—finds the “examined life” overrated in an indictment of Our Meddling Intellect.

When I examine my life, I ask not only what it is, but also why it is so. I ask how I came to live in this place? to practice this trade? to wed this spouse? to know these friends? to cherish these treasures? to scorn this trash? And what my meddling intellect discovers is that intellect is a very small part of the answer. My life was not built like a house after a plan. It accumulated like a logjam in a river. And, until my meddling intellect asked these questions, I had thought the form of my life “beauteous.”

Storm aesthetics.

It’s short but powerful! And… an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Famed Celebrity and Statistician to the Stars Matt Briggs kicks off the week with the strange(ly common) case of Evolution for Thee, but not Me. How’d that witches hexing Kavanaugh and Trump and all men who think they’re ugly turn out?

Cranky Professor takes the WordPress Editor for a guest post: Of Potentiality Per Se. Some serious philosophy in that one.

Over at Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson explores the inherent incompatibility between traditional Standards & the liberal formula. “If you like your traditions, you can you keep your traditions!” Does. Not. Work.

Filed under “Damn Lies”… Black Coffee Drinkers Are Sadistic Psychos: It’s ¡Science! Herein the usual p-value manipulation, along with questionnaire-based studies. Hey maybe black coffee drinkers are just more honest on questionnaires? Fight me, IRL! Finally, it wouldn’t be a week at Casa Briggs without a hormetic dose of Black-Pill: Insanity & Doom Update LXV—sodomy, asteroids, DIY-abortions, and the rest.

Dalrock updates U.S. Custody and Child Support Data (2015). Minor improvements for men. Things still quite bad. And if you think Hollywood is bad, the “Christian” version of it seems way more insidious. Moar on that. And yet more.

This Week in Arts & Letters

A very slow week in Arts & Letters this time around, as every mainstream-leaning outlet seems to have been braced for the US elections. Nonetheless, Chris Gale kicks off the week with Sydney’s sonnet cycle on Saturday. And on Sunday, more C.S. Lewis, who was a capable sonneteer.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Michael Jordan on Great Books, Higher Education, and the Logos. James H. Toner applies the example of the US Army’s restoration of discipline and command post-Vietnam to plug a restoration of the Church Militant. This piece wouldn’t have been out of place coming from a hardcore reactionary. And Joseph Pearce enunciates the need for Cultivating Friendship in a Fractured Age.

Richard Carroll, in the Halloween spirit, reviews old horror film The Wicker Man. Not the abysmal Nicholas Cage remake of course. Back then, even what was considered the trashy genre of film could deal with spiritual themes. Carroll likes to keep his analysis centered on the text, but I’ll say that the film can easily be read as an allegory for the decline of the Christian West, and leave it at that.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless engages in some rectification of names in Intelligence, Artificial and Otherwise. Every week should be Rectification of Names Week.

If you like your Chris Morgan in small doses (as I do), these are for you: Five Very Short Essays On Beauty.

This Week in the Outer Left

Our friend Craig Hickman offers some morsels from Žižek here and here. And he has a really solid piece exploding The Myth of Neoliberalism: Fabrications of a Lost World.

We should change the narrative to incorporate what actually happened, rather than the metaphysical humbug of petty critics nor conspiratorial gadflies. The actual narrative shows that our self-described neoliberals did not believe in self-regulating markets as autonomous entities. They did not see democracy and capitalism as synonymous. They did not see humans as motivated only by economic rationality. They sought neither the disappearance of the state nor the disappearance of borders. And they did not see the world only through the lens of the individual. In fact, the foundational neoliberal insight is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi: the market does not and cannot take care of itself. The core of twentieth-century neoliberal theorizing involves what was called the meta-economic or extra-economic conditions for safeguarding capitalism at the scale of the entire world. The neoliberal project focused on designing institutions—not to liberate markets but to encase them, to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy, to create a framework to contain often-irrational human behavior, and to reorder the world after empire as a space of competing states in which borders fulfill a necessary function.

In other words the whole edifice of the neoliberal order was an attempt to create by fiat a completely lifeless universe of rationality which could control the actual real world of human emotion and madness. [Emphasis mine.]

Adam Curtis in Century of the Self makes an eerily similar point about Edward Bernays’ motivation: He thought that “Public Relations” could be used to keep ostensibly free people from resorting to the violence naturally unleashed in a democratic polis. Stranger still: Thus far, it has worked.

Filed under “Pot, Meet Kettle!”, Jacobin whines There is No “Mainstream” Conservatism.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson sits down for an interview with Frederik Skavlan. He also jots down some notes on a dream in Oslo. The good doctor places great stock in the interpretation of dreams, but for those who don’t, he also meanders into discussion of some recent insanity regarding sexual harassment, harassment so subtle its victims don’t even notice.

And the “Half Hour of Heterodoxy” podcast features Charlotta Stern on Gender Sociology’s Problems—not least of which is biological sex is artfully ignored. Steven Pinker and Hjernevask pop up.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale has a superb essay on Objectification—to the extent it exists at all, it’s women (and attention whores of all sexes) doing it to themselves.

Only one article from Thomas X. Hart this week, but an interesting one: Theology Analysis | Notes on religion. A taste:

GK Chesterton was quite correct in noticing that religion confers many benefits that develop evolutionarily and are not possible to develop through reason alone or in one generation. It is very difficult to develop a religion from scratch, and the religions that do arise this way take time to acquire the “secret knowledge” of the generations. The collapse of religion was a liberation to an extent, but it has also led to profound social problems – divorce, feral women, a vicious sexual free market, atomisation, nihilism, the disintegration of social life, and a decline in honesty in the sciences. These developments, though offering excitement and interesting possibilities, have the potential to curtail technological development and will ultimately damage civilisation in the West.

Over a Z-Man’s… the greatest threat to Jews in America is other Jews. And a really fine exposé on The Cancer of Fanaticism.

Prague

Heartiste believes he sees Portents Of Civil War II. We think this a very unlikely scenario for the short and medium term. Indeed, we think there is exactly as much measurable “political polarization” as our cultural masters wish to measure. These are the same masters, incidentally, who are in charge of the (almost wholly aligned and orderly) US Military. Also there: The Worst Of Both Worlds, supremely well put.

Speaking of polarization, which is real even when largely manufactured… Roman Dmowski links this American Mind piece: Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America. Very worthwhile read, tho’ I do take some issue with some of Klingenstein’s analogies: He rightly claims multiculturalism presents an existential threat today, but slavery did not in the 1850s. And although the American house is divided today, it is not divided along lines conducive to an outbreak of war. I’d also argue that left radicals have far less freedom of movement today than they did then.

This week in 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace gives attention to the problem of the friendzone: “Lady Luck never smiles, so lend your love to me awhile…”

PA lifts a superb imprecation out of his combox. And, for All Saints’ Day: Eulogies For A Friend, with yet more translation from the original Polish.

This week in what remains the “Finest Podcast in The ‘Sphere”, Myth of the 20th Century delves into Tom Clancy and the Rise of the Technothriller.

Al Fin explains how, among other things, The Future Belongs to Women of Child-Bearing Years, assuming they can feed their children.

At Jacobite, Christopher DeGroot discusses Oblivious Eros. DeGroot focuses his attention on a sad article from the NYT back in September, He Asked Permission to Touch, but Not to Ghost, wherein the author bemoans how a man she found online and decided to fornicate with didn’t care about her enough. DeGroot uses this item as a case study to demonstrate the need for more traditional sexual mores.

Arnold Kling plugs the soon-to-be-released second edition of Martin Gurri’s book Revolt of the Public and offers some choice quotations. He also discusses the relationship between personality, culture, and violence and disagrees with Tyler Cowen concerning how should elites replicate?

