We knew coming out of the gate that the depth-n-breadth of last week’s articles was going to be a tough act to follow. Nevertheless, plenty of interesting stuff happening within and without the ‘Sphere this week. I guess the biggest news was NYT’s appointment of Anti-white Bigot Sarah Jeong to their editorial board. Biggest boon to Dissident Right ideas since Hillary’s Pepe Speech. Normies feel compelled to understand NYT, and the message has never been clearer: “It’s OK, or at least easily forgiven, to hate white people”—(signed)The Grey Lady. Heartiste pokes much deserved fun. Steve Burton agrees with me: What a Gift.
Victor Davis Hanson is up over at American Greatness explaining Progressive Regression. Liberalism always eats itself. What else is it going to eat? Also there, Ian Henderson explains Why Artificial Intelligence Will End the Need for Immigration. He could’ve said “increasingly automated low-skill work” will end the need. But that wouldn’t have been quite as sexy.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Northern Dawn provides its Weekly Roundup—News & Views Canadian Style.
Always magisterial Those Who Can See provides an encyclopedic explanation of Widening Circle of Empathy: The Final Frontier. An almost automatic 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Anti-Gnostic kicks Marginal Revolution off his blogroll. For causes.
This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam explains what happens Way, Way, After Sacral Kingship. He starts out with something that had thus far eluded me (and perhaps many readers).
I am trying to develop a mode of political thinking that is not a political philosophy. A political philosophy, like any philosophy, has “first principles,” and then starts “deducing” secondary principles from the first one (freedom, consent, the will of the people, etc.) including justifications of monarchy in terms of such principles, like the monarch as serving the people, or God, or constrained by “natural law.” All these “principles,” and the institutions with which they become co-dependent, are endless sources of imperio in imperium, installing the assumption that the ruler must be justified, opening up the constant struggle over who controls the means of justification. Instead, I begin anthropologically, or anthropomorphically, with the assumption of a relation to the center, a sacred center, and, with regard to politics proper, a sacred center that has been occupied by a human.
Whether he is drawing arbitrary distinctions—i.e., between “political thinking” and “political philosophy”, or between interpreters of “natural law” vis-a-vis interpreters of “sacred centers”—is perhaps debatable. But it’s helpful to know where Adam’s coming from, and either way he’s one of a very small number of people doing high grade “political thinking” in broader reactionary sphere these days. So… back to Sacred Kinship, he documents how seemingly inexorably, over generations or perhaps centuries, the office of Sacred King begins to lose its sheen.
The difference between the occupant of the center and what we could call the meaning of the center, is already opened, at least a crack: kingship is not wholly embodied in the existing king, whose centrality is somewhat indirect.
That distance is the problem we have to solve. Having the king ordained by God obviously doesn’t solve it—it simply highlights the fact that what God has ordained He can unordain, and who is privy to God’s will on this question? We have to accept the break with sacral kingship once and for all. This is no simple manner, and anyone who thinks we have accomplished it by establishing secular rule doesn’t pay much attention to what people, even in the most “advanced” societies, expect of their rulers. It is repeatedly pointed out that economic growth, unemployment, technological development, and so on, are only tangentially and in highly complicated ways related to policies enacted by the President, but all of that is irrelevant: everyone speaks with complete certainty of the “Obama economy” or the “Trump economy,” as if, just as with the sacral kings of old, all benefits and calamities follow directly from the hand of the ruler.
We are “way, way” after Sacral Kingship. Yet its modes of thinking still predominate in political discourse. It was, of course, Moldbug who pointed out the Modern Presidency is a purely symbolic role. But purely symbolic is quite far from nothing. Adam snags yet another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent work here.
Sarah Perry wades into the under-analyzed phenomenon of Boilerplate. As for the etymology…
The origin of the term “boilerplate” from the steel plates used to make boilers strikes me as mysterious. Why would intellectuals criticizing newspapers expect their audiences to be familiar with the specific materials used to manufacture industrial equipment? As far as I can tell, the answer is that during the steampunk nineteenth century, boilers were constantly exploding and killing people.
Sufficiently constantly for reporters to copy verbiage from the time it happened last week. Mrs. Perry finds boilerplate to be analogy of code that extends powerfully into a variety domains.
