This Week the brilliant memesters of 4-chan invented “It’s Okay To Be White” and then sat back with a tub of popcorn and watched. “So it’s… not okay to be white???” PA explains. A guy on Medium (of all places) had a pretty nice play by play too. Also Chris Gale’s worthwhile commentary.
Well, it was Halloween. Hope everyone got some nice beef jerky.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton serves the sphere doubly by kicking off our week with a few well put Sunday Thoughts on the moral of any story.
Parallax Optics shifts from first into second with The Positive Prescription. Brief, but supremely well-put. E.g.,
While we’ve presented our thoughts as analysis, diagnosis and argument, on another level it’s all just complaint—the eternal recourse of the disempowered child.
We’ve complained that the system is unfair, we’ve complained that our opponents are zealots, we’ve complained that everything is going to shit…
Now it’s time to build.
Don’t wanna steal any more of his thunder. Please RTWT. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Handle, of Legend, awakens from blog slumbers with Some Comments on Yuval Levin. Quite a few comments actually. A good ones too. Like a perspective on Cthulu Swimming Left…
Have you ever taken your kid bowling with the “bumpers” on over the gutters? If you see the right bumper bounce back the bowling ball, but the left bumper isn’t up, and the bowling ball only bounces back from that direction when it’s thrown so incredibly hard to the left that it bounces off the edge of the gutter itself, then you ought not to conclude, “No worries, we’re guaranteed to knock down at least some pins.” One only need look at the score, see some zeros despite those reliable bounce-backs from the right bumper, and conclude, “Hm, it seems that the guardrails aren’t working.”
Much of it was about the Flight 93 Essay—or rather the spirit thereof:
XXII.YL: “To look upon our country in our time as a society so degraded and depraved that almost nothing could be worse than its present condition is to allow despondency or partisanship to cloud our judgment. And to think that a presidential election victory—indeed that a loss for the left, almost regardless of the person who would win—could by itself set us back on the right course is vastly to overvalue electoral politics as a means of renewal and strength.”Mothers carry the most precious cargo.
XXII.H: Again (again), no one was claiming imminent zombie apocalypse, and no one was claiming the election of Trump would set it all right again. Anton argued that Clinton’s election would provide a certain, irreversible, and significant deterioration for the prospects of Constitutional conservatism in America, in the manner of the New Deal, not that it would mean Venezuelan bread lines a month after her inauguration. The “charging the cockpit” metaphor doesn’t mean a promise to set the place back on course and land safely, it means it’s the only chance you’ve got, and even if you yourself are doomed, you may end up saving some things you care about currently in the sights of your enemy. As for overvaluing electoral politics as a mean of renewal and strength, it’s obviously possible to undervalue it as well, which I’m afraid TCM has been doing for a generation.
It is quite long, but we hear from Handle so rarely, that it is certainly worth the read. It was also an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam searches for The Single Source of Moral and Intellectual Innovation. Which is all hard for me grasp, even set down in pixels on an html and css template. Along the way some interesting digressions on stereotyping and scapegoating.
Neocolonial is back after a long break. As always, he is terse, and shockingly on point: Deconflation: Right-wing. He throws the right wing-left wing spectrum under the bus. In it’s place:
- Using loyal and seditious also allows a much clearer rendering of Conquests Second Law:
“Any organisation not explicitly loyal to the Crown sooner or later becomes seditious.”
Shylock Holmes contemplates how we’ve gotten very adept at insulating ourselves from death and all its evidences, and makes a case for a renewal of the memento mori in The Imperfect Vision of the Past. The past is a foreign country. And in many ways more foreign than we’ve been given to imagine. Holmes snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ here.
Alf has a post-mortem on Poor Eminem. And the speculative saga of Barron Trump continues in The Orb of Covfefe, Part V: a new plan.
Spandrell chides American Soldiers, quite rightly I think for the reasons given. Nevertheless, it’s good to see a demographic in which Trump is so beloved.
At Jacobite, Razib Khan gives a survey of American entho-political history in America’s Demographic Deliberalization. Khan argues that the reemergence of ethno-nationalist politics could have been foreseen, and he is in agreement with Neoreaction as to its prospects.
[T]he reality is that demagogues cannot turn back time. They can only delay the inevitable. Sans mass ethnic cleansing, accommodations between peoples must occur. And when these accommodations come they will operate as understandings between elites of disparate peoples, and the political units which emerge to foster stability will resemble the ramshackle oligarchies and monarchies. When the people are too many dissonant voices, conductors must come on stage and enforce harmony and suppress individuality. In an age of diversity there will come the oligarchy.