And at Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus meditates On Universalism, Genocide, and Libertarianism. Maximus reviews and philosophically dispatches the first and goes on to consider when libertarians may engage in genocide and legitimate targets and techniques. Maximus identifies adherents to universalism as particular targets, and while he tries to be careful in his argument, he could do to type some additional words lest careless readers get the wrong impression.

Welp… that’s about it, folks! Thanks for reading. A hearty thank you to Ironman TWiR Staffers David Grant and Aidan MacLear for helping me get this together. Hans der Fiedler was out doing “activisty” stuff… We’ll try not to hold that against him. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/11/04) appeared first on Social Matter.

Antifa™ showed up on Tucker Carlson’s doorstep this week. Matt Yglesias couldn’t manage to empathize. A Psychopath. Turns out Yglesias had a front door after all. Dennis Dale comments.

The midterms happened. Glad THAT’s Over. No Red Wave. Nor much of a blue one. Pretty standard mid-terms, to be honest. The GOP lost the House, but Trump’s grip on the GOP that remains in Washington seems to have strengthened. Did they matter. TUJ thinks they were good for Trump.

Over at American Greatness, VDH recounts CNN’s Existential War With Trump. And he remembers: The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month—100 Years Ago. Also there: Simple Acts of Anti-Sabotage: Rules for Counterrevolutionaries. They hardly qualify as “Rules”, but as “Acts of Anti-Sabotage” many great ideas.

And at the august American Mind, Thomas Klingenstein on Our House Divided: Multiculturalism vs. America.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

This week at GA Blog, Adam is simply superb as he contemplates: Crowding Out the Political:

Braids!

So, when would a liberal order no longer be a liberal order? The ideal would be for the question not to be asked too widely until the answer was already “now.” After all, the assumption that all political intentions be widely telegraphed and explicitly stated is itself a liberal one that liberalism itself never abides by. No one is under any obligation to openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their aims, their views, their tendencies, and meet the fairy tale of authoritarianism with a manifesto of the party itself. It may be better to replace one plank at a time, and at the same time stockpile nicely prepared wood and devise some better names for various institutions, offices and practices, names perhaps to be used informally, satirically at first (memed into existence) but eventually to be “baptized” once the existing names are laughed out of existence. Where there is now liberal, let there be authority. If we itemize all the various elements of the existing order that are specifically liberal, approach them analytically, that is, break them down into their elements, we can identify where leverage lies. For example, does it make more sense to try and eliminate elections, or to render their results as irrelevant as possible (in which case they may continue but become vestigial)? How relevant are their results now? What gets decided by elections? What gets decided through the electoral process? What does the electoral process allow to be decided behind the scenes? How does the electoral process nevertheless shape what is behind the scenes so as to advantage some power centers over others? The point is to determine how the democratic system undermines authority, chains of command, competence, discipline and tradition, and to interfere with that process, to make it a less promising (more compromised) vehicle for those who benefit from, empower themselves through, higher levels of anarchy and chaos. The proper institutional “fix” will follow, more as a coup de grace than an apocalyptic triumph.

If there’s nothing that can’t be politicized, is there nothing that can’t be de-politicized? Isn’t the art of government akin to the art of flying a plane or discovering vaccines? Even if not very close, government should be about stealing someone’s shit and giving it to someone else. Doesn’t everyone agree with that? (At least if they’re being honest?) Less theoretical and more practical than most of Adam’s stuff: It’s a real treat and earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award. Please RTWT!

Alf keeps agitating for a new religion: Jimianity. Easier said than done. It took about 1000 years for Christianity to evolve (1800 if you’re Mormon). Gosh, I’m not sure we have time. Also there: a brief note on Aging gracefully.

Giovanni Dannato recounts The Changing of Power.

The magnitude of decisive policy changes these previous leaders regularly participated in dwarfs anything that has been possible for decades. As we bicker for years over the trivial funds needed for a border wall, keeping roads repaired, keeping consumerism chugging by keeping interest rates eternally low, or cooking up convoluted subsidies to health insurers as the next social safety net, we are but children playing among the ruins built by giants who came before us.

He recounts the increasing sclerosis of American Government, in both formal and informal modes. And earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.

Dannato also has a rather fanciful Response to Ginsburg’s Fall.

Shylock Holmes introduces a thought experiment you may be able to get normies to play: The Button C Option. And maybe they won’t be normies anymore…

Sarah Perry goes Treasure Hunting, with guidance from Mark Twain, Joseph Smith, and serious Buddhists. A taste:

Girl smoking. (A reprint for those keeping track.)

Mark Twain’s form of treasure hunting—prospecting during a gold rush—seems irrational to us now. For most individuals involved, it’s a losing proposition. Those four modern treasure hunters who have died in search of the Fenn Treasure, and those who still hunt for it despite the risks posed by the wilderness, seem irrational in the same way: the expected value of the benefit (the likelihood of finding the treasure, times the value of the treasure, times the likelihood that it exists, say) is almost certainly lower than the expected costs and risk. However, these forms of treasure hunting represents a distinct type of “irrational” from the magico-religious treasure seeking practice. After all, they are merely based on a poor calculation or an unusual utility function, not upon a magico-religious worldview. Mining is quite rational, but look how it connects to treasure hunting and gold rushes. Metallurgy is rational, but look at its history in the magical systems of alchemy.

Mrs. Perry’s piece defies simple summary. (As usual.) It’s about treasure hunting… and things like it. And how things like it tend to be the sort of high-risk/high-reward things that a civilization needs to be doing over long, low-time-preference horizons. So go and read the whole of this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award winner.

Anti-Gnostic encapsulates the midterms down south: Demography is democracy.

Social Pathologist has some solid notes on Z-Man, Whittaker Chambers, Principles—Chambers in particular.

Jacobite welcomes input from Reason‘s Christian Britschgi concerning what he calls The New Liberum Veto. Britschgi applies this old concept from the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm to the ability of anyone and everyone to disrupt development projects in California.

While Poland-Lithuania vanished long ago, its liberum veto has found new life in the urban centers of California. There, an endless array of boards, commissions, associations, agencies, non-profits, unions, individuals, and activists can at little cost stall, shrink, sue, or stop an unfavored development. The results from granting this veto to so many parties is well-known and oft-discussed. Witness the national headlines about the Golden State’s housing shortage and the many absurdities it has produced, from a burned down shack in San Jose selling for nearly $1 million to a man in San Francisco prevented from redeveloping his own laundromat because of its supposed historic significance.

Britschgi goes on to describe various examples and the legal environment enabling them. While the ability of local communities to defend themselves from unwanted developments is not to be wholly despised, California seems to have taken it to an absurd extreme. This article impressed The Committee and earn an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Malcolm Pollack wonders What Was Oumuamua?

By way of Isegoria… Energy drinks are associated with mental health problems, anger-related behaviors, and fatigue—My aren’t you surprised? The problem with allowing students to decide for themselves how they study and learn best. Gwern’s proposal for an archive revisiter. And on the 100th Anniversary of the end of The Great War, Isegoria links his own substantial archive on the subject.

Finally, this week at CWNY… No Longer Under Their Dominion.

This Week in Social Matter

Xiang Yu returns to Social Matter with an analysis of The Sinking Ship Of Liberalism. One large hole in the hull is the contradiction inherent to “liberal democracy” itself. If you want “liberal”, literal democracy is not going to preserve it. And if you want “democracy”, then it’s pretty much going to have to be imposed. But if you want to sink liberalism, leftism is a sort of superweapon:

Picture of little girl drawn with black ballpoint pen.

For the leftist, liberal buzzwords about civility, merit, moderation, and limited government are just constructs created by an immoral class seeking to preserve its privilege in the face of the leveling that is the only just way to order the world. The liberty the liberal so cherishes cannot be allowed by the leftist to persist in any form because it might be used to perpetuate that most odious of sins, inequality. Freudo-Marxist professor Herbert Marcuse admitted as much when he laid out his vision for the ideal society in his lesser known work Repressive Tolerance…

Xiang snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine bit of analysis here.