Let us take boiler plates, then, as an analogy for tiling systems or tiling structures: cultural elements, from architecture to activities to mental states, that tend to copy-paste themselves in identical form over and over, tiling over variation that existed in the past. I have written before about the problems with tiling the world in a top-down, legible manner, but there are both exceptions and redeeming features of this mode of production.
Unorthodoxy explodes the idea You Can’t Control the Environment—well you can’t when it’s not in your political interest to do so. That’s for sure.
Alf thinks Christianity needs to “Saintify” Charles Darwin. How ’bout we just declare a truce? (Which the Catholic Church has pretty much done from the start.) After all, what post-humous miracles might Charles Darwin perform? And this part was spot on:
The main purpose of religion is to prevent holiness spirals so we can all just get on with life. If Christianity can do that once again like it used to do, who am I to reinvent the wheel? I have no problem getting behind Christianity if it is capable of what Jim thinks it is capable.
Well, that’s not its main main purpose. But it is so from the point of view of any well-governed state. That more souls go to heaven—e.g., by eating God—that’s just pure gravy for the King.
Friend of Social Matter, Anatoly Karlin coins the Frito effect as a shorthand for all dysgenic trends in intelligence. If you know the source of the name without looking, I don’t know whether to be impressed or worried.
And Anatoly also gives an overview of Russia’s historical gun culture and the changes to it. To the surprise of literally no one, there were no significant restrictions on firearm purchases until the 1905 unpleasantness, and even then, it was much less restrictive than many areas of the U.S. today. Naturally, the communists began confiscating privately held weapons almost immediately after their rise to power, and they even went so far as to start banning knives. Today, Russia is still very restrictive towards gun rights and many Russians think that is essential to their safety. Sad!
Ron Unz has been hard at work these past few weeks with his American Pravda series with The Nature of Anti-Semitism. Unz reviews several sources and historical episodes and concludes that reports of anti-Semitism have been exaggerated.
Malcolm Pollack interrogates Roger Scruton on What is a Conservative? What it ought to mean is a different question.
By way of Isegoria… European financial history: starts with Fibonacci. Tyler Cowen describes what the decline of America would look like. Turkish Airlines produces an airline safety video worth watching. Microfilm may still have a future yet. Filed under My Aren’t You Surprised: The most expensive new public school in San Francisco history failed. Finally, How do placebos work.
Finally, over at CWNY, As You Would Oppose the Devil, oppose these six modern, very stylish, hypocrisies.
This Week in Social Matter
Jérôme Bernard Grenouille, on loan from Northern Dawn, returns to Social Matter with something completely different: (quasi-)autobiographical Thoughts Upon The Huangpu River.
There is a stigma in this new China—this seemingly open China—towards Chinese women throwing themselves at foreigners. A confident culture intrinsically seeks to perpetuate itself, which in turns requires it to regulate the behavior of its women. For a society significantly more socially intricate than any in the West, the mechanism of choice for enforcing the social contract is shame. Chinese women who date and marry outside of the nation’s social and biological compact can expect to be rather publicly disgraced. I have witnessed more than one interracial couple strolling down the streets on a breezy Shanghai night, jeered at by bystanders. The official term for Chinese women who engage in this social faux pas is “white cock sucker.” Although this may seems crude to a West steeped in the mantra of “diversity is our strength,” a civilization with five thousand years of uninterrupted history knows a thing or two about survival.
This state of things underpinned our entire conversation without it ever being stated….
Grenouille switches between personal vignette and deep commentary on the Chinese soul. And as if in a
mirror: the Western. Superbly crafted and a Must-Read: Winning the “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.
Empedokles Papadopolous drops part 2 of his Dark Enlightenment Now, an on-going critique of Steven Pinker’s breezy Enlightenment Now. Pinker’s primary target, it would seem, is loyalty. At least any loyalty to a biological or historical given. Loyalties to abstractions (fandoms of Canon cameras or enlightenment rationalism) get a pass. This would be, of course, horribly racist if the only people bound by the No Loyalties Rule weren’t white working classes.
If you are in any way disturbed by the prospect that your people are disappearing from the land they have occupied for generations, centuries, or millennia, if your neighborhood goes from being Irish or Italian to Mexican or Chinese seemingly overnight, if you feel any sense of loss, tragedy, or anger at this prospect, if you would like to urge your people to take steps to continue to exist, this is viewed as unacceptable. You have no justification to complain or feel a sense of loss. It’s just a condo complex. It makes no difference who lives there, and if you don’t like what’s going on, move to another complex with higher property values.
