Unamusement Park breaks a 3 year silence with a quick note, by way of the Harvard Crimson, of the Academic inferno. Does mean the book is complete? We certainly hope so. Either way, welcome back Unamusement Park, we hope you stick around!
Cathy “So You’re Saying…” Newman handed the Dissident Right a gift this week. Thanks, Ms. Newman.
Over at American Greatness, coverage of the Shadowbans and the Twitterdämmerung of Free Expression. Also, we get a View from Britain: Bonfire of the Pieties.
Our friend, VDH, heaps praise upon President Nobama. And he managed to get this hate-filled (I kid) op-ed in the LA Times: What the ‘Dreamer’ fight is really about.
One would have thought that all Republican presidents and presidential candidate would be something like the antitheses to progressivism. In truth, few really were. So given the lateness of the national hour, a President Nobama could prove to be quite a change.
Our oft-stated theory is: Trump can (and does) reward conservatives because he isn’t one.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton kicks off our week in the ‘Sphere with Sunday Thoughts—Allied Victory mostly misinterpreted edition.
Related…
If Nazism had won its war, citizens of the Nazi 2007 would see history as an inevitable progress toward the National Socialist present.
— Moldbuggery (@moldbuggery) January 14, 2018
This Week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf has a look at The Rise and Fall of Owen Cook. And he explains What really grinds his gears: “the appropriation of genuine connection by mindless corporations”. Like plastic trees.
Imperial Energy reflects upon The True, The Good and the Useful. And he continues his analysis of the Nork Situation: The North Korean Crisis II: Prospects of War. He contends that war is “highly probable”—bigly probable—and that it will be soon. Also there, IE has a useful disquisition on the Nature of Left and Right and National Socialism—or whether the Nazis were “right wing” or “left wing”. They were, of course, right wing. Just not nearly enough. And an installment of the STEEL-Cameralist Manifesto: Part 8 STEEL Sovereignty: From Equipoise to Energy.
The inimitable William Scott returns after a 6-month hiatus with the first installment of a very promising series on Tradition. And a very deep treatment of it thus far… Real tradition is not just a widespread preference (cf., “Jesuit Tradition”), but has some social function:
[C]onsider sexual liberation, and the mangled ‘traditions’ that have formed around this ‘ideal’. Not only will practitioners of this tradition tenaciously defend their own licentiousness, but will also speak of this liberation as the greatest good to ever come upon mankind. Apologists will speak of it with reverence; as though the value of free love or the freedom to tear families apart in pursuing ‘true love’ were so deeply rooted in the truth of human nature and community that it needs no explanation.
Twue Wuuv… So how’s that all working out for us? Scott continues…
Common to all PoMo intellectual and cultural traditions is the Hermeneutic of Resentment. Disaffected youth, they hope to be free of Tradition and live in an ever present newness of their own design. The Brave New World is the preferred utopia for pleasure bots everywhere. But Nature is inescapable; “gravity always wins“. It is not possible for humans to live day to day without familiar patterns of perception, and habit settling in. Tradition is both a guard against the terror of metaphysical chaos on a spiritual level, and an assumed cultural language, without which Community would be impossible on the ground. This is even so for communities of institutionalized rebellion.
Excellent work which earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ from The Committee. (Extra props for the Radiohead link.)
Over at GA Blog, Adam dons his Big Linguistic Philosopher Hat in a discussion of Programming, Power and Declarative Culture.
Parallax Optics has an intriguing, Inside Cybernetics Baseball, look at Left Accelerationism, Right Accelerationism and Land: Or, Prolegomena to R/acc.
When Spandrell is good, he is very very good. And he’s simply off the charts this week with his initially unassuming sequel: Leninism and Bioleninism. (What he is when he’s bad is classified.) He starts with a deceptively simple, and really uncontroversial, premise: The Invisible Hand of Politics:
[I]n a free political environment, if there is power to be grabbed, someone will find a way to grab it.
Which is why, ideally, you don’t wanna leave that stuff laying around. But back to Spandrell:
A state is but a gang of dudes who then grows into an army, then conquers a territory. As a gang the dudes did little more than drink beer and the odd assault on trading caravans. But eventually the grew into a state which does pretty much everything. Plenty of examples of that in Chinese history. For something closer to home: the East India Company. Started trading spices. Then ended up ruling over 400 million people. Why? There was marginally more money to be made in every step of the process.
