Theranos was back in the news. The bad news that is. And speaking of diversity: This week brought us the Diversity Bridge Collapse at FIU.
This week in American Greatness, Victor David Hanson finds Swamp Things in the Russia Investigation. Mueller and Comey are the probable tip of the iceberg. Swamp iceberg that is. And VDH does what he does best: history, in Lessons from Germany’s ‘Spring Offensive,’ 100 Years Later.
Oh, an the Great School Walkout of 2018 happened. Which no one will remember, by Fourth of July. Unless Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young write a song about it.
Last Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day. Or as we call it here: The Octave of St. Patrick. Paleo Mexicano offers a list of his Favorite Irish writers and books, and a few of his not-so-favorites.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton helpfully kicks off our week with his Sunday Thoughts—Lessons China is NOT Taking From the West Edition.
Giovanni Dannato finds it “impossible to ignore the politics” of The Shape of Water: Del Toro’s Final Descent into PC. But he tried.
Parallax Optics has well-placed thoughts on Exit Accelerationism.
This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam introduces a political position of Centerism, which bears an unfortunate lexical nearness to centrism, “which will undoubtedly one day become a synonym for ‘stupid.'” Centerism refers to “donating your resentment to the center”. If you’re like me, you’ll need an example:
To be a centerist is to seek out the more sustainable center, and do your part to make it even more sustainable. For the criminal, that might mean abandoning the co-conspirator/friend and finding in the legal process that now frames him examples and signs of significance to which he can convert; or, it might mean sticking with his friend and sacrificing himself in the name of a friendship that now means something more than it did previously. Even in the latter case, assuming the two survive, the fact that a new center has been found might open both of them to yet other centers, centers that it’s no longer so easy to dismiss as relevant only to the less lucky, brave, or skilled. Maybe the two friends can now encourage each other in self-reformation projects. Their resentment toward law, or order, or civilization, or respectability, or whatever it was, must now be donated toward that center in order to make it more capable of ordering such self-reformation projects.
As Adam’s explanation continues, “centerism” seems to be the persistent advocacy of transcendent goods. Which even liberals cannot avoid displaying, despite their ideological commitments otherwise, i.e., to the transcendent good of having no transcendent goods:
[W]hat center are you defending, and what is the center of that center? They will be with you in the opening—I’m defending basic human dignity! Human rights! Or, even, the Constitution! But what then? If we argue about what constitutes human dignity or human rights, what guides our arguments—what makes one way of understanding “human dignity” or “human rights” more plausible, sustainable, or legitimate than any other? They will drop out quickly, and implicitly concede they are just trashers (I’m defending human dignity against…!), but any terms regarding human goods of any kind whatsoever assume reference to a disciplinary center and a sovereign center: this is the kind of thinking that has converged on this question or category, and here is where I am within that kind of thinking; here is the kind of sovereign I imagine enforcing or protecting “rights” or “dignity” and here is the kind of order that makes such a sovereign imaginable.
Adam scores another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Imperial Energy has up the next installment of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 12: A Reactionary Vision of World Order.
Those Who Can See have up a new one: The Progressive Project: Re-Colonizing Africa. As always, it is copiously researched and magisterial in both content and tone. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Alfred Woenselaer conducts a thought experiment with The internet as a religious superorganism. Not that the internet itself is a religion, but that it is religious. With it’s own codex prohibitorum and everything.
The Streisand effect did not show that censorship fails, because we know censorship works. Instead, the Streisand effect showed the inability of the deep state to effectively censor the internet.
This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Anatoly Karlin considers Great Britain’s priorities to be backwards. 1,000 girls raped by subhuman savages? Meh. Lauren Southern tries to visit the country? REEEEE! Kipling assured us that eventually the Saxon will begin to hate. Any time now would be great, guys… guys?
Anatoly also provides a very systematic review of Russia’s technological backwardness. RTWT, but I can sum it up in three words: it ain’t good. Russia in general, and Putin in particular, gets a lot of praise in our sphere, but Karlin is unstinting in his assessment and does not spare Putin at all.
Nicolas Hausdorf at Jacobite reviews Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One and offers general commentary upon the Ending of the Long 20th Century.
