Well… this week, NYT released its second “The Interpreter” episode: National Identity Is Made Up. While technically true, what they don’t say is far more interesting. The series is proving to be a cannula drilled into the stomach of the Cathedral. You can learn a lot from watching its digestive processes.
Over at American Greatness, Angelo Codevilla explains The Benedict Predicament.
[T]he prescriptions of “conservative reformers”—for example, Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic—deny reality. They suppose that economics, ever the ground of compromise, is the dividing line between Right and Left. Hence they posit that the American Left is amenable to retreat from confrontation, to live-and-let-live.Economics is not the dividing line between left and right. Nor, in fact, is live-and-let-live.
Over on Medium (which is a pretty bad medium), Nassim N. Taleb—the ‘N’ stands for No BS—addresses The Controversy around Skin in the Game, with his inimitable forthrightness… and overdue bitch-slaps for journalists and journalism. Now I keep saying Medium is terrible, but it is getting less terrible, I think.
VDH plumbs The Labyrinth of Oppressions for American Greatness. Also from VDH: The Real Russian Disaster, the multitude of ways Putin has peeled USG like a boiled peanut. Hardly a disaster at all, we think.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Spandrell is herald of the good news: China doesn’t care about your opinion. He takes us behind the scenes (and Chinese psychology) as Xi Jinping becomes Dictator for Life (or at least one presumes “good behavior”).
It should be no surprise that this drives Western politicians crazy. China is now fairly rich, it’s buying property and high-tech companies across the world. China has made Southeast Asia it’s diplomatic backyard, made a strong relationship with Russia against the US. It’s practically vassalized South Korea, and eaten up so much of Taiwan economy that it’s independence-minded government is limited to approving gaymarriage and bringing Muslim immigrants in order to beg for some Western sympathy.Figured this would be a good spot for an Asian girl pic.
All while internally the party’s rule is tighter than ever. The standard narrative of Western democracy is that a developing economy creates a middle class, who then agitates for political rights. That may or may not be an accurate representation of the European experience, the revolutions of 1848 and all that. But it most certainly doesn’t apply today. Today we have the internet. The internet creates monopolies by network effects. And governments just can’t help themselves from merging with these monopolies. In the West, Google, Twitter, Facebook, are all arms of the cathedral. They censor, control and gather data for it. In China, Baidu, WeChat, Alibaba, are all arms of the Communist Party. The only difference is that in China, they are formally so.
Communist… with Chinese Characteristics. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This week in Generative Anthropology… a whole lot of generative anthropology: First Words.
Free Northerner returns after a sizeable hiatus with an in-depth examination of The Young Man’s Dire Problem, and the ways aggregate statistic might not be capturing it.
Imperial Energy has A (Belated) Response to Gray Enlightenment on the Concept of a Crisis and the Nature of Political Judgment. This regards the extent to which Trump’s election represents a “defeat” of the Cathedral. And the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto soliders on to Part 10C: The System and Structure of STEEL.
At first, I thought Land Translator was a parody account. After reading this Exposition on Landian Accelerationism, that does not seem to be the case. Tho’ the “Verbiage be my God” thing seems also to be rather unironic. (HT: AMK.)
Arthur Richard Harrison checks in with thoughts On The Trad Blogosphere and the Prodigal Son, and one reason to actually not be mad at Pope Francis.
Sarah Perry admits to Luxuriating in Privacy. Atomised freedom does present certain advantages… for the select few who are not likely to be ruined by them.
Privacy is a component of well-being, a form of wealth, a luxury even, and the gains from supplying more privacy to a larger number of people must be weighed alongside alleged losses of social capital from atomization. What looks like a loneliness epidemic to a certain kind of observer may look like a golden age of privacy to another. Just as there are mental states that are only possible in crowds or with others, there are mental states that are only possible in privacy.
Alf wonders who can save…. A dying society.
Malcolm Pollack invokes James Burnham on South Africa’s latest “Land reform”.
By way of Isegoria… by way of Frank Herbert, A fountain pen is not a screwdriver. You can’t have Denmark without Danes. Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity. And Taleb: Belief is an instrument to do things.
Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, Reclaiming the Lost Children of Europe. An indictment of classical liberalism.
This Week in Jim Donald
A lighter week from Jim this time around, with only a single entry on Trumpian protectionism. As context here, Trump announced significant tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from our libertarian friends. Jim, however, reminds us of some relevant points.
Trump, in accordance with his campaign promises to the rust belt and flyover country, has just slapped a tariff on steel and aluminum.Gratuitous pic of Ana de Armas would look good right about here.