So [what] happened when political parties started to form in the 19th century. Parties formed in order to secure power in parliament. But once you have a machine to grab power, why stop there? There’s a lot of power out there outside of parliament too, whatever the constitution says.
Enter socialism… He goes on to explain the Gramscian March, which has been more successful than even Gramsci might have predicted. (Tho’ he was Italian and probably would’ve predicted a lot!)
The great discovery of the 20th century wasn’t atomic power. It was the power of cliques. A few people in positions of power sticking with each other is the most powerful force in the universe. They can make lies become truth. They can make toilets be sold as art, they can make women be combat soldiers. They can do anything. It was quite easy for socialists to get their hand in the media; after all journalists are all natural socialists. Smart-ish guys good at writing with no talent for making money. And the same goes for teachers. Teaching doesn’t pay very well. And it’s exhausting. Why would anyone want to be a teacher? Well, for the greater glory of socialism, that is.
There’s so much more here, I can’t hope to excerpt it with justice. You’ll just hafta read the whole damn thing. With great respect to other contenders The Committee was compelled to grant Spandrell the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for this seminal work.
Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, remarks upon the centenary of the Bolshevik usurpation. He notes that Bolshevik supporters were mostly ethnic minorities, rebelling against the Russian majority.
Malcolm Pollack has a nice piece On Laïcité And The Cryptoreligion Of the Modern West. It’s not long and definitely worth your time.
[I]f religion is, as Bill [Vallicella] says, an essential, deeply rooted aspect of human nature that answers “deep human needs that cannot otherwise be met”, how, then, can an entire generation of civilized and educated people simply discard it?
My answer is that they can’t, and more importantly, they haven’t…
Indeed Leftists have a created a theocracy more terrible and absolute than anything they feverishly imagine might have existed in the Middle Ages: There’s no empirical evidence for the Hypostatic Union one way or another, but there’s abundant observational data on human inequality.
By way of Isegoria… Here’s Edgar Rice Burroughs’ humble take on the (occasionally) sublime craft of fiction. Tyler Cowen estimates the value of Free advertising for mass killers. A personal take from Hawaii’s missile false alarm. Senegal is (pretty much literally) a shit-hole, but not a hell-hole—good to know. Murder rates: St. Louis vs. Iceland. Astute commentary on Jordan Peterson’s BBC4 Interview. And… Isegoria turns 15.
Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, The Horror—with a soul-stirring kickoff from Edmund Burke.
This Week in Jim Donald
Jim observes that the (metaphorical) Reichstag is on fire. The Trump situation, as it stands right now, is unstable, and needs someone to take some kind of decisive action to resolve the instability.
If Trump had been successfully given the perp walk by social justice warriors wearing recently issued police uniforms on the basis of a court order obtained by Mueller on the basis of being an accomplice after the fact in Russian spying on Hillary from some judge no one has heard of, or if he had been successfully stuffed into a straitjacket by social justice warriors wearing recently issued psychiatric orderly costumes, on the basis of a long distance mental health diagnosis by some psychiatrist no one has heard of, this would have been a deep state coup by the permanent government against the merely temporary and merely elected government.Stunning photo of Ann Margret.
If, however, high ranking members of the deep state are arrested for illegally spying on American citizens, which is to say, illegally spying on members of the merely temporary and merely elected government, this is a coup by the elected government against the deep state and the permanent government.
Those look like the two most likely outcomes at this juncture. Personally, I, contra Jim, think that the deep state has enough of a grip on its leftmost elements to tolerate the instability until 2020, when they believe Trump will get voted out of office. If Trump does not get voted out in 2020 and in fact wins reelection, then the deep state will likely pull out all the stops to get rid of him. Recall that it was only after Nixon’s reelection that the deep state swiftly removed him, after first getting Spiro Agnew out of the way.
This Week in Social Matter
On Monday, Costin Alamariu returns with something completely different: Civilization And Cuisine. There’s a lot more to it than you think… or at least than I thought.
Decaying aristocratic palace cultures invariably nurture complex cuisines. The three most sophisticated cuisines of the world, the Chinese, the Turkish, and the French, were a sort of long-term residue of palatial decay. The prerequisites are not only ritualized pomp and circumstance, but an aristocracy eviscerated of its military powers. An aristocracy bound to the king’s palace that has to relinquish physical virtues in favor of cultural and intellectual; and where the competition is not so much for power by force, but for gaining the king’s favor by wit and intrigue; historically this is the audience that cultivates the best foods.
