Late in the week it became clear that Sky King was going to be the biggest news within or without the Reactosphere in quite some time. Giovanni Dannato was quick to post on its potential meaning: Seattle Airplane Suicide Is A Barometer of Culture.
Please click to read Borzoi’s whole magnificent thread:
I'm going to attempt to explain what's going on with the Skyking thing for people who don't get it.
Rich is a martyr.
And if you don't get that, then you aren't part of the people or culture that understands *immediately* what I meant by that
I will try and explain 1/
— Borzoi
(@ByzantineSnake) August 11, 2018
(@ByzantineSnake) I’m sure there’ll be a bunch more about Richard Russell (RIP) next week.
Over at American Greatness, VDH documents The Elites’ War on the Deplorables—round #437. As well as The Ancient War Between the Press and the President. Brandon Weichert looks at Confronting China: America Needs Japan, India, and Australia. We agree, but would certainly add Canada. And our favorite “yellow journalist” (heh!) and professional bigot is still in the news: The Genocidal Elite, Part I: Who’s Afraid of Sarah Jeong?. The AG take is that this is mostly a crisis for the New York Times. We quite agree. I would not be surprised if The Grey Lady does eventually find some plausible way to fire her.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton helpfully kicks off the week for us in the ‘Sphere. But instead of “Sunday Thoughts”, it’s “Yellow” Journalism, in honor of the NYT’s Sarah Jeong of course.
Based on her Twitter statements it becomes abundantly clear that despite her imposing educational credentials, she not only looks like a Starbucks barista, she almost certainly has the IQ of one, too. With that in mind, it’s not too hard to see why the New York Times hired her recently.
He also mentions “Europhobic” to describe her—“europhobic” is a word that is in need of a far more widespread use. Pendleton’s main effort is in taking “conservatives” to task for merely trying to get her fired for “racism”:
Racism was a term conjured up by Marxists to get ethnic minorities to help them tear down the power structure of the West; it’s a continuation of the class struggle dynamic, carried over to racial, rather than economic classes. The left created the word and as such they get to determine the parameters under which it gets used; and logical consistency is not one of those parameters. They are more than happy to use the term against their enemies while smugly dismissing any criticisms that they might meet the criteria for racism as much as their enemies. Reactionaries must etch this point into their skulls like they would the Lord’s Prayer or the maxims of Confucius: leftists are not concerned about logical consistency. They are concerned first and foremost with power, and they will use any means necessary to seize it.
Remember, dear reader, you’re just a prole from a fly-over state so you don’t have enough power to hold them accountable for their logical inconsistencies. They control Cornell and Harvard, they control the New York Times and the Washington Post, they control the NSA and the FBI—what do you control, silly altar boy?
What, indeed? There’s much more, and I urge a full read! Strong showing from Pendleton—one of the very best things I read all week—and an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.
Our friend Кирилл Каминец checks in with a quick update: Где мы есть и куда мы двигаемся.
This week in Generative Anthropology finds Adam Hypothetically Speaking. As usual, difficult to summarize, but very good reading. A taste:
I am proposing a kind of freedom of thought, one already practiced by many on the new or dissident right (which makes it possible for me to reflect upon it). We’re not obliged, nor does it always serve our purposes, to “prove” that we have a better theory of “human nature” or “social structure,” or to provide, on demand, iron-clad “alternatives” to the seemingly carved in the stone of history liberal order. It’s not as if we shouldn’t do these things, if they seem useful—my point is that these are not rules we need play by. Liberalism thoroughly saturates today’s media-scape, and a lot of what we can do is facilitate liberalism’s own self-dialogues, its incessant, narcissistic babblings. It’s helpful to point out that the truth of the matter is almost always pretty much exactly the opposite of what the liberal says; indeed, what liberals say is almost invariably a way of avoiding some damaging truth. My own approach, which I of course hope others will find compelling, is to keep asking about origin, center, power, deferral and discipline, questions liberalism must avoid under penalty of brain death.