If you look at the Nucor product catalog, you can see that the USA has ceded high end steel production to foreigners.
Ceding high end steel production to foreigners is militarily unwise.
Ceding the high end is also likely to have externalities. A network of skills unravels. If company A does something high tech, it cultivates employees, customers, and suppliers that make it substantially easier and cheaper for company B to do something high tech, and this benefit is not captured by company A, unless, as in South Korea during the dictatorship, the state gives company A substantial monopolistic privileges, something difficult to do in a democracy, particularly a democracy where covetousness is deemed the highest virtue and high status.
And if company A stops doing something high tech causing other companies to stop doing high tech stuff – you have the rust belt, which is the network of high skilled white males unravelling. You have smart white men deskilling, taking opiates, and committing suicide.
Two points here.
First, describing the Rust Belt as “the network of high skilled white males unraveling” is basically perfect.
Second, the standard libertarian analysis that free trade tends to, on net, deliver quality goods at lower prices is generally correct. It is also autistic. There are values beyond the economic which may be worth trading a certain amount of economic efficiency to achieve. Even the most ardent free traders, and I know because I am one, agrees that protectionist policies benefit some group of people in the country. If the costs of the steel and aluminum tariffs are borne by the Brahmin and their Dalit and Helot foot soldiers, and the benefits accrue to the Vaisya and white working class, then it constitutes a Good Thing. It matters not one whit to me if a policy harms the Helots particularly, because they are foreign invaders who ought not be here and so count for virtually nothing in the economic calculus.
This Week in Social Matter
Arthur Gordian kicks off our week around here with a controversial, but nuanced, essay on Second Amendment Passivism. Second Amendment rights are safe for normies. Normies believe in abstract “rights”. We don’t.
Collective action is an exercise of real power in the modern world. Individual action is the mark of a loser, a fool, or a romantic. Traditional guns rights activism, prepping, or gun collecting will not actually do anything to enhance a person’s survival. The winning bet is not to outshoot the police, but to outlast the Left’s bloody-minded hate. By not making oneself a target, one ensures a better chance at surviving a Red Terror, and the best way to avoid becoming a target is to practice passivism.
I don’t take Gordian to mean that we should not own guns and know how to use them. Nor do I even take him to mean that we should not be NRA members, which confers many advantages in quite a few jurisdiction. The NRA has some power, and no doubt we share enemies with them. But the NRA is not in charge. Our enemies are in charge. So, until we can defeat our enemies in one quick decisive blow, we’re better off not being a pest (at least in real life). Gordian earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his solid work here.
Henry Olson returns on Thursday with an explainer: Why Does The Left Hate The NRA?
[I]f leftists are so concerned about violence, then how can we explain their utter indifference to every Muslim terror attack in Europe? European bombings or truck attacks happen with roughly the same frequency as U.S. mass shootings, and involve similar numbers of victims. And invariably, the Left’s reactions are to screech about one, and ignore the other. In London mayor Sadiq Khan’s immortal words, terrorism is just “part and parcel of living in a big city.” It is certainly de rigueur that no progressive person would ever believe that these attacks should lead to thoughts about changing the EU’s immigration policy. On the other hand, every U.S. shooting necessitates an immediate overhaul of all existing gun laws, and if you disagree, the blood of the innocents will stain your soul.
So… the left is not really concerned about violence. If they actually were, that’d be totally racist! No. It’s something else. But I don’t want to steal Olson’s thunder. An under-appreciated article, we think, which earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.
This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast is Episode 59: Malcolm X—Separation Or Death.
Malcolm X was once asked by a white journalist what he thought of the efforts of Martin Luther King to help blacks get the right to sit anywhere on the bus. He responded, “Having an opportunity to ride on the front, back, or middle of someone else’s bus doesn’t dignify you. When you have your own bus—then you have dignity.”
Sadly, his vision of “civil rights” did not please the white masters as much as MLK’s.
And for Saturday Poetry & Prose, newcomer Sutton Coldfield poses A Riddle (For A., Wherever I May Find Him). It remains, as of this writing, unsolved.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Over at West Hunter, Gregory Cochran endorses a study that concludes men know more general knowledge than women. Cochran also discusses what makes a race and argues that European is a legitimate racial group. He closes out the week by kicking around the idea of reviewing movies that should’ve been made.
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with How to Minimize “Emotional Labor” and “Mental Load”: A Guide for Frazzled Women. It kicks off with a debunking of an, apparently annoying article, but quickly looks at the science behind the state of relationships in Thee Current Year™. This snagged
an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. It turns out couples who share household chores are more likely to divorce….