This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Nigel T. Carlsbad is reading Old Books, friends. This week he covers Charles Reemelin’s Critical review of American Politics (1881). Reemelin doesn’t fit preconceived categories well, at times sounding positively monarchist and at times utterly progressive. Even so, he sounds orders of magnitudes more sane than any pundit today:
Reemelin declares: “The best status of mankind in morals, laws, and wealth can be reached only in a society, which measures its present wants by the standards of experience recorded in books and learning of all kinds, but which also lifts itself out of the old ruts by the help of progressive science.” For this, the Rechtsstaat. The inchoate politics of America are its opposite, a mere counting of heads or arbitrary wills. A true government of law requires the cooperation of society with culture through universities (!), deliberative assemblies, independent judiciaries, and free executives, “in the formation and execution of an intelligent, virtuous, wise, collective will.”Mothers are building cathedrals designed to last for eternity.
The more one tried to avoid this for the, what he calls, “fallacy of the hope to escape corruption and despotism by having a minimum of government, and it neglected and unwatched,” the more public robbery and avarice one would observe.
Reemelin also spotted The Cathedral. It was, of course, much smaller in those days. Little did he expect his beloved Universities and endorsed permanent bureaucracies to become capstones of it. The Committee tagged Carlsbad this week with the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
By way of Isegoria… He’s built up a remarkable repertoire of postings http://www.isegoria.net/2017/10/all-hallows-eve/; yet more from Techniques of Systems Analysis here, here, here, and here; The greatest trick the advertisers ever pulled; and The fascist that Germany’s baby boomers loathed was a loyal servant of Communism.
Malcolm Pollack has some brief comments on the Islamic Truck Attack in lower Manhattan. And he explains why Transgendered is the new Sacred.
Finally this week in CWNY, The Institutionalized Tragedy of Liberalism, with leisurely stops at The Bard and Tennyson.
Every regime, even a satanic regime, has its jesters. But a satanic regime uses jesters to ensure that there is no high humor, humor that elevates the soul. There must only be mocking, jeering humor that is supportive of the almighty satanic state. One must either face the fact that one lives in a kingdom of tragedy where “humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters from the deep,” or else a man must take the opiates of modernity and proclaim that he loves the modern negroid states of Europe and is a very happy man. If we face the reality of modernity, we will not be dancing in the streets, we will have no kindly fools to ease the pain of existence, because institutionalized liberalism is institutionalized tragedy that kills the good fools, but we will still have souls. If we take the path of spiritual anesthesia, we might be superficially happier than the non-anesthetized, but we will lose our souls.
This Week in Jim Donald
Only one entry from Jim this week: his usual update on the weird world of Trump. Drawing on Chinese history, Jim explains that Mueller points deer, makes horse. Point deer, make horse is one of those neat Chinese phrases that is bound up in awesome Chinese political history. It’s a brief piece from Jim, so I won’t bother excerpting, just go RTWT and you will be fully caught up on the latest in Trump.
This Week in Social Matter
Social Matter’s week gets its kick in the pants from Michael Perilloux’s The Golden Age podcast: Episode 5: Mission Command And Romantic Heroism with guest Rafael Xavier—a deep dive into military history and strategy.
The West Coast Guys™ celebrate acknowledge the Reformation in Myth of the 20th 16th Century podcast: Episode 42: The Protestant Revolution—500 Years of Division. They are joined by Free Northerner—one of my very favorite Protestants—from whom we haven’t heard in a while.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter more or less took the week off this time, stopping only to headline a comment on the previous post about secessionism in Secession Expanded.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X kicks off the week by tackling a question that I (Thee NBS) had pontificated about on the twitter: Are “Nerds” Just a Hollywood Stereotype? Mrs. X is a glutton for punishment I suppose. But truly I am honored by it. And she does a whole lotta diggin. My point was mostly validated, but it’s always a plus to see an intuition gilt in the bright light of SCIENCE!!
In most smart people, high-IQ doesn’t seem to be a random fluke, a genetic error, nor fitness reducing: in a genetic study of children with exceptionally high IQs, researchers failed to find many genes that specifically endowed the children with genius, but found instead a fortuitous absence of deleterious genes that knock a few points off the rest of us. The same genes that have a negative effect on the nerves and proteins in your brain probably also have a deleterious effect on the nerves and proteins throughout the rest of your body.