As usual, Adam snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent and important work.
Free Northerner goes pretty koanic in his clarifications of Power, Rights, and Illiberal Freedom:
True freedom is a form of power, and, therefore, comes from, at base, a capacity for violence.
True freedom is a reality, not a right.
The reality of whether a person or people has the capacity and will for violence to stay free.
“Bad” Billy Pratt checks in from a busy summer with another of his Astute Social Commentary Mashed Up With Classic Movie™ articles: Homosexuality as Suburban Invasion in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” (1985). This one is epic! First, Pratt sets us up with tales horror stories from OK Cupid:
The bugman has a complex relationship with homosexuality.
He can’t be gay, because duh. And he can’t be anti-gay, because that would be interpreted as repressed gay.
This leaves only one option for the bugman—to signal that he’s so comfortable with homosexuality, and so masculine and so heterosexual, that he can playfully joke about being gay—and, because of this, no one can suspect that he is either anti-gay or closeted gay. Sure it seems like an unnecessarily complex way to signal what should be considered the default, but this is what a culture who promotes homosexuality creates when it’s under the moral authority of a matriarchy.
Which is, of course… Totally Gay. But what’s that got to do with Freddie Krueger?
The film was a sleeper hit at the box office, grossing over 25 million dollars, and just one year later a sequel was released: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge” (1985). While Krueger was written to be an implicit sexual sadist, it wasn’t unusual that the main character of a slasher movie was cast as a woman. Just like real life, in horror movies men are disposable and women are inherently valuable. To get the most anxiety and suspense out of an audience, the story comes down to the monster stalking the last remaining woman (so much that the horror trope has its own name). The first thing that should stand out as unusual about “Freddy’s Revenge” is that the main character is male.
Read on to see how that turns out. This was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention
This week in Sovereign Exceptions, B. D. Matthews sketches The Prince and (Michael Anton’s) The Suit, in which he claims Machiavelli as “the world’s first neoreactionary blogger”.
Machiavelli is worth reading, not for any one interpretation, but because his context is oddly close to our own. At the time that he was writing, Northern Italy was one of the richest places in the world, albeit one that suffered from persistently dysfunctional politics. The economic ground was shifting beneath their feet, though, as seafaring traders found cheaper trade routes to India and China. Like us, Machiavelli is setting down the rules even as the economic and technological fundamentals underpinning those rules are undergoing unprecedented changes.
As for Anton…
The irony that a Straussian wrote the best straightforwardly conservative defense of Trump is not lost on me, or on anyone else.
Matthews contends Anton’s The Suit is a Weird Al level parody of Machiavelli’s classic. Apparently, it’s even convinced him to dress better. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Also there, at the 11th (and a half) hour, Matthews drops The Truth About Theranos. So when did Theranos become a fraud?
There’s not a clean answer. It’s like asking when someone became an alcoholic, or when a marriage fell apart. At some point, you can look back and say it happened, but at the time it’s such a slow slide as to be imperceptible.
Read the whole thing! Fantastic work from certified rising star B. D. Matthews this week. This earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award from The Committee.
Alf is rather vexed over Christianity—and understandably so… I think it’s because he wants it to do something that it cannot do, and never has done: bring order to society. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: we don’t suffer from too little religion these days, but a poisonous excess of it:
We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy.
The problem is not that the role of religion is too small in the government, but that it has gobbled up the entirety of the government as well as its training and propaganda organs. It has become totalitarian. Christianity is supposed to be about eating God. Not tranny bathrooms in North Carolina.
At Jacobite Mark Lutter ponders urban planning in
SimCity in Real Life.
Also there, our good friend Robert Mariani gives a thorough analysis of the Sarah Jeong brouhaha in
Sarah Jeong and the Only Direction. Mariani starts off by chiding the conservatives for thinking this is all some sort of game.
