This week at American Greatness, we find a sudden and full court press against NATO. Long overdue in our opinion. Angelo Codevilla acknowledges NATO Now Serves the Interests of the Transatlantic Ruling Class. NATO is the new UN. One fmore enemy that needs starving. Christopher Roach follows suit. So too VDH.
Also there, VDH takes Deport the Deplorables to task. And Conrad Black things Trump Will Win This Round With the Deep State. We certainly hope so, but if wants to actually rule, he’ll need to win the whole war.
Social Pathologist, with a lift from Dreher, examines the Wound that just won’t heal.
Reading through Dreher’s comments section I was struck by just how many people still believed in the Catholic Church while being appalled by the hierarchy. This is important because I feel the Church is the only organ out there capable of resisting Modernism but its clear that the hierarchy aren’t up to the task at hand. Any renewal of the Church, and therefore West, is going to be a “bottom-up” affair. Probably with much opposition from the hierarchy.
While we agree whole-heartedly with Slumlord’s sentiments and justifiable anger in this matter, we cannot disagree more thoroughly that “bottom-up” is any sort of solution. What is needed is a New Constantine—one willing to enforce the Church’s irreformable teachings right back on the Church hierarchy’s head. Meanwhile, the faithful should watch and pray… from the bottom-up.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Our friends up at Northern Dawn offer (I think) a first: Commentary in the Original Language of Reaction: L’Appel de Juillet by Jérôme-Bernard Grenouille. With a warning:
L’homme occidental du XXIième siècle ne peut comprendre l’affrontement parce qu’il est incapable de choisir. Il subit. Comme une feuille portée par les caprices du vent, il subit les grands bouleversements de l’âge: la numérisation de son métier, la perte des ses acquis économiques, l’effondrement de sa culture et de sa langue, l’immigration de remplacement… Coupé de ses racines, il ne représente rien. Il ne peut comprendre la tragédie de l’histoire et l’affrontements des ambitions puisqu’il n’en a pas. C’est un petit soumis, confronté jour et nuit sur l’écran de son portable à son manque de virilité, à des objets et des femmes qu’il ne possédera jamais. Frustré, il se console le soir en se branlant.Possibly French girl smoking cigarette.
Which I won’t dare translate. That may be Québécois and not French, but close enough. Also there the ND Weekly Roundup: 07/20/2018. In English.
Alf ponders speaking the truth as a Schelling Point for cooperation. Not sure about that: outrageous lies make a much stronger coordination point. We care about truth because good people care about truth. And good people need to coordinate, too. Next, he sets out to write a critique of Aristotle on Friendship, but ends up agreeing with him. So bonus points for Alf… and Aristotle on that one.
And this was completely different: Miss Alf speaks About doubt & love, with some confessions that will not surprise most of our readers. Sounds like a keeper, Alf. Wife her up!
Adam’s deep dive into the significance of literacy and domain-specific expertise continues apace in The Disciplines, the Imperative of the Center, the Generative Thought Experiment. As always, hard to summarize, but profound food for thought. A taste:
The language and traditions we have to confront the situation or choice lie beyond our conscious decision. So, how do we talk about this, at the very least, “residue” of the unchosen? This, to a great extent, is what the disciplines are for, including sacramental disciplines: saying that the trauma caused by my parents, or unjust social structures, or unconscious desires, etc., are not all that different from saying I was tempted by the devil. And there may be some truth in any of these “explanations”—at any rate, any of them is better than nothing. But they’re all really black boxes, sites of proxy wars for power—a particular psychology or sociology empowers a particular set of interests, within the disciplinary institutions and beyond. To be master of the “unconscious” is to be master of much more.
Another 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for Adam for his fine and off-the-beaten-path work.
Unorthodoxy proposes a new metanarrative 3RC: Republicans aRe the Real Commies. I like it.
Our good friend Кирилл Каминец is back up on Medium with, for those who can read Russian, Кинжалы и угольник, ч. I. By the looks of the Chrome translation, pretty interesting.
Atavisionary offers an extensive and sympathetic review of A Fair Hearing: The alt-right in the words of its members and leaders from Arktos Media (2018).
