Sources tell me that the digitally remastered version of Unqualified Reservations, freed from the chains of blogspot, is complete: Available at unqualified-reservations.org. It is beautiful achievement, marking the culmination of years of work by several unnamed and highly capable minions working in concert with Mencius Moldbug himself, and with his blessing. This is a great gift to us, our children, and to our children’s children. Read it and link it often.
In the news, the Smoke of Satan has officially been identified as having entered Holy Mother Church. Not that there should have been much doubt over the last 40 years or so. This would seem to cover it best from the (actually) Catholic perspective: a powerful screed over at 1 Peter 5 No Matter How Bad You Think the Corruption Is, It’s Worse. Just a taste:
The ring of criminal Nancy Boys is the same ring that has been sedulously working for decades to undermine the integrity of the doctrinal, moral, sacramental, liturgical Church. These men—McCarrick, McElroy, Wuerl, O’Malley, Mahony, Cupich, Tobin, Farrell, Lynch, Weakland, Paglia, Maradiaga, their lovable mouthpiece James Martin, Thomas Rosica, and far too many others, including ones who have passed on to their eternal fate, such as Lyons, Boland, Brom—are the same ones who have destabilized and adulterated catechesis, theology, liturgy, and most obviously the Church’s commitment to the unchanging moral law, as we saw in the Amoris Laetitia debacle and all that surrounded and succeeded it. We must connect the dots and not pretend to be shocked when we see, for example, attempts under way to “re-interpret” Humanae Vitae through a false teaching on conscience, or to do away with clerical celibacy, or to introduce female deacons.
To treat the sins of this ring of conspirators as nothing more than a recrudescence of the sex scandals of the past would be to lose sight of their real enormity. These are not just men of bad moral character; they are apostates, and they are trying to remake the Church in the image of their own apostasy. The Church has been smashed up in front of our eyes in slow motion for decades and few can even begin to admit that we are now faced with a Church in actual smithereens. The Nancy Boys have conducted their campaign of demolition with a kind of imperial sway. It is not this or that aspect of the Church that is corrupt; the rot is now everywhere. It is a rot on which the McCarrick Ring still sups, like maggots feasting on a corpse.
And there’s more where that came from. Phew! Justice cannot come soon or swift enough to many heirs of the Apostles. Satan Plays the Long Game.
I usually feature a smattering of stories from American Greatness near the top. After all they are our nearest allies who still get invited to cocktail parties. But with the midterms looming, it seema AG focus has turned increasingly to that most degenerate of subjects: Electoral Politics. This was a nice little non-degenerate gem: A bit of historical sleuthing from Steven Allen: When LBJ Warned Us About Southern Republicans (Not Really). VDH comes to the rescue, maintaining his focus on the real enemy (NYT) and The Double Standards of Postmodern Justice. And their own, pretty solid, take on The Shame of the Church.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Ron Dart returns to Northern Dawn with a superb overview of George Grant And The Orthodox Tradition. Grant, it turns out, got close to Russian Orthodoxy by way of marriage—his sister’s to George Ignatief, son of the Tsar’s last Minister of Education (Pavel Ignatiev), who fled to Canada when the Bolsheviks came to power.
Grant’s more catholic form of Anglicanism made for many an affinity with the Orthodox way, and in England at the time much work was being done on Anglican-Orthodox dialogue (the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius was on the cutting edge of this deeper ecumenism).
As usual Dart writes with profound ease and familiarity with his subject. I don’t that he knew George Grant personally, but it wouldn’t surprise me. He snags an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his excellent contribution.
This week in Dutch Neoreaction, Alf seeks a rectification of names on “The Intellectual Dark Web”. Well… it’s intellectual… sort of. As for the rest,
The thing about the IDW is that the name just does not apply. ‘Dark web’ implies anonymity, implies speaking truth to power, implies that if you took the dark web into the light of day, you’d be in jail. That members of the supposed IDW enjoy prominent media positions, big posters with their faces plastered on them and sold-out venues tells us they are the opposite of the dark web and that we are once again being conned by the media.
Of the supposed “web”, Peterson has stood out for his intellect (and I’d add surprising level of charisma, for a guy who speaks like Kermit Thee Frog). But Alf’s got some humorous slings to… well… sling at him too:
Jordan Peterson stood out as a man of some eloquence and intellect, lending most credence to the IDW, therefore it is the saddest to see him fall so fast.