The conservative-media response is one of asking where the ref is—there is supposed to be a neutral referee that makes both teams play by the same rules. Forced to play the bigoted jester, conservatives are always raring for an opportunity to share their perennial humiliation with progressives. It never works; the transcendent arbiter somehow always misses call.
The Washington Generals are supposed to lose. There is no referee, and this is not a game. Mariani goes on to discuss the actual ideology motivating Jeong and her masters.
Brooklyn left-neoliberalism is absorbing what it needs to secure the status of its adherents. This post-Marxism is becoming the religion of the elites, kind of like how Episcopalianism was a century ago. Alarm about white males “claiming to be oppressed” when no such claim was made, as strong as ever during the Jeong controversy, is the perfect illustration of why this ideology is so useful to the powerful. That such a specific phantasm is automatically generated by our shitty aristocrats tells us it’s something that they are worried about: white males having a claim to oppression is a threat. Nominal oppression is jealously guarded because it’s understood to be the gate and key to legitimate social domination.
Only those without Power are allowed to hold power. Mariani snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his superb work here.
Ron Unz continues American Pravda with Jews and Nazis. Unz explores cooperation between Zionists and Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s.
Anatoly Karlin had a nuclear theme going this week. First, he considers the ethics of nuking the USSR. It was well within American might to destroy the Soviet Union at any point before the Soviets developed a nuclear deterrent capability, but the will was lacking. One consideration that weighs heavily on me, which Anatoly does not consider, is what effect destroying the USSR externally would have had on future communist movements. Does it make communism less unattractive because people never see the horror of communism in full swing? Does it even make the Soviets into martyrs?
Continuing on his nuclear theme, Anatoly points to a study showing what we all already knew, namely that radiation is good for you. If a reactionary is nothing else, he is a man with a healthy atomic glow. The irrational fear of radiation and atomic fission has likely contributed more misery than any other phobia.
The conservative, strongly atomophile society portrayed in prewar America in the Fallout world is the gold standard of civilization that we must all unironically strive to attain.
Fully endorsed, completely unironically. If you don’t want your kids zooming around on nuclear powered rollerskates, can you even call yourself a man?
So what’s Isegoria been reading? Ray Dalio on close-minded people. Tyler Cowen on (non-technical) problems with tech. Asian historical adventures inspired by Shogun. On the “butt-eating powers” of the fungus Massospora—if yer a cicada that is. The disturbing case of the Right Whale. Eugène Dubois on how how Primates managed to keep most of their neurons the same size. Die Weltwoche’s interview with Peter Thiel. Finally, a 1997 interview with Nick Land—from “Wired UK”.
Finally, Cambria Will Not Yield’s Saturday epistle inveighs against Democracy—The White Man’s Covenant with Death.
This Week in Social Matter
Our old friend Arthur Gordian returns to Social Matter, with a take on Michael “Flight 93 Election” Anton’s WaPo “Citizenship Should Not Be a Birthright” editorial: Birthright Citizenship And The Machiavellian Moment. Anton does not quite go far enough. Along the way, Gordian deftly skewers David Marcus’ response to Anton at The Federalist.
Loyalty, as described in this previous Social Matter essay, arises in connection to real human relationships in a community sharing reciprocal obligations, not liberties, which are non-voluntary. Loyalty cannot be given to an idea because it is impossible to be obligated to an idea. Loyalty cannot exist on a voluntary basis because freedom to enter and exit would mean that there would be no obligation to honor the reciprocal needs of the community after receiving the benefits of membership. Likewise, the nation must be a body of real human beings to whom obligation is owed in order to be an object of loyalty. These obligations form on the basis of a commonality in the form of familial bonds and extended communal relationships by which the individual has accrued unearned benefits over the course of his life which he is incapable of easily repaying.
We know what libertarians get wrong, and that’s where Anton comes in:
From here, the weakness of Anton’s article emerges: the end of birthright citizenship is too little and too late to preserve the Republic. If the American nation existed as a strong, national community and the immigrant communities were merely isolated outposts surrounding a strong civic culture, then his policy prescription would be a reasonable stopping point to preserve the social capital of the community. However, even ending all immigration will not change the fact that the former American community has already been shattered by the forces of the managerial elites in their desire to atomize and homogenize the nations of the world into a plastic body of passive, slavish consumers. With the collapse of the American nation, the United States has entered a Machiavellian Moment.
