This Week in Reaction congratulates the Philadelphia Eagles (aka., “Iggles”) on their Superbowl Win last Sunday. We believe the reasons Superbowl ratings were down was not due to any particular hostility from whites or anyone else towards the NFL, but primarily because the Eagles and Patriots are the two most hated teams (and fan-bases) in the league. It was, however, an objectively great game, which easily outshined its attached commercials and half-time show. We consider this a modest cultural victory.
And a toast for Elon Musk and Space X for the Falcon Heavy launch. May mankind eventually get out of low-earth orbit again!! Maybe space exploration is a jobs program. If so, they’re awfully nice jobs.
Over at American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson draws a bead on Counterfeit Elitism and has a glowing (and detailed) review of Trump’s First Year. And Angelo Codevilla exclaims, in light of the Nunes memo: Jail the Guilty, Repeal FISA.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton helpfully and briefly kicks off the week with Sunday Thoughts—freedom as fnord edition.
Imperial Energy delivers an installment of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 9A: The Permanent War against the Minotaur, in which he provides a valuable summary of STEEL-cameralism (a theory of military government), and answers many questions in critique of Moldbug. And… one more for good measure: Part 9B: Posner, Power and Profit: Judge Posner on the Federal Government as a Modern Corporation—a Critical Analysis, in which he poses yet more Questions for Neoreactionaries™.
Arthur R. Harrison emerges after a long dormancy to discuss “Two Families” of Orthodoxy—the two being the Eastern and “Oriental”.
Unamusement Park’s renaissance proceeds apace this week the an analysis of National existence: the German question. It seems Germany cannot keep herself away from existential crises. Henry Sumner Maine writes the prescription. Next an examination of Human Sacrifice, aka. “Pathological Altruism”, with an afterword from James Burnham’s Suicide of the West. He examines a remarkable Academic freedom accorded a non-ironic Communist at Drexel, who advocated a non-ironic White genocide. Unamused throws some David Hume on an Atlantic reporter-ette overly concerned about interest in racial differences.
Also there, a bracing dose of Revilo P. Oliver applied to A murder and a suicide. The murder was German medical student Maria Landenburger. The suicide is that of the West itself… Unamused snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his pithy efforts here.
Parallax Optics tells A Tale of n Accelerationisms, for n ≥ 2: “left”, “right”, and more? This too: Parallax Optics has a fine piece on art galleries and curatorship, and the tactics leftists use.
Adam, at GA Blog contemplates Force and Education. Beginning with protest, of the existential sort, he notes:
[A]ll serious politics regards regime change, either advancing it or preventing it—if you’re the sovereign, you want to ensure that the security forces make the right choice in that encounter. So, we can reduce all the things we talk about in politics, all the policy issues, all the outrages, all the big ideas, to that single question of the marginal security force: what will tilt the balance one way or the other when the regime hangs in the balance. The competent sovereign who wants to ensure that things never get anywhere near that point nevertheless will do so by reasoning backward from that point, and taking measures to ensure that each rogue move by some power center that might push us slightly closer to crisis is never taken.
The sovereign (or protestors—the vanguard of the future sovereign) ultimately have to appeal to the marginal security forces, i.e., the ones most ready to change sides.
One very good consequence of this approach is that it is a way of constantly baiting the left to support exactly those things that are least likely to lead the security forces to support them. What the marginal security force must find worthiest to defend are competent hierarchies, professionalism, loyalty, and courage. These are precisely the institutional structures and virtues the left has the greatest contempt for, because all of them presuppose a social and moral core that sets the tone for the rest of the social order. To put it in today’s parlance, all these forms are “white.”
Security, you see, is racist. Which, Adam thinks, puts a theoretical limit on just how much left-liberal elites can deploy HLvM strategy. You kinda need that middle, if you value security. There’s much more there. This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Contingent Not Arbitrary looks at the secular consequences (if any) of The Filioque, Metaphor Edition.
Titus Cincinnatus doesn’t always write. But when he does, it’s always fantastic political theory. This week we are blessed with The Bergeroning of Western Civilisation—Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron to be exact, wherein equality is enforced by handicapping the capable. And Cincinnatus sees truth closing in on fiction just a bit too quick. And he’s not willing to just blame it on the Puritans.