The earlier linked interview, titled ‘an Invitation to the Intellectual Dark Web’, is a 90 minute interview between JBP and an incredibly stereotypical virtue-signaling leftist, whose main point seems to be that he is incredibly empathic for the disaffected. In fact he is so incredibly empathic that he can’t help but hate happy people and wants them to suffer as much as he himself suffers for the poor.
RTWT! This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
This too at Alf’s… a perspicacious analysis of the Male chain of command.
Over at GA Blog, Adam writes in defense of Narrative—his own, as well as in general principle.
[N]arrative is the primary way of exploring and representing mimetic desire. Whatever kinds of “communication” can be attributed to animals, what is certain is that they don’t tell each other stories. Hitchcock’s dismissive reference to the goal sought by the protagonist as the “MacGuffin” is correct, because the object is less important than the structure of rivalry itself. I think everyone has had the experience of choosing a side, in politics or any other form of competition, for what seems like a good, justifiable, limited, reason, and then finding that the act of choosing sides and engaging in the competition itself generated goals that seem urgent but would not have even seemed important without that initial act of taking sides. A narrative “hooks” us by getting us to take sides, to see the agent’s actions and goals as our own. But, looked at this way, narratives generate delusions by inflaming and providing new pretexts for our mimetic desires and resentments. We can easily see how this is the case with political narratives, where people can find themselves convinced that the future of the republic depends on whether some tax bill passes, or an executive order is overturned.Fresh out of smoking girls, so here’s one with a pretty generous glass of wine.
Adam explores ways not so much to escape the narrative, but enter and subvert it. An “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Our good friend Neocolonial retires from public life: All things come to an end. We’re certain he will remain quite busy in his private life.
Alrenous is now editing the news for accuracy: Muslim Norms Overrule Local Norms, Swedish Court Declares. He makes it a two-fer: Heretic Alex Jones banned from Facebook, Apple, Google’s Youtube, and Spotify .
Giovanni Dannato explains why There’s No Real Freedom Without Authority.
Anti-Gnostic finally “thought of something to write about:” Darwin is a jealous god. Inspired by the unfortunate (but probably inevitable) murders of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan.
By way of Isegoria… Technical commentary and unanswered questions about Sky King’s final act. Robin Hanson giving a rather mixed review JBP’s Maps of Meaning. Amazon Prime offers Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! for free… while that lasts. Has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war? A highly Menciian moment from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This moment: more Chestertonian I think. A century of findings on intellectual precocity. Psychological stress apparently induces neural inflammation and thus depression. When the west started losing wars. Not just the when—which seems just about right—but the who is important. And finally more Feynman: Highlights from James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. A whole boatload of ’em.
Finally, Saturday’s missive from CWNY: Who Follows in Their Train? On the legacies of John Tyndall and Sam Francis and where even they came up short.
This Week in Social Matter
Sutton Coldfield kicks off the week here with Reflections On Reading Yukio Mishima’s The Sea Of Fertility. Long a meme in reactionary circles, Mishima is too little read, and even less understood. Coldfield’s is a big first step in remedying the situation. A taste:
Mishima demands attention to several principles of a real Right: the sanctity and designation of authority; the nature of history; and the price of authenticity (and the cost of not paying that price). We as moderns feel that we do not have a clear notion of purity: we are compromised by our inheritance and the system we are embedded in. (This is a clearer notion than white guilt or white privilege, which imply complicity.) Mishima correctly identifies humanism as a river to be crossed (Runaway Horses, p. 292).
Coldfield gives only a small taste of the 4-volumes comprising Mishima’s last work. Take this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention as an invitation to dive in.
Empedokles Papadopolous’ onslaught on Steven Pinker continues apace in Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 4, wherein he is found to be a rather inconsistent “utilitarian” at best. To say nothing of actual human nature…
As with his discussion of reason, despite only making a modest point, he then goes on to act as if he’s proved a major one. He acts as if he’s made the larger point that human flourishing means the maximizing of pleasurable experiences over the course of one’s life and avoiding unpleasurable ones. But maximizing pleasurable experiences is not what humans did that was selected for. Something like fear of ostracism was selected for precisely because being in a cooperative community was advantageous. The benefits of cooperation were the ultimate effect of the fear of ostracism or loneliness, not the acquisition of pleasure. If people could take a pill to get pleasure whenever they felt fear of ostracism, instead of actually working to get the benefits of cooperation, they would eventually be out-competed by those who did actually get the benefits of cooperation.