It may have been a Flight 93 Election, but we’re all still on that flight. We haven’t regained control, but we haven’t crashed yet.
The Machiavellian Reformer is the late republican counterpart to the Founding Father. Like the Founding Father, the Reformer is a great and gifted leader with a mind toward history and concerned with the perpetuation of his nation into the historical horizon. The Founder creates a nation out of nothing, but the Reformer finds his nation amidst the chaos of the Machiavellian Moment. The genius of the Reformer is that he takes the decayed foundation of the Republic and forms it into a new structure suited to sustain the weight of the nation, thus following in the Founder’s footsteps as a Second Father of the nation. The New Foundation will not be identical to the old and may alter or change many of the most cherished Founding principles but will nevertheless carry many of the names and symbols associated with it in new forms.Fresh out of girl smoking pics this week. Shall have to get to the Quick-Chek to pick up a pack.
The mission: To reinterpret the work of Restoration as a reform effort, in keeping with the spirit, if not the exact letter, of the Founding Fathers. By the narrowest of margins, Arthur Gordian takes home the belt “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.
And close on Gordian’s heels, Empedokles Papadopolous delivers the next installment of his systematic rejoinder to Steven Pinker: Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 3. Here Papadopolous smacks down Pinker’s sunny and poorly founded optimism, which the latter sets against the cynicism and nihilism of post-modernism. Post-modernism is an error, to be sure, but not because modernism got it right to begin with. Ironically, Pinker runs from the implications of his own Blank Slate, whereas Dark Enlightenment thinkers take no small inspiration from it.
I said that I would give my own explanation for the resurgence of the Right, and it is this: if you adopt liberalism, you go extinct, and the Right is fighting against leftist deathwish values. In Pinker’s barrage of charts and graphs, the most important one is missing: fertility rates. The birthrates of all modern, Enlightened, liberal nations are below replacement levels, and this trend will ultimately lead to the extinction of these peoples.
Values have survival value, and everywhere modern liberalism reigns, the people of that nation are on the path to indistinctiveness at best and extinction at worst. Isn’t it convenient that Pinker doesn’t look at the survival value of his Enlightenment values? Apparently, when it comes to evaluating Enlightenment values themselves, evo and entro are no longer important. Modern Enlightened nations are not being killed by enemies, eradicated by disease, wiped out by natural disasters, or devoured by predators; they are being wiped out by their own deathwish values. Enlightenment appears to be the worst path a people can take from a Darwinian perspective. Evolutionist X’s saying “Modernity selects for those who resist it” might best encapsulate this movement.
Of course, this resurgence of the Right has garnered nowhere near as much power as it did in the 1930s, or even 1950s. And we all know how those turned out. So much work remains to be done, but Papadopolous’ point that this is an existential struggle is spot on: The fight against leftism is a fight for survival, on a long time line.
It is not ignorance, superstition, bigotry, or irrationality that is motivating the Right. It is that the Right can see that everything the Left touches dies. Institutions such as businesses, the military, or entire national governments require hierarchy and they die if they become egalitarian. Ethnic and religious groups die as they abandon traditionalism and adopt Leftist materialism. On the other hand, the values of traditionalism are designed, in a very “evo” sense of designed, to prevent social problems and preserve nation, family, ethnicity, and culture. That’s what the new Right is fighting for.
This whole series has been fantastic, and this week earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Saturday Poetry & Prose took the week off.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochrane muses on Japanese strategists, or rather the lack thereof during WW2. The sad story of Economists and Merkel’s migrants. Finally, a biological parable: monogenic vs polygenic.