Theory: well-adjusted people who love each other are happy to do what it takes to keep the household running and don’t waste time passive-aggressively trying to convince their spouse that he’s a bad person for not reading her mind.
Speaking of which, just as only Nixon could go to China (and just as only James T. Kirk could go to… whatever the Klingon homeworld is called), so too only Mrs. X could say this.
Men don't actually "mansplain." This a myth. The reality is that some women are really fucking dumb and can't handle people constantly pointing this out.
— EvolutionistX (@EvolutionistXX) March 3, 2018
which just might be the Tweet Storm of the Year thus far.
Next up, another installment of the invaluable Cathedral Round-up series #30: HLS’s Bicentennial Class. HLS, of course, is Harvard Law School for all you non-Ivy plebs. They used the august occasion to… what else?… celebrate diversity!, of course. Tho’ Harvard has a particularly privileged position when it comes to it’s “diversity”.
And for Anthropology Friday, the long, strange (and totally non-ironic) trip through the Scatalogic Rites of All Nations continues with a part 2.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
Over at our sister publication Thermidor, Andrej Sykora pens An Open Letter to Jay Nordlinger. Sykora rebuts the same old accusations leveled against Putin and Russia and reminds Conservatism, Inc. that their influence is waning.
The core claims against Putin, that he’s evil, that he’s exceptionally corrupt, that he’s a Hitler in the making, all of these are as unbelievable to American conservatives as the phony “Russian hacking” scandal that your magazine continues to endorse. For a long time, you’ve gotten your way, telling voters that while their values and beliefs are important, the interests of world-police international liberalism inc. come first, which means a mandatory two minute hate every day against the Russian state until it returns to the Yeltsin era. I’m sorry to say it’s wearing thin.
Walter Devereux delivers his usual quality work with Driving Old Dixie Down: The Fragility of Nationhood. Devereux considers the vandalism of statues of Southern heroes and contrasts it with other attempts to erase old cultures: the Boers of South Africa and the English under the Tudors.
What we are witnessing, therefore, is an attempt to erase the South as an independent identity not because of its Whiteness, or because of its illiberality, or because of any other peripheral reason, but ultimately because it has been identified as an obstacle in the path of the nationhood that a certain portion of the identity-building elite have been trying to force into existence on this continent for over a century.
Devereaux is quickly becoming one of our favorite writers in the sphere, and this piece in particular quite impressed The Committee… to the tune of an ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Congratulations, Walter!
Europa Weekly discusses The Non-Microaggression Principle.
Finally, Jake Bowyer rounds out the week with Zero Day for South Africa. With the National Assembly compounding general mismanagement by voting to seize White-owned land, prospects for South Africa grow grimmer by the day.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Kristor, musing on the nature of the Noncontingent, writes The Form of Forms is Itself Formless.
Bonald points to some of the lesser known facts regarding Isaac Newton: Arian heretic, millenarian kook, scandal to the modern mind. Then he asks When is school most pernicious? Probably some time between middle-school and high-school.
[T]he Church is at a huge disadvantage in that we only get to do religious education up till confirmation, meaning middle school. Leftist indoctrination continues through graduate school, so it’s no wonder people come away with the idea that Christianity is intellectually a middle school-level belief system.
Matt Briggs presents The New Old University: The Outline, a manifesto which begins to outline plans for what he calls a “Realversity,” that which he suggests a real university should be. Also, Some Doctors Want More People Taking Antidepressants even though meta-analysis suggest these medicines may have low effectiveness. Then he pops “The Conservative Case for…” into the old Google and sees what comes up. Without fail, the result is ìThe Conservative Case For… Giving in to the Left. And finally, more fun with Google searches and demography in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXIV.
Mark Richardson writes of the origins of feminist individualism. It goes back some way:
For some generations, men have been encouraged to develop, as before, in relationship with others, but young women have been encouraged to see this as oppressive and to develop solo. It’s possible that this explains, in part, the reluctance of many women to see their husbands as making sacrifices on their behalf – perhaps women assume that men have the same outlook, of solo development, that they themselves have been brought up to believe in, or perhaps they even think it wrong for a person to develop in relationship with others rather than as a solo act (so they mentally refuse the idea that it is a good thing for their husband to make sacrifices for them).Girl smoking.
This is one aspect of life in which a traditionalist community could very readily distinguish itself.
Richardson continues to analyze The solo mindset and its relation to atomized consumer culture.