Shylock Holmes is on a Mission from God™ to Break the College Monopoly on Credentials.
As far as I can tell, the massive increase in demand for higher education over the previous decades seems to be cargo cult reasoning writ large—rich successful people went to college, ergo if I go to college I will be rich and successful. A fortiori, if we all go to college, we’ll all end up rich! Better subsidize all those student loans, now helpfully made non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
The unfortunate part is that I suspect that a good number of the people who go to college (or at least their parents) probably sympathise with the fact that the above reasoning is moronic. So how come they don’t just skip it? Because, of course, it’s a signalling arms race. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and nobody ever got fired for hiring the Harvard undergrad.
So, smart people are looking for a smarter and cheaper way to play the signaling game…
But how do you get past the first HR screening? How do you avoid people just assuming that you didn’t go to college simply because you couldn’t go to college, or at least any one worth attending?
Holmes offers a novel, and I think not implausible, method that just might work. At least some of the time.
Marina Butina. Proper trigger discipline is sexy.
Over at Jacobite, Michael Siebert discusses the possible future of ecofascism in Linkola, Montana.
And Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin, reports on the arrest of Russia’s foremost gun rights activist by the American Blue Deep State. The activist in question, Maria Butina, is a photogenic young woman who founded a Russian organization called Right to Bear Arms (Pravo na Oruzhie), and has been living at least part-time in the United States since 2015. It is claimed that she is actually some sort of Russian Natasha super-spy, funneling money from Putin to Trump and the GOP via the NRA. Anatoly gives this conspiracy view all the ridicule it deserves.
Malcolm Pollack comments on the Madness of the regime press regarding Russia. He likes Angelo Codevilla On The Helsinki Summit (Codevilla’s essay here.) Plus… a Happy Surprise From The Ninth Circuit.
By way of Isegoria… Athletes were quite ready to take the bargain. Good news in the case of Cody Wilson’s Ghost Gunners. The physical strength of nations varies considerably—three guesses and the first two don’t count. Interesting: Israel significantly relaxes gun license regulations. Operation Barbarossa: In the end, it all depended on petroleum. What to do When a flash-bang grenade isn’t enough. Finally: the Wealth Gap explained by persistently bad spending habits—future time orientation be all rayciss.
Finally, this week at Cambria Will Not Yield, an imprecation against Most Barbarous, Most Degenerate Liberalism!
This Week in Social Matter
Very quiet week here at Social Matter as retooling continues. But we did have some excellent verse queued up for Saturday Poetry & Prose: newcomer Solon Orientalis weaves Beyond Kali’s Night.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochrane ponders some More Theory on genetic variations versus genetic death sentences.
Evolutionist X makes A Modest Educational Proposal. Several actually, to keep smart women away from not having kids.
We need to completely re-think this system where the smarter you are, the longer you are expected to stay in school, accruing debt and not having children.
Expectations (for women) are the key. Down in the comments, Mrs. X admits: “If you want change, IMO, it has to come from the men first.”.
Turning to even darker matters: War is Code for the Production of Corpses.
And for Anthropology(ish) Friday and The History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons, Part 2: the Andaman Islands.
By way of Audacious Epigone… After France’s World Cup win, he looks in on the “celebrations”… among the “French”. Praise for Kansas Gubernatorial candidate Kobach in Koch country. Finally, he revisits The gun gap.
This Week in Kakistocracy
First, Porter makes the astute observation that the “immigrants will pay for boomer retirement” argument is Reverse-Mortgaging the Future. And not even a financially sound one:
…how many American retirements will Guatemalan squatters actually fund? Very few in Guatemala, as we know. But while they are allegedly subsidizing boomer greens fees, how much will we be paying them in first world social upkeep? I wonder what our net take home from this arrangement is.
Then, he evokes a little Shakespeare against An Admirable Evasion of Whoremaster Man
And he also enjoys a moment of schaudenfreude at the expense of a leftist attacked by his own hate mob in Rabid Dogs Get Bitten Too:
If any readers are moved to sympathy, you’ll be without my company. The author’s disdain for destroying lives was only discovered as the left came for his, which is not much of a compliment to one’s foresight. Because even the dullest men are prone to epiphanies when teeth are sinking into their throat.