Things were down over at Malcolm Pollack’s last week. Hosting troubles, not related to Malcolm’s politics we hope. He’s always a gentleman in spite of his dissident viewpoints. Or rather because of them. Not that google will care. This week: “These are teenagers, folks!” You only pretend to listen to them! And he follows Andrew McCarthy’s excellent exposition of the Mueller probe.
By way of Isegoria… The culture will simply be that which is best at reproducing itself. Those wanting to ban guns better be careful what they wish for. The Elephant in the Brain. A prototype proton battery. How psychopaths see the world. And… Yudkowski on What’s a fire alarm for.
This week’s missive from CWNY: Our Faith Is Our Destiny.
This Week in Jim Donald
Jim favored us with but a single entry this week, observing as China passes the US. In view of Anatoly’s entry on Russian technology above, one might quibble with Jim’s assessment of Russian military technology vis-à-vis the United States. However, there is no denying that China has, in many ways, surpassed the US and is well on its way to becoming the pre-eminent power on the planet. But China is not a danger to the average American, the danger is already inside the house, as the horror movies teach us.
China’s total GDP has passed the US, though the US official statistics are in denial. Per capita GDP remains well below that of the US, but the gap is rapidly shrinking, with increasing numbers of westerners seeking Chinese jobs. Technologically, China has focused on buying, stealing, and copying US civilian technology and Russian military technology. But in civilian technology, the pupil has surpassed the master. All Chinese CPUs are based on the Arm design that they purchased from the US long ago, but they are now improving on this design in ways that arguably leave the US behind. They are at least equal in CPU design and fabbing, arguably superior. They are still copying, but are less reliant on copying.
Meanwhile US academia focuses on combating masculinity and raising female self esteem by showering them with unearned credentials.
To the average individual American, especially one of the “let’s just leave the rest of the world alone” bent, becoming number 2 in some statistics likely doesn’t matter one whit when stacked against pressing needs of family, community, and faith. But to the hardcore Cathedralite, it matters because it is the substitute for all three of those normal concerns.
It is difficult for us on the right to understand just how much Cathedralites insist that “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice” and actively care about making it so. China doesn’t even understand that diversity is our strength, they simply can’t win! Remember the shocked and angry disbelief when Trump beat Hillary? Amp that up a couple orders of magnitude and that will be the reaction when an ordered, sovereign state that doesn’t embrace the Cathedral’s religion becomes the most significant country. In that blinding anger, the Cathedral is likely to be very dangerous indeed.
This Week in Social Matter
At Social Matter, the week kicks off with Benjamin Welton’s micro-history: Military Adventurer Raymond Westerling On How To Defeat An Insurgency.
Westerling is often pilloried as the embodiment of evil—a throwback to the bad, old days of swashbuckling adventurers promoting white supremacy at the point of the bayonet. There is certainly some truth to this, for Westerling achieved his successes through harsh methods.
Sounds like our sort of guy! Fast on the heels of WW2, while the world was weary of war and with the Dutch liberated from domination (and collaboration with) the German Wehrmacht, Netherlands had their own empire to defend. In Indonesia.
Because of the haphazard nature of Dutch deployments between 1945 and 1946, Amsterdam’s attempt to reclaim the world’s largest Muslim nation proved to be an uphill battle to say the least. Westerling tried to correct the deficiencies in the field by creating a network of local informants. By September 1945, Westerling and his KNIL unit controlled the restive island of North Sumatra thanks to the “Westerling Method.” This method included three prongs: 1) the 570-man strong DST (Depot Speciale Troepen), a commando unit skilled in low-intensity warfare, 2) the use of informal spies drawn from the local population, and 3) very public acts of violence.
Game of Thrones-Style in some cases. And he proved successful again in the ever more challenging environment of South Sulawesi. You’ll have to RWTW for the details. The Committee deemed this one worthy of the ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.
And it’s great to see Mark Christiansen writing more again. On Tuesday, he delivers a masterpiece in Bourgeois Revolution: Restoration And The Problem Of Capital. There are too many keys here to count, but this is a central one:
We live in a world where the reigning ideology is liberalism, which became accepted among segments of the aristocracy and middle classes. Its adherents destroyed European Christendom in a long arc of coups and revolutionary violence. It begins with 1688 in Great Britain, 1776 in America, 1789 in France, and culminates in the final collapse of Christian monarchy in Europe after World War I. Since then, a global order centered on American power has woven liberalism into politics, culture, and the very consciousness of billions of people.