Evolutionist X has a theory to attempt to explain The Mainline Paradox: Memetics and Liberal Christian Collapse. If All Are Welcome™ in liberal denominations, why are they shrinking? And why are the less tolerant (or explicitly racial) denominations doing just fine?
I propose this is because functionally religious identity is about group identity, and a group identity that hinges on “openness to outsiders” is not a functional group identity.
Well, that is true, whether it explains the paradox or not. The paradox I was hoping Mrs. X would have a theory on is why do these declining denominations—or at least their ideas—remain so influential? I’ve only met one or two Unitarians in my life—although those COEXIST bumper stickers are everywhere—and I’ve never wittingly met a Quaker. Don’t even get me started on Seventh Day Adventists. So… get right on that one, Mrs. X!
The EvX Book Club motors along to The Code Economy, Chapter 11: Education and Death. Auerswald is surprisingly (given his patent unrealism on similarly charged issues) realist on the topic of education being the panacea his social class generally believes it to be. This was interesting:
It’s easy to imagine this future in which we are all like some sort of digital Amish, continually networked via our phones to engage in small transactions like sewing a pair of trousers for a neighbor, mowing a lawn, selling a few dozen tacos, or driving people to the airport during a few spare hours on a Friday afternoon. It’s also easy to imagine how Walmart might still have massive economies of scale over individuals and the whole system might fail miserably.
Apparently, believing in the orthodox panaceas are not required of Auerswald’s caste, so long as you have plausible different panaceas. His seems to be “peer-to-peer” everything, at which Evolutionist X takes some masterful swipes.
Anthropologyish Friday continues with Oriental Prisons pt. 4 Egypt. Griffiths’ History and Romance of Crime: Oriental Prisons was written at a time where white-washing documentary history was not obligatory. So the sheer barbarity of… well… barbaric peoples is on full display.
By way of Audacious Epigone, the over-representation of white males among congressional Democrats—scandalous. It’s time to end white male oppression of the Democratic Party.
This Week in Kakistocracy
First this past week, Porter anticipates Trump unleashing Sherman on the tech giants. That being the anti-trust law, not the tank. But our God-Emperor would be well-advised to use both:
The left controls the monopolies, and monopolies aren’t in the business of platforming their competition. Ecumenical platitudes about non-existent principles are the things one utters while building a military infrastructure. In contrast, HATE is what one says when that infrastructure is deemed secure enough to form a foundation of attack.
Then, his trademark viciousness is on full display in Justice for Sarah Jeong. I’m spoiled for choice as far as tasty quotes go, but this one’s my favorite:
Perhaps more than anything her hiring left me wishing the Pusan Perimeter had collapsed before we got there. That because it requires the cultivated conscience of an insect to express fervent contempt and eradication fantasies about the same people who lost many thousands of their own saving you from a short life of stomach worms. That was our mistake.
Finally, he turns a critical eye toward the “research” that passes for scholarship at our most eminent university in Veritas Doesn’t Wear Crimson:
So if fondly disposed toward America, you are an “ardent” nationalist (as explained on page 10/35). Conversely, if one dislikes America very much, as for instance with the black panthers, that person is completely devoid of ethno-nationalist sentiment. The premise being that you can’t be a nationalist if you want to replace someone else’s nation (that you don’t like) with your own (that you do). I hope this lesson has been edifying. As our motto says here at Harvard: Veritas.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Kristor feels The Unconscious Girds for War tugging at his passions. Then he explores What Tends to Happen at the End of a Vicious Cycle and how far we might be away from it.
The question is not whether the present wealth of the West is massively greater than it was in 1914—it most assuredly is—but rather whether our present wealth is as great as it would be, had we not in 1914 or thereabouts begun a precipitous descent into *moral* confusion and error. We are much wealthier and more powerful than we were in 1914. But we are much less wealthy and powerful than we might have been, had we made better decisions.
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about the conservative revolutionary historian Gustave Le Bon on the World in Revolt.
J.M. Smith takes a sympathetic look at fantastic sleeping giants, Boiled Frogs and Beanstalks.