Dalrock compiles some useful Links to posts for Christian husbands.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale starts off the week with a Pound poem about Pounds, and brings us part three of Sydney’s Astrophil and Stella for our Saturday Sonnet. I feel obligated to provide a little bit of context for our readers, and contrast Sydney’s courtly love with the fact that, contemporary to our poet, the middle and lower classes of England built elaborate contraptions that they used to dunk their bitchy wives in the local pond to cool their tempers. Indeed, both the carrot and the stick are necessary for raising good women. Not coincidentally, Anne Locke, another contemporary, displays more guilt in fourteen lines than I’ve seen from millennial women in my entire life in our Sunday Sonnet.
Stephen M. Klugewicz at the Imaginative Conservative illustrates The Decline of Western Civilization in 10 Pictures, a piece which could have come straight from our meme presses. As always, the road to reaction is aesthetics. And James Matthew Wilson republishes T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, which is a real titan of an essay on reactionary poet T.S. Eliot. RTWT, then pick up Eliot’s complete works and RTWT if you haven’t done it already. Modernism in general represents a last generation of traditionally-minded men staring right into the abyss and chronicling the spiritual horror, and is definitely worth the study.
Richard Carroll arrives at Socrates’ death this week in Plato’s Dialogues: Phaedo. Along the way Carroll draws some sharp, short lines between the philosophy of Socrates and what we now know as Christian doctrine. Remarkable. No wonder St. Paul was received so well on Mars Hill. An excellent bit of analysis which impressed The Committee, who give it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
At City Journal, Brian Allan has a retrospective on the life and work of photographer Peter Hujar in Shadow and Light. And Lance Morrow tackles our culture in The Age of Travesties.
John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening introduces Welsh author Arthur Machen and his novel The Great Return.
Logos Club was fairly quiet this week, with Kaiter Enless plugging away at The Iron Garden, picking up at Part 6. Here are part 7 and part 7. Also The Brass Rat, a (very) short story.
This Week in the Outer Left
The Baffler came through with a take on the recent school shooting, and whew boy, we got a live one here. Now, in order to present this piece in its proper context, I must first direct you to the photograph (below) of author Jay Baron Nicorvo. He looks like Pauly Shore reborn as soy. This is the person who dares to lecture us on violence, claiming boys do cry (and shoot). I could do a point by point takedown of this nonsense, but I will instead quote it at length and then drop my take.
Male fragility is a biological fact, encoded in our cells. This certainty has yet to work its way into our popular consciousness, but the body of evidence is now irrefutable. Each lone gunman—engaging, by the week, in blatant acts of domestic terrorism, eroding the safety of our schools, dance clubs, and churches—shows us the same damn thing. These killers of women and children, of teachers and deacons, are often white but not always, often young but not always, often certifiably sane but not always. But be he a Nikolas Cruz or a Stephen Paddock, a Dylann Roof or an Omar Mateen, the killer is always, always a man.Jay Baron Nicorvo: Physiognomy has perhaps never been so real.
…
Boys are more sensitive than girls. Boys do cry more, are more anxious, have a harder time regulating emotion, care less about objects in their environment, are more likely to suffer developmental disorders and genetic defects, and are more susceptible to malnutrition and disease. For boys, parental unavailability and insensitivity have a greater effect on attachment to a caregiver.
…
Girls are—simply and truly—heartier than boys by just about every measure, and any self-respecting Darwinian—no longer exclusively a men’s club—would agree that women are the fitter sex.
…
The reason for greater female fitness is due to the discovery that women are less disposable.
I’m going to ignore the bad science being indulged in here, and just assume everything said is correct and take it at face value. The misandry that drips from every pore of Nicorvo’s being still doesn’t follow.
Male variance is greater than female variance on nearly every trait that has a heritable component, this must be said again and again. Which means, that while men dominate among the ranks of murderers, men also dominate among the ranks of heroic and badass pacifists. Men dominate among the ranks of dullards, and among geniuses. Male variance is greater than female variance, always has been, and always will be. These are facts rooted in biological differences between the sexes. Drawing a misandrist morality play out of these facts is completely inane and does nothing to advance the conversation about crime one bit, and is the exact opposite conclusion one ought to draw! Friend of Social Matter, Free Northerner, said it best: “patriarchy is essential to controlling male humans’ destructive impulses“.
Also at The Baffler, Zach Webb opines on a different tragedy of the Commons. He is discussing a new housing startup, called Common. There isn’t too much to say here, it’s another example of the bugman seeing the world he has created and shying away in horror. So, if that sort of schadenfreude is your thing… and c’mon, it is… definitely RTWT.
