This week, Mercedes Grabowski Commits Suicide After Mob Hounds Her For Refusing Partner Who Had Gay Sex. Because there are some standards porn stars—ordinarily liberal ergo “you go grrrl” ergo holy—are not allowed to have. Heartiste comments… ironically.
Something a little out of the ordinary at American Greatness: A hit piece on Sarah Sanders. Who, BTW, totally had it coming. Also, VDH is there: Is a President’s Character His Presidency’s Destiny?
Also this week… Pearl Harbor Day… VDH remembers.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam delves deeper into the social psychology behind Centrality, Power, Sovereignty.
Sarah Perry is up at Ribbonfarm Feeling the Future. Herein she explores the extent to which failure to normally process time figures into a variety of mental illnesses. And even provides occasional relief.
Alf defends The terrible truth—as typified by the Asian horror flick Nang Nak. Sounds purdy creepy.
Imperial Energy trots out the next installment of The STEEL-cameralist Manifesto: Part 6B: STEEL Reaction II (Strike Fast, Strike Hard and Strike with STEEL). Wherein he makes the case for—rather a prediction of—a military takeover of the machinery of empire. The Vendee makes an appearance.
Parallax Optics speculates On Risk.
Nigel T. Carlsbad was busy this week with some light reading: Kaiser Wilhelm I on the eve of the March Revolution. A case study on the uncanny valley of Radicalism in moderation. And he digs up a boatload of ironies and curiosities of right-wing history. Like:
And get this: the Massachussetts Know Nothings outlawed segregation in public schools in 1855, a whopping 100 years before this would be done on the federal level.
That’s right: American nativists invented racial liberalism, because they wanted to use blacks as muscle against the Irish. Of course, segregation remained as a social convention even if scrubbed from legislation.
And he’s got a zillion more. It was worth an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Over at Jacobite, Alice Maz writes about A Priesthood Of Programmers. Maz chronicles the history of communication technology and the role of priests in societies.
The priestly role is, in a word, systematization. Their chief purpose is to construct the reality in which their adherents live. They provide order and grounding, defining the base truths those of a society take axiomatically. It is on these axioms that all else is built.
And she has much, much more to say on the matter. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
By way of Isegoria… An early Icelandic experiment in republicanism—a window into the super-Hajnal soul if nothing else; how Ordinary people blunder into highly advanced systems; why All legal systems need a punishment of last resort—hint: so that it need only rarely be used (yet more on that); a veritable cornucopia of Isegoria posts on Pearl Harbor; a preview of Caplan’s forthcoming The Case Against Education; and a closer look at the less than unidirectional Anglo push for gun rights.
Finally, this week in CWNY, a lament for The Vacant Hearth:
N
o liberal of the female sex has a right to scream ‘sexual harassment.’ By embracing feminism she has left her humanity and her rights as a woman behind. Why should I or any male be concerned about the alleged sexual harassment of feminist harpies who welcome Moslem and black rapists into our nations while screaming about the sexual harassment of the pornographic actresses in Hollywood? The Victorian maiden and mother has a right to be protected from sexual harassment in word or deed. The modern feminists have no such rights. If we accord them any rights or sympathy, we are supporting the continual reign of terror of our modern legions of Lady Macbeths.
This Week in Jim Donald
A nice three post week from Jim, starting and ending on the subject of Bitcoin. First, Jim reverses his recent declaration and has now decided that now is a good time to invest in Bitcoin. Astute readers will remember that some weeks ago, Jim advises against Bitcoin as an investment, but he’s now back on the train. Let’s see why.
Lately I have heard tell of thought criminals opening bitcoin accounts, because they noticed “Nazis” getting their accounts blocked, and figured that come the terror, they would need some money that could not be blocked.
That, people getting bitcoin accounts for actual monetary use, is a mighty good reason to invest in bitcoin. Time was when these people would have purchased gold or uncut diamonds.
Seems sensible enough to me.
And, inspired by frequent commenter peppermint, Jim pens an entry on Kate’s wall. Take it away, Jim.
Several years ago in California, an invader with no license traveling very far above the speed limit on the freeway smashed rammed my car from behind, wrecking it. Police let him off. I should have seen this as a straw in the wind. One guy who does something bad is just life. One guy who does something bad with social and organizational support from other guys like himself is war and invasion. They are coming to kill us all and take our stuff.
…
Our elites are telling our enemies that badwhites are the problem which needs to be eliminated, but the distinction between “badwhites are the problem and need to be eradicated”, and “whites are the bad problem and need to be eradicated” gets lost in translation.