If athleticism-correlates-with-intelligence seems non-intuitive to you, perhaps you should read up on sample bias. Mrs. X snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for her excellent research and analysis here.
Next up: a Note on Ethnonyms and how (mostly white) people seem to want to change them every fifteen minutes so as not to offend anyone.
The term “Eskimo” is not even pejorative; according to Wikipedia, it means “a person who laces a snowshoe.” Snowshoes are very clever and useful inventions and there is no shame in being able to lace one properly. I mean, I’m an “American”, what’s that, a corruption of an Italian guy’s signature that got mistaken for a map label?
This turns out to be a bit more than “just a note”. But it is quite entertaining.
Finally for the indispensable Anthropology Friday, she’s reading Outlaws on Horseback: Henry Starr, Gentleman Bandit. Among quite a few others.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
Over at our sister publication Thermidor, C. A. Shoultz starts the week off with Deutschland Über Alles, an analysis of the rising nationalism in German politics. Shoultz argues that, contrary to popular belief, Angela Merkel has been ruthlessly pursuing national aggrandizement rather than implementing a principled globalist program.
None of these observations are made to chastise Ms. Merkel or her nation. Quite the contrary: many of those who deride “globalists” might turn from haters to champions of Germany when its commitment to sovereignty is fully considered. These observations, rather, are made to illustrate a broader point: since the dawn of the 21st century, and certainly during Ms. Merkel’s time in power, Germany has not been globalist at all. Rather, Germany has been pointedly nationalist, at every turn making decisions with its own self-interest in mind, over and against the lofty ideals of European identity or human rights. Its projections of shame and humility are a façade, behind which lurks a ruthless opportunist that will take every advantage and game every system while doing its best to avoid any negative consequences for its actions.
Viewed in this light, the “rise of nationalism” is nothing more than an intensification and reorientation of long-standing German policy. Shoultz gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for piquing the Committee’s interest here.
Moving from central to western Europe, Stephen Paul Foster asks Has the Spanish Civil War Ended? Foster explains how the current, popular narrative on the Spanish Civil War came to be:
[T]he Spanish Civil War is, perhaps, unique in the 20th century as a political rebellion where the forces of reaction prevailed against a well-organized, highly energized far-left terrorism supported by and aligned with the liberal and left-wing elites in politics, the universities and haute culture. Also unique is that the narrative of the Spanish Civil War that eventually triumphed was produced and widely promulgated not by the winners (Francoists) but by the losers (the left). Its success was due in large part to its simplicity as a tragic, but inspirational morality play. The freedom-loving, democratically elected Republicans, supported and defended by the International Brigades, succumbed to the tides of Spanish fascism under the leadership of General Francisco Franco, goose stepping in a junior partnership with Hitler and Mussolini.Mother Nature looks after her own.
Next up, Nathan Duffy breaks down reactions to another Hollywood scandal in Kevin Spacey and Homosexual Pedophiles. All and sundry, it seems, are at pains to separate Spacey’s behavior from his “orientation.”
This is something all the mocking responses of his statement have tended to miss. Most of them insinuate or state plainly that his homosexuality is completely irrelevant, and the tone of the reactions has verged on the hysterical. While some of the hysteria is justified (due to Spacey’s attempt to obfuscate and misdirect), at least some of it is because the LGBT lobby knows that raising homosexuality in this context will counter the propaganda they like to push on the matter. Namely that gay men are not sexual deviants, but normal and decent and good in every way. Spacey should be blamed for his cowardice but not for connecting homosexuality with adult sex with male-minors. It is the elephant in the room and not mentioning it would have been negligent.
This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Europa Weekly 49 this week: I’m Not Racist Mom, I’m Just a Gamer.
Another week, another pair of response articles, this time to a friendly Uzbek sharing the blessings of diversity with New York City. Jake Bowyer discusses American immigration policy and Uzbeki politics in Reverse Lottery.
Although merit-based immigration has its problems (it will lead to increases in East and South Asian immigration and a further increase economic disparity in America), it is preferable to some moronic lottery system that sacrifices Americans at the altar of the ever-hungry Moloch dressed in rainbow denim.
Stephen Paul Foster takes note of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s slippery language in Fake Pronouns and Muslim Immigrants. Cuomo plays the pronoun game, much to Foster’s annoyance.