Great foods, but at what cost? Very insightful work from Mr. Alamariu and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This week’s Myth of the 20th Century is Episode 53: Falklands War—The Empire Strikes Back.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter was silent yet again this week. We hope all is well.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Homeschooling mom Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Homeschooling Corner: Erdos, Fibonacci, and some Really Big Numbers, a review (goods and bads) on a whole passel of math-related books for kids.
Next up, a very fine meditation upon Unemployment, Disability, and Death, backed up of course by Mrs. X’s painstaking research. Disability, it turns out, is a way to keep unemployment numbers low.
In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability.
One wonders whether the Dire Problem might not just have snuck up on us. This snagged a ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ from The Committee.
And for (I’d still call this Anthropology) Friday, she has a partial review of Caleb Everett’s Numbers and the Making of Us.
Everett tries to claim that cultural ratchet is all there is to human mathematical ability. If you live in a society with calculus textbooks, then you can learn calculus, and if you don’t, you can’t. Everett does not want to imply that Amazonian tribesmen with no words for numbers bigger than three are in any way less able to do math than the Mayans with their place value system and fancy zero.
But this seems unlikely for two reasons. First, we know very well that even in societies with calculus textbooks, not everyone can make use of them. Even among my own children, who have been raised with about as similar an environment as a human can make and have very similar genetics, there’s a striking difference in intellectual strengths and weaknesses. Humans are not identical in their abilities.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
N. T. Carlsbad kicks off a busy week at our sister publication Thermidor with Controrisorgimento. Carlsbad pays special attention to Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian-nationalist firebrand with extensive English connections.
Europa Weekly gives us Revolt Against the Discord Bots, as well as The Nazbol Manifesto—the intended episode for last week.
In The Barkeep as Guardian of Civilization: Recovering the Lost Art of Epicurean Mixology, Walter Devereux serves up a cocktail of commentary on alcohol and its social function.
A good mixologist is thoroughly social—a glue binding the group together, he assumes the natural role of leader and link. A bartender will be sociable, of course, but taverns need to survive on money and he will therefore always have a lurking sense of insincerity that he will need to overcome in order to be successful. In the case of a public house, this is especially true, while in the case of a local beerhall or fixture of a local community, the mercantile quality may be less disruptive. In any case, good drinks ease society because of the way they manifest personality, be it communal or individual: the mixologist, therefore, requires the skills of a good confessor as much as a good host, knowing how to blend his guests and knowing them each personally. The barkeep or tavern-master of a community plays quite nearly as important a role as the local priest, and the more impersonal he is, the less cohesive the community will be.
The bulk of the article focuses on the eminently practical art of mixing drinks, and garnered a somewhat surprising but well-deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Next up, Richard Carroll reviews the works of the Roman poet Catullus in Stately Bawdiness. Carroll discusses not only Catullus’ own work but also modern translations.
Finally, Lancelot Andrewes makes his Thermidor debut with California Dreaming: Light and Dark. Andrewes reviews several examples of film noir from the ’40s and ’50s to uncover the dark underbelly of America in general and California in particular during that day and age.
What were these and other films like them trying to say about their times? For one thing, one is struck by how much the main characters resemble the lonely figures that haunted Edward Hopper’s shadow cities on canvas, estranged individuals that warn of what progressive, technological modernity really means. Fifty years before Robert Putnam’s inquest into the demise of American civil society, film noir presents a world full of characters who are very definitely bowling alone, people very frequently without families, certainly in the sense of extended kinship groups of siblings, cousins, uncles etc. Children are rarely seen. God is almost always absent. The protagonists may not be burdened with responsibilities to others, but rarely is there any individual, family or community who can counsel, chide or restrain them; they are horribly alone when the going gets rough. Very often, their isolation is also bound up with movement; our anti-heroes have frequently fled or been lured from another part of America in search of better fortunes elsewhere. One can’t help but notice that their escape-cum-quest is often made westward.
This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith reminds us of the gentler terminology of a bygone era while issuing Strictures on the Portable Pit Privy, to euphemize Trump’s terminology.
And here we see what some might see as a flaw in the President’s metaphor (on top of its regrettable vulgarity). It’s not the pit that moves, but the privy, although wherever the privy is moved to, there will be, of course, a new pit.
Smith also laments how most “people in Texas” (not Texans) would rather “Forget the Alamo!” Then he indignantly distends his nostrils over the current Christian state of Living on Sufferance. Lastly, he goes over the stages of a polity Falling to Pieces: Party > Faction > Conspiracy > Great Conspiracy > Civil War.
