Our old friend VDH is up over at American Greatness analyzing The Ideology of Statue Smashing. It’s always the 8th century somewhere in the world! “History is also not kind to statue smashers,” Hanson notes.
The Romans defaced the statues (“damned the memory”) of unpopular emperors (albeit safely when dead) up to whom they had once toadied. Cadres of frenzied French revolutionaries sought to wipe out all Catholic iconography, clergy, churches and monasteries, and are now condemned by history for their destruction. Joseph Stalin eliminated all pictures and even printed references to renegade Communist rival Leon Trotsky.
Not unkind enough, we think. Also there: Morrison on Tucker Carlson and the Alex Nowrasteh’s Procrustean Bed. And Pedro Gonzalez explains the explainer behind the curtain and How Vox Misleads the Public About Immigrant Crime.
Arnold Kling wonders just where are the profits in health care? Kling argues that if health care were expensive because of greedy health care providers, they would be raking in astronomical profits, which don’t seem to exist.
If you think that America overpays for health care by $1 trillion a year (a figure that Silver and Hyman toss around), then show me where that money goes in the aggregate. Add up all the excess returns on capital at hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, medical supply companies, etc. I bet you won’t find anything close to $1 trillion.
Good point. But the inflation always goes somewhere, right? My guess: “Administration”. Healthcare is a jobs program. Kling also asks, “Is internationalism liberal or imperialist?“, and, in a snarky mood, provides another way to describe the contemporary political divide.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Spandrell kicks off the week around the sphere with some good history-telling, mashed up with some cask-strength BAP: The BAP Trap. As always, jam-packed with bon mots. Like…
Never before in the history of the world, homosexuals, men and women, were given each a name, an identity. Names are no laughing matter. Names are socially approved categories. They are a social license to exist. Gay men now exist. Lesbians now exist. They never did before, but now they do. And since we gave them a name, Western society created categories of people where none existed before. And that has had very notorious consequences. Perhaps fatal consequences.
Alf has a movie review PSA: The Adjustment Bureau is crap. I didn’t even know it was a movie.
Then Alf explains how Content is downstream from power. “Content”, by which he means art.
Slumlord is tantalizingly close to accurate in his Thoughts on the Clergy and Christian Revival.
It is this blog’s contention that what primarily ails the West is the collapse of the Christian value system and empozzment by both the modern secular project, a radical branch of the Enlightenment and the decay in quality of Christian thought. Secular has attacked Christianity from the outside but theological developments within Christianity have undermined it from within.
Secularism is not a doctrine foreign to Christianity, but one which could only arise within and under its protective care. Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a heresy. It’s one of the worst ones for this very reason.
A healthy dose of history from Кирилл Каминец over on Medium: Ферганская Одиссея, ч. I: Игра Наркомов. Which recounts the little advertised front of Turkestan in the Russian Civil War.
Over at GA Blog, Adam’s treatise this week concerns Money and Capital as Media and Power. Therein, he comes as close as I’ve seen him come to tackling Nick Land’s vision of capital as alien super-intelligence, thus algorithmic government. This seems to be key:
[C]apital must grant the disciplines some “relative autonomy” in doing so. It must allow us to pursue our interests if only in order to capitalize on those interests; within the more paranoiac streams of “oppositional” thought we could imagine that capital has “always already” channeled those interests in ways guaranteed to flow back to capital in full, but how could capital know how to do that without granting its knowers some leeway in the first place. Someone must plug the variables in the algorithm. Now, liberalism can only accelerate capital’s “logic” by trying to access some level of freedom yet unpenetrated by capital. If the medium of capital can be interfered with, it will be through the power medium, first of all by pointing to capital as a power, or a network of powers, rather than an amorphous monster. Power is more of a retardant than an accelerant.Obligatory girl smoking pic.
As always, challenging and thought-provoking work from Adam, and another 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Our good friend Bill Marchant saw fit to interrupt his long hiatus to drop a few buckets of ice cold Hudson’s Bay seawater on this article at Vanity Fair, which breathlessly fears “The Supreme Court is in Danger of Losing a Generation of Voters.” So now you know what keeps SCOTUS justices awake at night, eh?
Free Northerner has some straight, drama-free talk about The Trump Realignment of the GOP. The key is Middle American Radicals (MARs)—elsewhere termed Amerikaners or Kulaks where it suits the rhetoric.
The interesting thing about the MARs, is that despite being by far the largest constitutency in the US, they have minimal political power. They vote inconsistently, have no coherent ideology, and have no real political organizing (before the Tea Party) which makes it difficult for them to influence policy. MARs control only one notable institution, the NRA. This is why the NRA is so outsizedly powerful, because they are the only real interaction node between the MARs, the largest bloc of votes in the US, and the federal government.
Except now, they’ve got Trump. Much more there in a superb bit of analysis in this “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
After taking lengthy break, Ron Unz returns to his American Pravda series by touching that thirdest of rails: Holocaust Denial. Unz makes his case with his trademark fearless iconoclasm. Anatoly Karlin replies and elaborates.
