The neoreactionary community was hit hard by breaking news of Tom Petty’s death on Monday. Well, at least I was. For better or worse (and mostly for the better I think) Petty’s simple 3 and 4 chord music was the backdrop of this Gen-Xer’s life. Tom Petty (1950-2017), Requiescat in Pace.
VDH considers The Strange Case of Confederate Cool. You see it in Hell on Wheels as well. Not to mention Firefly.
[I]n such a Jacobin climate, shouldn’t civil-rights activist Joan Baez, for example, be condemned retroactively for her thought crimes?
She jump-started a second career in 1971 with her rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Her likely motivation for redoing the tune, aside from natural career concerns, was that it’s a powerful lyric piece and a magnanimous expression of empathy for the South’s post-war poverty and humiliation. But for anyone else, romancing slavery and racism would still be a felony in the eyes of the Orwellian thought police.
All politics is identity politics. And Joan Baez is one of the good guys (from NPR’s perspective).
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Our good friend Fritz Pendleton kicks off the week with (blessedly) brief Sunday Thoughts.
This Week in Generative Anthropology, Adam focuses his considerable analytical skills upon (P)ower, which he sees primordially coming into existence by the extension of (social) credit—not far, I think, from the NRx concept of worthiness. So why does power seem to grow?
“Secure” and “Unsecure” are relative terms. An early medieval king ruling over a territory the size of a small town may consider his power quite secure if he can on occasion rouse his lords to mobilize their soldiers to defend against the predations of a gang of nomadic looters; the modern state apparently feels its power is insecure if there is a single “white supremacist” who can hold down a job. Why, though, describe the purge of “white supremacists” in terms of “unsecure” power rather than simply power hunger? What is it the state wants to do that it perceives the “white supremacists” to interfere with?One of the ways I like to remember Tom Petty.
Jim Kalb in (the increasingly prescient) Tyranny of Liberalism frames the phenomenon as destruction of natural mediating power structures that are resistant to bureaucratic control. But back to power…
At this point the best qualifications for filling the highest offices no longer include the charisma of leadership, or earned credit—rather, those functionaries are recruited from the broader cultural training grounds established so as to continually replenish the elites with facsimiles of the existing ones. And what the future elites are trained in is how to play the idealized “principles” of Power against Power, the equality reflected in the abstraction of all individuals before Power against the insufficient degree of equality presently presided over by that Power.
Well that was a taste. There is much more. Adam, as always, provides high-quality penetrating analysis. This snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ from The Committee.
Imperial Energy’s STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto continues apace with Part 5A. The European Minotaur of War I: The Origins, Nature and Development of the Minotaur. Along the way, he takes a lot of insight from Jouvenel’s On Power: A Natural History of Its Growth, for which IE has much praise. This needs a closer reading than I am competent to give.
IE also delivers the latest Imperial Circular.
Spandrell takes note of A sad day for diversity—courtesy of KSA… and Foggy Bottom.
Social Pathologist takes a break from talking about Nazis, to talk about other fake-rightists: Strauss and Cthulhu. It is quite good… even before he gets into Strauss:
I think one of the great accidental disservices of Burke was to interpret the Revolution along temperamental lines. The Left being seen as innovators, imprudent and champions of novelties while the Right, their opposite. The real action was at the metaphysical level. The triumph of the Jacobins was the triumph of the secular over the Christian worldview. And what the Burkean interpretation has resulted in is the association of the Right and Left with temperamental qualities, whereas a more correct interpretation of it would be between Christian and Secular world views. The temperamental interpretation has also resulted in a conflation of Christian with Right and Secular with Left, whereas in reality, both Christian and Secular world views can have their Right and Left dispositional variants.
He knocks it out of the park on Strauss too:
For Strauss, faith and reason were incompatible, yet influential upon each other. Whatever Strauss’s view of religion, it is clear that he felt that it had no obligatory right on reason: it existed in a separate domain. Sure, religion may be an influence, an inspiration, a tradition, etc., but if reason came to a conclusion separate to religion, reason had to be given its “latitude.” At its best, Straussian Neoconservatism is a secularism that is “respectful” towards religion, at worst, it plays cynical lip service to it.