Bonald Defies the moral arc of history: The Catholic tribalist and the will to live, despite a society where we are encouraged to renounce our old collective identities. Genocide, of the soft sort, is alive and well:
[P]eoples do choose oblivion. Every people that has abandoned the Catholic Church, their mother, has done so. Once there was an Irish people, sons of Saint Patrick, with a proud history of national defiance, at the heart of which was the Catholic faith. Yet not one generation after getting their own country (a republic, alas), they repudiated their own identity by renouncing their own faith and embracing that of the enemy. Where once they identified as Catholics, now the Irish formed a new identity as victims of the Church. Those they used to remember as leaders are now remembered as oppressors, and the viewpoint has shifted a largely imaginary Irish people who always longed for the free air of liberalism and sexual degeneracy. This isn’t just a change of beliefs; it is a change of identity.Famous person Cara Delevigne
A very passionate “rant” from Bonald. That hits the nail on the head and snagged an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Also at Bonald’s: A new batch of deplorables—courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.
Kristor argues The Right of Exit Does Not Entail the Right of Entry.
[W]ho is inclined to trust a man who has abandoned his own native people as much as a brother or cousin who has not? No one. Who is inclined to treat a man as if he were a distant cousin, when that man has betrayed and abandoned his own real cousins? No one.
Matt Briggs, reporting on the academic front, writes Lack of Ideological Diversity on Campus: A Feature, Not a Bug, Say Professors. Then regarding that book Fire and Fury: It’s False, That’s How We Know It’s True is a fallacy growing in popularity and exemplified by the same book. Finally, Asatru on the rise in Iceland, homophobic child extremists, and Quranic homosexuality, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XIX.
James Kalb recommends a natural law approach to Harassment, social progress, and the Church.
[W]e live in a very odd world that talks about “inappropriate” conduct without a way of explaining why something is inappropriate, eliminates courtship while complicating pairing up for people who get to know each other in the work settings where that happens today, and abolishes standards for consensual conduct while imposing absurdly demanding standards with which no one is likely to comply for what constitutes consent.
Mark Richardson stridently challenges new revisionist literature on the historicity of an Open borders & individual dignity ethic.
According to Dalrock, contrary to the prevalent matriarchal view on the civilizing effects of marriage, Headship makes all the difference. Then he writes on the heresy of The gospel of child support.
Donal Graeme, responding to Dalrock, distinguishes between an Incentive V. Motive Force which causes the civilization of men.
Rather, women can act as an incentive to men to civilize. However, it is men who civilize other men. [And women too, while we are at it—but that is for another post.] And the approach used, if one wants to succeed, is always the tried and true method of the carrot and the stick.
The new, and always stunning, Regina Magazine is out: Volume 29: The Millennial Issue.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale explains that The Proles are rotten because the Elite are, and takes a stance on The Thot Question. He also comes down in favor of Theocracy, and has a few words to say On Babel. He exhorts that we Choose Christ, and gives us some advice: Write what you know. Especially if it’s unfashionable as far as our critics are concerned. Finally, more Belloc for our Sunday Sonnet.
On the Imaginative Conservative, Peter Hartwig introduces Jeremiah Webster’s After So Many Fires. A 1973 “Timeless Essay” from the late Stephen Tonsor on The Siren Song of Anarchy in Western Art & Literature. Benjamin Lockerd’s introduction to Russel Kirk’s Enemies of the Permanent Things.
Richard Carroll brings us the words of St. Alphonsus, and How to Pray at All Times. According to this Catholic saint from 1753, the Lord doesn’t mind a casual chat.
Harper McAlpine Black sets out to prove just how lost the art of poetry recital is by introducing us to Crowley’s (!) Hymn to Pan. Crowley, make no mistake, was about as much of an enemy as one can be. But the exercise is interesting nonetheless.
Fencing Bear reports Fear and Trembling in the Cloister. Apparently the rudeness and hatefulness and all-round uninclusiveness of medievalists has gotten completely out of hand, and become something up with which the Academy… Shall. Not. Put.
At The Logos Club, Kaiter Enless brings us the belated Part 3 of his Porn/Erotica distinction. And Gio Pennacchietti gives us an excellent rundown of the Modern Bugman. Also of note is Part 3 of the Iran-US Geostrategy Primer.