Finally, he retreads some old ground to say that being American is not A Matter of Perspective, no matter how badly you want it:
Mockery aside, the article goes on to drench the page with tears for deportees over their loss of American safety, order, and social compassion compared to the apathy and “crime, corruption and lawlessness that pervades Mexico.” Those are their words. Perhaps we should take care to remain so distinct from Mexico that her citizens can still lament the difference.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Lue-Yee embeds a video on the Visual and Aural Æsthetics of Hagia Sophia, which should motivate us to bring it back into Christian hands. This time permanently!
Cologero posts expansive thoughts on Sophia and the Eternal Feminine.
At The Orthosphere proper, J. M. Smith advocates against extermination. After all, The Yahoos Will be With You Always. It also serves as a reminder that the maladjusted and poorly socialized are not a scourge unique to large cities.
Thomas F. Bertonneau looks at the reactionary relationships between Poe and his Frenchmen and Baudelaire and his Amricans.
Richard Cocks begins the series Social Justice: an analysis—part 1 of 4.
To reject inequalities is to rebel against reality itself. All people bar two are superior to some and inferior to others in any conceivable characteristic. To reject that fact is to renounce the character of existing at all.
Bonald argues, concisely but powerfully, that Tribal motivations are rational.
Liberal critics of Catholic loyalty speak as if identifying an opponent’s behavior as “tribal” is equivalent to showing that it is irrational. In fact, there is nothing irrational about tribalism; it merely supplies another set of concerns to guide our reasoning. One sign of this is the fact that liberals do not apply the same anti-tribalist critique to the groups and loyalties they really care about. They certainly do not think that their fellow liberals should seek out and carefully consider criticisms from their professed enemies. Such critics are dismissed as irrational preachers of hatred, and it is considered important that they have no mainstream platform that might “legitimate” their views. This is, indeed, a rational strategy for them in pursuit of the critical goal of space-control.Gratuitous pic of girl smoking.
Do RTWT! This earned the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. Also from Bonald, as if Nature herself wills it, a few green shoots of reactionary ideas spreading.
Matt Briggs aims a 16″ gun at the very basis of the Fermi “Paradox”. He revels in how Trump & Putin Drive The Media Mad. And It Was Beautiful. Then on the academic front, at University of Minnesota: Use The Preferred Pronoun Or Be Fired is a policy under consideration. Next, he writes Does Free Will Exist In The Universe? (That Would Be A Yes) in response to a nearly identically titled article that reaches the opposite conclusion. Finally, unspeakable acts is the theme of this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLIV.
Mark Richardson notices an encouraging Twitter trend in More trad women. Then he countersignals Jordan Peterson In defence of identity.
Group identity has another advantage in that it creates bonds of loyalty and support within a community, which then provides for individual security.
William Wildblood at Albion Awakening takes a trip through the ruined monasteries and intact Gothic cathedrals of England in Christian Albion. At least to our Northern souls, I don’t think there’s another style of architecture so spiritually evocative.
Bruce Charlton writes positively about the traditional Chester Mystery Plays 2018—a review.
And John Fitzgerald solemnly reflects on Logres, Britain, and the Betrayal of the Romanovs.
This Week in Arts & Letters
This is new and I’m not sure how to classify it: Lou Keep at Sam[]zdat offers a paraphrase edition of Plato’s Republic Parts I-IV: Footnotes 1. (“Footnotes”… on Plato… get it?)
Chris Gale starts off the week with more Sydney for his Saturday Sonnet, and then John Henry, Cardinal Newman with the Sunday Sonnet.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Mark S. Milburn touches on a personal bigotry of mine in Gnostic Bodies: Why Millennials Love Tattoos. Gnostics that is, not (necessarily) Millennials or tattoos. And thus inadvertently touches on a great eldritch demon writhing at the spiritual core of leftism.
Richard Carroll first brings us Notes on The Odyssey. Which I happen to know a thing or two about, and went into a bit more depth in his comment section than I could do here. In short, there’s a good reason why Froude chose “The Bow of Ulysses” as the metaphor on which to hang his defense of monarchial sovereignty and Restoration. And then his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain.