[W]e need to decipher “Don’t let them change us,” one last slippery pronoun in this verbal smog to ponder as we twist the ring. Who does this man think he is talking to? Eight people, very much alive on a bike trail having a nice outing have already been permanently changed—into corpses by an angry Muslim in a rental truck. “Change” doesn’t get more profound and irreversible than this, and, as noted above, somebody, obviously, let this happen to us, somebody who should have grasped the obvious: that fewer angry Muslims in the U.S. means safer sidewalks and bike paths and, for those who care, less Islamophobia. How do we make sense of what seems to be apparent nonsense straight from the Governor’s mouth?You’re only fertile once. #YOFO
Finally, Fritz Pendleton rounds out the week with The Wild Socialism of Oscar Wilde. Pendleton reads The Soul of Man Under Socialism
so you don’t have to, and gives important context to the famous wit’s epigrams:
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
This is a seemingly brilliant sentence. It is timeless wisdom and speaks to those of us who try to have some special perception beyond just the everyday surface level understanding of things. When placed in its proper context, however, this quote is not so profound at all.
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Mr. Pendleton earns himself a nice ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his work here.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J.M. Smith recounts A Curious Prophesy from 1683 by Sir Thomas Brown, eerily predicting the modern political climate in the Americas. Then he makes the case that, although rape victims should usually not be legally faulted, they should nonetheless socially be Faulted as a Fool. Relatedly, he whimsically muses that a simple magic “no” is all it should take to still The Antic Dance of Folly and Desire.
As Kristor observes, Materialist Reduction *Just Is* Elimination. Didn’t Aristotle categorically settle this a few millenia ago?
In The Narcissism Test: Reality. Who Needs It?, Richard Cocks argues that knowingly taking the blue pill is a reliable indicator of narcissism.
The foundation of morality is this lack of separation—making not caring about other people irrational. All are an emanation of the same divine Spirit. Separation is not ultimate. To see and feel through this illusion represents enlightenment and salvation.
Matt Briggs writes about Soloviev’s inspiring prophecy regarding The Antichrist and The Coming Christian Unity. Then he describes the very popular power of
The Offence Fallacy. (British spellyng relevant.)
The Offence Fallacy is a particularly effeminate fallacy, because it contains the implicit premise that whatever “outrages” a (usually) woman, that thing cannot therefore be spoken of. The premise is also fallacious and self-defeating, because that premise itself is outrageous.
Also, pregnant “men” in Denmark and the UK, Christian persecution at University, Satanists moving up in the courts, and Catholic priests endorsing relativism, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update X.
Bonald also writes about pregnant “men” and how such definitions are merely A matter of language.
Even when not pregnant, they differ in important ways from other men and women. For convenience, we could have a word for these people; let us call them “uterines”. Only uterines can become pregnant. This is not hateful; it is tautological. We can have another word for the other medically important category of men and women born with penises who at some point in life might impregnate a uterine—call these people “seminists”. Which category a given person belongs to could be called its “procreaclass”.Cute girl on swing
That would be totally ironclad against all denotative drift, right?!!
At least, according to Mark Richardson, there are pockets of Feminists losing the terf war. (A TERF is somebody who thinks only women can get pregnant. It’s usually intended as an insult). Then he writes this brief but bold essay Sketching manhood.
William Wildblood writes a bit about The British Myth of King Arthur and the Holy Grail, particularly in regard to its call to holiness.
This Week in Arts & Letters
At Imaginative Conservative, the poetry of late Southern Agrarian Allen Tate: “Stranger”. A thorough review of the celebration of Halloween down through the ages. Deep poetry analysis here: The Language of Neurosis: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Casey Chalk has a very nice overview of The Wisdom of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King. A very well-done video interpretation of Poe’s “Ligeia—actor looks hella lot like Edgar Allan Poe.
Beauty is fitness ordered toward telos.
Also there, the music of Vivaldi Beatus Vir. Michael Connolly tackles Orestes Brownson’s New England and the Unwritten Constitution. Brad Birzer looks at Cosmopolitanism and the Hellenistic World. Finally the poetry of G. K. Chesterton, “Gold Leaves”; and John Donne, “The Apparition”.
Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga focuses on Risky Revenues—i.e., from legalized gambling, which is becoming a race between states for increasingly limited shares of market that no one really wants to get too large anyway. Beston has an expansive history of how professional boxers (more than others) have long been Champions of Place. On the 10 Blocks podcast, Judith Miller and Seth Barron discuss the recent Islamist Terror in Manhattan; and, related, Miller considers the potential dangers of a collapsing ISIS in Caliphate of the Mind.