This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Alf is not at all happy with “the babyboomers”. I understand why people feel this way. It’s still the wrong way to feel. (And no… I AM NOT A BOOMER!)
Shylock Holmes makes a welcome—and very late-in-the-week—reappearance with George Lunt and the Tragedy of the Civil War. Holmes has been reading through the Menciian Canon of Old Books. This is a key term paper.
Discussions of the Civil War take place in a bizarre environment of historical illiteracy. Not about the Civil War itself, or of America’s experience with slavery – Americans actually know quite a lot about their own history, even if they’ve only heard one version of events.
No, the ignorance that is more striking is the ignorance of the slavery experience anywhere else on the planet. Of which there was plenty. And in particular, the ignorance of the other ways that countries went about ending slavery. Because it somehow never occurs to people to ponder whether there might have been other, better ways to end slavery without resulting in 700,000 corpses.
Lots of blame to go around in that tragedy, of course, as Lunt and Holmes document. Holmes garners an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his efforts here and the crucial reminder to Read Old Books®!
By way Isegoria this week… the outlandish wargame, The Campaign for North Africa, was a standard archetype blown out to its extremes. The alarming recognition that the reason we don’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles, is that we can’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles. Some insight into what happens at Harvard to produce the kind of people it produces, i.e., how it helps its richest and most arrogant students get ahead with some equally insightful counterpoint in the comments. Understanding psychology could be more effective than business training. More indicators of decline in the US Army Chief of Staffs’ reading lists. How the 2012 election taught us to trust the data. Jerry Pournelle on Think Tanks. And the US Army’s neglect of Megamission Three.
Anatoly Karlin looks at voting patterns in the recent German election and finds that East Germans vote like Visegrad Europeans. It is actually quite remarkable how strong support was for the AfD in the former DDR, and relatively weak everywhere else.
Anatoly also posits that the Russian Empire was too nice for its own good. I do not think many reactionaries would disagree that the Tsars gave in to demands from liberals too much, particularly in the 20th century, but the liberality Anatoly documents was quite a surprise. Definitely RTWT if you have interest in Russian history.
Malcolm Pollack explains Why You Should Subscribe To CRB. We consider Claremont Review of Books to be among the least annoying of mainstream rightist publications—which should be interpreted as exceedingly high praise.
Finally, This Week in Cambria Will Not Yield… Mere Virtue Is Not Enough.
When a Tucker Carlson-type of conservative debates a feminist, a ‘black lives matter’ advocate, or a radical Moslem, he always wins the debate. He wins the debate if debates are won by who makes the best argument, but when there is no moral consensus between the debaters, the victor is always the amoral debater who understands that debates are only subterfuges for his satanic agenda. A Christian cannot debate a man or woman who wants to destroy every white Christian on the face of the earth.
As always CWNY is quite right, but I don’t think he and I are fully agreed on what constitutes “virtue”. Virtue will have to be enough, I think. But skill in debate—or psychology—is not necessarily virtue.
This Week in Jim Donald
Three pieces from Jim this week, so let’s get into it. First up was a fairly extended examination of cryptocurrency. Whether you are a cryptocurrency neophyte or expert, this one is definitely worth reading in full.
The successful altcoin will be genuinely decentralized, as bitcoin was designed to be, originally was, and to some extent still is. Most of the altcoins, possibly all of them except the Bitcoins and Ethereum, are furtively centralized.
It will use, or at least offer the option, of Zooko type wallet names, as Bitcoin and Ethereum do.
It will be scalable to enormous numbers of transactions with low transaction costs, as Steemit and Ripple are, but Bitcoin and Ethereum are not.
It will support sidechains, and exchanges will be sidechained.
It will be a blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is, and will be a decentralized blogging and tweeting platform, as Steemit is not.
Jim also keeps us up to date on certain current Trumpian events with an explanation of why the US government Massachusetts Empire is losing in Afghanistan.