Bonald is over at The Orthosphere too, writing about the political IQ gap and The evolving narrative of conservative stupidity.
And over on his home blog, he takes a sober look at the dignity arguments on the death penalty and slavery.
I am not a magistrate with the power of life and death, and the Church has made it clear that she doesnít want amateur apologists like me picking fights on her behalf. So perhaps I should just leave it at that. I do not know if the death penalty is always immoral. I do not know what the Church teaches about it. The question of faithñdo I believe that what the Church teaches about it is true?ñdoes not even arise for me on this issue.
Matt briggs is glad Sarah Jeong, The New York Times & The Problem Of Whites is on full blast on Front Street. The truth will set us free. Then he affirms Despite What You Heard, The Death Penalty Is Legitimate. Feser and Bessetteís ìBy Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishmentî, a book review. And of course, there’s teachers failing math tests, mainstream pedo jokes, straight crossdressers and professional sugar babies, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVII.
Mark Richardson looks closely at what goes into A Jeongian analysis
Because you are present in elite spaces, your authenticity will often be called into question. So white-bashing becomes a form of assuaging internal and external doubts, affirming that despite ascending into the elite, you are not entirely of it.
Busy week over at Albion Awakening. John Fitzgerald reviews the book of essays that perhaps inspired his blog’s namesake in England’s Dreaming—Wayne Sturgeon’s ‘Albion Awake’.
Bruce Charlton asks, Why the recent suppression of conspiracy theorists?
And William Wildblood gives an answer to the question, What’s the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
Seriouslypleasedropit has some brief and well-constructed thoughts on Fulfillment and Metamorphosis.
Steve Skojec at 1 Peter 5 goes on a powerful rant here: “There is no such thing as conservative Catholicism”—as George Weigel reckons it at any rate.
And Cane Caldo takes “Equality before the law” out to the Biblical woodshed.
Finally, at Faith & Heritage, contributor “Adi” kicks off a promising series: Viktor Orbán: Christian Nationalism Is the Future, Part I. Here’s Part II.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and continues with the excellent Hopkins on Sunday.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce distinguishes between evil art, and art depicting evil, in Satan and the Art of Darkness. And Auguste Meyrate notes how Eliot predicted The Male Millennial.
At City Journal, Edward Short plugs a new book about the rise of Trump in Trump Contra Mundum.
Harper McAlpine Black shows up this week both to impugn Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien and lament the poor quality of illustrations of his work in general, in Mary Fairburn and the Visual Tolkien. To Harper, and to Tolkien, attempting to illustrate literary myth is a foolish exercise. Mary Fairburn, however, seems to have come close to capturing Tolkein’s mindset.
Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and also a rundown of Plato’s Dialogues: Euthydemus.
At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless publishes Part II of The Photographer’s Dilemma. He was also very impressed with the horror movie The Midnight Meat Train and gives a detailed review in two parts. And finally, a writing tutorial in video form: Keeping a Scene in Concord With Its Characters.
This Week in the Outer Left
Over at The Baffler, Tom Whyman has a lot of ink to spill in ire over how the media supposedly treats snowflakes. He sees the media breathlessly report on college campus disruptions where students aggressively protest the latest social justice cause célèbre and concludes it falls into the genre of “kids these days” reporting. He is also eager to contrast that with media reporting on Trump supporters, and the supposedly fair hearing they receive. Throw in some very badly misinterpreted Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is bullshit even when it’s not mangled, and you have this screed. Here’s the thing though: the media pitches stories in a “kids these days” mode because that pulls in the maximum number of clicks, simple as that. Those stories, no matter how minor, get news coverage not because the media just can’t stand these kids and their social justice, but because the coverage is a veiled threat. Every single time. It is a veiled threat to get on board with being outraged about cultural appropriation or trans rights or whatever other thing that does not real… or else. The supposedly sympathetic portrayals of Trump voters result in people losing their jobs and being internationally ridiculed in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. Whaddaya know? An even less veiled threat! Get on board or something bad might happen to you. Actively oppose and something bad will happen to you. That’s it, the media is a tool of propaganda and terrorization, and nothing else.