The current intellectual and political trends seem too incredibly out of step with simple common sense and a reasonable sense of self-preservation to be purely the result of historical accident. The West is currently replacing itself through mass immigration leading to demographic displacement. Common sense realities about human biodiversity which used to be widely known and accepted have been shuffled to the “fringe” by academic hocus pocus masquerading as science. Indeed, large swathes of the social sciences (especially psychology and anthropology) have been corrupted by the promotion of unscientific and empirically unsupported notions of racial equality, as well as by unsupported assumptions about the influence of “environment” over and against that of genetics, heredity, and cross-generational cultural transmission. The result of all of these things has been the development of unrealistic ideas about the way societies work which then leads to further unsound and destructive policy decisions.
Someone, it would seem, is deliberately handicapping Western societies, and it’s not just to score Jeezus Points.
[T]he real world consequence of this false ideology about IQ equality is to gradually lower the average IQs of Western nations, which in turn limits their economic and technological competitiveness. As these nations shoulder the burden of more and more low IQ third worlders, greater and greater amounts of their social and economic resources are tied with merely maintaining their present level of development against the corrosive influence of increasing numbers of dyscivilizational invaders. In essence, Western cultures are transitioning from being “innovator” societies to being “maintainer” societies. There’s a reason why we’re no longer seriously talking about going to Mars within our lifetimes—it’s because we have to spend our resources babysitting masses of people who still haven’t produced high civilization without Western colonial help even after hundreds or thousands of years.
The Jews are, of course, a tribe; a tribe hostile to Amerikaners. But so too is the Yankee Brahmin ruling class a tribe, and, if history is to be believed, at least as hostile to Amerikaners as Jews. It almost seems like they’re ganging up. The Committee bestowed this an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Also at The Neo-Ciceronian Times, Titus looks at The Religions of the Three Castes, or rather expressions, usually of the same religion, among them.
Sarah Perry returns to Ribbon Farm with an analysis of Justice Fantasies. Justice works better when you have recourse to a higher authority—imagined or not, religious or not. Ms. Perry clarifies with many examples.
Over in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf returns to the rallying point of truth and what it is (and is not) good for.
Bill Marchant is back after an extended break with Bystanders, Language, and Rallies, imploring the Alt-Right to come up with symbols that transcend Esoteric Hitlerism a little better. Marchant earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.
Malcolm Pollack finds the New York Times lamenting the “dangers” to democracy around the world. It’s About time! he says.
Over at Jacobite, editor Robert Mariani takes on a Jacobin hit piece in Lying About Jordan Peterson. The campaign to associate Peterson with the Right continues apace, and Mariani makes short work of a shoddily written article.
Anatoly Karlin uses the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch as occasion to argue that we should colonize space… with nukes. He will get no argument whatsoever from us on this point; the termination of Project Orion was one of many crimes committed against human achievement in the 20th century.
In the end, a combination of Cold War nuclear proliferation treaties and environmentalist hysteria about all things nuclear killed all these beautiful 1950s visions of nuclear trains and trucks and interstellar spaceships dead.
Considering that the nuclear taboo is now greater than ever – there are many demented national leaderships who are banning nuclear power – the chances of anyone resurrecting Project Orion must be considered very small. If anyone does it, it will most likely be either China, which doesn’t answer to demotist whining, or Russia, where the construction of floating nuclear power stations suggests that the anti-nuclear taboo is less than overwhelming.
Otherwise, the chances of us getting off this sad clump of rock in bulk and on a sustainable basis—and these two things are interlinked—must be close to zero for the foreseeable future.
By way of Isegoria… Razib Khan on Iron Age ethics by which we live—not like that’s a bad thing. Anomaly UK on the Political Animal. Who benefits most from early childhood education—answers will not surprise you. This was very interesting: By way of The Culture Code, Kindergartners vs. Business Students. On the significance of launching things into space. More from The Culture Code: Three negative archetypes. And Microschools?
Finally, this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: This Will Ever Be Our Story. A taste:
Is Christ a revolutionary? If He is not the Son of God, then of course He is a revolutionary. He was the great destroyer of the ancient Jews’ civilization, the Icelandic-Celtic civilizations, and the Greco-Roman civilizations. But what if He was the Son of God? Then the narrative changes. He was not the destroyer of the ancient Jews’ religion, He was the fulfillment of it. He was not the great destroyer of what was good in the pagan religions, He was the embodiment of all that was humane and noble in the pagan gods. What He destroyed was all that was ignoble and inhuman.
This Week in Jim Donald
A big week from Jim, with three posts, each of substantial length and depth.