It has been common on the Right to critique this process on the philosophical level. From de Maistre to Richard Weaver, erudite work has been done on everything from nominalism to secularism. But this has often blinded the Right to an essential truth: an idea which gains influence does so due to the actions of power. This is not invoke relativism: ideas are true or false, better or worse. Power can be in error. However, the relations between power and ideas are immensely predictive and therefore useful. Liberalism must be analyzed by the Patron Theory of Politics. In the case of liberalism, the patrons were the rising bourgeoisie. Though the definition of this term shifts between political traditions, it generally refers to the classes who gained wealth and power through non-agrarian property. They were urban, less rooted, and not tied to the aristocratic social classes. Any attempt to understand liberalism must understand it as an ideology born in and formed by this class, and serving its interests.
Christensen then turns to critiques of liberalism… from it’s own left: Lenin. There’s no way I can excerpt this piece with justice. Douglas Smythe comments that this is one of the more important recent works in the Reactosphere. A must-read, and a runaway ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ winner.
The Myth of the 20th Century podcast picks up where it left off last week with Episode 61: The Syndicate—American Underworld—Part 2
This Week in Human Biodiversity
At West Hunter, Gregory Cochran looks at adaptations that allow certain groups to survive in their unique climates, and laments intellectuals’ tendency not only to reject racial IQ differences but also to preach that everyone else must reject them, too.
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with some audience participation: Your Favorite Songs (or Bands). She doesn’t wanna end up like those moms who are “preoccupied with 19… 19… 1985“. You definitely don’t want that!
Next an interesting bit of analysis on “Cultural Collapse”—the supposed one versus the actual one. The Tablet thinks the election of Trump reflects one kind of cultural collapse.
Berman is insightful until he blames cultural collapse on the educational system (those dastardly teachers just decided not to teach about George Washington, I guess.)
We can’t blame education. Very few people had many years of formal education of any sort back in 1776 or 1810–even in 1900, far fewer people completed highschool than do today. The idea that highschool civics class was more effectively teaching future voters what to look for in a president in 1815 than today therefore seems unlikely.
But there’s a cultural collapse all right. And Trump getting elected is at least as much a desperate a response to it, as it is an effect.
Today, technology has completely transformed our lives. When we want to talk to someone or hear their opinion, we can just pick up the phone, visit facebook, or flip on the TV. We have daily commutes that would have taken our ancestors a week to walk. People expect to travel thousands of miles for college and jobs.
The effect is a curious inversion: In a world where you can talk to anyone, why talk to your neighbors? Personally, I spend more time talking to people in Britain than the folks next door, (and I like my neighbors.)
I don’t wanna steal Mrs. X’s thunder—her parting shot is superb. In her inimitable style, she gracefully pulls in data (¡Science!) from diverse resources to paint a coherent a picture. This is a very fine piece worth your attention and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
A brief, and I think deserved, eulogy for Professor Hawking (RIP). All the hatred flowing on The Twitter for him this past week was embarrassing.
Finally, breaking open a new text for Anthropology Friday: James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910).
This Week at Thermidor Mag
Over at Thermidor, M. Charles Stuart continues to critique Reaction with What If Everything Neoreaction Knows About Monarchy is Wrong? The title is hyperbolic, but the content is a solid review of medieval—in deliberate contrast to early-modern—political theory and practice.
Thirteenth century French society was actually organized through networks of consilium et auxilium, “counsel and aid,” which were networks of friends, chief among these being the friendship between King Louis and Pope Clement. Rather than struggle over power, the King and the Pope were actually working together to achieve the same ends.
Stuart proposes that medieval arrangements offer a superior model for Church-State relations than do the early modern ones preferred by Moldbug. A debatable proposition, but one well worth debating.
Next up, Richard Greenhorn offers supplementary material to David Hines’s analysis of the Right’s organizational failings in The Spirit of a Spiritless Situation: On the Right’s Failure to Organize. Whereas Hines focuses on the Right’s lack of an institutional base, Greenhorn identifies as a more crippling weakness the Right’s lack of a coherent, unifying principle.