To the immense disappointment of his base, and indeed the immense disappoint of the vast majority of American voters left and right, Trump, breaking his election promises, decided to continue war in Afghanistan, while making the war slightly less infested by lawyers, transexuals, and women’s rights activists.
Well, delawyering the war will certainly help, but lawyers are not the core of the problem.
The core of the problem is that the Afghans really really do not want their religion replaced with the state religion of Massachusetts, which involves young girls putting a condom on a banana as a sacrament. The Massachusetts Empire is perhaps equally stubborn in its insistence that the Afghans will adopt the Progressive faith.
And, despite his protestations to the contrary, Jim turns his blog into a kinda sorta PUA blog for a post on what women want. If you know Jim, you probably know what the tenor of this piece will be, but let’s take a little peek anyway.
The main thing I have learned is that women are incompetent and wicked at making sexual and romantic choices, and should never have been emancipated.
Also the concept of “consent” is not easily mapped onto the real life sexual and romantic behavior of women, and therefore should not be given legal or moral weight. Short of a full marriage ceremony where vows are made before God and man under parental guidance, it is really difficult to say whether a woman consented or not, and makes little practical difference.
Come for the red pill shock therapy, but stay for Jim discussing anime.
This Week in Social Matter
The Week at Social Matter gets kicked off in grand style with C. A. Shoultz’s The Great Green Earth—which thrusts environmental concerns into the Reactionary Spotlight. And this has been long overdue in these pages. (Parenthetically, it has kicked off an enormous among of discussion and analysis in the private gardens of neoreaction.)
The word ‘conservative’ is an excellent place to start, as that word’s root, the word ‘conserve,’ is also the root of that potent word, ‘conservation.’ A cursory glance at the history of reaction reveals a not-inconsiderable focus on the natural world, on the world in which men live and what their attitude towards that world should be. Consider the great reactionary J.R.R. Tolkien; his masterwork The Lord of the Rings depicts a reverence for the natural world, from the carefully tended gardens of the hobbits of the Shire to the mighty guardians of the great forests, the Ents of the deep woods. For Tolkien it is a grave sin, an evil thing, to needlessly destroy and ruin the natural world. We must remember that the Ents are roused, not merely by the destruction of their trees, but by the wantonness of it, the cutting and burning for no good reason.
On the other hand, believers in progress, despite their wishful thinking, bear much blame
It was the great original Modernists—Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza—who shifted the West’s view of the natural world, moving it from a seamless created order in which man participated to a base collection of material resources which man ought to exploit for his own benefit. It was their mechanistic thinking—their minds of metal and wheels—that paved the way for the industrialization that, while it has done several very good things, has caused great harm to the living world, as well.
The descendants of these thinkers have a similar idea in mind; they merely employ it with different intent. Not only do progressive, radical environmentalists deserve not to have the issue all to themselves; they might perhaps be said not to deserve a voice at all, given the nihilistic ends to which their discussions ultimately turn. Radical environmentalists view man as divorced from nature, just as their radical predecessors once did. Where the early Moderns saw this as license to dominate nature, however, the current Moderns take it as license to exterminate ourselves.
Shoultz hits upon a key idea here: viz., one error (radical separation of man from nature) leading to two ostensibly polar opposite deformities. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine work here.
Arthur Gordian returns with a real doozy: Transgenderism Is Propaganda Designed To Humiliate And Compel Submission—i.e., an not mere virtue signaling.
[C]onsider an additive hypothesis: the Cathedral elite know full well that transgender individuals are mentally ill and have chosen to embrace this cause for ulterior motives, as there is something inherent in the issue that provides them an advantage. Transgenderism is Type 1 Propaganda, and its primary targets are not loyal leftists, but individuals on the marginal Right capable of swinging either for or against the Cathedral.
And he makes his case. Well.
Weaver explains that this form of propaganda is aimed at demeaning, humiliating, and eroding the self-respect of those who oppose the regime. It is an expression of pure power, in that the propagandist can force the victim to repeat a doctrine that both people know is untrue. There is no potential gain for the propagandist except insofar his enemy is psychological broken and defeated. There is no intention for the “Big Lie” to have any effect outside the torture chamber. Whether or not transgender individuals are accepted by society is irrelevant to the exercise of power by the Cathedral elites over marginally right-wing individuals.