What Pinker is missing is that these mental states all have distinct etiologies and intermediate functions before the ultimate function of survival and reproduction. In writing “pleasurable experiences allowed our ancestors to survive and have viable children, and painful ones led to a dead end,” Pinkin jumps straight from pleasure to survival and reproduction. Pinker says that “They are links in the causal chain that allowed minds to come into being” but doesn’t look at the individual chain of each mental state. It’s not that the desire for food directly produced more people, and the desire for camaraderie directly produced more people, and the desire for comfort directly produced more people, as if when you experience comfort a baby pops out of you.
Emphasis mine. That particular sentence is worthy of @WrathOfGnon meme. Papadopolous is really in his wheelhouse here, and absolutely on fire throughout. Arguably the best installment yet and earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. Part V is on its way! [Hint: it’s already here, but we’re supposed to pretend it’s still Sunday night.]
Finally, for Saturday’s Poetry & Prose column: the talented Carl Hildebrand pens The Holy Investiture Of Shah Khosrau Parviz.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochran permits himself some speculation on a Gaussian anomaly or maybe not. Related: Notes from the class struggle. Also… why PTSD probably shouldn’t exist.
Evolutionist X kicks the week off tackling Liberal vs Conservative “Essences”, and the failure of psychology experiments to replicate. A tall order.
EvX Book Club continues with Auerwald’s Code Economy ch. 12: How do you LVT a Digital Land? LVT stands for Land Value Tax. (Took me a while.) The implications are tremendous, even if you don’t live in (or ever want) a Georgist System. My $0.02, there’s always bandwidth. In fact, taxing bandwidth would greatly improve the quality of what passes across Teh Interwebs. And if people had to pay $1.00/mo. to use Twitter? Well, I’d pay it. (But not $10.)
Finally a Guest Post (from an unnamed guest) on Professor Dwayne Dixon and the death of Heather Heyer. Dixon’s quite probable role in the death, that is.
By way of Audacious Epigone… Whites in Iowa and New Hampshire hold back racial progress—Dems should respond by holding their earliest primaries in CA, Manhattan, and DC!
This Week in Kakistocracy
First up, Porter uses a recent incident of #MeToo to hammer home what is perhaps the core message of his blog in My Astounding and Beautiful Nimrod. And it’s a message that deserves repetition, loudly and often:
Hate, Raysis, and Nazis are not and never have been principled positions in any of our lifetimes. They are only and always tribal vehicles. The purpose of which being to turn you into petroleum and your children into janissaries. That means you, you relentlessly dull conservatives. The left doesn’t actually care about nazis, because there are no nazis. They care about destroying you. Your history, your culture, your traditions, your future, your family, you. That is their operational principle.
However, he’s not too optimistic about the likelihood of an American Civil War. That is, he doesn’t think conservatives have the will or ability to mount a defense. He lets an anonymous commenter from the Unz blog take it from there in Falling Down. In other words, decline; none of these likely futures look too good for America barring a Trump coup.
And finally, he pokes a little fun at (i.e. applies to actual reality) some amusingly un-self-aware science from a leftist newspaper (but I repeat myself) in The Possum Brain. A major function of the brain, of course, being to predictively model reality based on our sensory inputs. And, of course, to turn itself off when status need be signaled.
And while your model is ingesting that input, you’re negotiating a future model that asks ìWhat if everywhere was East St. Louis?î This inducing a motivation that everywhere not be East St. Louis. Fortunately, your predictive brain alerts you to the fact that expressing this preference for a non ESL world is likely to result in social shaming, harassment, and unemployment. So your brain negotiates this hurdle by accurately predicting that parroting false platitudes about diversity will enable sufficient income to subsidize a life far away from it.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Thomas F. Bertonneau reviews Pierre Manent: Beyond Radical Secularism. Then he does another fake write-up no less ridiculous than what might actually be printed by Universities today: Upstate Consolation University Extends Diversity Recruitment Policy to Triffids.
Kristor suggests the purpose of the Enlightenment was to kill metaphysics, or as he puts it, The Sorts of Liberalism Are Attempted Implementations of Nominalism.
JMSmith exhorts us to approach our fallen nature With Fear and Trembling, not Pique and Grumbling.