By way of Isegoria… Incentives boost effort on IQ tests—effort, not necessarily scores. Some… Call it moxie. He’s reading Sailer on A Golden Era of live-action sitcoms for six-year-olds—Land of the Lost FTW! This comports with my own engineering experience: Collaborate on complex problems, but only intermittently. It’s actually hard to believe Stratolaunch is real. How much carbon dioxide is on Mars is not nearly as important as how much Nitrogen there is—almost none apparently. Finally how Missile lock-on! actually works.
Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield… For God So Loved the World.
This Week in Social Matter
Summer doldrums continue unabated here at Social Matter. Only one article here (other than my own) this week: A contribution from newcomer William Mason on Ecology Viewed From The Right. But it was a strong piece worthy of Social Matter…
Whatever its current associations, the natural home of political ecology lies on the Right. Not the false right associated with the Republican Party, of course, whose conservatism is little more than a desperate and self-destructive attachment to the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, but what Julius Evola has called the True Right: the timeless devotion to order, hierarchy, truth, and justice, entailing implacable hostility against the anarchic, profane, and disintegrating principles of modernity.The Met.
With which we fully agree.
To many of its earliest prophets, such as the Romantic poets and New England Transcendentalists, as well as nineteenth-century nature philosophers and wilderness advocates, ecology rightly understood was the contemporary expression of a primordial doctrine, one that emphasizes natural order and a devotion to forces that transcend mankind.
Which is pretty hard to justify if you’ve given up on transcendence generally. Which the left has. Because transcendence is nothing if not the privileging of a certain narrative over others. And everyone knows… That’s racist! Mason snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award for his superb work here.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochrane muses on the possibility of North American Neanderhorse. And this one made the rounds: Nits Make Lice:
You might think it would be difficult to induce parents to have their daughters spayed, but apparently you can convince bien-pensant liberals of absolutely anything, as long as it’s false. Gotta keep up with the Jim Joneses. They even pay for it!
“Modernity selects for those who resist it.”
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with another in her fine series of “Cathedral Round-Ups”: It’s about territory. It’s always about territory. Maya Angelou (Good Person) vs. Rudyard Kipling (Evil Villain) Edition.
It takes some special variety of gall to major in English at a British university and then complain about reading one of Britain’s most famous poets–and a great deal of stupidity to put up with it.Handsome guy.
Angelou’s words were written in a specifically American context, responding to the way she and other African Americans were treated here in the US. Her poem has nothing to do with Kipling or things Kipling or other Brits have done. It was selected in this perverted sense that all whites are equivalent and interchangeable, as are all non-whites. Any non-white poet will do for replacing white poets.
ISWYDT…
Mid-week brings Mrs. X’s 800th post: an Open Thread and a graph on farming around the world. A pretty interesting graph, but you’ll need to click for embiggening.
And for Anthropology Friday: Our Moslem Sisters pt 2. It’s as much a window into the soul of Calvinist missionaries as it is to Middle-Eastern social conditions. And by Calvinist, we mean “Cathedral”.
By way of Audacious Epigone… A trip to the GSS data in Electoral behavior of white Hispanics and non-white Hispanics. Would you stay thin and healthy for a million dollars? Of course you would. And it’s probably worth more than that. Finally, praise for Trump on McCain: Senator, you’re no Vespasian.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter weighs in as usual on the ongoing saga of our corrupt judiciary; all Muller needs is to find A Few Honest Men:
You see, when Mueller offered to pay Rick Gates with years of his life for testifying against Paul Manifort, that wasn’t suborning perjury since Gates was only being hired to tell the truth rather than lie. So if, for example, Manafort had handed a $100,000 check to the presiding judge while urging him to conduct a fair trial, you can imagine the shrugs all around—didn’t everyone want the trial to be fair? So what’s the problem?
This is in the context, of course, of the “plea deal”. For our readers outside the US, this is the process by which a judge bribes a defendant with a lower sentence in exchange for, not to beat around the bush, telling the judge what he wants to hear. Usually by indicting the guy that the prosecutors really want to get.
And then, in Hell is Other Liberals, he takes a look at familiarity bias:
So when exposed to conservative opinions liberals became slightly more liberal, while conservatives exposed to liberal opinions became much more conservative.
To summarize many words, conservatives generally don’t understand that, or how much, leftists want to destroy them until they’re actually face-to-face with them. Or at least watching them talk to each other on Twitter. Is it any small wonder that NRx was birthed in the Bay Area, or that TRS is a product of New York City? If you live out in rural America, you might be fooled into thinking that things are pretty alright.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith kicks off the week over at The Orthosphere, with Professors of Despised Rival Truths Must Fight or Fold—a solid bit of analysis on Oliver Wendell Holmes and his role in the History of Liberalism. He is credited with the “marketplace of ideas” meme idea, but battleground of ideas is much closer to his real vision. Professor Smith snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his troubles.