Jim opened the week reporting on, and explaining, some research showing the disastrous effects of females in power. This is a must read, especially as a corrective for those who wish to reduce everything down to IQ, and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:
Women cannot do men’s jobs, and the pretense that they can and are is doing immense damage to men’s work and the creation of value by men.
Women in men’s positions subtract value. Women in powerful male positions subtract enormous amounts of value. Men at work get paid for creating value, and are forced to pay women for destroying the value that men create.
The reason for female under representation among top engineers, scientists, etc, is that women are slightly less competent on average and have a narrower distribution.
The reason for female under representation among CEOs is moral and emotional, unrelated to competence. Women are very competent managers. A woman has always managed my affairs, and generally done so very well, but women are uncomfortable running things without a strong alpha male supervising them and approving their work from time to time. If they don’t get the supervision that they emotionally need from someone masculine, patriarchal, and sexy, they start acting maliciously, and self destructively, running the operation off the road and into the ground in a subconscious effort to force an alpha male to appear and give them a well deserved beating.
Jim continues his Trump coverage with what we know about the Reichstag fire.
The Democrats applied the full suite of extremely powerful intelligence capabilities of USG to spy on Trump and everyone remotely connected to his campaign, in order to help Hillary and hurt or intimidate Trump’s people and deter potential people from joining up with him, and they wanted as much of that information to be as widely shared as possible so that the dirt they were certain would be there (which, to everyone’s surprise, wasn’t) would be leakable to the propaganda machine press and public in a way that would be impossible to attribute to any particular individual.
Using the fig leaf of an illegal fisa warrant on one member of the Trump campaign, they illegally spied on Trump and the entire Trump campaign, (“unmasking”, June 27, 2016 “Tarmac Meeting”, Samantha Power) expecting something to turn up that would retroactively make the spying arguably legal, legal in the progressive sense of “what does it matter now”.
Except that it did not.
Trump is in a hard spot here. On the one hand, he has more than enough justification to clean house in the FBI and DoJ, at a minimum. On the other hand, he almost certainly believes, and probably correctly, that if he does clean house in the Deep State, he will be unable to actually govern. If Trump had access to a large group of qualified statesmen in a traditionally Machiavellian mold, then the problem is solved: just clean house, put the statesmen in, and then Trump can rule in actual fact. If the courts don’t like it, then perhaps the phrase “shall hold their offices during good behaviour” should be reintroduced. If Congress doesn’t like it, then sufficiently aggressive deportations will elect a people who will elect a Congress that does like it.
And to finish out the week, Jim uses Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy launch and the announcement of a military parade to reflect on guns, ideas, fashion, and military parades. This is one of those pieces that merits reading all the way through, but you should not neglect the comment section. Some of Jim’s commenters are ankle-biters, but many have good contributions on the subject of reactionary fashion.
Ideas are more powerful than guns, but fashion is more powerful than ideas.
If Trump has a military parade with snappy parade uniforms, we may well win. Trouble is that our elite has been busy making soldiers dress androgynously, because they hate and fear the military. We are always ruled by warriors or priests. If soldiers continue to dress like Elon Musk’s rocket scientists, soldiers, like nerds, will remain low status, and priestly rule will continue.
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My assessment of the fall of Kings that began in the nineteenth century is that kings did not fail because of gunpowder, did not fail because industry rather than land became the source of wealth. Kings failed because George the fourth was fat, lazy, had a fat mistress, a bad tailor, and slept with other men’s wives, but most of all, Kings failed because Beau Brummel made the Puritan aesthetic cool. If King George the Fourth had had better fashion sense and hotter mistresses than Beau Brummel, and if his mistresses had, like Beau Brummel’s mistresses, only been sleeping with him, instead of sleeping with him and their husbands, we would have been fine. Also, if he had gotten off his fat ass and did some kinging, we would have been fine. He failed in the job of being the fount of all honors, mortal and divine (which is to say the job of regulating status competition into prosocial positive sum displays, rather than antisocial negative sum displays). The successors of the puritans took that job, ran with it, and have never let go of it.
Seriously, guys, learn to dress well to go along with your lifting. If you need help, and you almost certainly do, start here with Ryan Landry. (As for me, I picked up a leather Stetson last week.)