And over at Jacobin, they insist on being mustache-twirlingly evil by denouncing the recently passed federal right-to-try law. There are a couple points that need to be made here. Naturally, they are scandalized that money is potentially changing hands, but that is hardly even worth mentioning. They are valuing the supposed sanctity of a lengthy bureaucratic process—which has only existed since 1962 and been reformed several times since—over people’s lives and choices.
A young man of my acquaintance, a friend of mine, lost his father last year to a terminal illness. A degenerative neurological disorder… no cure, no treatment, nothing. Just five years of misery, suffering, and heartache. Five years watching his father decline mentally, a once sparkling wit reduced to monosyllables. And then a final week of seeing his father starve himself to death because the man had simply had enough. Who can look this young man in the face and say: “That needed to happen to safeguard the sanctity of the FDA’s Sacred Bureaucracy. Your terminally ill, dying-no-matter-what father has no right to try medications that the FDA has not blessed. After all, he could’ve died poorer!”? Well, apparently Jacobin can.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Salon tries another apologized for criticizing Dr. Peterson’s work without having read any of it (which
apology Dr. Peterson accepted), but also finds himself accused of unimaginable sins against Leftism by a disgruntled former graduate student. Oh dear.
Peterson himself publishes the transcript of his remarks and Q&A from the Aspen Ideas Festival.
This Week… Elsewhere
PA proposes a very illuminating thought experiment: To The End Of The World With A Friend. And… an encouraging word: Love In A Time Of Poz.
Gornahoor provides a strong survey on the History of Christendom in Hungary.
Tom X. Hart does Bro Science™—which is to say: self-experimentation. The Certified Bro results are in Month of meat: A month on the Mikhaila Peterson diet. Pros substantially outweigh cons. He notes:
The following observations are, of course, in no way scientific.
Au contraire, Bro… Bro Science is real science. Also from Tom: Ideological Analysis | The left has an Israel problem. Or Israel has a The Left problem. Or (most likely) both.
Arnold Kling reviews Lilliana Mason’s book Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became our Identity. Naturally, Kling takes Mason’s conclusions in a libertarian direction, but still, based on his consideration, Dr. Mason’s book does seem to be worth reading. Also Kling pooh-poohs Tyler Cowen’s pessimistic scenario with: Whose problems would you prefer?.
Spotted Toad has the data on what we’ve long expected: Too Rich or Too Thin—people just can’t afford to be thin anymore.
Ace lifts a line from Kid Rock: “I can tell you’re trouble but I still want a taste…”
Over at Zeroth Position Nullus Maximus offers a Book Review: The New Wealth of Nations. Maximus goes chapter by chapter through Surjit S. Bhalla’s book pointing out what the author gets right and what he gets wrong or ignores. In general, Dr. Bhalla seems to consider education the solution to all social problems and downplays or dismisses anything to do with biology or any desire or motivation that can’t be met with money.
Also there, Darien Sumner offers a critique of Mark Christensen’s award-winning article We Need Tremendous Government with the predictable libertarian reply: The Myth of Tremendous Government. For the most part Sumner misses Christensen’s point and gets himself wrapped up in libertarian autism, but he has a few good points sprinkled in.
Al Fin explains Donald Trump: China’s Great White Grandfather. Also there, an update and critique on Fusion: Far and Near, Slow and Fast.
This week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: The NSA—Signal vs. Noise.
Over at Heartiste’s, a superbly well put Comment Of The Week: American Identity.
And Dennis Dale examines Real Comedy v Fake Comedy.
Welp… it turned out to be a much fatter week that we initially expected. That’s about 115 links and 5500 words for your perusal. Try not to open all the tabs at once. My trusty staff did much of the heavy lifting this week: Many thanks to David Grant (who went above and beyond the call of duty), Egon Maistre, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/12) appeared first on Social Matter.