The big story this week was, of course, Former Papal Nuncio: Pope Francis Knew about McCarrick, Covered for Him “to the Bitter End”. Hadn’t we all been thinking this was the case anyway for the last 5-10 years, anyway? Well… I guess it’s good to get it out in the open. The trial balloons sent up by the left-Catholic press in the aftermath have thus far been amusing. Pass the popcorn!
In other news, John McCain passed away. (RIP) I hadn’t realized he was still alive.
Over at American Greatness, a heart-warming analysis of The Untouchables vs. The Deplorables in American politics. Also Pedro Gonzalez on The Institutionalized Race War. I’d call it a “scripted scuffle”. An actual race war wouldn’t last 15 minutes. And since all races know this, it would never get started.
VDH, native Californian, is over at the august Hoover Institution with more memoir than history: The Diversity Of Illegal Immigration—or rather the lack thereof.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Anti-Gnostic checks up on The other anti-gnostic. By whom he means James Howard Kunstler, whom I simply cannot stand, despite his great talent and many quite correct ideas. I can’t stand him him for the same reason I hate Neil Young—pompous ass who despises ordinary people. Nevertheless, Kunstler is very consistent; and hates the neoliberal establishment—and their shibboleths—at least as much as I do. Our Anti-Gnostic is inspired to note:
Our forebears derived spiritual truths from harsh reality and passed them down in the form of Tradition. All the world’s spiritual traditions deal with the cruel world, and they all generally say the same thing: love God and your neighbors, get married and stay married, be fruitful and bear children, venerate your ancestors. Failure to follow these laws for living puts you outside the Tribe on a very uncaring planet. But now that we generate sufficient wealth to indulge all manner and number of sins (forgive my brevity–the Internet only has so much bandwidth), the wages of sin are not death.
Not death as the fleshly man accounts it, at any rate. But then again…
Also at the Anti-Gnostic, a rant: The Independent will not be appearing on my blogroll. The charge? Relying upon the Post-WW2 think tank archipelago—a phrase new to me (not being a regular enough reader of AG until recently), but one which begs for wide circulation immediately!
Alrenous continues his Herculean task of rectifying the language of news articles for scrupulous honest. Here is Opposition speechwriter purged amid scrutiny of appearance with heretics.
Darren Beattie, who was a visiting instructor at Duke University (now under investigation by MiniTru) before he joined the Opposition House speechwriting team, was fired Friday after low level party operatives were ordered to notice he appeared at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club conference, where Beattie spoke on a panel alongside heretic Peter Brimelow.
Brimelow, founder of the mainstream-heretic website Vdare.com, a publication which “insolently agrees with the majority” and “signal-boosts their viewpoints,” according to the Semetic Prosperty through Lies Centre, a MiniTru anti-science group that tracks heretics.
“Speaking in a room near a person constitutes endorsement,” the SPLC added.
The guy has a gift!
At university, Beattie dared pay attention to Martin Heidegger, who was a member of the Evil party of Evil. Beattie has called Heidegger’s Evil affiliation “highly troublesome” but maintained that his heresy is worthy of priestly attention, according to a report by Forward magazine.
The Post very loyally did not contact anyone who would know why this heretic was allowed to run free for so many years, and only purged this week, as questioning Party decisions is itself heresy.
Fresh from a new batch of girls smoking pics.
Another one: Austria’s terrifying-Oppositional government ordered a raid on our embedded Party organ. Now Loyalists are freezing the country out. Delicious! And: NEW YORK TIMES MISREPRESENTS SANCTITY STATUS OF MOLLIE TIBBETTS’ KILLER IN HEADLINE .
This week at GA Blog, Adam examines Fraud and Force in human psycho-social systems. Very deep.
Alf shares some brief thoughts on Youtube, and some surprising features of the internet in general.
Late in the week (as his wont), Shylock Holmes pens an explanation—and advocacy—of Mudita, or Sympathetic Joy . Mudita is a Pali word translated as “sympathetic joy”, which is a pretty close antonym to “envy”, which antonym Holmes says English lacks. (Contentment, to me, comes closest, but I agree it’s not a close enough antonym invert back to envy, directly.) Anyway, a good read as always, and something quite positive, in comparison to the rather dismal fare we specialize in around here… and an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Over at Jacobite, Jacob Phillips meditates upon festival and play in Game Over.
By way of Isegoria… A bit from our good friend Travis Corcoran: The inspiration for his novel was not, actually, the American Revolution. Pretty cool firefighting tool: PyroLance. May have uses not indicated. On Cresson H. Kearny’s survival skills—an impressive resume. An ethnographic approach to studying how partisan groups interact with media—they’ll make better judgements without media “interpretation”. John Durant’s Paleo Manifesto is “neither paleo, nor a manifesto—and that’s not a bad thing”. Doomsday prepping for less crazy folk. Finally, filed under that’s just gross—but pretty interesting nonetheless.
Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield, praise for The Gift of Sight.
This Week in Social Matter
Arthur Gordian articulates what many of us—natural conservatives—have felt and hinted at for a long time: characterizing the Pro-Life Movement As False Opposition. Not that he’s coming down too hard on little old ladies who feel strongly about abortion, or even young ones. His fire is for “Pro-Life” Leadership. A lot of money quote here. This is certainly one of them:
The pro-life position, on the other hand, fails the test of internal consistency. It argues that human life begins at conception, and that abortion therefore is the termination of a human life, i.e. murder. At this point, however, the pro-life position falls to pieces. If an abortion is the murder of a child, who is the murderer? Pro-life leaders have been explicit that they do not consider women who pursue abortion to be murderers. It is the mother whose action instigates the chain of events which lead to an abortion, and her agency which primarily wills the abortion. The rise of informed consent laws merely highlights that the act of abortion is not due to the will of the doctor or clinic but the mother who freely chooses abortion after clearing the high hurdle of understanding the procedure and all alternative options. This makes her ethically responsible for the action, thus logically she must be a murderer if abortion is murder. If she is not a murderer, abortion must not be murder.
“Pro-life” leadership has capitulated to the liberal poison at the root of “Reproductive Freedom”.
[L]iberalism is no different from its other universalist ideological siblings, communism and fascism. In invoking a world-immanent universal community, they must resort to paradigms which are inherently limited and constricting, thus incomplete. When people appear who cannot fit the paradigm of the world-community, the very existence of these people demonstrate the lie at the center of the ideological construct. While the threat may not be immediate, eventually all of these ideological systems will find it necessary to remove these inconvenient people. Unfortunately, as universalist creeds, simply deporting them is not sufficient. The universal world-community has no border over which deportation is possible, thus make mass-murder the logically inevitable and ultimate conclusion of the ideological regime.Good lookin’ guy.
There’s much much more there. RTWT! As always, a very strong outing from Mr. Gordian, and and “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.
And Empedokles Papadopolous returns for his much anticipated finale: Dark Enlightenment Now, Part 5, in which the meaning of “human flourishing” comes to the fore—our views versus Steven Pinkers’. Papadopolous draws a bright red line between human flourishing and the mere “pursuit of happiness”…
Flourishing—doing well at school and work, attracting and keeping a mate, having children, providing them with a good environment in which to grow—normally does produce happiness. In fact, we are designed to receive happiness for accomplishing these things. But this phrase has been subjectivized and relativized and captured by the ego, so that today the culture teaches that happiness entails not having to repress a single desire out of concern for its effect on others. (See: “Allow Me To Explain The Darkness Of The Human Soul.”)
Our selfish and social natures are in constant conflict about how to act. Selfishly, we wish to be able to defect yet receive the benefits of cooperation: to be fat yet still be found attractive, lazy and not have to work yet receive wealth, liked without having to be likable, loved without being lovable, and so on. It is the preferences of others which motivate us to put in the effort required for virtue, not pure reason. But popular culture, as I have mentioned, urges us to defect and listen to our selfish nature; it pronounces repressing the urges of the selfish ego to be weakness or inauthenticity and calls success at avoiding this happiness.
For those of us who’ve been reading Papadopolous for years (at Darwinian Reactionary), many of the themes he brings to this critique will be familiar. It has been a supreme pleasure to see these ideas finally shine under the bright lights of Social Matter.
A civilization is a large-scale teleofunctional institution designed to solve the problem of how to allow the living of a good human life in the abnormal state. Thus, church and state are separate in the way that the State Department and the Defense Department are separate—yes they’re separate but they are not ultimates. Rather, they are both part of something larger, namely the United States government in this case. Similarly, the cultivation of human flourishing in the abnormal state is the purpose of civilization, and church and state are its two great arms serving this one shared purpose.
America has no official state church, of course. Which begets the insoluble problem of having an unofficial state church; one beyond the reach of any executive or constitutional law. And the unofficial state church is antinomian—as befits whig fervor—with an absolute stranglehold on virtually all organs of information.
We will always be torn between our selfish desires and social needs. In order to balance these conflicting impulses, we need the message to be about restraining our appetites, cultivating attractive masculinity and femininity, overcoming inertia so as to thrive in our education and work. We need to see that the culture praises the loving family, not the individual career, as the highest expression of human flourishing, while illustrating how to detect and avoid omnipresent negative influences—promiscuity, drugs, vice, crime, careerism, envy, vanity—which lure us away from the living of a good human life. What motivates virtue is the prospect of producing negative social relationships through vice. But our current liberal culture wants to practice vice yet receive the benefits of virtue; they demand the right to not repress a single urge and yet receive the benefits of virtue. The desire to defect and yet receive the benefits of cooperation exists in all time periods, but some are better able to inoculate against it, to teach the people to detect and shun it in others and themselves, unlike ours, which manufactures rationalizations on an industrial scale so as to justify it.Lincoln Center
Just tremendous, canon-worthy work from Empedokles Papadopolous. And another “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award. We hope he returns soon to these pages.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochrane looks at assortative mating, genetics, and Natural Aristocracy. He muses on Big Science and it’s economic returns—or lack thereof. And a pseudo-scientific comparison so ludicrous that Cordelia Fine must be Cochran’s sock puppet.