One of the best pieces you’ll read this year, I think. Which I hope you will do. In an otherwise strong week, this won the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ going away. Mr. Gordian really knows his stuff.
Remember how last week was real slow here at SM? Well, neither do I. This week was jam packed with good stuff. Luke Wesson makes a debut on Thursday with A Tutorial In How To Switch The Ruling Class—a topic of not a little interest in these parts. Wesson gets a lift in the lesson from the under-appreciated Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class. Mosca is the one to whom we owe appreciation for the oft-repeated neoreactionary formula: A coherent minority (the “ruling class”) always and everywhere rules over an incoherent majority. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
For those of you starving for Ryan Landry content, he joins the West Coast Guys™ for Myth Of The 20th Century: Episode 37: The Cambridge Five—King, Country, Class and Club.
And the multi-talented Michael Andreopoulos has some original verse to round out the week: The Passage.
This Week in Kakistocracy
First this week Porter takes some satisfaction in What is Best in Life. To crush your enemies, etc… But even better is seeing your enemies destroy themselves:
Before we get to the edifying example of that, consider the logical sand hole white leftists are burying themselves within. They serenely proselytize the gospel of evil whitey to quickly converted ìminoritiesî without ever seeming to wonder how those receptive minds might extrapolate the message.
Then, a little dissatisfaction (to put it lightly) on the recent DACA business in The Artlessness of the Deal. Much in the same vein as previous posts, the salient point being that the GOP, including Trump, has bent to the Left’s frame:
For instance, if I am in the market for a 1998 Nissan Sentra, I donít counter-offer $35,000 if the seller is asking $40,000. As a party of opposing interests, his assessment of value or propriety is not the basis of mine.
And finally, Porter takes a brief look at the financial costs of illegal immigration in The High Cost of Sharing. Who would have known that a society needs net producers in order to have nice things? And of course, don’t broken windows raise GDP?
A slug leaving its mucus trail across the wall can conceivably add a dollar to GDP. But that tells you nothing whatsoever of whether its presence represents an economic boost or burden to the host society. And that absence of actual insight is precisely why liberal economists find GDP so useful.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with an uncanny set of “coincidences”: Sam Worcester, Cherokee Missionary: Relative or Physiognomy?
Next a bit of a fisk on Tablet’s typically abysmal coverage: The Fault in our Tongues: Tablet, Spencer, and Political Deafness. Yes, journalists have a special charism from Jeezus to look into Alt-Right hearts and see whether what they say is genuine or a troll.
What does it mean to appropriate someone’s values? “You can’t be an environmentalist, only people whose ancestors were environmentalists are allowed to care about the environment?” “I’m sorry, but since Freedom of Speech was not originally enshrined in your country’s laws, you’re not allowed to want it.”Courtesy Craig Hickman.
But if we read the paragraph again, it becomes clear that Tablet doesn’t really want to accuse Spencer of appropriating liberal values, (which it thinks he does not hold) but instead the logical arguments used to support liberal positions.
Sadly, Richard Spencer truly believes in liberal values. This really turned out to be a pretty solid analysis on Multi-zionism, as well as the disingenuity of Tablet reporters.
Rounding out the week another of Mrs. X’s invaluable Cathedral Round-Ups, #26: Philosophy—Poor Oppressed Minorities At Extremely Elite Schools Edition.
[P]erhaps people who get into top schools develop some form of survivor’s remorse? How do you reconcile a belief that “elitism” is bad, that intelligence isn’t genetic, that no one is “inherently” better than anyone else nor deserves to be “privileged” with the reality that you have been hand-selected to be part of a privileged, intellectual elite that enjoys opportunities we commoners can only dream of? Perhaps much of what passes for liberal signaling in college is just overcompensation for the privileges they have but can’t explicitly claim to deserve.