It needs to be remembered—by us—that Kate Steinle was a 32 year old unmarried woman with a communications degree. I daresay: a thot that needed patrolling. But we must never let our enemies forget that she, by virtue of being killed by a non-white invader, was our 32 year old unmarried woman with a communications degree and we will righteously smash the outgroup in her name. Thus, Kate’s Wall.
And, returning to the topic of Bitcoin, Jim assesses Bitcoin and the May scale of monetary hardness. Jim considers the scaling problems of Bitcoin as money, how that will go in the future, and to what extent that might lead to a soft money Bitcoin and a hard money Bitcoin coexisting. Cue Gresham’s Law.
The difference between hard money and soft money is that people are always happy to take hard money, not so happy to take soft money. Always willing to give you soft money for hard money, not so keen to give you hard money for soft money.
Words to live by, but not to die by, in this humble writer’s opinion. When it comes to Bitcoin, if you can spare some money to play with, definitely pick up some, but don’t kill yourself over it either way. Everyone has lots of theories about what is going to happen with it, but theories have a funny way of not surviving repeated contact with reality, and that should be understood whether you are bullish or bearish on the thing. Don’t invest so much that if it does crash you won’t be able to raise a family, and if you can afford it, don’t invest so little that your kids will curse your name for not getting in on it if it does go to the moon.
This Week in Social Matter
Our week at Social Matter kicks off with the latest installment of the Myths for a New Tomorrow series: Faithful John—a classic from the Brothers Grimm; and expertly narrated by Marcus Wolfe.
On Wednesday, Hestia’s own Wolfgang Adler brings his next installment on Portuguese history Salazar And The Loss Of The Business Elite. It is the next to last installment of his original research into this understudied, and under-appreciated “Right Wing Dictator”. It is a breathtaking in scope as it is painstaking in detail, utterly defying simple synopsis. As always, Adler takes the slow approach to history. And earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his impressive efforts.
The “Smartest Podcast in the ‘Sphere” is almost certainly Myth of the 20th Century. This week’s installment is Episode 47: Lockup—History Of The U.S. Prison System.
Also on Friday, Michael Andreopoulos proves himself rather a Renaissance Man as he explores Language And The Aesthetic Venture. He cautions the “Outer Right” against throwing out the intellectual baby with the academic bathwater. Rightly, I think.
Our educational system is a reflection of the mercantile values and ideals of the ruling class—unconstrained exchangeability. They cannot absorb the fundamentally different, the transcendent or the other. Small-minded and incapable of the labor required for suspending judgement, they cannot think another’s thoughts, cannot run different software simultaneously on their own systems. The technocrat’s incapacity is reflected, partially, in the cheap universalism of the monoglot who refuses to acknowledge the value of any epoch, civilization, or philosophy different from his own.
The Moldbuggian remedy for this cultural malaise is “read old books”—an efficient way of dislodging oneself from the progressive hegemon whose future is fixed, and whose past is always in flux. The point of the exercise is not to make you a clone of Carlyle, but to awaken you to see beyond the ever-flattening horizon. Fundamentally, this is an aesthetic venture, a creative capacity in potentia awaiting activation.
The “Enlightenment” stole our civilization. Now, we’re taking it back. Andreopoulos makes a spirited defense of high culture—restored:
Poetry should not be seen as mere decoration—it is fundamental to the project of creating, maintaining, and passing along civilization. The Greeks, Arabs, and Europeans all saw poetry as memetic technology.
Tho’ they might not have used precisely that term, things are what they are. The play too rises to the level of “aesthetic technology”:
Eventually, he becomes a critic with knowledge about how effects are achieved, the ideology of the producer, the economic pressures of the theater. His experience of the play is no longer that of the first order consumer who goes along for the ride taking everything for granted. His is not only a richer aesthetic experience, but also a far more grounded connoisseurship, framed within a more comprehensive theory of the play than that of his naive counterpart. His model of the play is raised to a higher level which nonetheless contains all lower levels. The naive spectator and the expert watch the same play, but the expert sees it kaleidoscopically.
More please? Definitely RTWT! This was the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.
Finally, Poetry & Prose Editor, E. Antony Gray is back with some newly minted verse: The Cutting Of The Cords. That’s not about what I think it is, is it?
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter took the week off. We trust all is well.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X contemplates The Facsimile of Meaning now often necessary to remain healthy in a modernity we weren’t really designed for. And, given the explosion in psychiatric drug use, it doesn’t appear to be working.