This Week in Social Matter
Alex Sadler makes a fantastic debut in the pages of Social Matter, with an analysis of The Fundamental Problems Of Democracy. Çritiques against democracy are manifold, but here Sadler captures the essences of 6 key problems, by which we have a handy checklist to evaluate possible alternatives. He has a jaunty and economical writing style to go along with his solid analysis. For example:
Full-spectrum weaponization is the idea that in a democratic system parties have every reason to weaponize every aspect of society and engage in epistemically destructive warfare aimed at people’s minds to extract votes. As such, people will remain powerless even if you hand them some small amount of decision-making ability such as voting because they will draw a bigger gang of people, such as the media, politicians, or anyone else who gains from swaying the vote. This can leave the voter worse off because parties and other operatives will use whatever techniques necessary to obtain the vote. These techniques almost always have a side effect of implanting false beliefs or memories and otherwise reducing one’s reasoning ability.
Not only is propaganda required to get you to love one government faction, but it you must be trained to hate the other one. A Kabuki Theater, played well outside the safety of the stage. RTWT! Alex takes home an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Try not to spend that all in one place.
This Week in Myth of the 20th Century, Adam Smith and Co., less Hank Oslo, have up Episode 56: Spanish Civil War—Collapse Of The Left.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Audacious Epigone tracks those Eugenic Mormons. Impressively so.
Gregory Cochran delivers Parts II and III of his review of Brian Caplan’s The Case Against Education (and a podcast to boot). He also opines briefly on the Diversity of Though on Campus movement and meritocracy.
Evolutionist X kicks off the week wondering Is Crohn’s Disease Tuberculosis of the Intestines? Very big science piece.
She remembers the simpler days of Elementary Communism—an ideology of sharing, which truly makes a lot of sense… when you’r nine.
And Anthropology Friday continues to walk through by Caleb Everett’s Numbers and the Making of Us, pt. 4/a>.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
Over at our sister publication Thermidor, Jake Bowyer kicks things off with Giving the Greens the Blues. Bowyer ponders and condemns the priorities of the rioters in Philadelphia after the Super Bowl. Fly Iggles Fly!
Europa Weekly discusses Frei Bürger on the Land.
Next up, Nathan Duffy reviews the recent films “Mother!” and “The Shape of Water” in Unsubtle Propaganda. Duffy provides a solid rundown of the anti-Christian themes and messages of the two films.
Wyndham Wright makes his debut with Modern, All Too Modern: Jordan Peterson’s Empty Dream. Wright examines Peterson’s work and influences and illuminates limitations to his challenge to modern ways of thinking.
In most popular renditions of his work, Peterson comes across like a Marie Kondo with footnotes. For Peterson, however, tidying one’s room is merely the start of self-examination and with it, a journey through the symbols and sidequests that make up life. Crucially though, Peterson’s journey starts and ends
with the individual.
That part of his schtick is indeed a bit cringeworthy. Individual vs. collective is not either/or.
Finally, Lancelot Andrewes returns with a historical piece: When Fr. Neuhaus Saw Cthulhu. Apropos the kerfuffle over the Edgardo Mortaro case, Andrewes reviews a First Things symposium twenty years ago about the overbearing judiciary which raised comparable condemnation from “respectable” conservative commentators. This is a must read and earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Seriouslypleasedropit hasAssorted Thoughts, including an excellent practical rundown on sexual polarity.
J. M. Smith focuses On the Words Patriot and Country in the “Dangerous Sense” and asks, although a patriot should love his country, whether this means he must also love his government. Then he writes this ode of Valediction to the Hickory Stick, whose disciplinary song is no longer heard in elementary schools.
Thomas F. Bertonneau’s students seem to say, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Especially when they don’t have enough critical thinking ability to cogently analyze a short poem with clear devices.
Bonald advises to just accept Surrendering to the communists and teaching white children to hate themselves: more stuff we mustn’t be discouraged by. Move on to more winnable battles, he says. Well… we can certainly mock them without mercy, while we’re doing all that surrendering.
Matt Briggs asks Do Demons Exist? and answers affirmatively. Those steeped in a materialist or empiricist mindset will very often come to believe in the necessity of Hell before the necessity of Heaven. He argues that Abortion Supporters Believe In Magic.
If the fetus is only a blob of tissues that “holds the potential for human life,” then it must be that at some point in time the blob is transformed from a blob into a human being. The only way this can happen is by magic.
Also from Briggs… deconstruction of philosopher Tamler Sommers’s rejection of free will with You Don’t Have Free Will. That’s Why You Make Such Bad Choices. Also, Equality of Opportunity Always Masks Desire For (More Than) Equality Of Outcome. Finally, Special Forces making entry tests easier for women, minority quotas being pushed on corporate boards, and Judith Butler trying to ban socially conservative speech, all in this week’sInsanity & Doom Update XXI.