And on Friday, Daniel Miller returns with what appears to have originally been a lecture (delivered, helpfully, outside the US) on Trump And The Sacred. Must have been one whale of lecture! He really goes meta on Trump, and there’s so many good points, I scarcely know where to begin. Maybe here:

Not mainly because of what he does, but because of what he is, Trump is himself taboo. He comes from the wrong caste; he’s déclassé. If the main part of the miscellaneous charges thrown against him, on the thinnest of pretexts; his sexism, racism, fascisms, Hitlerism etc, are in general explicable due to this error of birth, one also sees, beyond Trump, a glimpse of the comprehensive religious system which he negatively illuminates.

A prole who made good. But unlike Andrew Carnegie before him, Trump refuses to kiss the Astoreths of the Clerical Caste.

In the first place, he threatens the global elite, because he comes from outside it, and has an independent base of support, not least through his personal wealth. Thus, he cannot be controlled by it, and what’s more, he’s knows where the bodies are buried.

It may have been a repeat for those who attended the lecture, but it was new to us and earned the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award this week.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with A Quick Civil War Calculation. Yes, the cost was too high. I seem to recall there being some Abolitionist idea of doing something like this. But that wouldn’t have permitted Massachusetts to wage war on Virginia. And Massachusetts has always been at war with Virginia.

Two more EvX’s Greatest Hits: Do Black Babies Have Blue Eyes? and Other Baby Matters. And on Saturday: How Turkic is Turkey? Genetically not very, but culturally… that’s a different story.

Preparations are under way for the next EvX Book Club book Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion.

By way of Audacious Epigone… Predictions for 2018 midterms on Monday, which turned out to be pretty accurate. And some analysis after the fact, including the remarkable polling number 93% of Democrats think it’s important that fewer whites be elected.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith contemplates his passage into old age, and the cyclical nature of time, with The Way of Decay on a Dull November Day. As go lives, so go empires. Is America turning 61 as well? He’s got some great feature art to go along with it. Definitely worth checking out.

Then Smith delves into the history of The Doctrine of “the Body”: a Note on the New Gnosticism.

This article states that theories of “the body” originated in feminism. This is true if we limit our attention to the past fifty years. The basic doctrine obviously goes back at least two thousand years to the Gnostics, a Christian heresy that argued dualism of body and spirit.

And it remains just as much a foundational error today. You’d think the ostensible decline in superstitious thinking would have spelled the death of gnosticism. But humans will always find ways to be superstitious.

Richard Cocks writes at length on AI and the Dehumanization of Man.

According to Kristor, The Acid Eating at Tradition is Not Capitalism, But Cheap Information.

Thomas F. Bertonneau compares Two Theories of the Renaissance==-Berdyaev’s and Spengler’s.

Bonald asks some important Jewish questions.

What is the proper Christian attitude toward our Elder Brothers? Neither hatred nor pity, but admiration and a determination to emulate those who have proven to be our superiors. For in our competition and cultural clashes with them, they have proven overwhelmingly our superiors in determination, courage, intelligence, and initiative. How else could they have triumphed so thoroughly? What’s more, while we Christians talk about the Benedict Option, the Orthodox Jews have made it work.

Also there: A conundrum: capitalism is the void.

Matt Briggs, using An Illustration Of Type I Scientism, mocks those who need a scientific study to tell them what everybody already knows through common sense. Then he explains why Science Is Magic & Miracles Aren’t. And in academia, the new rule is Swear Fealty To Diversity, Or You’re Out. Last but not least, its necrophilia and other oddities in this week’s edition of the Insanity & Doom Update LXVI—Necrophiliac Edition

Mark Richardson wonders, Are conservatives just trimmers? In other words, do conservatives simply serve to keep the progressive ship from capsizing? That’s certainly what neoconservatives do, like A trimmer Frum the second Bush administration leftover who debated Bannon last week.

At Albion Awakening, Bruce Charlton tells the story of the real-ife Doctor Who.

And William Wildblood, quoting the Dalai Lama, discourages Westerners from converting to an Eastern religion. It might cause you to become Homeless Inside Yourself.

Dalrock examines the economy’s effect on the family and determines that Incentives matter.

Nice interior!

We’ve removed the incentives and prestige that once motivated men to work hard to support their families as husbands and fathers. We’ve spent decades teaching men that husbands and fathers are despicable at worst, and at best jokes. All of our entertainment, even product commercials, continuously hammers this message. It isn’t just secular culture either. Christian movies are even worse than secular entertainment in this regard, and Father’s Day is now a day to disparage married fathers in churches across the land. It isn’t just our culture that sends this message. We send the same message with even greater potency with our family courts.

The message is: Men who marry and have children are despicable and deserve the harshest punishments we can mete out.

Cologero has a really captivating piece: The Stages of the Fall, in which the first 19 chapters of Genesis are united in an anagogical interpretation of the complete descent of man. This too: Members of the Crew—a sort of primer on esotericism. Helpful for congenital exoterics like meself.

Over at One Peter Five: Helpful (and timely) Words of Consolation: Chesterton, Tolkien, and the Crisis in the Church. Leading off with Chesteron’s profound Ballad of the White Horse.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with Sydney’s epicly long sonnet cycle on Saturday. And in rememberance of the Great War, C.S. Lewis on Sunday.

Good looking older guy.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Michael De Sapio asks Can We Stop the Decline of the West?. In memory of Armistice Day, Gustav Holst’s Ode to Death. And Micheal Vlahos, channeling the forces of reaction, if Americans Were Made for Civil War. At least, the low-level civil war that is democracy. Talk of a hot civil war has picked up of late among the Right.

At City Journal, Heather MacDonald doesn’t much like Trump’s firing of Jeff Sessions, calling it Casting Out A Man of Honor and Achievement. And Joel Kotkin tries to look on the bright side for Signs of Hope in California. At least the wildest reactionaries tend cluster on the dark blue coasts.

Theodore Dalrymple shines a light on mental health experts who believe themselves duty bound to diagnose Donald Trump Psychiatrist, Heal Thyself. And here I thought that The Authoritarian Personality was influential everywhere except psychiatry.

Richard Carroll first introduces the poetry of Sappho, and then shifts his attention to A. E. Housman.

At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless takes a brief look at technological decline: Globally, 183 Nuclear Reactors Set To Be Decommissioned By 2020.

Chris Morgan pens a long but penetrating analysis of the American (vis-à-vis English) psyche: Intensity, with First Man, or rather the reviews of it, as backdrop.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Jordan Peterson sits down with his patrons for his October Q&A session.

Arnold Kling addresses some issues in education policy, particularly arguing that parents are better judges of school quality than are standardized tests. Kling also asks, “should taxation be regressive?” and ponders selection effects. Finally, he highlights comments from Razib Khan on Harvard’s admissions strategy.

This Week… Elsewhere

Z Man has a really skillful piece on The Art of Life.

[I]f a reasonably aware and smart person in the 1970’s had fallen asleep, like Rip Van Winkle, and woke up in our age, he would assume the Soviets had won the Cold War. After all, we have adopted the aesthetic of the Soviets. Our cars all look the same and come in black, white or shades of gray. Our buildings are sterile, utilitarian structures. Our high and low art is purely ornamentation, rather than imitation.

Well, the Soviets did win the Cold War. In a manner of speaking.

Courtesy of Baron Zach.

This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast: The European Union—Nick Griffin.

Really excellent thoughts over at Heartiste (his and his commentariat): Trump’s America: Dying, But Not Dead. Reminiscent of Driving Through Dying Blue Towns. Also there: Heartiste connects the dots on Thucydides Foreseeing America’s Decline.