I will make one comment, I suppose. It is a commonplace that housing costs are skyrocketing. The mainstream conservative and libertarian response is “let more housing get built”, which is entirely correct, so far as it goes. What is missed is the greater context beyond government over-regulation that impedes building more housing. We are witness to a great hollowing out of America, away from the heartland and to the coasts. The number of metropolitan areas that offer numerous high quality jobs is going down, even as population climbs. The Rust Belt stands as the monument to this hollowing out. As more people crowd into, for example, the Bay Area, even the most permissive housing policies in the world would likely not keep up with demand. But if jobs are decentralized out among a greater number of urban centers, that makes it easier for any one area to cope with growth. But just look at the list of cities that have gone from centers of high quality jobs to death zones in just a few generations: Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Baltimore.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Park MacDougald has a kind of meta-review of reviews of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed: Has the Operating System for the Western World Crashed? Curious analogy. Very curious.
Filmmaker and former BBC4 dude Dave Fuller’s First full documentary on Jordan Peterson is now up. About 50 minutes long, and surprisingly sympathetic. Very much worth a view. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Also on Medium demographer Lyman Stone outlines The Rust-Belt Comeback, Cincinnati-Style, with a whole lotta data to parse.
Jordan Peterson answers questions on grief, religion, therapy, and more from his Patreon supporters.
Fashionably self-described “classical liberal” Steven Pinker goes on a Guardian podcast to talk about academia, the need to listen to “repulsive” ideas, and the folly of blank slate theory. In a case of possible irony, he also gets called out by Elon Musk for his ignorance of AI.
In a busy week for EconLog, Scott Sumner dreams of a world where people don’t know who the president is. If only there were political systems other than democracy! Sumner also discusses how nationalism is changing political fault lines and argues against Trump’s trade war. David Henderson shares his respect for Jordan Peterson. Bryan Caplan shares his opening statement from his recent Capitalism vs. Socialism debate. Finally, Richard McKenzie argues for the inherent rationality of consumers in the EconLog article of the month.
Quillette’s Nick Ottens examines how rural, blue-collar whites have been pulled far-right and how to bring them back in line to the center. David Johnson discusses the effect of pro-immigration bias on social sciences. Clinical social worker Lisa Marchiano defends a shocking study linking social influences to transgenderism among teens. Genevieve Weynerowski argues that the word ‘privilege’ has lost its usefulness.
Heterodox Academy’s Nick Phillips discusses the limits of viewpoint diversity.
This Week… Elsewhere
Education Realist provides commentary on Teachers and Smart Kids.
Zach Kraine marshals some key ammunition against Mandatory voting, most of which can be aimed at voting at all. Also: why Matriarchy is an absolutely terrible idea.
Ace is superb here as he muses on the phenomenon of talking good internet game: “He can’t even run his own life, I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine…”.
Al Fin dives into San Francisco’s (human) waste crisis—very brave man. Also: Take Time to Meet Your Overlords. You’re paying for ’em. In the Dangerous Children department, Al covers The Importance of Inoculating Against Groupthink.
Heartiste delves into Leftoid Cognitive Biases: Negative Transference And Psychological Projection. Also a crucial HateStat Of The Day.
Over at Zeroth Position finds himself Agreeing With Statists For The Wrong Reasons: Anti-Discrimination Laws. He suggests: Agree and amplify.
PA discusses styles of Propaganda for different styles of ideology.
Fred Reed speculates on The Future of the Jews.
Speaking of which, Rebbe presents @FrameGames: evidence he’s LARPing as a Jewish Lawyer. I really don’t have a dog in that fight. I follow them both. Also there: an ambitious outline of The Jewish Question Rebutted. And The Truth about Islamic Immigration, in which he presents a pretty strong history lesson in American Politics.
Unorthodoxy seems to be well within his wheelhouse when it comes to discussing Why Tariffs. Exploding the WTO is only part of the fun…
America’s enemies operate through a web of multinational institutions. Those institutions were designed for America to dominate the world and defeat the Russians in the Cold War (the U.S. banned trade with the U.S.S.R. and it didn’t end well for the U.S.S.R.). Those institutions have now become a noose hanging the American people and a tool for oppression of anti-globalists around the world. The institutions are riddled with globalists. They are riddled with people who believe free trade theory and open borders.
That’s about all we had time for. A slightly lighter week than usual. Hope you are all having a blessed Lent. Cannot thank my Based TWiR Staff enough. Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and (new guy) Burgess McGill: You guys keep the lights on! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/04) appeared first on Social Matter.