Finally, in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald has a warning to the #MeToo movement on the impossibility of Policing Sexual Desire. Kerry Jackson on Why California is America’s Poverty Capital—just bad luck I guess. And Mac Donald is back in short order with a defense of the Met’s Faithful rendition of Tosca: which is, apparently, “marred by . . . too much beauty, and too much fidelity to the composer’s intent”. LOL.
This Week in the Outer Left
Coverage of the Outer Left opens this week on a bit of a bittersweet note, an announcement that The Awl ends. They have stated that they will be ending “editorial operations” at the end of the month. As regular readers of this space know, The Awl has been a staple of our coverage of the outer left. While their political commentary was frequently of a very low grade and rarely graced the august pages of This Week in Reaction, their non-political and cultural commentary was a valuable insider’s take on the lives of bugmen, the kind of content one would not find at other outlets, and just damn interesting. But, still, The Awl was founded by people who had worked at Gawker, and we must not forget that. So, ultimately, good-bye… but also, good riddance.
Keeping with The Awl, the ongoing color history series continues with a personal favorite of mine, Haint Blue, the ghost tricking color of Southern homes and gullah folktales. #SRx calling all Southern Reactionaries for this one.
Over at The Baffler, Maximillian Alvarez presents the view from inside the Cathedral on the year history died. We all know how we feel about the ability to communicate our message in ways that didn’t exist, say, 30 years ago. It is a commonplace that this represents some amount of power taken away from the Cathedral. Mr. Alvarez confirms just this, and provides a view of just how scared and enraged the Cathedral is over just this tiny loss in their power. And behold the cycles of despondency in one low-level priest’s hysteria. Let’s go to the extended highlight reel. If you should happen to hear dry laughter in the background as you read it, that’s just Nick Land enjoying the schadenfreude.
As much as it is a type of memory, history is a form of authority. The ultimate difference between “history” and “the past,” after all, is that the former always imposes itself on the latter. The past is always in the past—the past always was—but history can only be insofar as it can recover and represent the past through stories…. Even if it does so with the utmost respect and gentleness, history can never be entirely neutral or wholly inclusive in its recuperation of the past through stories. Stories always need authors, and authorship is always, inescapably a condition of authority.
…
To fit into a narrative that can be understood, available information must always be interpreted and ordered to “make sense”; choices must inevitably be made about what to include, how to present it, and what to leave out; questions of causality must be explained with hypotheses; etc. “Something is always left out while something else is recorded,” Trouillot writes. So, naturally, it matters who is doing the recording and how.
…
With such authority comes the power to set the acceptable standards for what history should look like, how it should function, and so on. At least since the end of the Cold War, the national popular consensus of neoliberalism… had seemingly settled on a core collection of shared assumptions about these concerns. Of course, this is not to suggest that all historiographical debates were magically settled (quite the opposite, in fact). But there was a certain continuity, an apparent shared consensus regarding the most basic historiographical demands ranging from who got to speak “with authority” about history and which (real or imagined) audiences they were expected to engage in suitably deferential fashion.
…
We are living in an in-between period, an interregnum, in which history has lost all semblance of agreed-upon authority. Far from serving as a reassuring arbiter of social goods and larger political goals, the past today is a battlefront in a metastasizing war of all against all. The combatants are familiar enough to anyone glancing across a newspaper’s front page or a battery of cable chyrons: politicians, citizens, pundits, institutions, extremist groups, media outlets, social-media feeds—all are frantically jockeying to redefine and rezone the acceptable sources of historical authority as an essential step in their own parochial quest for political, cultural, and economic domination. This entails, among other things, directing their most vicious efforts at discrediting, destroying, or elbowing out traditionally accepted sources, practices, and standards.
…
The real issue right now is the end result. When history has been unmoored from the sanctified markers and standards that anchor its authority, when accepted discourses and institutions are being viciously discredited, when individual and collective memories have been so dangerously flattened by the pace of the digital content stream, the result is a history up for grabs and a free-for-all battle of competing historical visions that operates, not by persuasion or compromise or consensus, but only by the singular principle of blunt force.
…
Now it’s our turn to fear the abyss. Now it’s our turn to fight against oblivion. The frightening truth, however, is that for too long, too many of us have continued to operate on the same privileged belief that the supports holding up our given idea of history will not collapse—the same, shibboleth, in other words, that has sheltered us from ever having to consider what it would be like to face the kind of threat we’re now facing. Too many have failed to acknowledge that the Trumpian political mission is determined, not just to secure a place in history, but to dictate what history will be moving forward. Because such a prospect has never encroached on our privileged ability to expect that history would always have a favorable place for us (or any place at all), we seem to be utterly incapable of recognizing it for what it is. And time is running out.