Blank-slate equalism is generally self-congratulatory: “Genetics didn’t give me success; I did it… through my own hard work.” (Ignore genetic predispositions toward hard work.) How most-favored minorities manage to spin this is anybody’s guess. I suspect it’s convenient to believe the “victim” bullshit. Hey, it pays the bills. The academic discipline of philosophy is looking as white and xy-chromosomal as ever, so the Ivies have much over which to beat their collective breast.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
The week starts off at Thermidor with Gio Pennacchetti’s Content Minded: A Brief Reflection on the 2017 Content Emmys.
N. T. Carlsbad offers up The Comte de Montlosier’s Swansong for the Debased Nobleman. The eponymous Comte tried to combine both liberal and reactionary principles.
Montlosier was driven by one overarching principle: that the superior cannot be judged by the inferior. However, he did accept much of the Revolution up to about early 1790. This was not an unusual opinion among the Second Estate, as their cahiers de doleances of 1789 do show a lot of internalized “enlightened” principles. “From the right of personal liberty arises the right to write, to think, to print and to publish,” declare the nobility of Blois at the time. Not much else left for them to do except babble, anyway. They couldn’t even heed the advice of “enrichissez-vous” because engaging in commerce was an offense strictly worthy of d’Èrogeance (loss of nobility).
In the end, however, he wound up firmly on the reactionary side.
Montlosier’s De la Monarchie française, interestingly enough, was commissioned in 1804 by the Corsican mountebank Napoleon Buonaparte. It wasn’t finished until 1807. After the censors read it, its publication was delayed until the Restoration in 1814. It’s pretty obvious why—the sheer elitism of it is poison to any national-egalitarian unity. As it ought to be!
The Committee deemed Carlsbad’s an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Next up, Jake Bowyer provides some Latin American-inspired political theory with The Caudillo Principle. Neither liberal nor fascistic, …
…a truly ideal caudillo state would be one that is at once hierarchical, authoritarian, and anarchic. Picture this: the central state agrees that the home is ruled by the patriarch. The next level of power, the municipality, is ruled by the people, who in turn elect or somehow chose the best among them to wield power. The next highest level is the central state itself, which pledges to never interfere in either the home or the municipality so long all are loyal to the sovereign. Such a hierarchy contains enough decentralized power and guaranteed liberties that it meets the criterium of a libertarian state.
However, on a philosophical level, this state also agrees to the idea of patriarchy as being the most divine form of leadership, thereby stressing the reactionary ethos. Most importantly, this hypothetical system would recognize the importance of struggle for the health of social organism, and would, therefore, encourage the creation of militias and private protection societies in lieu of standardized police forces or a standing military.
Bowyer readily admits that such a state is unlikely to emerge out of the current political milieu—but that fact has never dissuaded true reactionaries. This too earned a nod for ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
M. Charles Stuart offers some commentary on the nature and significance of neoreaction in Whither Reaction? Stuart suggests we think of ourselves more as a debating society than as a “movement”.
If we stop thinking of ourselves as a “movement,” and instead think of ourselves as a debating society, or if you will, a series of private, volunteer think tanks, we will be focused above all on the project of establishing the truth or falsity of our central proposition about liberal democracy. Of course, this ambit provides much flexibility to explore a number of different topics from many different perspectives.
Stuart’s characterization of neoreaction is not wholly wrong but is outdated. Convincing people that liberal democracy is a bad idea is not our primary goal—we expect reality to do that for us more and more in the future. Rather, we are looking ahead to what comes after the coming collapse, preparing for that stage both as men and as intellectuals.
The week comes to a close with Childhood & Holiness, an essay by Romanian theologian Nichifor Crainic. The essay focuses on, well, childhood and holiness, but it also dwells on the nature of the state and its relationship to both of those things. RTWT.
This Week around The Orthosphere
Kristor distinguishes between The Truth That Founds the Error of Pantheism and actual God.
Richard Cocks gets The Trolley Problem Solved. All you have to do is find a scapegoat.
Alan Roebuck writes this Letter to My Son: What is Postmodernism?, leaving out certain key concepts such as deconstruction, but including the more important points like relativism.