And for Anthropology Friday, a Part 2 of The Way of the Wiseguy, by Donnie Brasco.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
The week opens at our sister publication Thermidor with Walter Devereux’s Silmarils, Synthwave, and Sham Futurism. Devereux makes reply to Gio Pennacchetti’s comments on contemporary Right-wing aesthetics. Says Devereaux…
He will hopefully permit your author to offer some critique of his claim that “the æsthetics of the new Right is sadly inadequate to reflect today’s Zeitgeist.” The reality is, in fact, that the exact opposite is true: the æsthetics of the dissident Right today are inadequate because they reflect todayís Zeitgeist. The dissident Right delights in the “Futurist” label: millennial right-wingers seemingly desire nothing more fervently than to prove to their parents that they are the real rebels, the real dissidents, the real revolutionists (their elder Gen-X cousins and siblings share this fault). They claim to be the futurists—truly forward-looking heroes tearing down the system their parents erected for themselves, without an eye to their posterity. Their futurism, though, is a sham futurism; it is neither forward-looking or backward-looking; instead it looks down at its own two feet and refuses to move at all.
Please read the rest! Devereaux impressed The Committee here and snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Leslie Cuff offers up The Center Cannot Hold: On The Decline Of Jordan B. Peterson. Cuff reviews the fates of other notable “centrists” and comments on Peterson’s failures.
Peterson is the closest thing to an intellectual the “classical-liberal” camp currently boasts. This is why, in my view, he serves as the perfect metric by which to measure the status of contemporary centrist politics. In most circumstances, examining the political center is a waste of time, as it normally contains nothing but tired diffidence, if not downright cowardice.
Europa Weekly podcast this week is Actually, Muhammad was Mannerheim’s Grandpa.
Next up is a reprint of N. T. Carlsbad’s piece on The Transition from Prussian Conservatism to German Nationalism.
Jake Bowyer marks the suicide of porn starlet August Ames with Let It Burn: Porn In America. Ms. Ames’ is a textbook case exhibiting the malevolent debauchery of the Left—as though we needed any more evidence to convict.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
For those with the stomach for it, this might be an illuminating read: The Dictator Pope.
American Dad exposes the voracious maw of the Domestic Violence Intervention Industrial Complex.
According to J. M. Smith (pace GKC), America is merely A Dishonest Church Disguised as a Nation. We could hardly agree more. And it is arguably the single biggest hurdle for Restoration.
Kristor writes Traditional Sexual Morality Works; the Liberal Sort Cannot, & So Tends to Marriage. One is based on simple marriage, the other on the compex notion of consent. Also, contrary to prevalent materialism, Nations are Ontological Reals. So are marriages, incidentally.
Richard Cocks writes this great essay, Foundationalism: in praise of vagueness, inspired by his experience teaching epistemology and also by Jordan Peterson.
The truth of foundationalism is that at the core of someone’s general worldview, his basic stance towards reality, is some kind of metaphysical commitment and many if not all of his beliefs will reflect this basic commitment—depending on how consistent he is. Complicating matters is the fact that a person’s stated beliefs and his real beliefs often conflict. Someone’s real beliefs can be seen through his actions. If someone were to claim to be skeptical about the existence of time but make plans for next year’s vacation, or if someone were to question whether a chair exists but proceeds to unthinkingly sit on it anyway, or if G. E. Moore thinks “is this my hand?” is a meaningful question but withdraws his hand when a knife descends towards it, then the person is a liar, fraud and hypocrite.
Jim Kalb writes about how ideologies that contradict Church teaching are inevitably Anti-ideals, anti-theologies.
The incomparable Ianto Watt continues his ongoing theme with Russian Exceptionalism & The Universal Church. These essays are great for gaining perspective on the modern status of the Schism from this side of the Dnieper.
In this week’s edition of Matt Briggs’s Insanity & Doom Update XV, learn about moderate Al-Qaeda and 10% of men taking their wives’ last names.
William Wildblood makes of William Blake—A Slight Reassessment. Ya think?!
Bruce Charlton posts some nice English holiday season folk songs. Wassail!
Don’t miss Bonald’s Interview With an (hypothetical distant future) Historian: Part I: looking back on the 21st century, Part II: the rise of rabbinical Catholicism, and Part III: the West and its great unfinished project. It’s pretty black pill, but has a hopeful ending.
A 10-year-ld boy make-up artist is receiving international praise. Says Dalrock, Don’t worry. We’ll get used to it. Then he recounts the story of an Australian father Ensuring a safe and pleasurable ride for his daughter who was dating a member of a biker gang. Following up, Dalrock concludes If she has enough self esteem she won’t tingle for Harley McBadboy. Also, more on the trend of women Devouring a lifetime of courtship.
To my future husband: I know you will be worth the wait! But what about her imagined future husband? Will it be worth the wait for him?