Men are not motivated by proposals or policies, they are motivated by creeds. And the right lacks any unifying idea but for the belief that the left is, in various ways, shapes, and forms, bad. Anti-leftism is a principle for twitter rants and other online bloviating, but it is not a principle for action. Why does the right tend to attract so many madmen? Because madmen attach meaning to things that have none. To organize requires a sense of purpose. The collective right could have a million people on call, dedicated leaders, overflowing coffers, and yet they would still fail because they lack a purpose.
The Committee, stingy by nature, were impressed with Greenhorn’s work and gave it an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Europa Weekly this week: Evropa Total War40k—Rape Island DLC.
C. A. Shoultz suggests another alternative to monarchy in In Defense of Republicanism. Shoultz makes a reasonable case for aristocratic republics, especially considering the examples of Venice and Rome. Still, a republic is only a good system “if,” as Benjamin Franklin said, “you can keep it”. And that is harder, we think, than Shoultz makes it out to be.
Finally, sneaking in just before the deadline, N. T. Carlsbad provides another of his trademark historical reviews in Lally-Tollendal’s Defense of the Royalist Emigres. This time, Carlsbad focuses on the complicated history between European governments and foreign nationals.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Over at Gornahoor, we learn of Cologero’s deteriorating health and a A Necessary Interruption
Kristor writes Moloch is But a Vassal of Our True Enemy, rebuking the demons of nominalism and liberty.
Thomas F. Bertonneau covers Count Gobineau on Race and Civilization, examining some classic, currently forbidden anthropology texts.
Objectively, Gobineau sought only to articulate a scientific racial theory or a scientific theory of race. The term “master-race” moreover is foreign to Gobineau’s text; and “Aryan,” as Gobineau properly uses it, is an ancient tribal self-designation. Had someone accused Gobineau of racism, or of being a racist, the term would have baffled him entirely.
Bonald has up Aristotle’s Physics: a review which is long overdue. Then he follows up on the same topic with Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and their followers on self-motion and the generation of new substantial forms.
Matt Briggs reports on a California judge who is Courting Climate Comedy by ordering an in-court climate change tutorial. Also, Richard Dawkins’ Cannibalism Suggestion is Hard to Digest and other consequentialist inevitabilities. Then he chronicles the coup of the administration over faculty at the academy, helpfully suggesting The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All The Administrators. Finally, fun with fake academic articles, relaxed army standards, and a $17,850 urine test, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXVI.
Mark Richardson transcribes some highlights of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s great speech.
Dalrock explains Why Game is a threat to our values—perverted, gyno-centric values, that is.
The threat that Game poses is not that large groups of men will learn how to put it into effective practice (although many have and will). The threat comes from its assault on young men’s belief that chivalry is sexy and therefore chivalry is virtuous. Even worse, a young man doesn’t even have to ever hear the word “Game” or directly study its theories to be at risk of concluding that chivalry isn’t sexy. This is a message that is slowly making its way through the culture.
Game is so corrosive to our moral order because the normal methods to return to course only make the corrosion worse. Lectures on the importance of chivalry will be met with ridicule, since chivalry is unsexy.
Christians should rightly be appalled… At the enthronement of Romantic Luv—aka., tingles—as the sine qua non of Christian marriage. Game remains a strategy for navigating the devastation wrought by the former error.
This Week in Arts & Letters
PA provides apposite points on Torture, dehumanization, and the possibility of transcendence. And a translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s (Polish I think) poem: The Interrogation of an Angel (1969).
Chris Gale returns with more Locke and Sydney for our Saturday and Sunday Sonnets.
In City Journal, Heather Mac Donald and Frank Furedi discuss The Campus Victim Cult. Emmett Hare gives voice to what everyone in NYC can smell: the city’s Downward trajectory, literally since the moment Comrade Deblasio took over. And related: “Equity” Before Security.
Brad Birzer at the Imaginative Conservative Reflects on Burke’s “Reflections”. Not, of course, that we here at Social Matter endorse Burke’s proto-cuckservatism. To cleanse the palate, we have John Mark Reynolds with The Shattered Image of the Thirteenth Century, a great place to start if you’re interested in the pre-renaissance thought and culture of Europe—and you should be.
Richard Carroll brings us a little poetry straight from the mouth (allegedly) of an English monarch, and also reviews, with reasonable confidence now that he’s brushed up on the subject, A Confucian Notebook.
John Fitzgerald, at Albion Awakening, reviews the undeservedly obscure Mark of the Horse Lord.