Thomas F. Bertonneau channels Voegelin in his literary critique of Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen on Ideology and Violence.
Matt Briggs explains that Homosexuality Is Abnormal, Unhealthy & Unfortunate—In The Church & Everywhere.
A two-fer this week in Insanity & Doom: Special Midweek Doom and your regularly scheduled: Insanity & Doom Update LII. Sometimes one black pill just isn’t enough.
The irrepressible Ianto Watt covers the Chaos & Outrage In The Church.
And Briggs offers the chair to The Cranky Professor who discusses Leibniz’s Problem with Materialism.
Bonald spots himself in a movie—figuratively speaking.
Sydney Trads have an excellent bit of commentary on Victim Privilege and its Consequences. As it relates to Australia, South Africa, the Anglosophere, and the World.
Over at Albion Awakening, And Wildblood explains how the world is run by Demons, even though real demonic possession remains rare.
What is the left actually based on? Stripped back to its fundamentals, it is based on hatred of the good and resentment of the superior. That is why leftists will ally themselves with anyone who is an opponent of the Christian West. It is the Christian West that the demons behind the left wish to destroy, and you have to admit that they are doing an excellent job. Their long-term strategy has been most professional. They have used lesser truths to attack greater ones, for instance putting material improvements above spiritual priorities and then using the excuse of love and freedom to justify constant attacks on the natural order.
A very perceptive and nuanced take, especially given the subject matter. The Committee were impressed with this one and gave it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Continuing that discussion, Bruce Charlton ponders The work of angels in Modern Man.
Dalrock has the data: Percentage of US population over 15 who were married by sex and race, 1950-2017. It’s actually not as bad as you might think. Or is it?
I had no idea August 26 was Women’s Equality Day. Faith & Heritage explains one way you can celebrate. With particularly poignant cover art.
One Peter Five sets its gaze on upcoming Columbus Day with Burn the Ships: Hernán Cortés and the Order that Changed the New World. A nice bit of history—worthy of sharing now that boring old Columbus Day has taken on so much deeper a meaning of late.
Cane Caldo has some interesting historical tidbits on The History of Cheerleaders, the Future of America.
And Cologero takes a properly philosophical assessment of The Future of Intelligence.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, more Hopkins.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Dwight Longenecker draws inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ writings on conspiracy to describe The Lavender Inner Ring of the Catholic Church. And Mitchell Kalpakgian opens some Samuel Johnson to contrast Utopian Fantasies Versus Real Happiness.
At City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple raises the point in Fever Line that the distinction between Muslim terrorism and ‘mental illness’ is blurred, since the Muslim’s psychosis often takes on a religious flavor. And Samuel Malanga argues that the Catholic Church’s credibility as an institution could be destroyed as a result of the sex scandals in Days of Wrath.
Richard Carroll has just his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week.
At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. He also tries his hand at a little abstract poetry: Distal Sky, and another horror short: Scalegrave.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Jordan Peterson sits down with Democratic party strategist Gregg Hurwitz to discuss political polarization. Hurwitz is trying to make the Democrats seem less insane. We can only wish him the best of luck, considering that he’ll need it. (Can he help neocons?)
This Week… Elsewhere
Al Fin has not a few unkind words for Social Justice in Engineering—or Engineering +, as we like to call it.
Thrasymachus pens the obituary: White Nationalism is Dead. It’s not entirely clear it was ever alive, but… now it is definitely dead… Or Ace checks in midweek with “…crawl on hands and knees until you see you’re just like me…”—a meditation on agency and how to use it. And how not to.
Tom Hart is back with a vengeance. He must have been reading GA Blog, because this Philosophical Analysis evaluates Capital as consciousness. Somewhat surprisingly, he seems to come down on the affirmative side…
P1: Capital is the sum of self-interested actions expressed through the market place.
P2: The sum of self-interested actions, each a calculation, is analogous to the actions of neurones in the brain that, acting as individual calculators*, form consciousness.
…
P3: Therefore, capital is a global of consciousness with its own intentions and purpose.
Several errors there hiding in plain sight. Perhaps Mr. Hart was trolling us. Also up at Medium, more in Hart’s Analysis series: Ideological Analysis | Why do social justice themes predominate in advertising and the media?; Logical Analysis | The pseudo-Jungian fallacy, and Moral Analysis | Christians must support the death penalty.
This week in the Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Common Cause—Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism.
Heartiste gives due reverence to Gnon in The Masculinizing Effects Of The Birth Control Pill.
PA explains the good and bad of America accepting Afrikaner refugees. Also more translation work: “The Flowers Of My Land”.
That’s all folks. Vacation Season and excessive heat continue to suppress output around the sphere: Only about 80 links and 3000 words. Still plenty to see, and too much to drink all in one gulp. To my trusty TWiR Staffers: David Grant, Aidan MacLear, and Hans der Fiedler, many many thanks for your help. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/02) appeared first on Social Matter.