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale features the poetry of Ezra Pound: “A Study in an Emotion”. A controversial study which might indicate Psychosis hunts with diversity—wouldn’t surprise us. Lessons in how the Slippery Slope Fallacy never is (i.e., a fallacy): The Freedom and the Damage Done. A hopeful: DeusVult, and the coming unity—there’ll be time for killing each other later!! Two hymns for the Second Week of Advent. And Hilaire Belloc is due up again for Sunday Sonnet.
Over at Imaginative Conservative, Jim Kalb get’s the honor of a “Timeless Essay” reprint: The Left vs. Human Nature. Fr. Dwight Longenecker plays Christmas Curmudgeon: Twelve Things I Hate About the Season—my list would be largely orthogonal to his. An extended meditation on (replete with videos of) one of my very favorite hymn settings: Sibelius’ “Finlandia”—including one in the original Finnish. Birzer on Irving Babbitt vs. Progressivism. And Olmstead on Why We Need to Read Literature. In honor of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a rendition of Pérotin’s “Beata Viscera Marie Virginis”. Finally, M. E. Bradford looks at The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver.
In City Journal, Aaron Renn finds Vigor in the Heartland—not that you’ll hear much about it on CNN. Saffran calls the acquital in the Kate Steinle case Jury Nullification, Plain and Simple—not that there’s anything wrong with jury nullification per se. Praise for President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And Heather Mac Donald covers the Bavarian State Opera and Rossini’s un-PC Battle of the Sexes.
A frenetic week over at Logos Club. Kaiter Enless posts 4 new editions of the Radio Enless podcast Episode 2 Episode 3 Episode 4 and Episode 5. He hasn’t started naming them just yet. A bit of outrage pron: “White People Are Devils With No Culture”. A bit more as Youtube Organizes Saturnine Squadron To Memory Hole “Extremist” Content. Enless points to a 220 page independent report that confirms Authorities Allowed Violence To Erupt In August Charlottesville Rally.
Getting back to the Arts, Enless has a visually stunning post on The Beautiful Syncretism of Tatsuo Horiuchi. As well, an audio PSA: Eulogy for Posterity.
Over at It’s Oll Korrect, Richard Carroll dives deep into Reliques of Ancient English Poetry to find Some Scottish Guy’s “Edward, Edward”—a challenging piece for non-native Scottish speakers. And Carroll also has analyses of two “Poems in Motion” flicks: Your Name and 5 Centimetres per Second.
And this was something aways off from the beaten path: Manticore Press explores “The Practice of Philosophical Ecstasy”. Seems like something Alrenous might enjoy.
This Week in the Outer Left
Lyman Stone, our new favorite shitlib who actually has something interesting to say, has More Thoughts on Falling Fertility
It was a nice non-triggering week from the Left this week, just pretty interesting stuff from their misguided perspective.
In The Baffler, Liz Pelly has an extended piece on the problem with Muzak. She takes on Spotify on grounds that I think many reactionaries would sympathize with. Allow me to give you an extended excerpt.
Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper. They’re also tied to what its algorithm manipulates best: mood and affect. Note how the generically designed, nearly stock photo images attached to these playlists rely on the selfsame clickbait-y tactics of content farms, which are famous for attacking a reader’s basest human moods and instincts. Only here the goal is to fit music snugly into an emotional regulation capsule optimized for maximum clicks: “chill.out.brain,” “Ambient Chill,” “Chill Covers.” “Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.“Chill Music” mixes seem to feature images of beautiful women. Go figure!
…
These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform. “It leaves artists behind. If Spotify is just feeding easy music to everybody, where does the art form go? Is anybody going to be able to push boundaries and break through to a wide audience anymore?”
It is endlessly amusing when the bugman SWPL sees the end result of the bugman lifestyle and turns away in horror. You have made your bed, either lay in it or get out of the way so we can fix it.
Two entries over at The Awl worth reading this week. First, in their ongoing series on unusual colors, is fuchsia, the pinky purple of Victorian gardens and Miami Vice. Nothing leftish here, just an obscure history of a color that was popular in the Victorian era, then fell out of favor until it was resurrected in the 1980s by TV shows like Miami Vice. And now it is a mainstay of contemporary synthwave.
And also at The Awl was an examination of flat earthers and the psychology behind conspiracy theories. The Flat Earth thing genuinely puzzles me, and when I first heard of it about a decade ago, I thought it was all an elaborate prank, which really does still seem like the most likely explanation. But we can look at things more broadly to wonder why people believe weird things, and that is actually the phenomenon that Angela Brussel is attempting to discuss here, even though she doesn’t really know it.