At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless first compiles a number of his more philosophical and analytical pieces into Suzerain, in a handy long-form PDF. And, prolific as ever, another short story: The Mire.
Finally over at City Journal, Dalrymple takes stock of the World Cup and Rooting for the Home Team. And based Heather Mac Donald tells A Tale of Two Killings.
This Week in the Outer Left
Over at The Baffler, David Neiwert pontificates on the freedom to bash heads. For context, the Patriot Prayer and Proud Boys groups had a rally in Portland, Oregon last month. They were attacked by antifa and elected to defend themselves. Antifa quickly found out that they had bitten off more than they could chew. We here at Social Matter do not endorse activism or public rallies of any kind, while we do admit to more than a little schadenfreude at seeing this.
There are two issues of interest in David Neiwert’s hand-wringing. First, the sheer number of times he has to switch from active voice to passive voice and ambiguous pronouns in order to try painting Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys as evil aggressors. Look at this particularly egregious instance:
Most of the day’s event had been relatively peaceful, the two groups of demonstrators shouting at each other as they clustered on either side of the police barriers around Terry Schrunk Plaza in the heart of downtown….
The first fights erupted as the crowd turned the corner near where the counter-protesters gathered; as they assembled, a couple of water bottles were lobbed at them. Shortly after that, firecrackers and smoke bombs filled the street with smoke.
This particular part of the rally has been well-documented on video and the events can be clearly seen: antifa threw (glass) bottles, antifa threw firecrackers, antifa threw smoke bombs. All crying out in pain, of course.
Second, Weiwert makes a big deal out of the martyrdom rhetoric from many of the Patriot Prayer organizers. They had that kind of rhetoric because this was not their first rodeo, they knew exactly what kind of violent response they could expect. And that is the point: you can wring hands about the violence all you want, but the simple fact is that if antifa had not shown up and started shit, then Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys would not have finished it. But it’s the usual leftist framing, that the right’s words are violence and actual violence from the left is a just response.
And, over at Jacobin, Rachel Reiderer reveals herself to be definitely a woman as she whines about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos doing cool stuff for space exploration. I draw attention to her sex because women generally fail to appreciate the importance, and inherent coolness, of anything having to do with space exploration/colonization. Another reason to repeal the 19th Amendment. Just look at this moronic take:
Musk’s idea was to “make humans a multiplanet species, and create a backup hard drive for the human race there, just in case Earth crashes like a faulty computer.”
It is impossible for any reader living through the ravages of global warming to scan these sentiments without skepticism. If someone is going to invest enormous amounts of wealth and time in an engineering project, gathering together some of the smartest scientists on the planet to develop and test creative solutions to an intractable problem, in the interest of saving the future of humanity, how could you choose any focus but climate change?
Perhaps because climate change isn’t an existential threat and a stray asteroid is?
But this is all hand-waving and distraction from the real issue: the left is hostile to mature space exploration and especially colonization. Not as a result of it being done by private billionaires, but inherently as a project of any kind. Access to space is access to Exit, and they know it. What good is a welfare state and state-enforced homosexuality if the most enterprising and productive people can hop into a ship and move to a different hollowed out asteroid, leaving all the Bioleninist parasites behind? That is what terrifies the left about space, the endless open frontier—a brain and revenue drain from socialist policies. Precisely that which excites right-leaning and especially libertarian people about it.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dennis Dale finds Israel aligning On the Rightist Side of History. To shrieks and convulsions from the usual suspects. But Israel does what it wants. It’s good to be Israel.
Anti-Gnostic links us to a prophesy regarding porches, which seems to have now come true.
Not only is People Power corruptible, it is the most easily corrupted of all.
Spotted Toad looks at Kindergarten versus 4th grade achievement in high and low poverty schools and finds very little that money can fix. Next he looks at the ways the income gap between black and white might narrow in coming years—basically by the United States continuing to be a brain drain on the Third World. Like I always say: all the Ghanaians I know are socially well-adjusted engineers with PhDs.
Al Fin bemoans the waste (and ugliness) of Texas wind farms. Also there, some bad news: Russia Could Use Some Help. He’s bearish on China as well. Tho’ we admire what the CPC has been able to accomplish in China. We hope Al’s right because China (alone in our estimation) represents an existential threat to the West. Apart from the West’s acute on-going suicide, of course.