Al Fin has Jordan B. Peterson coverage: If Not for Miscomprehension There’d be No Comprehension at All. Also there The Universe is Infinite: Economic Growth is Forever* (note asterisk). I agree with the general tenor of the piece but find fault with any exponential graph not drawn on a logarithmic scale. Additional quibble: per capita GDP is the more relevant metric.

And then Al Fin posts this: Genetic Drift vs. Memetic Drift. “Genetic drift can doom a space colony,” but… “Memetic drift can doom a civilization”. Really solid explainer piece and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

PA and a commentator offer an astute observation: The AltRight Offers Nothing New—“Nor should it”. Also there: coverage of Poland’s Independence March 2018.

Ace checks in with a parable about putting first things first… even if that happens to be grape jelly: “The way that you treated me… I know I’m not to blame”

At Zeroth Position Nullus Maximus proposes A Holistic Approach to Ending Corporate Censorship. Maximus considers several options, including “Alt-Tech”, various avenues for government regulation, and his own personal favorite: implementation of his own ideas regarding corporations and the state.

That’s all we had time for this week. A lighter week than usual, but with some very bright gems in the mix. As always, many thanks to the excellent and faithful TWiR staff for their top notch contributions: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. I couldn’t do it without ye. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

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

The centennial of WWI’s Armistice was still very much in the headlines this week. Hapsburg Restorationist offers A Requiem for Old Austria. The Great War seen as The Great Cull—i.e., of high-quality men from the population.

Stan Lee died this week. American Greatness pays tribute.

And VDH recounts the latest leftoid outrages: Maybe We Could Use a Civic Hippocratic Oath—i.e., for journalists, celebrities, and all those in position to tell people what to think. Related: The Progressive Synopticon.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Parallax Optics’ interview with Woke Capital got a lot of quite deserved attention early in the week. Amazingly good stuff in here. Like:

Havel’s Greengrocers—this is a reference to Vaclav Havel’s seminal essay “The Power of the Powerless”, wherein a greengrocer puts a “Workers of the World, Unite!” sign on his store in communist Eastern Europe not because he believes it, but because it’s the party line and he wants no trouble. The analog to today’s Woke Corp is the Pride Flag, or the Black Lives Matter sign, or some other iconography of the Progressive (Cathedral) Religion. The motivation for these types is to stay in business; it’s basically a risk mitigation strategy, as any company perceived as insufficiently woke may be penalized with lawsuits or boycotts, etc. Pay some lip service to the religion, pay the danegeld, pay the mafia protection money. It’s the path of least resistance, and it’s unsustainable, but one can understand this impulse. It’d be wrong to call it a coward’s impulse, because heretics truly can be (and have been) destroyed. If you’ve got a family to feed, or employees who depend on you for a livelihood, you swallow the bitter pill and do what you think must be done. There’s nothing brave about being destroyed, where your “martyrdom” would just encourage others to try even harder to avoid that fate.

Clearly the man’s read his Moldbug. Do RTWT, if, on the odd chance, you haven’t already. On the strength of Woke Capital’s content alone (no offense PO!), this one won an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Alf is “inspired by Jim” to update some male archetypes: Warrior, Priest, Merchant, Lover. Also there: What are false prophets? Specifically, who is selling lies to young men these days?

And great news! Late in the week, Alf’s Orb of Covfefe continues with Part X—friends in high places. In which, the story leads (coincidentally, I’m sure) to the Netherlands.

Rich Greenhorn continues to republish his lost Thermidor pieces: Devil’s Bargain: The March for Life and the Novus Ordo Church—a “Best of the Week” Award winner when it appeared back in February of this year. And Spirit of a Spiritless Situation: On the Right’s Failure to Organize, which earned an honorable mention in March.

This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam is his usual awesome self as he considers: Hostages, Proxies, and Moles. He is pleased with the expansion (or recapture) of vocabulary, especially with regard to natural hierarchies, spawned by various pockets in Dissident Right. While Liberalism focusses on collapsing hierarchies and reducing all preferences and obligations down to the atomic individual level, natural individual identity suffers a death by 1000 cuts in the process:

Obligatory girl smoking pic.

It is belonging to a team that makes sense of qualitative “identities.” Teams have captains, and most team sports have more central figures, the one who controls the ball or initiates the action. Liberalism can’t do much with such an approach, because a team needs to be very clear about qualifications and roles. Imagine a wide receiver insisting on the “right” to play fullback. But if social orders are teams (really, teams within teams), what’s the game? It’s easy to get tripped up on that question, because it implies the existence of some external, “Archimedean” point from which one could “choose” among different games, different ways of “winning.” But we can always ask the questioner what game he’s playing in asking the question. Or what leverage within some other game he expects from that move. We’re always immersed in games, that is, and all we can do is solicit and elicit new moves within them. The new moves might eventually become new games. Of course, someone will come up to you and say “life is serious!” or “look at what’s happening—this is no game!” To “gamify” such moves is then an important act of deferral: yes, I can see there is real danger, people might get hurt, maybe they’re getting hurt, there’s no time to lose—still, though, the more we place people in clear-cut roles where they can show what they are made of, the more we find the right measures of tacit and explicit cooperation; in other words, the more team-like we are, the better we’ll handle the emergency.

Maybe the “game” is… Fewer People Get Hurt in The Aggregate. Are you really ready to be concerned, Concerned Citizen? Adam turns his attention the ways teams operate for their own advantage. Tremendous insights ensue. For example in the HLvM dynamic:

The high uses the low as proxies against the middle. Let’s see if the concept of hostage taking can enrich our understanding of the process. To activate a proxy, you need a group, or a team. In order to turn the team into a proxy, you need to interfere with its exchange system—and exchange systems within groups work primarily on the gift and honor model. Members of that team get humiliated by members of another team. This lowers their value on the team—if they are humiliated enough, it’s not worth it trying to redeem them. The way to leverage the team as a proxy is to elevate the value of the humiliated members, to redeem them as hostages by making their humiliation shameful, not for the team to whch they belong, but for the team from which the humiliators come. This can only be done by the “highs,” i.e., an external and more powerful group which has, for example, the means of publicizing instances of humiliation and framing them as shameful, pressuring the team to repudiate them, that is, refuse to pay ransom in added scrutiny of the team. It even becomes possible to induce members of the targeted “middle” group to offer themselves as hostages, by allowing their value to be determined by the team from which the humiliated come, which really means determined by those with the spotlight to shine on (or turn away from) all of these doings. The humiliated ones then acquire the highest value, which they can leverage within their team and on behalf of their team. Within this economy, the interchangeables become irreplaceables.

Plenty more where that came from. Superb piece and an obvious “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Aidan MacLear sets another record straight: Bullying Works.

Life itself is low-level stress and conflict. When kids fight, they learn to fight back. Absent, of course, the supervision of catladies who punish the victim for defending himself, the bullied often become friends with the bully.

Anecdotally, this is very often the case among boys. I wonder if social psychologists have caught up with Bro Science yet.

Social Pathologist pastes a really fine bit of analysis on Hiss, McCarthy, and the Red Scare. More from Whittaker Chambers: The Enemy Within, wherein the decline of the West is seen as a foregone conclusion in the first half of the 1950s.

Late in the week, Shylock Holmes reviews Empire of Dust, which wasn’t intended to be a comedy.

To a western audience, it has the wonderful frission similar to playing cards against humanity—hearing someone utter hilarious taboos, but here with the possibility that they might be true. Eddy gives textbook rationalizations, but with a look as though he doesn’t really believe them, and just smiles as he’s called on them. Meanwhile, Lao Yang has the easterner’s qualified immunity from charges of racism that forces the audience to listen a little longer. Of course, modern progressives would say he is racist (I think—it’s hard to keep track of whether minorities can still be racist in The Current Year, or whether the Chinese count as minorities). But in any case, even if one could address him directly, one knows with certainty that if you accused him of racism, neither he, nor his employers, nor his countrymen, would give a flying fig. Take away the power of accusations of witchcraft, and watch how quickly people lose interest in the whole topic of witches.