William Wildblood discusses the fatally materialistic origins of Feminism and Power.
It is no coincidence that the female revolt against the male followed the male revolt against God. Men cannot blame women for this. By not living up to their responsibility, they have helped bring this situation about, though it has certainly been encouraged by the dark powers who, among other things, have promoted the illusion that one is somehow less valid a person as a wife or mother than as a unit of economic productivity. Only a materialistic age like ours could believe such an idea.
Sunshine Thiry gets a lift from the Babylon Bee: Woman To Shelve Belief That Gender Is Social Construct For Few Minutes While Boyfriend Changes Flat Tire On Side Of Road, which highlights some glaring contradictions in modern feminism. Then, in More Self-Contradictory Feminism: My body, your choice (beverage edition), she criticizes a feminist who thinks men should be responsible for enforcing a drink limit upon their dates.
And this was interesting… Duck Rabbit reviews an important study by anthropologist J. D. Unwin which concludes that Sexually permissive societies always fall.
[A]mong the 86 different societies he studied, he not only found monogamy to be correlated with a society’s strength, but came to the sobering conclusion that “In human records there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.”
This Week in Arts & Letters
PA has up some more translation work from the Polish: “A Letter To Che”.
It turns out that Belloc has a lot more poetry in store, as Chris Gale brings us another Sunday Sonnet. He then advises Milo to “Get thee to a monastery” in Hate Facts, along with a few words on Godly Hatred. He then laments that They Don’t Make Socialists Like This Anymore— with a sense of humor, that is. He also has a very good discourse On Clear Speech, and then comes up with four good reasons to Burn it Down. It being what some among us would refer to as the “poz”.
At Imaginative Conservative, Harry Lee Poe catches a glimpse of the Cathedral in its infancy, in Edgar Allen Poe’s Literary War. And Maciej Was on G.K. Chesterton’s dubious Rehabilitation of Eros.
Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal brings up a disturbing new trend Moral Hazard. It’s an ironic inversion of the natural order indeed when children have to save their parents from reaching into the pill cupboard.
Richard Carroll takes a look at Cardinal Newman’s Portrait of a Gentleman and his defense of liberal (not that kind) education.
At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless is back for Part II and III of his Overlooked Fundamentals in Fiction Writing series.
This Week in the Outer Left
Speaking of fertility rates, Lyman Stone asks How Long Until We’re All Amish?
The New Inquiry rarely graces the pages of TWiR, but when they do, oh boy, it’s a doozy. This week is no exception, as Taeyoon Choi takes issue with artificial advancements. There are a lot of technological advancements that make life easier for handicapped people, from the venerable cane to hearing aids to prosthetics. You might think this is a good thing, and you would be right. Many on the left, however, will tell you that you are wrong and ableist. As anyone who understands bioleninism would predict, the left does not want to help the handicapped, but rather mobilize them. In a footnote, Taeyoon Choi even refers to “disability as a political identity”. The left is the enemy of everything good and decent, and they will try to mobilize the handicapped, and even the ill, to win the status game for themselves. My anger at this is overwhelming, because I take great issue with the demand that people needlessly suffer for some made-up political identity that is constructed solely as a club to use against me.
At The Baffler, Natalia Antonova offers up her thoughts on Russia’s election. Anatoly Karlin will be disappointed in me if I do not point out that Miss Antonova is Ukrainian, which I am assured is relevant for very good reasons. Anyway, Miss Antonova finds much that is objectionable about the Russian presidential election and the virtual certainty of Putin’s victory. This is, of course, another way of saying that the American left finds much objectionable about the Russian presidential election, but they are quite impotent to do anything about it. For the time being, Russia is safe from the Cathedral, but it will be fascinating to see what happens when Putin does decide to step down. For obvious reasons, progresives would really like to add Russia to their collection, and will pull out all the stops to do it once Putin is out of the picture.
You know that someone has really pissed off the left in a big way when both Jacobin and The Baffler publish attack pieces on him in the same week, which is just what has happened with Jordan Peterson. The attack at Jacobin is by far the less interesting of the two, and has already been adequately destroyed by our friend, Robert Mariani, at Jacobite, so I see no reason to pay it any more mind, just read what Mariani had to say.