Chris Gale takes inspiration from Christ’s teaching on What is important? As far as self-improvement goes: Streaks matter—for good and ill I think. And the poetry of Hilaire Belloc as a Sunday Sonnet.
Richard Carroll has a brief piece in his Friends Series: Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”.
And Logos Club got back in business this week with Kaiter Enless’ Məhshinēk Horryr, Prt.2: The Scourge of Neo-Luddism—or how inanimate objects do not have a will and cannot make you do something or turn you into something. You do those things to yourself.
Consciously or not, this move (internet agency attribution) is one which absolves oneself of agency in near totality (that is to say, to think outside of and beyond genetic propensities – to think in realms of pure fate, designs without cause). The Machine then becomes conceptualized as a agent who functions counter to it’s silver-screen cliche—whereas Hollywood machines are oft lumbering or digitally deft and invasive monstrosities of twisted, malicious steel—the machine here is a scapegoat for personal failing.
Enless earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine effort here.
I enjoyed Craig Hickman’s expansive musings on Tolkien’s Ring Trilogy as Pagan Myth. As well as his feature art, which is always top-notch. Even if sometimes a bit creepy.
This Week in the Outer Left
After last week’s mind-searing piece on juggalos, one would think anything this week would be a let down, but the left has actually come up with things that are… not completely without intelligence. So, let’s talk about it.
The Baffler makes its regular appearance in these grounds with some advice for its readers: don’t troll, organize. I’m not sure we have anything particularly to learn here, but it’s interesting seeing the other side have frustrations with certain kinds of juvenile activism too.
They [protests] are, rather, an all-too-familiar example of the aggrieved liberal superego simply advertising itself as aggrieved. Under this grand insular dispensation, stressed-out, privileged college students and disenchanted liberals alike can retreat to their own preferred sanctums of privilege to vent, as the rest of the world continues going to hell.
And in the realm of “a bit late, and missing the point”, Jacobin has a review of Blade Runner 2049, claiming that it shows no future at all. It almost goes without saying that the things I most enjoyed about the film were the things that most triggered Jacobin, but it shows the full lack of imagination on the part of the left that if a movie isn’t all about climate change and race politics then it cannot possibly be a genuine story of the future. So high on their own supply they can’t even enjoy good cultural products anymore.
Yet despite all its futuristic trappings, Blade Runner 2049 offers a conservative response to these collective fears, calling for a return to an imagined past of whiteness and traditional gender norms.
Holographic waifus aren’t traditional, no matter how much communists tell you otherwise.
The main character has a holographic waifu (played by the lovely Ana de Armas), but it’s calling for a return to traditional gender norms. Yeah… sure it is. Ya know, this is how techno-libertarians get pushed towards us. They get told that everything short of queer communism is a “return to traditional gender norms” and they start to wonder about those traditional gender norms, and why they existed in the first place, what problems they were intended to solve… and now look, you’ve gone and turned techno-libertarians who just did not care what consenting adults did with each other into sex traditionalists. Many such cases!
Over at Status 451, Samuel takes a cringingly centrist (and nominalist) approach to The Current Year’s Political Compass in I See Trad People. He takes it pretty deep though.
It’s nice to see lefties concerned about declining religious observance, and not even for all the wrong reasons. But extra street lighting and “third places” are an abject (and verbose) refusal to deal with the real issue: diversity + proximity = declining civic engagement. Among other things.
Finally, filed under Stupid Shit Shitlibs say… “Why is the UK government so desperate to get rid of foreigners?” Desperate… to “get rid”… of foreigners. Ya see, the British government is really Nazis; just really, really, really incompetent Nazis. Or something. More shit: “Please Don’t Procreate”. We said “pleeeeeze”.
This Week… Elsewhere
Al Fin considers A Mind Forever Young, and the manifold ways in which modern institutions (*cough* mainstream schooling *cough*) conspire to kill it. As well, some more Sino-bearishness. Also some well-deserved abuse of Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson: No Fool Like a Green Fool.
Ana de Armas, because you don’t need a reason to have pics of Ana de Armas.
Speaking of China… TUJ examines China Policy From The Perspective of Hamiltonian Regionalism.