Fencing Bear manages to avoid slobbering over Milo just long enough to comment on The Trolls of Academe, from deep inside the safe (and very white) space of Medieval Academy of America.
Finally, over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless releases part 11 of The Iron Garden. And Part 12.
This Week in the Outer Left
There was a lot going on with the left this week, so let’s get right into it. See what I did there? To start the week off on a bizarre note, Josh Fruhlinger penned a short story for The Baffler entitled The Man Who Knew Nothing At All. And I do mean bizarre. I am including it in this week’s round-up because it is amusing and has a few moments of unintentional honesty, but to quote some of our alt-right friends… I’m not sure who’s jewing who anymore. I get this is supposed to be satire, but of what? and why? Say one thing about a previous generation of leftoids, say they could at least write well enough that you got the point.
Continuing at The Baffler, Tim Shorrock provocatively wonders about peace as armageddon. If you RTWT on this one, and I recommend you do, it’s probably best to have a bowl of popcorn at hand for all the bashing of liberal talking heads. Thoroughly entertaining, and also frustrating, as Shorrock gets so close to uttering the whole truth, but can’t get past a partial one. Let’s roll the tape.
…liberals tend to see Korea only through Cold War blinders that twist North Korea into a permanent enemy that should be confronted with permanent war, and South Korea as a slavish ally without a mind of its own.
…
The real story here is that too many liberals and too many journalists simply can’t accept the idea that the two Koreas may have accomplished this feat on their own, without the sober adult guidance of the American intelligensia. An independent Korea? A South Korean president driving American foreign policy? As the past several news cycles have shown in embarrassing detail, such things are simply unthinkable to the wised-up U.S. pundit caste.
He’s so close! Why can’t the journalists accept that the Koreas acted without the “guidance of the American intelligentsia”? Regular readers of Social Matter certainly know the answer, but, alas, it eludes this particular member of the American intelligentsia.
And rounding out the offerings from The Baffler, Corey Pein urges us to blame the computer. This is a long one, but a must read if you’re one of the technophilic geeks who found his way to neoreaction. As might be expected, there are layers here. On the surface, it’s a screed against the computer itself and the computer science departments in universities that teach the esoterica thereof. But if you’re astute, your attention should have perked up the moment you saw the word “universities”, because that is what this is really about. Pein is not at all happy that computer science majors don’t have to take lots of ethics classes, nor is he happy at the status that accrues to people particularly skilled at computer usage. But even deeper below this is a recognition that it is thanks to a system of networked computers that the first cracks have started to appear in the seemingly impenetrable facade of the Cathedral, and it is that which is so terrifying.
Sometimes people are so stupid, it’s actually noteworthy. Ostensible Baltimore school-teacher Ms. Willis may be one such example.
cyborg_nomade closes out the batting order with a post on proudhonian cosmopolitanism. While I recommend reading this one, do so with caution, as he liberally sprinkles in links to Nick Land blog posts from 2011, and that’s a rabbit hole that will consume anyone’s day.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Jordan Peterson delivers three podcasts this week: a discussion of biology and psychology’s capitulation to the Left with Quillette founder and editor Claire Lehmann; a reading of a chapter from his latest book about psychological diagnoses of mass shooters and possible correctives; and a Q&A with his Patreon supporters.
Steven Pinker continues his lecture tour promoting his new book Apocalypse Enlightenment Now.
Over at Heterodox Academy, Christian Gonzalez notices that the Left encourages minority groups to feel oppressed, and the Half Hour of Heterodoxy podcast brings Musa Al-Gharbi on to discuss the current political climate at Columbia.
In an interesting week for Quillette, Ben Sixsmith shines a light on the relationship between race and grooming gangs in the UK as well as on the cuckoldry of British politicians. Coltan Scrivner explores the inevitable tension between diversity and freedom of speech: When given the freedom, people tend to take a pass on the diversity…. John Faithful Hamer describes the ongoing civil war between wizards (who wish to stay the present course) and prophets (who see disaster looming on the horizon). Most interestingly, Jonathan Anomaly and Nathan Cofnas argue that the Alt-Right gets Jews wrong and that Jews’ high average IQ explains their overrepresentation in various Leftist causes. But since they acknowledge that many Jews feel threatened by (Gentile) nationalism and push for multiculturalism as an alternative, their take on the JQ may not be as different as they think…
Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Carlos Bueno examines how hard it is to get AI to explain its decisions.