Modern Christian thought is mostly modern thought with candles. In the case of human dignity, it accepts the cosmic degradation of men to cyphers and hollow men that float on the surface of deeper social forces. This is why its men are not so much sinners who have fallen as they are victims who have been pushed.
And when nativist Americans are routinely condemned for their culture and heritage, Smith asks How Many Generations Will It Take? Lastly, he takes a look at yet Another Plague of Pederasts.
Richard Cocks pens a rather thorough critique of Sam Harris: The Unconverted
Harris has a moral project—to reduce suffering and promote happiness. His starting axiom for this quest is that the worst possible state of affairs is one where people would be maximally miserable; an ultimate hell for all conscious beings. The goal then would be to move in the opposite direction. This has an arse-backwards quality to it. Keeping one’s eyes firmly on the hellish, one backs one’s way towards the heavenly.
Bonald notes that with a Church in crisis, it’s laity to the rescue, again.
Matt Briggs says it’s time to Regulate Information-Monopoly Tech Companies Before It’s Too Late. Then he opines on Priests Oriented Toward Males & The New Crisis.
There are no such things as “gays”. There are no such as “heterosexuals”, either. There are men who have properly ordered sexual desires or, at times or for long periods, have intrinsically disordered sexual desires—of every kind, not just toward other males.
Equally controversial are Briggs’s opinions On Israel’s Jewish New “Nation State” Law. Finally, it’s LPGA girls in the clubhouse, Jimmy Carter speaking for Jesus, and China’s AI economists, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XLVIII.
This week in Albion Awakening… Regarding the culture wars, Bruce Charlton says You are too late – I told you so. He also argues why School history teaching about Albion should start with the Mesolithic. And William Wildblood writes about Sunset in the West and how to cope with our decline.
Dalrock chronicles a young female blogger who countersignaled against debt free virgins, got flamed for it, and Mama ain’t happy. As for girls who do decide to go the debt-free virgin route, A shortage doesn’t indicate a buyer’s market.
Cologero provides an excellent overview of Rationality and the Triune Brain. On the way the 99% argue…
[T]he real cause is the priority of passions and interests over rationality. In psychological terms, such a person is motivated by eros or thumos, corresponding respectively to passions and interests. Then, so-called debates become battles of partisans, more akin to arbitrarily rooting for the blue or the green team in a chariot race. Not only is one’s own position defined, but also the adversary’s. What follows typically are mutual accusations of inconsistency, often stated with great mirth and glee. Some snarky types will go a step further by posting an argument that, they hope, will upset equally both “sides”.
The end point can only be like kayfabe, a mock battle with no real winner. This is especially the case in the numerous televised debates between “both sides of an issue”. Never does one such side suddenly become converted to the other; were that the case, the show would be over and one of the debaters would be out of a job.
Colegero snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention from The Committee for his fantastic efforts here.
This was not what expected, considering Faith & Heritage is the source: The Puritans as Radical Reformers. Adi distinguishes between conservative and radical reformers, and finds plenty of the latter type to throw under the bus.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, the poem that Hopkins considered the best thing he ever wrote; to which many would agree.
Courtesy of Harper McAlpine Black.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Mitchell Kalpakgian runs down Chaucer and the Heresy of Courtly Love. The point being that romantic love is a heresy. Notice how, as your literature gets older and older, most of the stories of “courtly love” are cautionary tales that end in disaster. Lancelot’s cock ended a civilization. Renaissance writers were fools and degenerates who failed to understand the lessons their ancestors taught them. And the Victorians, reading them, were worse. Jane Clark Scharl explains Anthropological Architecture in detail; including a hint at what modern architecture says about the souls of those who build and tolerate it. But she could have gotten quite a bit nastier on that point. Joseph Pearce has a word on Faith, Reason, & Science Fiction: “The apocalyptic vision in science fiction is akin to the memento mori in mediaeval art. It reminds us of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell”. And Thomas Ascik investigates the Supreme Court’s discovery of the Right to Create Your Universe. I ctrl-F’d gnostic, and nothing. Boo.
Over at City Journal, filed under “restating the obvious”, Heather MacDonald explains why Gender is Not a Social Construct. Even using the word “gender” is playing into the Left’s hands. Gender is a property of language. Humans come in two sexes, period.