This week in Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, porcine lipstick is applied to seasteading. It must not be seen as Colonialism 2.0, Chdeist insists. Call this Seasteading+. Hey! There was nothing wrong with Colonialism 1.0, but for the loss of will to keep it going forever.
PA wonders Whom Does This Political Ad Help? A disgusting ad that might very well continue to radicalize normie GOPers. Heartise comments on same. PA cobbles together a nice playlist for thoughts of home.
Speaking of Heartiste, this was a solid bit of analysis: Social Media, Dating Apps, And The Decline In Millennial Sex.
It think this bit On Consumerism, Corporatism, Time Preference, and Modernity scores some good points. I don’t go much for the Capitalism Has Never Been Tried tack, but author Insula Qui is certainly correct that the excesses of modernity have little to do with Double-Entry Accounting per se.
Xavier Marquez takes a valuable and expansive look into the first decade or two of the Bolshevik age in Utopia and Revolution that will be of interest to true students of the 20th Century. Iconoclasm, check. Science fiction narrative, check. Pseudo-religiosity, check. Ideologically driven degeneracy, check.
AMK has some scattered but occasionally quite poignant Thoughts on a couple of subjects. Like:
The shorter people’s interactions with each other are, the worse their behavior.
The shorter people’s relationships are, the less they invest in each other. <—This is the most important thing.
The more diversity, the less trust.
People behave badly because they know they can get away with it. They know they can get away with it because they change jobs frequently, lose friendships often, move constantly, and interact with strangers on a regular basis. Cities facilitate all of this in abundance.
Also there, more on Scientology, training routines, and the post-rationalization of abuse. The Committee ranked Marquez’s work an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
The Rebbe is a perennial (and, I think, salutary) thorn in the side of white identitarian politics. This week he notes that Since the 90s, the Ideology of the Left has been Intersectionality. And along the way explains how Jewish Privilege isn’t keeping Jews—at least of a certain variety—from getting flattened under the anti-“white” steamroller.
Buzzfeed had some of its “male” correspondents get their testosterone checked. What’s amazing is that they published it anyway. Heartiste has full coverage.
Unorthodoxy attends to the St. Louis Fed: Good Case for QE Being Detrimental. Now they tell us? Could the tide be shifting??
Giovanni Dannato does a nice job here of Unraveling Civil War Moral Hysteria in light of the recent General Kelly brouhaha. Yes. Slavery was the formal cause of the Civil War. But that doesn’t mean what modern propagandists want it to mean…
The problem with their virtuous narrative is that slavery causing the war didn’t mean anyone actually cared about Blacks. The truth is, nobody really did except for a tiny handful of abolitionists who nobody liked. Slavery causing the war doesn’t mean what they think it means.Anita Ekberg smoking.
The more important thing to understand about slavery is that it was an incompatible economic system with the wage-driven industrializing North. I suspect the moment Lincoln was forever set against slavery is when the institution arrived in Kentucky and depressed the local economy, playing a role in his family moving to Illinois. To really understand what slavery meant to average white people back then, you need only reflect on how average workers feel now about the onslaught of tens of millions of 3rd world immigrants.
Slavery was incompatible because free labor was toxic to the wage economy. If anything, many people who opposed slavery would have despised the Black slaves, a seeming contradiction to revisionist moralizers.
Dannatto gets a nod from the Committee with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.
Nishiki Prestige is back with a tale of Los Angeles, or rather, horror and disappointment. He really comes up with the cheeriest titles, doesn’t he, folks? The cheeriest, bigly. Anyway, RTWT and get uncomfortable when parts of it hit a little too close to home… I did.
There’s a big TV in every room, and they’re all on. You’re high on benzos and weed. You dream about the day you make it big. It’s gonna happen.
There’s always traffic, even at 2:00 AM. You can hear it from the back yard.
You only leave the house to spend money. For miles: endless strip malls. You can drive an hour and still be in it. “What else do I need?”
The restaurants are all chains. You have your favorites. You think Japanese food is rice, chicken, and teriyaki sauce. You don’t eat fish, because of the texture. They started giving you Ritalin at 8.
Greg Cochran has a brief (and darkly humorous) note on Orcas. Then a full form piece examining Augustin Fuentes’ claim “I am not a Moron”. Well, if ya need to say it…
Welp… that’s all we had time for. An interesting week jam packed with high quality articles. Many thanks to my tireless staff: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, Egon Maistre, and Hans der Fiedler, you guys basically keep the lights on here. Keep November NoFAP! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2017/11/05) appeared first on Social Matter.