A less advertised takeaway from the film, according to Holmes, is that Chinese imperial domination over Africa is not going as well as we’d planned. Maybe they could hire the Belgians. This too was an .“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

About 2 hours later, Titus Q. Cincinnatus shakes Neo-Ciceronian Times awake with a superb analysis of Omnipolitics and the Limits of Formal Power. There’s a whole lotta personal to be made political. Which in no wise benefits formal power. Which is why the revolutionaries insisted that the personal be made political in the first place.

It’s reached the point where literally everything is involved in some way with politics. Your choice of restaurant now signals your political inclinations, and thus who will harass you while eating there. Businesses themselves feel compelled to virtue signal, usually in a leftward direction, lest they bring upon themselves threats of boycott, bad publicity, or worse. It has escalated to the point where being the public face of the “wrong” side earns you harassment and menace to your physical health, as Tucker Carlson and several Republican members of Congress have found out. Expressing the “wrong” opinions in the workplace or online can get you reprimanded or fired.

How did we reach that point?

If you think US foreign or tax policy is hard to manage, try adding transgender bathrooms to your To-Do List. Governments leak power, on thermodynamic principles alone. But divided governments leak power like a sieve.

Gabrielle Marlene as Lola Montez.

Once power has become fully, or at least substantially informal, then control over the formal organs of government is relatively meaningless. This is why Trump and the Republicans have been able to accomplish little over the last two years, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government. Losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats did little to change the actual overall power structure in Washington, other than to provide that party with a formalised way to endlessly investigate and impeach the president and his judges. Overall policy-making capacity remains largely unchanged since policy was being made by bureaucrats and quasi-governmental organisations under progressive control anywise. At this point, the president can’t even control the composition of his own press pool anymore, much less ram through The Wall or enact meaningful First Amendment protections for social media users.

Cincinnatus does offer a solution to the problem. But it’ll take more political moxie than we’ve seen in the last couple of lifetimes. He takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his fantastic work here.

Tamara Winter is up at Jacobite with a critique of The Amazon HQ2 Scramble: The Wrong Kind of Jurisdictional Competition.

Malcolm Pollack has a useful roundup of sorts: Freeman Dyson On Scientific Tribalism, Jordan Peterson On the Idiocy Of Climatism, And NASA on Cooling.

By way of Isegoria… A fuel cell that runs on methane at practical temperatures. The shockingly high percentage of The Class of 1914 that died for France. Do the rich capture all the gains from economic growth? The answer may surprise you. No really, it surprised me. How Russian history has been a godsend for literature. The bitter fruit of Czar Alexander II’s liberalism. More than you thought there ever was to know about the original animated Lord of the Rings movie. A little known but crucial turning point in 19th C Russian history. Further on down that road: How the People’s Will, the world’s first modern terrorist organization, killed the czar, and why It is impossible to draw a line between revolutionary and criminal action.

And finally this week’s epistle from Cambria Will not Yield: From Darkness to Light.

This Week in Social Matter

Bastiaan Niemand debuts at Social Matter with superbly crafted essay on Jugaad Ethics. Jugaad here comes from Hindi and means “cobbled together” or a “hack”. The horse-drawn (formerly functional) automobile is analogue. The real subject is cobbled together progressive ethics, which 1)are, upon reflection absurd and; 2)don’t really serve anyone very well. Old social technology for sexual relations, for example, …

“Waiting for the ferry”

… were as backwards as they were boring—a kind of sexual horse-drawn buggy if you will—so we scrapped them for something faster and more exciting. Then we discovered that the new technologies require a lot of competence, special parts and disposable income that perhaps aren’t always available. They also have a tendency to run people over and dump toxic waste into the atmosphere. Yet even after the new tech proves itself unsustainable, the new chassis is the only thing you’ve got left lying around. So you bolt the old engine on as best you can and get back on the road.

Once you have the image of the jugaad car in your head, a lot of modern preoccupations start to look like jugaad social tech.

Oh, like “affirmative consent”. And good and holy NGOs running Africa, instead of evil and greedy colonizers. This was a really artful essay and snagged an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award in an incredibly competitive week. Don’t spend that all in one place, Mr. Niemand.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Mysticism and Greater Male Variability—i.e., two explanations of why men are “overrepresented” in noticeable positions. Only one of the explanations, of course, makes any sense, but that one don’t bring in da gimmedats.

Next up: Neanderthal DNA–hey!—what is it good for? Mrs. X counts the ways in which Eurasians have (or may have) benefitted from cross-breeding with Neanderthals back in the day.

Finally, Race: A Clarification.

People may tell you that “race is a social construct,” but human population clades are not.

By way of Audacious Epigone… A series on American Secession, or it’s burgeoning popularity at least. Spurred on (presumably) by: New York Magazine contemplates secession. AE looks at polling data: Severing the Southwest seems least implausible. And then by age: It’s Not your grandfather’s America when it comes to secession (or just about anything else for that matter).

This Week Around The Orthosphere

J. M. Smith notes how The Baneful Sway of French Philanthropy currently seeks to pit patriotism against nationalism, but in reality seeks to eliminate both. Very profound critique on Macron and the modernist zeitgeist, and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Matt Briggs gets a head start down the slippery slope, arguing that Bestiality Is A Sexual Orientation. Then he messes around with Some Curious Results In World Poverty Rates, leaving us to draw our own conclusions as to why poverty rates are falling in Africa as they rise in Europe. And finally it’s no-fap fascists, female-exclusive professoriates, wiccans surpassing presbyterians, and male surplus news filters, all in This Week In Doom—Deranged Psychology Edition.

This week in Albion Awakening, Bruce Charlton explains why he thinks Agnostics are (even) worse than atheists.

Beautiful deck.

To be an atheist is to introduce some precision to one’s claims about the triviality of life; and to leave the matter open to further analysis. The atheist opens-himself to a demand to explain how he knows that God does not exist, that reality is meaningless. There is a possibility that an honest, rigorous atheist may come to realise his error.

But to be an agnostic is to relegate the whole question to triviality, and to avoid saying anything substantive about it; and thereby to relegate Life to triviality, forever.

And William Wildblood laments the societal loss of reticence: An English Virtue.

On the legal front, Dalrock highlights some of the ways and reasons Our family policy is designed to weaken married fathers.

Interesting thesis over at Faith & Heritage: The Trenches in Perpetuity: The First World War Never Ended. In a sense, Mr. Malsbury is quite correct. Seen as a war between Ancien Régime and Liberal Democracy, of course, WW1 was quite decisive, and WW2 triple exclamation point. But seen as a war between Civilizational Order and Satanic Anarchy, the Great War may be seen merely as a more violent than usual interlude in the now 350+ year-old English Civil War. We all Anglophone now!

And Cologero has a deceptively practical guide to Demonic Possession and related spiritual disorders.

This Week in Arts & Letters

Chris Gale begins the week with Sydney’s poetry on Saturday. And more C.S. Lewis on Sunday.

At the Imaginative Conservative, Paul Krause on Virtue and the City. And Dwight Longenecker sees the podcast as the Return of Storytelling.

By way of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple thinks Red Britain Looms. More red than it already is, anyway. And Edward Glaeser with a long piece on Reviving the Rust Belt.

Over at the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless on the Future of Fusion. And he begins what looks to be a truly massive project: The Singularity Survival Guide. In too many parts to link here—but if you’re interested, head over and check it out.

Chris Morgan pens a succinct and humorous Cocktail (napkin) Discourse.

This Week in the Outer Left

From Social Ecologies, Craig Hickman posts highlights of an interview with Nick Land: Modernity, Blockchain, and the Intelligence Explosion.

Also there a really top notch essay on The Myth of Homo Faber: Prometheus, Epimetheus, and the Predictive Mind.

Bonus girl smoking pic.