“Sanctified markers and standards”…? Is this guy for real?? Dude, do you even irony??? I don’t know about you, but reading that kind of impotent leftist anger fills me with the desire to light up a cigarette.
This Week… Elsewhere
PA has an excellent bit of perspective with An American Nationalist Visits Warsaw. And he has another work of translation in A Poem About Leftism.
Some important kernels in AMK’s exposition on the paradoxical relationship between Truth and Morality.
TUJ wonders Has Lord Keynes Outmaneuvered Pragmatically Distributed?
Over at 80 Proof Oinomancy, Ace checks in: “But find the ones that bring you life and you’ll find me”.
Xavier Marquez has a remarkable history of Official Socialist Linguistics with Stalin as Reviewer #2 (and Editor). Also some updates to his Democracy Data, which are of some interest to the New Social Science. “Democracy”—well-defined in his studies, but still…— may be on the decline lately, but it can’t disappear fast enough for our tastes.
Unorthodoxy responds briefly but piquantly to Latham’s Frenemies on the Right.
Filed under Hubbert’s Peak Local Maximum, Al Fin looks at how US Petroleum Output Rocks Global Economic Calculus. And he has a whole passel of travel risk maps that have the unfortunate and unintended consequence of confirming stereotypes.
Filed under Not At All Dangerous Children: Infancy is Now Officially Being Extended to Age 25.
Zach Kraine has some brief comments about his Future, and thanks us for sending some readers his way.
Nullus Maximus notices some patterns in the way leftists (i.e., mainstream authors) fundamentally misunderstand conservative ideas and dispositions in (increasingly) predictable ways: On Leftist Academics, Respectable Opinion, and Civil War. Maximus develops this into an excellent analysis of the phenomenon we tend to call the Overton Window, but which goes by several names, each of which highlights peculiar features of this force. He zeroes in on an even more pernicious culprit…
Whig historiography and echo chambers, while important factors, are only proximate causes of the intellectual limitations of leftists. A more fundamental source comes from the dynamics of social coordination and is known as virtue signalling. Virtue signalling is a conspicuous and/or invidious expression of one’s opinion on a moral issue done primarily to maintain or enhance one’s social status.
Any people governed by Public Opinion is governed by the curators of that opinion…
When the Overton window is combined with an ideological echo chamber and reinforced by copious amounts of virtue signalling, it can become thick and opaque, hardening into an ideological pocket universe which can only be entered or re-entered with great difficulty. This Overton Bubble, as neoreactionaries call it, can form when the establishment effectively controls the Overton window and uses this control to maintain political power. When the range of respectable opinion is policed with sufficient rigor, having an accurate understanding of opinions outside of that range is enough to make oneself the target of a political witch hunt.
And he has much more there. Excellent theoretical contribution from Nullus Maximus and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his efforts.
Loretta the Prole has a <``a href="https://lorettatheprole.org/2018/01/21/i-believe-we-are-absolutely-getting-a-great-big-fat-amnesty/">very black pill on the upcoming Amnesty. Perhaps.
Random Critical Analysis has a follow-up post On the relevance of the income inequality to expected health expenditures—a huge follow-up post.
Meta-Nomad put up another of his incredibly well-written music reviews, tackling Clwnwrld Presents: The Ringleader’s Symphony by New Shoppe. The music itself is fairly challenging, but the review itself is recommended purely on grounds of style. If I could write like Meta-Nomad, I would churn out novel after novel in a William S. Burroughs style and then retire to shoot paint cans and call it art for SWPL rubes.
You’re sat in this cafe, this cafe. The windows, the large, bowing panes of glass feel as if they’re vibrating, reflecting and strumming against bulb lines. Maleficent trembles as your entire glaze’s over, eyes over chips and under-others into a chem-soup. Into the muzak-home of a banal existence, falling backwards into plastic and mundanity as one does during a slow mourning; the daily march overstrung by a realist chorus of chiming techscape.
And Greg Cochran applies his typical sardonic wit to the Rise and Fall… i.e., of Empires.
That’s all we had time fer, folks. As always, I was assisted by the trusty (and based) TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant and Aidan MacLear contributed bigly. I had the pleasure of meeting Aidan IRL this week: Very sharp, good lookin’ guy, ladies. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/01/21) appeared first on Social Matter.