In reality, neither reason, nor science demands the shedding of attachments to one’s people, traditions, religion, or homeland to become deracinated cosmopolitans.
Oh, and it’s always 1939 when it comes to Nationalism too. Of course it is… Superb work again from Papadopolous and another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award. Three more installments to come.
Finally, Benjamin Welton is back this time with some exquisitely crafted poetry: The Clerk Returns.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Over at West Hunter, Cochran aims his spotlight (and wry wit) at NYT’s Paige Harden Blowing Smoke about increasingly strong associations between genes and completing college.
Harden argues that genetic inequality is unfair, and so -> redistribution. The earlier argument was that everybody is really the same, and so -> redistribution. I’m pretty sure that if the astronomers found that an asteroid the size of Texas was going to hit us in twenty years, that answer to that would also be massive redistribution. What does she says about the boring topic of making society actually work better—where well-understood genetic influences could have a role? Nothing, of course.
Still vacationing (which apparently she doesn’t like???), Evolutionist X presents Notes From The Road™… Brain Modules, Fertility, and Conspiracy.
Book club discussion continues unhindered on Philip Auerswald’s The Code Economy: Chapter 10: Complementarity—In which I am Confused.
[…] [T]hat word–bifurcation—contains a problem: what happens to the middle? A huge mass of people at the bottom, making and consuming cheap products, and a small class at the top, making and consuming expensive products—well I will honor the demonstrated preferences of everyone involved for stuff, of whatever price, but what about the middle?
Auerswald suggests that automation bifurcates products into cheap and expensive ones. He claims that movies, visual art services (ie, copying and digitization of art vs. fine art,) and music have also undergone bifurcation, not extinction, due to new technology.
Is this how the middle class dies?
Is the economy made for man? Or man for the economy? Along the way, Mrs. X hikes through some related sociological trails. An unexpectedly large effort here nets an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention from The Committee.
Finally, for Anthropologyish Friday History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons, pt. 3 Burma, China, and Japan. Not sure what makes it merely anthropology-ish. Study of mankind is as study of mankind does. But this is a particularly gruesome episode.
By way of Audacious Epigone, some pretty solid Meditations on America and Rome, and nationalism and identity as well.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter took a well-deserved week off this week. Given the various outrages late and impending, we’re virtually certain he won’t say silent for long. Tune in next week for finely crafted, cold-aged skewerings of your favorite liberals.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Thomas F. Bertonneau looks at some maladaptive cultural practices when he reviews Robert Edgerton’s Sick Societies (1992) Revisited.
J. M. Smith muses on academic bombast and a corresponding lack of substance in Hellebore, Nettles and Jimson Weed. He reports from the front lines of the latest droll academic trend. A taste:
Woody Guthrie was a communist, but was not, at least, a bombastic communist!
“Spatial justice” is just a bombastic way to say desegregation, and a soothing way to say forced integration. In this anthology, “justice” will almost certainly mean equality, in which case “spatial justice” will require that every individual is equally likely to occupy any particular “space.” As a practical matter, it would mean that families were assigned to neighborhoods randomly, and without respect to their wealth or preference.
Whatever the opposite of gentrification is… I think that’d be it. Smith, impresses The Committee yet again, and earns an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his troubles.
Kristor detects Reaction at First Things when Nathan Pinkoski writes an article about Understanding Marion Maréchal. Don’t count First Things out quite yet…
Matt Briggs weighs in on The McCarrick Scandal & Objectively Disordered Sexual Desires. Then he writes about What Christianity Fails Into.
People don’t usually embrace Caribbean animistic Santeria when abandoning Christianity. They instead become animal “rights” supporters and talk about being nice to the planet.
Briggs compares HR departments to Corporate Zampolit, that is, the Communist military thought police. Also, corporate meat bans, the developmental benefits of lying, and antifa summer camp for kids, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVI.
Mark Richardson wonders why Tony Abbott thinks Australian immigrants are The best citizens?
William Wildblood takes us on an early Christian pilgrimage to the island of Iona in Scotland.
Dalrock examines the “servant-leader” and Complementarian contempt for the servant’s heart.
By coining this new term to replace biblical headship, complementarians are challenging traditional Christian men to affirm that leadership and service can coexist in the same role. The cynical brilliance of this strategy is that complementarians themselves don’t believe this. Complementarians don’t believe that leadership is a form of service. They see leadership and service as a zero sum game.