[I]t is this very theft of technology from the gods that has shaped and formed humans from the beginning; our fate and our catastrophe. It is this theft of technology that lies at the core of the human condition; in spite of our self-sufficiency, our lack of an essential nature, we as humans are bound to our supplements, our tools, our technological wonders. And it is this original relation to technology that has shaped us into the very antagonistic world we see around us. The very hubris of our need for supplements binds us to a world where the making and re-making of ourselves and the world around us condemns us to a never-ending war of perpetual re-creation of the very means of our existence.

Obviously technology—our growing toolbox of supplements—has made man very powerful. The missing piece of the puzzle is I think a hidden “supplement”: “social technology”. Human cooperation, vis-à-vis eating each other, is what made that technological advancement possible. It remains to be seen whether social tech can keep up with the material tech. Great power comes with great responsibility.

This Week in Liberalism Besieged

Heterodox Academy is very concerned that you’ll misunderstand them: They’re not using the term “academic freedom” as a cloak for Nazi scumbags. Really they’re not. They mean it!

This was really well done: Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. We persist in the belief that America is as polarized as her Cultural Masters, wish it to be; but it’s nice to know smart folks are keeping a plausibly independent eye on it.

Arnold Kling is not sanguine about the future of economics on the Road to sociology watch.

JBP, authentic believer in Liberal Democracy, pens a fake apology from The Democrats for their being unprincipled. Social shaming is what victors do to the losers. Winners are immune to it. Win first, Dr. Peterson.

This Week… Elsewhere

Dennis Dale has the latest edition of the Pozztown Dispatch.

Z-Man is on point in his analysis of what passes for the right these days. A Real Right hasn’t existed in the US since it was persecuted and dispersed in the war for American independence. Also there: pulling back the curtain on Prog Taqiyya.

Al Fin is bearish on China as she Pursues Weapons with Abandon (Of the Economy). Related: Japan Suddenly Becomes a Major Military Power Again. About time we think. Also: Human Slavery and the Coming Automation Age, in which jobs should be plentiful for those with sufficient cognitive capacity. The rest will be slaves (or “wards”) as they always have been. Related: Great Human Die-Off: How Low Must Average IQ Go? Which need not happen, so long as wards—being unable by definition to care for themselves—do not have the freedom to procreate.

Cobbled together but and important and interesting piece from Heartiste on The Shitlib Nonprofit Money Laundering Industrial Complex. Introduces (to us at least) a new and very explanatory concept: The Fiat News Index:

Fiat news is about the press telling you how to think about issues. Fiat news is about the presentation of opinions as facts, regardless of whether they consistently favor one group or another. If you want a bit more of a primer, including why we call this fiat news, the original piece Ben wrote in 2017 is located here.

“The unit of the Fiat News Index is the Vox“, for hopefully obvious reasons. It is insufficiently edifying for news outlets to simply present the news qua facts. If you really wanna be close to Jesus, you need to explain to your postulants readers how to think about the news. Also there liberal op-eds accidentally working for us: Where Is The Lie?. And Reframe Of The Day: The Regressives.

Later in this week at Heartiste, for those who refuse to believe their own lying eyes: A meta-study of scientific literature invalidating the Contact Hypothesis. And a beautiful synopsis of Bro Science: Lift Weights, Cut Carbs, Intermittently Fast. Bro Science™ is real science.

This week in Myth of the 20th Century podcast: The Big Fraud—Savings and Loan Crisis. A little lower energy than usual, but as always an interesting and astoundingly well-researched take.

TUJ has some advice for the President: Trump should replace Ginsburg with a Bitch, not a Barrett. Let’s hope that’s sooner rather than later.

And over at Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton offers a hearty three cheers for Private Imperialism and Colonialism, which we fully endorse. Except for the ceremonial, but otherwise meaningless, adjective: “Private”. He recounts the sufferings of Portland State professor Bruce Gilley who let his altruism get just a little bit too effective in making “The Case for Colonialism” last year in Third World Quarterly. (It headlined the TWiR roundup here.) It was, of course, withdrawn to shouts of outrage. Well, whaddaya expect from a magazine with such an overtly racist name anyway? Who ya callin’ “Third World”, bigots? Today, no democracy is going to “vote for” imperialism—under the nurture and care of anglophone media at any rate…

How then can imperialism be revived? A possible answer lies in imperialism without the state. There are at least two models of non-state imperialism from history which could be resurrected in the modern world. More importantly, these stateless empires could appeal to libertarians, despite the oft-cited contention that libertarianism and imperialism are diametrically opposed to one another.

Welton’s models of non-state imperialism turn out to be species of state imperialism, but po-tay-to/po-tah-to, so long as we get our imperialism, we’re satisfied. Jokiness aside, he makes a strong case for the great and natural good that imperialism is. This “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention certainly deserves your attention.

PA has a report card on Trump’s Administration and it really doesn’t look very good: Which Way, Mr. President? Also: some inspiring coverage of Poland’s Independence Day march: “We understand how hard and costly it is to regain our country”.

Ace tackles the “Smile More” dilemma: “As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive…”

Welp… That’s about all we had time for, folks. Many thanks to Hans der Fiedler and Aidan MacLear for helping me get this all together. David Grant was off this week. Looking forward to his swift return. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!

The post This Week In Reaction (2018/11/18) appeared first on Social Matter.

Well, this week was Thanksgiving here in the States. Hope you all enjoyed your day off. And for those in the rest of the world, we hope there was a palpable decrease in internet activity from your stateside interlocutors. We apologize for any inconvience.

Over at American Greatness, Rich Logis takes a flyswatter to Media Hysteria Over Nationalism as “Democrat Revisionist History”.

Let’s see… what else was going on?

Navigate…

Our own Aidan MacLear kicks off the week with a superb meditation on Winter and all it means for Higher Latitude Peoples upon the occasion of our First Snow. It was something completely different, and earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

Parallax Optics goes a bit reductionist on us with Civilization is a Neural Network. I’ll see that Neural Network and raise ye a Full Organism.

Alfred Woensalaer publishes the next installment of Orb of Covfefe: Part XI—Politics politics. Baron visits The Netherlands of the not too distant future. Make that two three installments this week. Here are Part XII—Into ze Germanland and Part XIII—Roadblock, ending with a major cliffhanger!

And in the midst of all that speculative fiction, Alf manages to pen a pretty solid analysis on the Passiveness that plagues men of his generation. He sees it principally as a rational response to incentives. He’s correct. He suggests personal corrective action which I think might fairly be summed up as… “Become Worthy”.

Richard Greenhorn continues his task of resurrection his (generally top notch) Thermidor material… This week he’s got Dead Letters of a Contrarian: On the Career of Christopher Hitchens, which originally appeared in April of this year.

This week at GA Blog, Adam takes a deep dive into Derrida, the relationship between speech and writing, and Logocentrism, Media, and Originary Satire. The implications of “post-literate media” are of particular interest:

Obligatory smoking girl pic.

The only way to become a critical “consumer” of both news and entertainment is to “adumbrate” what you watch with the possible decisions, maneuvers, and conflicts and imagine some “they” who wants you to see these things (and not some other things) in this way. To help others along this path, then, would involve disrupting the imagined “speech situation” that “installs” the view in the desired position. Almost all media representations (including social media like Facebook and Twitter), in fact, aim at simulating a personal, “face to face” relationship with what is on the page, or the screen, or the CD, or the airwaves (indeed, there is outrage and disgust or at least bad reviews when this is not done successfully)—by locking the audience into “spontaneous” oralized reactions (like wanting to sing along, feeling like you’re letting the TV family “into your living room,” or arguing with an anchor or columnist— wanting to “shout at the screen”), it becomes very easy to pump the memes of the day into us. What’s insidious is the fabricated intimacy—an insight, by the way, one can find in the dreaded “cultural Marxists” of the Frankfurt School like Adorno and Horkheimer, not to mention Bertolt Brecht. There is something here that probably goes back to the sensationalist popular press of the 19thcentury, looking for sob stories and horror stories that “could happen to anyone” and “bring the nation together.”