Another strange consequence of postmodernism is this: A postmodernist, a person who believes in postmodernism, is not certain of postmodernism. And so if you tell him what postmodernism is, he’ll say you’re wrong.
Matt Briggs writes Glubb Glubb Glubb: The Noise A Drowning Civilization Makes, where he reviews Sir John Bagot Glubb’s essay describing parallels between historic and modern civilizations and their decline. Then the uncomfortable task of requesting readers to Give It Up to help support the author of one of the more excellent blogs out there. Lastly, degenerate Oscar nominees, pro-life hate speech, female firefighters, Englishmen going native, and college spaces safe from veterans, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update V.
And the incomparable Ianto Watt continues his project, A Clash Of Empires, Russia & USA Part II.
Now this brings up my little pet theory. Think with me here, Komrade. If the Soviet Union did really collapse in 1991, and all those state assets got sold off to the Oligarchs for pennies on the dollar, how was it that the Sukhoi Design Bureau never got sold? And the Mikoyan-Gurevich (MiG) Design Bureau never got sold? And what about the Russian boat works? You know, the ones that produced the new Kazan-class boat this year that is state of the art for submarine warfare? Who kept producing those RD-180 rocket engines that we have to beg Moscow to sell us? Tell me again. Weíre the super power, right?
On the Catholic front, Bonald notes a San Diego bishop calls for purge of homophobia and Pope Francis clarifies: preservation of cultural and even religious identity is not an acceptable reason to limit Islamic colonization. Then, this fascinating Book review on absolute vs. relational theories of space and time.
It was a pleasure, for instance, to read about Newton entertaining the proper Aristotelian question of whether space is to be regarded as a substance or an accident. (He concludes it is neither, but a sort of necessary emanation of God.)
Mark Richardson bemoans A strange pathway to transsexualism, offers ridicule when A bank redefines marriage, and strikes an indignant tone when Breitbart confuses conservatism and liberalism regarding the legacy of the Hef.
And according to Dalrock, the elite plan for the poor is to Let them become elite through the miracle of birth control, delayed marriage, and student debt.
This Week in Arts & Letters
A Triumph of virtue made the rounds on facebook this week, and (from the sublime to the ridiculous) biz weighed up the merits of the latest celeb-endorsed ICO with typical exuberance. To file under the serendipity of networked information-aggregators, this splendid collision.
Evelyn Nesbit (1884–1967), American chorus girl and model
Over at City Journal, James Piereson investigates The Big Fix, a historic corruption scandal that sheds light on the current fiasco facing College Basketball. Judith Miller presciently forewarned of Storm Clouds in the heightened vigilance of security and intelligence agencies about the threat of terrorism. Dalrymple with another first-hand perspective on the shifting mores of the Arabic world, as it takes One Step Into Modernity. Stefan Kanfer meanwhile explores Hugh Hefner’s arrested development on his demise at the grand old age of 91. Nicole Gelinas rakes over the disastrous implications of bail-out economics in the aftermath of Puerto Rico’s Maria Reckoning. Mark Pulliam surveys the formidable gauntlet the permanent state will have in store for pro-Texit AG, Ken Paxton of the Lone Star Chamber. Bob McManus pores over the ongoing trainwreck of Anthony Weiner’s political career as a man Consumed by Compulsions, "Hit send in haste, do hard time at leisure" indeed. McManus also takes on the grim account of a murder in a New York City high school that illustrates the Mayhem and Failure now endemic in the system. Kevin McCarthy praises the uniquely American fashion of Confronting Disaster. Steven Malanga suggests it’s about time the NFL should check its antitrust privilege. And Heather Mac Donald has a few delusion-puncturing words to say about BLM hyperbole in its disconnect from the FBI’s most recent crime stats Hard Data, Hollow Protests.
Chris Gale is against tolerating evil, prompted by sad news from the Gloriavale cult. His quote of the week addresses the perversion of natural law implied in the feminist HR push. He is also dismayed by the imminent retcon now that Disney owns Marvel; and yet celebrates the creation of a new Alt-Hero. He laments the influence of the new breed of political old cat lady, warning, Do Not Be Theresa May. Urging quietism and passivism where warranted, as Against State-sponsored worry. And enjoying two poems of Hulme, as well as the usual Sunday Sonnet.