The Baffler, however, actually comes close to landing some blows on Dr. Peterson, and does so in a way that is of interest to you, the TWiR reader, so let’s talk about it. Full disclosure: it is the Official TWiR Position that Jordan Peterson is, on balance, a force for good in the world at this point.
In essence, the essay argues, when it isn’t being obnoxiously irrelevant, that Peterson claims to be defending Enlightenment values and traditions from the left, but the left started that whole Enlightenment thing to criticize values and traditions, so there!
Peterson—whose favorite medium is the fervent oration, rather than the tightly-argued treatise—is a strange figure to present himself as defender of rationality and critical thought. For one thing, most of his disciples find him through YouTube; of these Peterson estimates 80 percent are male. For another, his ideas and political views mirror not the grand ideals of the radical Enlightenment, but the tradition of reaction and conservatism associated with the Counter-Enlightenment, mixed with the accessible self-help style of pick-up artists like Neil Strauss.
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The strange paradox we face today is that the Enlightenment is being invoked like a talismanic object to thwart the very questioning of political hierarchies and norms that, for Enlightenment thinkers, was necessary for humanity’s emergence from tradition and subordination. But even if the forces of Counter-Enlightenment may have now adapted the language of rationality to their own purposes, authentic Enlightenment thought has never been about building up the bulwark of tradition.
The crux of the reactionary critique of Jordan Peterson is actually precisely this. His ultimate worldview is utterly at odds with the Enlightenment, but his politics have not caught up to this fact yet. We can hope that one day they will and Jordan Peterson will start telling his followers to read Moldbug. Until that day, however, if someone brings up Jordan Peterson to you, take it as an opportunity to drop some small red pills because if anyone is a gateway drug to reaction in the Current Year, it is JBP.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Steven Pinker has released a book Enlightenment Now in which he argues that innovation and decline in large-scale violence are products of the Enlightenment. Here’s a more detailed synopsis and interview.
Catholic theologian and talk show host Patrick Coffin interviews Jordan Peterson on his new book, faith, evil, and the origin of bucko.
Over at Econlog, David Henderson reviews a study showing that male Uber drivers earn more than female Uber drivers—you know how sexist fee rate algorithms can be. Also at Econlog, Scott Sumner can’t figure out why the GOP never seems to stand for its apparent “core values”. Weird, that.
Heterodox Academy announces the hire of its new Executive Director, Deb Mashek, who left academia to lead the fight against the SJW-infested ivory tower. Good luck accusing Heterodox Academy of sexism now, libtards!
Over at Quillette, Bo Winegard discusses research on progressive bias. In the first part in a series on diversity, Evan Osborne laments the folly of minority cultures refusing to adopt their homeland’s way of life. Walter Olson confirms there’s no wave evidence of murder wave targeting gay Americans.
This Week… Elsewhere
Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui continues his exploration of (unironic) Libertarian Statecraft with Political Strategy. Qui spills much ink on the structural impossibility of implementing libertarian solutions at the political level. With which we quite agree. So what else is there? Destruction of the state by secession and/or revolution, he thinks.
There can be no libertarian statecraft if there is a state. Conversely, the abolition of the state will create the possibility of statecraft that far exceeds anything we have yet seen.
Camila Banus as Lola Montez
In other words, abolition of the state will create the state. With which we are also quite agree. Tho’ we do hope to avoid the first step altogether.
Also there, Nullus Maximus post the second of his “Agreeing with Statists for the Wrong Reasons” series. This week: Conscription.
Ace emphasizes the necessity of standing firm: “You could be right, they might come for me at night—an angry mob with torches bright outside my door…”
Al Fin explains Where Would We Be Without Renewable Energy—about where we are now, except a good deal richer. And he compares Good Elon vs. Bad Russia.
TUJ provides General Thoughts on DACA.
PA has a field guide on how to Agree & Amplify With Libs, and why this works.
Unorthodoxy considers going with the flow as a strategic position.
Heartiste offers a wonderful video and expert commentary: the Arc Of Beauty. As well, some pointed social theory on The Particularism Of White Morality.
Arnold Kling is pretty interesting here on Dave Rubin and the Weinstein Brothers.
As you may have noticed, this one was very very late. I had been traveling over the previous weekend and was just exhausted on Tuesday night. Never fear, we shall be back on regular schedule by next week. As always, my TWiR staff pull a large fraction of the weight: Special thanks to Burgess McGill, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant, and Aidan MacLear for a job well done. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/02/11) appeared first on Social Matter.