Over at Faith & Heritage, perceptive explanation of how Racial Reconciliation Is a Gospel Imperative—just not what proggies mean by it.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, the eminent and tragically underrated Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was prolific enough to keep the blog fueled for many weeks.
Courtesy of Baron Zach
At the Imaginative Conservative, Anthony Esolen asks: How Would Our Ancestors View the 21st Century?. Not too well, of course.
By way of City Journal, Heather MacDonald describes the anarchy currently Shooting Up Chicago. She advocates a ‘culture of marriage’ to solve the city’s problems; but culture is downstream of power. So we come back around to the lash and the noose as panacea. Frank Furedi gives a brief history of The Campus Culture of Fear and its Costs. Like many conservatives, he believes that college victimhood culture inhibits the university from conducting serious intellectual work. When in reality, the cause and effect are opposite. The university had already stopped producing serious work and its current climate is merely a war over status in an institution that still has the cultural power to confer it, but no longer fulfills its primary purpose.
Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, which I guess is some sort of anime thing.
And over at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless has Writing Advice: Note-Keeping and Linguistic Fluidity for us. He’s also Accepting Submissions in the realm of fiction and theory. If you’re a writer, hit him up! And finally, the brief horror vignette Interval One: The Severing.
Finally, Chris Morgan offers the somewhat surreal, and hopefully not autobiographical, tale of Magic Fingers.
This Week in the Outer Left
The Outer Left were too boring this week to link. If the pinko avant garde manages to say anything interesting—or at least funny—next week, you can read about it here.
This Week… Elsewhere
Nigel T. Carlsbad drops a pile of poasts all on the same day. Must have had them in the hopper. He makes fun of the once hoped for The banana family of nations—forgetting that the last century of Brazilian and Uruguayan history hadn’t happened yet. He digs up a gem of Woke racism from 1922. He makes a very strong point Leninism and scale: Why do putative reactionaries have romantic feelings for historical commies, when those feelings are never reciprocated? And a reading on the manners of the Roman aristocracy.
PA has coverage of Occupy ICE vs. Philly Police—armed with bicycles, round one. Video: very lulzworthy. Also there, recognizing the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising: White Eagle—with more original translation.
Hapsburg Restorationist quotes Otto von Habsburg on The Inherent Fallacy of the Ethnic State.
Something completely different this week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Quiz Show—Listener Q&A.
Al Fin looks at the Surge of Americans Renouncing US Citizenship. It’s been on the rise for a while now, but it’s still really tiny numbers. And besides… Good riddance.
Spotted Toad is (unusually) brief with The Problem of Meritocracy in One Graph. Basically, “meritocracy” is a morally soothing euphemism for “something else”.
You can “take The Derb out of National Review, but you can’t take The National Review out of The Derb“.
Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui does some ideological analysis with The Producerist Theory of Society and Civilization. What exactly is “producerism”? Well, despite its origins as yet another communist sex cult, it is an ideology centered on being productive, albeit not in the crass economic/materialistic sense.
Life, by its very nature is productive insofar as it exists to self-improve and self-perpetuate. This means that those humans who do not use their lives to produce anything are inherently misusing their life.
For sufficiently expansive definitions of “produce anything”… maybe. The focus on maximizing production also leads to specialization, since pursuing multiple objectives causes inefficiency.
Instead of trying to get a firm grasp on the political apparatus, we ought to improve that which we can improve. Trying to do both at once will always lead to having to make sacrifices which are ultimately destructive. If one is blessed with a sociable nature, the best one can do is to create connections, lead people towards an ideal of connectedness, and imbue individuals with a higher regard for production. But if that person is instead talented in the arts, it is in his power to change the landscape in which aesthetic values are conceptualized to make people embrace that which is good.
Qui goes on to apply producerism to historical epochs and thereby make a case for political liberty. Though we’re not about to endorse “yet another communist sex cult“, Qui snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for the depth and quality of work here. A full-blown critique of “producerism” is, we think, a worthy next step.
Late in the week, Ace offers some hard-won lessons in “I still dream of dad…”.
That’s about all we had time for this week, folks. A less densely packed week: About 80 links and 3400 words. Well… it is August. And, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you should be out enjoying it; not slaving over blogposts. Many thanks to my faithful TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear did most of the heavy lifting this week. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/05) appeared first on Social Matter.