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with the Nerd Girl Challenge: Survey: What are your hobbies? Like most highly intelligent, scientifically-minded people I know, she has diverse interests and pursuits well outside the scientific realm. (Obviously an overachiever, too, but that’s probably sample bias for the survey.)
The EvX Book Club wraps up discussing the final 3 chapters of Auerswald’s The Code Economy and The Blockchain. Which has to be capitalized because it is a proper noun, apparently. Or… A Metaphor.
And back to real Anthropology Friday (no -ish qualifiers): Our Moslem Sisters pt 1. Which you can tell from the spelling is old: Published 1907. A missionary account of the Middle East.
This Week in Kakistocracy
First this week, Porter thinks over the impending Zimbabwification of South Africa, and ponders the need for a little Aid From Tennessee:
So in the midst of their disease and famine, I’d paradrop pallets of Tennessee Coates books into Johannesburg. I’ve been told black uplift is contingent on maintaining their high self-esteem, so surely those pages would provide succor. If not cellulose does make for a high fiber diet.
Ta-Nahisi Coates, after all, is a great proponent of the benefits of blacks living without whites. Not realizing of course that they will take their civilization with them into the cannibal’s pot, but a little insult makes good seasoning for injury.
He also has a few comments on the Mollie Tibbets’ murder in Where Predictability Becomes Intent. In which he raises the topic of Mollie’s own unfortunate submission to leftism:
She likely believed her conspicuous racial self-flagellation and openness to uncomfortably forward Mexicans in the middle of a desolate road would move events favorably. That’s the logical conclusion of progressive ideals. But who caused her to embrace an idea that would treat her life so frivolously?
Now, I’m personally tempted to savor the delicious irony here. Part of me would like to see every leftist disappear into the maw of their swarthy clients. On the other hand, it seems slightly cucked to ascribe our brainwashed women enough agency to make them responsible for their actions. We should consider them infected by a disease—or does the defection to heresy warrant the punishment it once did?
At any rate, this next one really riled him up. The Rusty Toggle. I.e., the (atrophied) ability to actually fight back against the people attacking you. In this case, the failure of a nominal Republican on the Manafort jury to stand her ground:
If Mueller proceeds unimpeded, and Trump gets impeached, and the dems win 435 house seats, and black South Africans are granted refugee status for fear of contracting disease from white corpses, Ms. Duncan can take smug satisfaction at her informed and intelligent decision. It was as clear as the end of her nose.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith points out how diversity studies might be beneficial For the Education of White Girls. He recounts some of the embarrassingly paternalistic (and totally rayciss) charter and history of the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences (now known as Texas Women’s University—Go Pioneers!).
Richard Cocks writes about The Schizophrenia of Strong AI and the unlikelihood of it being a realistic possibility.
Bonald writes On the media being the enemy of the people.
Why will the media consensus always be Leftist? The possibility of ideological intolerance and holiness spiraling are not limited to any political persuasion, although Leftism may be better able to accommodate those who have misplaced their religious devotion onto this world. The ranks of journalists and their audience are disproportionately urban and middle-class, groups naturally more attuned to liberty and equality than throne, altar, blood, and soil.
Bonald considers the provincialism of the philosophers, particularly non-western ones.
Ianto Watt, invoking the legacies of the communisms, instructs Do Not Fear Being Called An Isolationist.
The Blonde Bombshell says Let’s Talk About Q Again in a favorable light.
Matt Briggs does double duty this week with changing anatomical terminology, the loosening of the bible belt, pedophile dark webs and mouse/human chimerae, all in the
Insanity & Doom Update XLIX—Special Midweek Doom! Then it’s trans pronouns in the Aussie military, firing gender essentialist doctors, and LGBT teens on the rise, all in this week’s second Insanity & Doom Update L.
Mark Richardson covers The Anning speech, where an Australian senator challenges that country’s status quo. Then he brings some nuance to the question, Is the left really collectivist?
There are at least two types of individualism. The first relates to individual responsibility, and here left-liberals do seem to be more collectivist. Whereas a right-liberal will stress the ideal of self-reliance and the aim of successful competition in the market, left-liberals are more likely to claim that “it takes a village to raise a child” or to stress the need for social security.