Anti-Gnostic actually watches a movie. Seems to have enjoyed it: The Coen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I hadn’t even heard of it.

Fritz Pendleton checks in on Thanksgiving Thursday with a really brilliant bit of analysis: Hamilton In Retrospect.

Hamilton was never truly a classical liberal. Hamilton was a man wholly out of place and time, a foreigner in his own tongue, a stranger in his own home, a man who had slipped through the gaps of one era and fallen into another. He was a Bonapartist two decades before Bonaparte. He was a Caesarist one thousand eight-hundred years after Caesar lay dead on the marble steps of the Curia Julia.

Hamilton understood something that few Americans of his era understood; in fact, he understood something that even fewer Americans of our era understand. The core of Hamilton’s philosophy is something that liberals of all stripes, classical and modern, try their best to ignore or deny: good government comes from good leaders. Government is, by necessity, an executive function.

John Adams has some competition now for my Favorite Founding Father. Pendleton contrasts Hamilton’s versus Jefferson’s view of liberty…

Jefferson in particular felt that the citizens themselves should be responsible for maintaining their liberty, clutching their guns and ready to rebel should they suffer too many affronts to their liberty. I find this view hopelessly naïve. Everyday men and women, middle class people, have to go to work. They have to pick up the kids from school, buy some carrots and squash at the store, order a nose hair trimmer for grandpa’s eighty-fifth birthday. They’re busy. They have neither the time nor the energy to police their government as assiduously as one man with a mandate.

This Jeffersonian paradigm leads to the absurdity of modern American politics: the great masses of the middle-class are excluded from the political process on every day except election day, while the people with the most free time, the extremely poor and the extremely rich, get to play politics all they want.

Jefferson’s vision—the whole “Don’t Step on Snek” schtick—makes the guarding of liberty a hobby for the leisured classes. They’ll guard it for themselves, of course. Everyone else will benefit from a strong executive watching out for them. Anyways, hope I didn’t steal too much of Fritz’s thunder. There’s much more there. Pendleton takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his outstanding work.

Bad Billy Pratt takes advantage of the extended weekend to assemble another one of his patented cultural mashups: Horror and Fairy Tales: “Halloween” (1978) and “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (1994).

Fairy Tales are written to speak to the emotional language of children—to present a problem that is both vague and foreign on the surface, but highly relatable to the child’s subconscious fears, and then to provide the child with practical, cautionary advice for problems yet to come or coping strategies for problems which have no solution.

The better sort of horror movies do this too. And Mr. Pratt provides many examples. The Committee saw fit to bestow an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.

Titus Cincinnatus deserves much praise for getting back to a regular posting schedule. His stuff is pure gold. This week he turns his not insubstantial rhetorical powers to exploding The Cargo Cult Mentality Behind “White Privilege”.

Handsome guy.

The cargo cult aspect is essentially what the leftist appropriation of Western history and the invasion of our societies is about—because anyone could have done the West, anyone can keep the West going. White, western Europeans and Anglos aren’t really necessary and since people (like runways and bamboo control towers) seem superficially similar, they can be considered interchangeable so that more pliable replacement populations can be brought in to keep the lights on while yet going along with the globalist program.

Yet, as western nations continue to import low-IQ third worlders, they will not be able to maintain the level of civilisation that they have hithertofore achieved. Cultures and civilisations require more than the presence of warm bodies.

Civilization is much harder to build than to destroy. Like an airplane, only moreso. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.

At Jacobite, Nicolas Hausdorf discusses The Decline of the Imperial Aesthetic. Hausdorf explores the rise of modernist architecture and the significance of its embrace by the Left.

Over at Malcolm Pollack’s: Is this the dawning of the age of Jeuvenocracy? Also, a heavy dose of sound mixing and recording wonkery: Thinking Inside The Box.

By way of Isegoria… Multiple highlights from Gary Morson’s Dagger and Swagger: The literary legacy of 19th-century Russian revolutionary terrorism: Liberal professionals and industrialists did more than applaud; Stalin added very little to this sort of thinking; Westerners won’t sympathize if you talk to them the way we talk among ourselves; really you can’t make this shit up: At first the goal is social justice; unsurprisingly: The terrorist state emerged directly from the terrorist movement; In conclusion: Terrorist success depends on support from polite liberal society. In other news: Ion thrusters. And The worst year in history—not even in living memory, phew!

Finally, this Saturday’s missive from CWNY: Still Our Ancient Foe.

This Week in Social Matter

Obviously things have been slow around here for quite some time. But this week we (or at least I) got quite a surprise when Luke Markovic dropped a pamphlet-sized (7500+ words) micro-history on The Political Legacy Of Konstantin Pobedonostsev. Markovic’s prior contribution was a short 3-stanza poem last month. He is a man of diverse talents… and diverse word-counts! I confess to having never heard of Pobedonostsev, and after reading Markovic’s superb history, I can see why he’s been deprecated by our Cultural Masters. He seems to have been something of a Russian Thomas Carlyle: a stout and profoundly insightful critic of liberalism and modernism. And prophets who get things right tend to get conveniently forgotten. Pobedonostsev has insights on virtually every topic of interest to well-rounded reactionary. Markovic’s piece is a definite must read, receiving an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

This Week in Human Biodiversity

Greg Cochran has some seasonally appropriate anecdotes on Plunging Poultry. And he’s got a outrageously funny Conspiracy Theory of his own.

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with the banning of facts and Mental Slavery. Nothing mental about it really…

A free man may speak his conscience, at least on his own time. A slave may not.

She makes a Call for Guest Posts, as it appears she’s going to be out of the Blogging Chair for a bit.

This was splendid: Donna Zuckerberg and Knowledge Production vs. Knowledge Community. That’s Mark Zuckerberg’s sister who recently published Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age, complaining of evil white guys “culturally appropriating” their own classical literature.

This is a problem because White Men on the Internet are Privileged (even when they are poor whites who struggle to get a job or even friends,) while rich white women like Donna are the Oppressed.

Well, we didn’t think so. So what’s really going on here?

We think of academic disciplines as “producing knowledge,” but it may be more accurate to think of them as “knowledge communities.” to be part of those communities, all you have to do is produce works that show what a good community member you are. People who fit in get friends, mentors, promotions, and opportunities. People who don’t fit in either get pushed out or leave of their own accord. There’s not much new to say about the Classics, but there are plenty of people who enjoy reading the classics and discussing them with others–and that makes a community, and where there’s a community, people will try to protect what is culturally “theirs.”

And well-educated internet shitlords are not part of “them”. Plain and simple. Mrs. X’s parting shot was alone worth the price of admission:

There are probably many academic disciplines which could, at this point, be transformed into blogs and tumblrs without much loss.

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

And on Saturday, another gem: Racism OCD and Other Political Neuroses.

Politics has largely replaced religion for how most people think of “sin,” and modern memetic structures seem extremely well designed to amplify political sin-based paranoia, as articles like “Is your dog’s Halloween costume racist?” get lots of profitable clicks and get shared widely across social media platforms, whether by fans or opponents of the article.

So now… instead of worrying about whether you might have sexual fantasies about your sister, you can spend all your time worrying about whether a Trump-voter handled this very dollar bill or slept in this very hotel bed. “How do we stop our national neuroses from causing disasters?”, Mrs. X asks. Well, not putting neurotic people in charge of the psychological and propaganda industrial complexes could be a start…

By way of Audacious Epigone… Polling data on peaceable secession—liberalism for me but not for thee edition. Californians of every race say Trump thinks less of black people—which is what they were told to say. And (supposedly) Young bloods want blood—it’s not evidence of “increasing polarization” (or whatever cause du jour it’s called) unless you control for age cohorts over time.