This Week… Elsewhere
Al Fin has a nice bit of analysis here: Nihilists and Doomers Come Cheap and Stupid; Competent Optimists Have to Know Something. “The Human Future Could Be Grand if We Would Let it Be.” We fully agree. Related: Machine Paradox: Master/Slave vs Symbiosis. The take-away, the barriers to human advancement are primarily moral, social, and psychological, and not really technological. The industrial revolution and it’s consequences have indeed been a disaster for the human race, but not on account of the industry itself.
Insula Qui’s backbreaking task of formulating a libertarian statecraft continues at Zeroth Position with Part V: Aristocracy, Republicanism, and State. Qui admits from the get-go:
To concede that individual sovereignty is invalid would effectively defeat all libertarian values. To concede that central sovereignty is invalid would defeat the purpose and role of statecraft. To resolve this, one must look to the nature of contracts.
But isn’t a contract only as good as its enforcement mechanism? And what is contract enforcer but a “central sovereign”? And this is setting aside entirely the compulsion of unwritten, un-volunteered-for, and even un-articulable duties that most humans inherit most of the time. He avers that
First, in a low-trust society, contracts ensure that the society is not in perpetual chaos, as they channel conflict into production. Second, it means that when people are already prone to collaboration, contracts become mostly redundant because interests are already synthesized.
I think this is neither empirically observable nor intuitively obvious. In a low-trust society, contracts are correspondingly meaningless. It is more a race to the good graces of the contract enforcer (or contract ignorer, as the case may be). On the contrary, I think contracts are a social technology built upon an extant base of high social trust—or at least mutual high trust of an impartial contract enforcer. I strongly suspect contracts are most useful in a society “already prone to collaboration”. Contracts, by my reckoning, are an undoubtedly valuable cart pulled only by the strong horse of implicit social trust.
And Mr. Qui makes another interesting concession:
We can have low-trust monarchic individualism or high-trust republican communalism. There is no sustainable option for a stateless society that is both individualistic and republican.
I don’t exactly agree with that. But it certainly explodes some sacred libertarian myths. As always, I urge my political theory-minded readers to head over there and give this treatise some quality feedback and critique that I am not really capable of giving myself.
Also at Zeroth Position this week, Nullus Maximus makes an appearance with a pretty in-depth book review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus (2015). He doesn’t seem to have liked it too much, so maybe the review is all you’ll need. Interestingly, Harari does traipse awfully close to some of the ground covered by Moldbug. And this too was quite good: Ten Observations on Right-Wing Activist Bans in the UK. We find much to agree with there. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Zach Kraine provides a nice list of How to win: A guide for new movements. An omission: “Dress better than the competition”.
Heartiste notices some mainstream coverage of The Empathy Gene—or gene complex as the case may be. HBD-ers can chime in with some expertise, but I have to agree 10% of variation due to genetics seems awfully low. I’m not sure any psychological trait is that low.
Roman Dmowski explains why Trump’s Victory and Success Have Been Entirely Predictable (But Rarely Predicted).
Ace stays in the 70s for this week’s illustrative selection: “She’s got a smile that heals me…” TIL: Billy Joel was making records as early as 1971. I sorta thought his career began with The Stranger 1977. Who knew? 80-Proof Oinomancy new.
The Rebbe has been working on a refutation of Culture of Critique: The Jewish Question, Answered is a work in progress. Deserves a read.
Hapsburg Restorationist tackles The Paradox of Metternich.
Thrasymachus brings up the strange, and rarely noticed, case of The Thomas Wales Killing.
Brandon Adamson, at Alt-Left, dives into Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and has Governor Breck Reconsidered.
Anti-Puritan requests your help to find out if people would sell their right to vote.
And Meta-Nomad has a lengthy meditation on the function of the Academy. He focuses on the relationship between philosophy and the Academy, with other fields left as an exercise for the reader. So, RTWT and figure out the function of the Academy as it operates in your field.
That’s all folks. Many thanks to my staff for their excellent contributions. Everyone was in place this week: David Grant, Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill: I quite literally couldn’t do it without you! Happy Spring, everyone! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/03/18) appeared first on Social Matter.