One trait that is most prominent amongst conspiracy theorists is a strong distrust of authority. Once they have decided that officialdom has deceived them in one way, other distressing world events lead them to a similar conclusion.
There is more truth there than was intended, I think. People distrust authority at certain times because ‘officialdom’ is made up of people, who have interests that may diverge from the interests of those outside of ‘officialdom’. Once you recognize that, you have already left the Official Story narrative behind. This does not make every weird idea true, but it means that at least one might be. That’s a heady realization for anyone, and sometimes it leads to NRx and other times… flat earth. If you’re going to strike out on your own, away from the Official Story, you are more obligated–not less–to pay attention to where the evidence points and worry about cognitive biases. Just something to consider.
This Week… Elsewhere
Knight of Númenor comments briefly and astutely on The idealistic Nordic race.
Faith & Heritage have a bone to pick with Amazon’s War on the White Working Class. A war made more effective, no doubt, by downward wage pressures due to low-skill immigration. Related: Kraine’s The working man’s mind.
Also at Faith & Heritage: “If everything is racist, nothing is”. Well said.
Unorthodoxy has a fine overview of Trump’s Anti-State Department—nice to see a covert war on BlueGov.
A private spy network is to the CIA as Bitcoin is to the U.S. Dollar. Power is being redistributed from large, centralized states to decentralized groups. When Great Powers are allied, such as the United States and Russia in Syria, a decentralized state such as ISIS will be crushed. Where they are in opposition, they will undermine each other using non-state actors.
This earned an appreciative ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee.
Heartiste has some solid psychological frame tips for WNs (and other “haters”).
Thrasymachus relates the all-too plausible story of Sam ‘N’ Ella’s Farm Fresh Chicken… coming to a Cracker County near you.
Arnold Kling’s The Simplicity Assumption, and its better—but less rhetorically artful—alternatives is an interesting read. But however complex a problem may be, it would seem inarguable that “having one guy in charge of solving it” does make it quite a bit simpler. Kling also reviews Yudkowsky’s Inadequte Equilibria.
Al Fin looks at the remarkably stable (and large) share fossil fuels play in world energy production. Also a large bucket of ice water to pour over a study showing high rates of mood disorders among Mensa members.
Also there, Fin has a magisterial review of psychometrics: Welcome to the Idiocracy: Lynn and Flynn Agree.
Chris Morgan takes an entertaining look at The Spectrum of (intellectual) Obsolescence.
Nullus Maximus gets into the Spirit of the Season writing in Praise The Grinch Bots.
Whilst imploring the reader Don’t hang on my every word, AMK provides some pretty good ones to hang onto…
The more I study the more I think the solution to everything that ails Western civilization is a religion. Progressivism infiltrates because it has a religious characteristic. Capitalism co-opts everything through getting people to adopt its immoral value system of use-value as a moral and religious code. Islam is a threat because of its religious nature. Everything threatening and dangerous is religious. From one perspective this is a reason to try to abolish religion. But then you realize that religion is an integral part of the human brain, that it is going nowhere, and that human nature will always produce an incentive to exploit the religious part of people’s minds. Something has to occupy the religious position. Abdicating that responsibility will simply invite someone else to take up the position and use it against you.
Meta-Nomad unleashes his trademark style for another of his music reviews, this time reviewing Subboreal’s Childhood’s End. I don’t care if this type of music isn’t your thing, or you think you don’t care, but seriously, RTWT for the style if nothing else. It will nudge you towards being a better writer, or double your money back. Just look at this, and recall: it’s just a music review.
As the sterilization comes, you’re already anaesthetised by the suffocation and fall, quietly into a bed made of humming. Bone splinters and spinal plunge, take the hand of steel, let go of flesh, of life, of sense. Come forth into repetition pure. We can give you your memories back for a second or two, it wont help, but the illusion of help might be nice, amongst your trees of youth, horizons lost to polite play, everything you had, had, had.
Short, but then childhood is.
PA revisits Robert Putnam’s optimism about diversity in spite of his own findings now 10 years on. It hasn’t aged well.
David Chapman takes a long hard look at Post-apocalyptic life in American health care, coming soon to a loved one near you. This is actually a very important and careful analysis of what’s fundamentally wrong with our current health care “system”—so to speak.
Welp that’s all we had time fer. I’ve been noticing an explosion around the ‘Sphere of the use the proper dash lately—the html emdash to be specific. We hope we have inspired this in some small part—but remember too much of a good thing is still too much of a good thing. Many thanks to the Best Roundup Staff in the Universe: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2017/12/10) appeared first on Social Matter.