The second kind of individualism relates to identity. Right-liberals often strongly oppose the notion of collective identity (think Jordan Peterson), seeing it as an affront to the sovereignty of the individual. They see themselves as defenders of individualism against the collectivism of leftist identity politics.
Sydney Trads give us the rundown on the most recent Australian power shift in Recently, on the “Bip & Bap Show”. That is, apparently, the official name of Aussie Electoral Politics.
Over at Albion Awakening, William Wildblood calls for a reconciliation between men and Women Readers.
And John Fitzgerald introduces The Robin Hood Option, which seems to involve withdrawing from the world and taking mutual oaths.
Dalrock analyzes the US Marital Status Data Through 2017.
Seriouslypleasedropit finds one thing that’s worse than Change. This too: Long Live The Fathers, The Fathers Are Dead—rambles a bit, but good stuff in there.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, more Hopkins; this being a more personal prayer.
This week at the Imaginative Conservative, E.J. Hutchinson remarks on the Hedonism of Reading Good Books. Good books being old books. And a positive sort of hedomism at that— though one wonders if he would ever dip into the heresy of old books about politics; ones a little more darkly enlightening than Burke.
Over at City Journal, Milton Ezrati runs the numbers on Medicare for All. And Bert Stratton puts on an embarrassing display of public cuckoldry by lamenting Locking my Bedroom Door. Because this so-called conservative lets his wife run an AirBnB out of his house. And then lets her go out and drive Uber for hours.
Richard Carroll has his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain, and resurrects an ancient (2012) writing of his own: Of An Estranged World: Flannery O’Connor and the Grotesque.
At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. And continuing his fascination with horror, reviews of Shin Godzilla and The Bone Snatcher.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dennis Dale shares quite apposite thoughts on Hegemony and Harmony. As with politics (evil) and democracy (holy), you can’t really have one without the other. The question is not whether hegenmony, but who? (And whom?) This too: “Calling out another man’s racism is like calling out his bipedalism”.
Ace turned 46: “Let down for no good reason, chose to walk the way I did…” 46 isn’t old… if you’re a tree.
N. T. Carlsbad seizes an interesting bit of history of Benjamin Kidd and the decline of left-wing Social Darwinism. A lot there. A taste of the conclusion:
If Darwinism once more grips the imagination of the elites, we may expect it will be the self-serving, pigheadedly triumphant social evolutionism of a Benjamin Kidd. For any biological argument favoring conservatism, several more just as convincing can be made for liberalism. “Evolutionary conservatism” is an oxymoron. The selection-driven accumulation of congenital variations cannot be the foundational, first-principles basis of anything, but merely a moving target for enterprising rebels to read their tarot cards the way they want to.
A conclusion with which we wholeheartedly agree. The Committee gave this one an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention. This too was a nice piece: Hyphenated Americanism and the sense of place.
Al Fin is pretty bearish on electric cars. The technology is premature. Hybrids would seem to be a sweet spot right about now. Diesel-electric hybrid even better. And Fin looks at Singularity University’s Global Startup Program. Definitely need some “disruptive innovation” in social technology before we can handle (or probably even expect) any more in material technology.
The Myth of the 20th Century podcast delves into The USS Liberty—Adrift Over Troubled Waters.
Heartiste scores some excellent points on Defanging The “Hate Speech” Sophistry. “Hate speech” doesn’t real. It must be ridiculed as a facile, low-status myth; never argued with. This too worthy of note: Activism From A Position Of [relative] Powerlessness:
So if I were Head of Counter-Narrative Activism, where would I start?
I’d start with a protest at the foot of the Yarrabee Farms property, owned and operated by CEO and Boomercuck Craig Lang. That’s his company which illegally employed the churlish chalupa Cristhian Rivera (undocumented immigrant née foreign invader) who murdered American White Girl Mollie Tibbetts. Banner? NO CHEAP LABOR NO CHEAP VOTES GOP CUCKS GET THE R0PE
Actually an excellent idea… ‘cept for the rope part. Which doesn’t match up with powerless bit.
Arnold Kling elaborates on his position concerning Public Money and Schools. And… filed under Duh!… Virtue signalling may be a signal of less virtue.
At Zeroth Position Benjamin Welton attempts to cull some lessons from The Rise and Fall of the Sturmabteilung. The main takeaways are the necessities for discipline and institutional support for a right-wing movement to gain lasting power.
Jordan Peterson conducts his monthly Q&A session with his Patreon supporters.
And PA considers Relearning The Lessons, i.e., of Western Hegemony, that everyone pretty much took for granted a generation or two ago. A civilization that has lost confidence in itself pleads, does not demand; it does not act, but is acted upon.
That’s all we had time for folks. As always, many thanks to the Expert TWiR Staff for helping me throw this all together: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/08/26) appeared first on Social Matter.