This Week Around The Orthosphere

Kristor takes us back to the future as he writes On Backward Causation.

J. M. Smith examines the adage, “familiarity breeds contempt” with It is a Cold Wind that Blows from a Strange Country.

The Latin proverb was, in other words, a warning against egalitarian informality and the erasure of social boundaries, and this (along with their addiction to novelty) is why modern men mangle its meaning. They believe that the cleaning “lady” will be reconciled to her life of cleaning if the swells invite her to call them by their first names. They believe that her structural servility will be palliated by this affectation of equality. The Romans believed that such an affectation makes structural servility more galling, and that a pretense of familiarity only stokes the always-smoldering furnace of ressentiment.

Richard Cocks writes this monumental essay on the relationship between the sexes as he explains why When One Sex Attacks The Other, Both Lose. A thoroughgoing thrashing of feminism, and argument from Nature and Nature’s God for traditional complementary sex norms.

Prior to women’s suffrage, some worried that women were too emotional, irrational, had a tendency to personalize disputes and were unable to separate themselves from the topic debated and thus could not be counted on to make decisions in an objective, unbiased manner or to make a healthy contribution to public debate.

The advent of women’s suffrage, has of course, fully validated those concerns. Later…

The scapegoating of men by women has a peculiarly evil dimension to it. Men are particularly prone to becoming willing accomplices in their own demonization thanks to their traditional biologically-derived role as the protector and provider for women. If women claim that they need protecting from men, many a confused male will incongruently try his best to save them; hoping all along to gain the love of women.

Which, of course, never works… at least not very well. And Professor Cocks has much, much more there. This snagged a coveted “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.

Matt Briggs criticizes an academic movement toward Citation Deplatforming All Men Women Don’t Like. And Cornell University To Require Indoctrination To Graduate, to wit, a diversity test. Lastly, it’s Nickelodeon’s naughty secret messages, 100% diversity achieved for Walking Dead romances, and legal genital mutilation, all in This Week In Doom—Cartoon Pr0n Edition.

Also there, guest poster Jefferson White teases us with some rare insight into what Moldbug has been up to. Hint: He’s Building the New Internet.

Mark Richardson uses the somewhat surprising words of British socialist Paul Embry to describe Two kinds of globaliser:

Gabrielle Marlene as Lola Montez.

For 40 years, the nation state found itself caught in a pincer movement, assailed by two kinds of globaliser: on one flank, the economic globalisers in the form of the multinationals and speculators, the totems of neoliberal ideology, with their demands for access-all-areas and reductions in regulations, including controls over capital and labour; and, on the other, the political globalisers in the form of a cultural elite whose brand of cosmopolitan liberalism and internationalism became so dominant within our modern establishment.

The first stood to benefit in the form of greater global clout and increased profits; the second from the advance to their desired destination of a borderless world, in which we all exist alongside each other in a diverse and liberal utopia under the benevolent patronage of assorted wise technocrats. Both groups had little more than the bare minimum of loyalty to the nation.

Richardson’s train of thought is continued in Liberalism & Leviathan.

By way of Albion Awakening, William Wildblood asks What Are the Signs of a Civilisation in Decline? He provides a decently sized bullet-point list.

Dalrock recounts fond memories in masculine spaces for this Thanksgiving Holiday, Giving thanks for fathers.

Stephen of Númenor offers A lesson for identitarians from the Mongols.

And just one more tiny black pill from One Peter Five on the State of the (visible) Catholic Church: It’s a Runaway Train, and the Devil Is Driving.

This Week in Arts & Letters

My goodness, but it was a banner week in Arts and Letters. The creative powers of the Right must be waking up as Winter stretches out his icy fingers. Chris Gale begins the week with Sydney on Saturday, who is trying to give up on Stella to become an honest married man. And not only C.S. Lewis on Sunday, but his wife as well, a fairly competent poet in her own right.

Pretty cool pic.

At the Imaginative Conservative, E.J. Hutchinson on the moral force of Shakespeare’s Othello Shakespeare’s Othello. I admit, this one slipped by me. I need to brush up on my Bard. Christine Norvell on John of Salisbury and the Ideal Scholar. K.V. Turley looks into some film noir, Nightmare Alley. It seems that the ubiquitously necessary moral warning for the West is not to try and play God. Joseph Pearce on Classical Education and the Future of Civilization. A heartening look at a small rebellion against postmodernism. Ending the Western canon with Eliot is wise. He is to literature what Spengler was to philosophy. And finally, in the Thanksgiving spirit, Elizabeth Barett Browning’s poem The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. We at Social Matter might be no fans of the Puritans, but you can’t help but admire the act of will that drove them, and the successes they found in taming a wilderness. But the last line of her poem inspires today a profound sadness.

By way of City Journal, Heather Mac Donald with the scoop on Cathedral outrage at DeVos’ due-process policy in Feminists’ Undue Process. It’s always good tactics to call for common-sense things like “due process” and let leftists undermine their perceived legitimacy with their own tantrums. Aaron Remm takes a look at sensible urban renewal by a union-smashing, public-sector slashing, fiscally conservative… Democrat? Shining in the Rust Belt. The real boon for Kokomo, Indiana is of course the Chrysler plant. Funny how America looks a lot nicer where it makes things and everybody has a job. And not very funny that trade protectionism is somehow controversial. Eric McAfee (any relation?) with Mall’s End, the decline of physical retail. Amazon is to blame, of course, if the decline of the Mall is a bad thing. It certainly exists as a social commons in the minds of Gen-Z, but left unmentioned is that many malls are hives of urban vibrancy, and little else. A lot of Americans don’t feel safe at the mall anymore, something that has no doubt contributed to Bezos’ profits. And perhaps I’m in the minority, but a charming small-town Main Street makes for a much more pleasant shopping trip than a suburban supermall. Developers and real estate investors have wised up to that: I lived in a town that built a new mall to resemble an historic outdoor village. Victor Davis Hanson sees the California fires as a failure of policy: Even California Cannot Defy Nature Forever. I’m tempted to invoke the fires that consumed Sodom and Gomorrah, but those who reaped the whirlwind in this case were the decent common people of rural California, and not the evil ones who sowed this wind. David Schoenbrod wants to Make Congress More Accountable. Accountable to who? The people? A lot of people who probably shouldn’t be voting are making out like bandits under the current deal.

Richard Carroll has quite a good piece, originally at Thermidor, on The Everlasting Empire. That is to say, Chinese imperial stability. Though to this Westerner’s eyes it looks a lot like stagnation. I prefer a civilization that does stuff, that expands and conquers. Not that there’s nothing to be learned from the Orient, of course. He also goes into the literary theory of Eighteenth Friend: Thomas Campion, who was an early critic of rhyme in English verse. Ezra Pound would indeed be proud. But our language owes as much to Norman French as it does alliterative Anglo-Saxon. And French verse without rhyme would be quite an abomination indeed. I prefer a healthy mix.

Over at the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless points out that Only 1 in 3 Americans Can Pass US Citizenship Test. Well, a lot of “Americans” are actually from somewhere else. But not too surprising. It’s not just indicative of a lack of historical factual knowledge, but evidence that we do not even have a unified national myth. Which is what the common people need in their souls more than a memorization of historical facts. He also laments the conspiracy theorist’s Paranoia Against Transhumanism. And then a rigorous study of the USA-Japan Nuclear Alliance, with policy proposals going forwards. Finally, more issues of the Singularity Survival Guide than I can possibly link. If that interests you, you can go check it out.

Chris Morgan pens a really excellent reflection on growing up in The Bubble—i.e., of Suburbia in the ’90s—and the ironic ways it can get popped. It was a bubble very close to mine. In more ways than one.

And Literary Squadristi has a (quite positive) review of the increasingly based Tucker Carlson’s A Ship of Fools: The Obituary of America.