All was quiet at the Logos Club this week. But Albion Awakening was fairly busy. Bruce Charlton was in strong and supple form, wrestling with the Difficulties of being strategically evil. A sort of steel-manning exploration of the moral reasoning required by the agents of the new global totalitarian society, and its ever-present adversary in Grace. Quite brilliant.
He was also tackling the contemporary Western perversion of metaphysics this week, in a trio of essays that also shone brightly. Firstly, on the defective compromise of modern metaphysical attitudes and the importance of making them explicit; then on the paradoxes entailing from and constituting the demonic spirituality that rules Albion, and then again on this rot as it has seeped into the very ethos of the modern Christian himself, What is wrong with (real) Christians? Finally, he caps off a journey around England with some direct observations on its moral character and mood, informing an appraisal of What can be done towards awakening Albion? I can’t pick just one, so go and RTWT, by which I mean, the whole blog!
Harper McAlpine Black returns with a customarily scintillating account of Don Mei and the Tea Revolution. Coffee-lovers proceed with caution, you may be triggered by some of the political implications of your hot beverage of choice herein disclosed! Though not personally a fan of gurning vloggers as harbingers of cultural change, if this does indeed lead to a greater availability of silver needle tips at the local vendors’, perhaps it will have been worth it after all.
Another one of Evelyn Nesbit, ca. 1905.
Richard Carroll is revisiting the Hyakunin Isshu and exploring its possible invocation as an Anglophone version. Its first fruit, this delightful comparison of Fujiwara no Masatsune with the celebrated imagism of Pound. Bravo Richard!
Fencing Bear has (a lot) more to say on the slings and arrows of outrageous flamewars with the Female of the Species, as well as the Power of Prayer to mitigate and dispel the sense of encroaching darkness.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Malvasi responds to Jospeh Pearce with an argument Toward Patriotism: An Alternative to Nationalism. Birzer remembers his first encounter with Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Gleaves Whitney’s ongoing series on Stephen Tonsor explores the civil war as The South & The American Iliad. T.Adams Upchurch is concerned by rampant Zuckerbergation or What Has Facebook Done to Political Discourse? Joseph Pearce celebrates, The Hobbit at Eighty and rejoices in its eternal orientation toward goodness, truth and beauty. Jacob Bruggeman delves deeper into the infernal machinations of those Relentless Rationalists: Creating Hell for Humanity, meanwhile Jacoby Sommer finds us at the Homeric Crossroads between justice and human nature, or what some of us have elsewhere framed, purity and GNoN. George W. Rutler on what happens When Colleges Betray Their Benefactors. Stephen Turley assays the problem with Misunderstanding Populism. Musical and poetic interludes, by way of Respighi and Blake. Louis Markos on Pope Francis and the Caring Society. And finally, Terez Rose conveys the fascinating mystery of Mozart’s youthful purloinment of Allegri’s Miserere, or The Day Mozart Stole Music From the Vatican.
This Week in the Outer Left
Quite a variety of material from the left this week, which is always nice as a change of pace from the same old tired talking points and omigodding.
Craig Hickman of Social Ecologies maintains his spot at the top of the left list, with a really fantastic meditation on the regeneration of the West. At stake here is the postmodern infection and destruction of the West’s universities. If he keeps it up with pieces like this, we might re-evaluate whether Social Ecologies will continue to be classified as a leftist blog.
Their enemy is every aspect of Western Euro-American Culture and its intellectual and imaginative inheritance. To put it bluntly: they seek to wipe out the ancient the Greco-Roman and Jewish Hebraic Culture of Western Christendom without mercy. The hatred of every aspect of the past two-thousand years of Christian culture and thought is the enemy for this ultra-left vanguard of mercenary literati.The quite lovely Evelyn Nesbit
Sadly most universities have lent their ears to such non-sense and the humanities have been stripped, gutted, and slowly but surely turned to ashes over the past decades by academics that harbor the postmodern and progressive worldview that sees in traditional culture an enemy to be silenced, erased, and forgotten—its thought and intellectual inheritance, its imaginative literature and aesthetic worldview wiped from the face of the earth.