TUJ makes a simple yet powerful reframe on Russian Collusion.
PA has a review, not without praise, for Cobra Kai—an authentic serial drama for the Trump Era.
Heartiste highlights a particularly excellent reframe of the “racism” slur. Based Poles are based. Now they just better start having more children! This too was particularly astute: The Hard Bigotry Of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jewish Provincialism. And yes, I suppose it really is only the 98% of girls with tattoos who give the rest of them a bad name.
Sacha Baron Cohen, Louis Theroux, & their lessor imitators specialise in taking advantage of natural hospitality, pliability, & willingness to be considerate to foreigners to create a parody of “weird” mid-America that is sold as propaganda to the Coasts & Euro middle class.
— Tom X Hart (@tomxhart) July 24, 2018
Speaking of Tom Hart… he kicks off (apparently) a promising new series on “Ideological Analysis”. This week What is this thing we call decadence? and Against Linkola. From the former…
When discussing decadence, the great block to clear thinking is envy. A great deal of what is called decadence in the sexual, financial, artistic, and political life of nations is called so by people who cannot access the “decadence”.
My suspicion is that if these people had a sniff of decadence then their demands to end “decadence” would dry up almost immediately.
Despite my suspicions that the roots of accusations of decadence lie in envy, I believe that there still is such a thing as decadence itself.
Which he proceeds to define, more in terms of fitness or aptness:
Decadence is, therefore, a matter of having things in their proper place. A fifty-year-old man who still pursues the fashions of seventeen-year-olds is, in this sense, decadent. He is out of place. He is decaying relative to the actual demands of that period of his life. But there is nothing decadent about the clothes he wears or the music he adopts.
There is a particular way decadence is expressed, even in the rigour of war. The black marketeer is decadent, but the man who continues painting a picture during a war is not. Obviously, during a war, not everyone can paint pictures. That would be decadent. But the man who struggles to preserve something of art in conditions where art would otherwise be abolished is anti-decadent – even if he is drunk, sexually loose, effeminate, or whatever “typically” degenerate behaviour you can think of afflicts him.
Highly recommended and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Hart’s critique of Pentti Linkola is solid as well, and appropriately nuanced. Sufficiently strong rejection of technology amounts to an anti-human rejection of the tool-builder himself. Rejection of the excesses of Western Civilization ought not civilization herself. Man is a tool-builder. Man is a civilization-builder. To reject these is to reject telos.
Roman Dmowski offers coverage and commentary on the Summit Meltdown, viz., the coordinated deep state and establishment press freak-out over Trump and Putin.
Over at Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton is simply superb Against the Magna Carta.
There a few documents in the world that receive such undue reverence as the Magna Carta. Conservative MP Daniel Hannan has called the signing of the document a “secular miracle”, the logic being that it was the Magna Carta that enshrined limited government in the English, then British soul. Hannan and others sincerely believe that the 1215 document is the root and origin of modern Anglo governance, with its protection of individual freedom, liberties, etc. Let us show that this is bunk.
Welton turns yet another Libertarian sacred cow into steak tartare, with capers on a crisp baguette. While the symbolic importance of the Magna Carta in enshrining “English liberties” is vastly overblown, a significant poison in the document is the primordial and aspirational separation of Church and State:
Clause 61 places man ahead of God in terms of the creation and structuring of civil society. Taken together, Clause 61 might be the most egregious in the Magna Carta for undermining the Christian nature of monarchy and the rights of the English sovereign. Historian Wilfred Warren argued in his book King John that Clause 61 made civil war inevitable in England because it so drastically upset the balance of power in the country in favor of the barons.
Excellent bit of analysis from Welton and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.
Steve Burton (I suspect he is this Steve Burton, but can’t say for sure), offers a beautiful little gem: Nietzsche on Ben Shapiro.
Ace tackles “female empowerment” this week: “…frown upon her face, tryin’ to be sincere…”
That’s all folks. Many thanks to the on-time TWiR staff this week: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler. You are all indispensable! Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/07/22) appeared first on Social Matter.