This Week in Out of Phase, Harper discovers a modernist he actually likes in Barzaga – Windows for Closed Doors. And offers this gem:
This is finally the great divide between modernity and tradition. A traditional order is essentially vocational. The great moving force in such a society is what we might call ‘karma yoga’—salvation through work. It was fully understood that a man might be justified to God and Heaven just by being a blacksmith or a scribe or a doctor or a soldier. Work was thus a spiritual path.
Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and also a rundown of Plato’s Dialogues: Menexenus.
Good heavens, but Logos Club was prolific this week. A bunch of videos, which you can go watch at the site, Kaiter Enless’ The Photographer’s Dilemma, parts III and on, a review of Hellraiser: Judgement, and his own weekly roundups, the Fiction Circular and the Philosophy Circular.
Thrasymachus takes a poetic trip to a graveyard to see how The Family Rests.
And Chris Morgan dons the prophet’s mantle on social media and The Sensory Apocalypse. Instagram in particular.
This Week in the Outer Left
The Outer Left took the week off. Or at least we did. With any luck we’ll be back to mocking them or taking note of where they’re accidentally correct next week.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dennis Dale has a humorous take on Marginal Ross—in which Ross Douthat reads Steve Sailer with plausible deniability.
Al Fin is bearish on Russia, but on the bright side, he’s extremely bearish on China. And a plug for JBP’s interview with John Stossel: Jordan Peterson on Being Competent and Dangerous. Related: Who’s Afraid of Jordan Peterson? And an ominous review of South Africa Walking Down Zimbabwe Path of Ruin. Remember the bumper-sticker: “No white people, no food”.
This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast concerns: The Six Day War.
Fred Reed is just a bit off most of the time. Enough of the time that I rarely link him. This is not one of those times: Decline in the Fall (or Late Summer, Anyway): by Fred Gibbon. Just a random sampling…
Wild thought: Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are owned by the government. Ours is a system in which the means of production own the government. Congressmen are commodities and Washington a Coke machine: insert your coins, choose your law, and pull the lever. Voila.
Demographics have consequences. Only whites and East Asians, mostly men, display talent for engineering, mathematics, scientific research, or organization on a large scale. Affirmative action does not put landers on Mars nor program computers. By now it must be obvious that racial gaps in achievement are intractable. Argument over causes changes nothing. The country depends increasingly on a declining number of white brains. The attacks on both whites and brains will continue.
Nope. Not one bit off there. Nor here:
Universities for the most part are no better. We suffer from an odd sort of civilizational autoimmune disease, eating ourselves. Shakespeare is racist, Mozart elitist, grammar a means of oppression. Two and a half millennia of Western civilization, forgotten by a sea of gilded peasants with no retirement plans. Monkeys chattering over the ruins of a forgotten society. Once the chain of culture is broken, it cannot easily be restored. Anyway, a literate population might cause trouble. We will not have one.
“Civilizational autoimmune disease” is a phrase worth canonizing.
Ace crafts a superb bit of commentary out of The Princess Bride: “…now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do…” “You’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts…”
PA pulls up a devastating comment about the “Holocaust Industry”.
Heartiste features a delicious new meme: The New Jackboot.
At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus winds up Agreeing with Statists for the Wrong Reasons: Impeach Donald Trump. Maximus describes how impeachment would fall out in various circumstances. All things considered, the Democrats are unlikely to have enough support to remove Trump and, even if they did, that would simply put Pence in charge. If they could take Pence out too… now there’s an intriguing possibility.
For Congress to remove one President from office, let alone two in quick succession, would greatly diminish, if not work to delegitimize, the office of the Presidency. This may seem counterproductive in terms of weakening a powerful office that can be captured by outsiders to use against the establishment, but such actions would only reveal a paper tiger to be such. A Presidency thus weakened would signal an important truth to the American people: that they are governed by a faceless monstrosity unresponsive to their needs that they cannot bring to heel by placing a man of their choice behind the curtain. Eliminating ineffective democratic means of change is sometimes necessary to encourage effective anti-political solutions.
Arnold Kling explains Why I Favor Vouchers. The short answer: to break troublesome teachers unions.
That’s about all we had time for, folks. Thanks to our excellent TWiR Staff: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler. Egon Maistre took the week off and his absence was sorely felt. Tune in next week for all the news and old books fit to print. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/19) appeared first on Social Matter.