Not your Grandfather’s Intersectional Feminist Leftism, that’s for sure.
The Baffler makes another appearance this week, as yet another example of just how insane the left is getting. Siddhartha Deb pens a review of Mark Lilla’s recent book The Once and Future Liberal, tellingly calling Lilla yesterday’s liberal. It is only out of politeness that I call this a review, as Deb absolutely excoriates Lilla and deems the book full of wrongthink. Let this be piece of evidence #65876438 that you can be more left-wing than 99% of all humans who have ever lived (as Dr. Lilla likely is), but if you fall even one step behind as Cthulhu swims ever lefter, you will be cast out.
To my shock, there was actually a worthwhile piece at Jacobin of all places this week. Derek Davison does something that might even approach legitimate journalism is looking at monarchists and automobiles. At issue here is the news that Saudi Arabia will be allowing women to obtain driver’s licenses in the near future. Davison does himself credit by asking the important question “why?”, and his answer might even be the right one.
But because the driving prohibition was so infamous, because it was the public symbol of Saudi reaction for so long, lifting it is Riyadh’s ultimate “what about” moment. The Saudis are betting that by making a big show of allowing women to get behind the wheel, they can bamboozle western liberals into ignoring the litany of Saudi abuses and heap praise on them for removing a legal restriction that never should have been put in place to begin with.
And, rounding out our survey of the left, was Brandon Adamson of Alt-Left making a case for Catalan independence. Interestingly, Adamson directly addresses the case against Catalan independence one usually sees from nationalist minded people on the right. You’ll have to RTWT to see his response, and, whether you ultimately agree with it or not, it is thought-provoking in its Machiavellian approach.
The right wing reactionary nationalists are opposed to independence movements when they are leftist in nature and/or the group seeking independence itself largely promotes open borders. This argument was used against supporting Scotland independence and (to a lesser degree) Brexit. It is now being used against Catalonia. Right wing nationalists point to supporters of Catalan independence as being “commies,” radical leftists or as being for open borders (I’m not even sure to what extent this assertion is actually accurate.) Therefore they must not be allowed to secede and must be crushed. They must be forced to remain part of Spain even if they don’t want to.
This Week… Elsewhere
TUJ is still reading Metternich. He thinks America is Still a Republic If You Look at the Details. Just a really, really, really big… “republic”.
PA presents Salutary Images of Violence. Salutary and probably a whole lot milder than the violence deserved.
American Dad explores both the possibility and the great need for A framework for red-pill “therapy”. This was quite good too: In four short years… the years in question being 1984 and 1988.
Al Fin explains How to Win the War on Drugs. Social Matter does not (yet) take a position on this issue, but we note that comparisons of America to other Western Nations are bound to be misleading because of America’s uniquely diverse makeup. Also a pretty cool video here: A Child’s First 12 Years in Less Than 3 Minutes.
Social Matter alumnus Benjamin Welton is back up over at Zeroth Position discussing Privatizing State Security—contradiction in terms intended. While we have no great love of “privatization” for its own sake here, Welton scores some excellent points as he describes more and less successful models of private force. The Committee gave this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Heartiste unleashes some Cato the Elder on toxic egalitarianism.
Unorthodoxy is firing on all cylinders here: Culture War: Trapped in Satan’s OODA Loop. Also a movie recommendation. And a thank you and a (welcome) plug for us truly.
Giovanni Dannato speculates on Fourth Generation Sovereignty. We have our doubts about that.
Zach Kraine has some intelligent remarks on National Symbols, Patriotism, and Use.
Well, that’s about all. It was quite a big week by the looks of things: 6100+ words and ~130 links. Well over half of those words were composed by my trusty and faithful staff: Alex Von Neumann, Aidan MacLear, David Grant, Egon Maistre, and Hans der Fiedler. They are simply superb and keep this operation running—relatively on time. I keep promising a Monday Night delivery, and one of these days it’s gonna happen. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
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