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:
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.”Obligatory smoking girl pic.
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”.
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.Handsome guy.
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:
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.Gabrielle Marlene as Lola Montez.
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.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Arnold Kling discusses government and financial fragility and particularly focuses on fragility in China. He goes on to highlight Scott Alexander on the Representative Agent model and tells us about what he’s reading.
Heterodox Academy is looking for a Director of Communications. Any secret shitlords out there ready to infiltrate?
This Week… Elsewhere
Heartiste has a beautiful photo of MAGAmerica and great story to go with it.
Lady from the Walking Dead I guess.
Random Critical Analysis has a boatload of data for Noah Smith. I suppose you can guess who’s winning the argument.
Tom X. Hart is back up at Medium with “Woke Capital”: A response to Parallax Optics—i.e., to this award-winning article from last week. Hart thinks there may be more going on than simply Havel’s Greengrocer Syndrome.
This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast features Sam Dickson—Civil Rights and Their Consequences.
For Thanksgiving Day, PA unearths some hidden treasures in the “Ordering Feminine” and in Love Story (1970) of all places. Also there, a wistful: What Happened?
At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus pens a short consideration of that high holy day of consumerism in The Economic Fallacies of Black Friday: 2018 Edition. While there is much wrong with Black Friday and the commercialization of Christmas, Maximus prefers instead to channel his inner Scrooge and suggest that people should put their money in savings accounts rather than spend it on gifts for friends and relatives. Humbug!
Ace contemplates the power of parental models, for better and worse: “…all he left us was alone…”
Welp… That’s about it folks. Many thanks to my sturdy staff for their tireless help in gathering this linkfest together: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. We wish you all a Blessed Advent. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/11/25) appeared first on Social Matter.