The Kavanaugh hearings were very much in the news, fake and otherwise, this week. VDH samples The Circus of Resistance, which is about all you can expect in Clown World. And Rachel Bovard is All Out of Eyerolls. Whether Kavanaugh supporter Zina Bash was really flashing exosemantic gang signs is almost immaterial at this point.
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Our own Aidan MacLear debuts his shiny new blog: Setting the Record Straight just before the Sunday time bell. He has some historical nits to pick with Jim’s Stationary Bandits Theory of governance.
Arnold Kling thinks he sees the source of entry barriers on the internet: experience.
The knowledge that managers accumulate while operating a business becomes a big entry barrier. When I was the “chief scientist” of an Internet-based business in the 1990s, we were periodically spooked by VC-backed competitors who had enough capital to bury us—if they had our experience. But time after time they squandered their money trying stuff that we already knew didn’t work.
Experience is one of those intangibles, something whose specific effects you can’t identify a priori but which is nonetheless indispensable. Kling has also started reading Yoran Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism and offers some preliminary thoughts.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Shylock Holmes looks at The other counterfactual to wasteful childhood spending. There are two ways to spend less per child and you’re only thinking about one of them, right? (Til now, I mean.)
[T]here is a group of people for whom the alternative counterfactual is crucially important. These are the couples who feel that they might like to have one more kid, but they just can’t afford it. Those are the people who are making the wrong choice. The piano lessons and the maths tutoring don’t matter. If endless driving the kids to weekend soccer is too hard, just don’t put them on the soccer team. They’ll survive. If you don’t have a huge house, then maybe they’ll have to share a bedroom. People have turned out just fine, starting with much worse.
Have one more child, and spend less on each one.
The spending doesn’t matter. The child does.
Pretty much describes my life thus far. Holmes snags an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his fine work here.
Anti-Gnostic shines a light on “The economy’s biggest mystery”. And he has commentary on Dreher’s Benedict Option (and Handle’s commentary on the same): Be of good cheer. A-G recounts some of the latest news not to be cheerful about. Faith, it is said, is the substance of things unseen.
Speaking of exosemantic gang signs… This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam presents a more complicated essay than usual (which is saying a lot) as he sketches, and expounds upon, the development of meaning in human language: Signing Up. Why is this significant to us?
This kind of “parrhesia” provides for a convergence of GA with much of the alt-right and neo-reaction, both of which similarly wish to map out, openly and honestly, the “mechanics” and rules of interaction between individuals and groups. It is only such a peeling back of illusions and ideologies that can make a “formalist” political project, in which actual power relations are formalized, possible. (Without a disciplinary space trained on all the various articulations of power, how could the actual relations be formalized?) Pursuing such an inquiry is the highest vocation of the human sciences.
Bold mine. This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Alf explains Why Jimianity. The only problem is that Jimianity doesn’t explain how to eat God.
Moose Norseman checks with an aphorism on The hidden secret of feminism’s success.
After the last American Pravda installment, we were wondering where Ron Unz would dare to go next. The answer: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. Unz indeed never fails to give us something provocative to think about.
By way of Isegoria… Seems like textbooks on how to teach teachers are primarily indoctrination, which is how teachers get so good at it. It’s not just your imagination: life expectancy of refrigerators is falling—but, hey, it can turn on your coffee maker, so there’s that. A quick dip into Heinlein’s Juveniles. Time marks for the “highlights” of Google’s All Hands video after the Trump election. The dirty, and quite expensive, underbelly of knowing more about your health than is healthy to know. Introducing: the Kitty Hawk Flyer. Finally: Lord of the Rings is still under a vigorously enforced copyright.
Finally this week’s missive from Cambria Will Not Yield… The Forgotten and Condemned Europeans. In which he reveals more than usual about his idiosyncratic version of Christianity.
This Week in Social Matter
Business perked up a bit this week at Social Matter. Newcomer Daniel Miller speaks of Progress And The Voodoo Gods—a review, of sorts, of John Cussans’ recent Undead Uprising. Plus a meditation on exogenous forces acting in human souls. An unusual, but not unwelcome perspective in these parts…
“History,” wrote Michel de Certeau, “is our myth,” but what creates the myth, and who are we? Suppose that the voodoo gods, or lwa, or entities resembling their descriptions, reach into our dimension and demand things, possess human beings and compel behaviors, including speech, or transatlantic quests, for their own aims, what would that look like? Land’s “right-wing Marxist” theory of accelerationism enters the story at this point as a theory of a Capitalist Lwa, on an adventure of intelligence, beyond the sunset of the human brain and human time.
There’s definitely something there, but r/acc strikes me as a sort of an intelligent design for edgelords.
And William Mason returns with an analysis and microhistory: Rightist Ecology, Leftist Entryism, And The Tragedy Of Earth First!. And defeating Conquest’s Second Law of Politics may only be possible by defeating politics itself.
These groups often begin, sincerely enough, as a collection of like-minded individuals engaged in a project of mutual interest. However, as seemingly innocent and apolitical as their cause might seem (playing video games, saving old-growth forests, drinking Scotch, smoking cigars), once the group achieves a certain mass and visibility it is only a matter of time before the Left takes notice. Mortified that a group of people could be going about their lives unfettered by his neurotic obsession with righting historical wrongs and destroying the last vestiges of traditional culture, the leftist will begin by critiquing the organization from outside, drawing fellow-travelers to his cause, demanding to know why the organization isn’t more diverse or active in campaigning for social justice.
Those possessing a vague familiarity with the group in question will insinuate themselves into the membership and ultimately the inner circle, exacerbating tensions in the organization that had previously been minimized by their common cause, throwing a little petty personal rivalry into the mix, and thereby sabotaging the group’s ability to accomplish anything without taking a “hard look” at their inherited privilege first. They will browbeat a few of the weaker and more insecure members of the group, cultivating a small but substantial Fifth Column within the organization. They will call for greater democracy and transparency and inclusivity in the group’s leadership, using their newfound power to subtly undermine some of the more uncompromising earlier positions.
(Emphasis mine.) And, boy, hasn’t everyone had more than their fair share of that.
As I outlined in a previous article, the worldview of ecology, in its metaphysical, scientific, and political manifestations, is a contemporary iteration of the perennial doctrine of holism. This tradition of thought regards the cosmos as an interconnected whole whose integrity takes precedence over narrow human concerns, and entails a concomitant rejection of narrow anthropocentrism in the service of the natural order. In other words, rightly understood ecology shares the transcendent and hierarchical ethos that the Left has been rebelling against since the days of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The greater the moral signaling attached to your conversation effort, the less effectiveness you will be in accomplishing your ostensible policy goals. For the Left, this is a feature, not a bug.
“Nature is the ultimate fascist.” It also corresponds to the reactionary concept of “Gnon,” which regards Nature itself—whether consciously or not—as an implacable order that mankind contravenes at its peril.
Very strong showing from Mason and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochrane has an uncharacteristically worst take on Ron Unz. But give him credit, he does it with aplomb.
Handsome guy.
Evolutionist X (with uncharacteristically bad formatting??) ponders Political Inconsistency? It seems to her that the answer whether or not to spend blood and treasure to secure the loyalty of a far off imperial province depends not on principles but on which tribe happens to be occupying the oval office. Political principles have never not been a club with which to smack ones enemies. It’s just that the American Founding Fathers were so good at it, they convinced almost everyone “political principles” were real.
Solid formatting returns in Homeschooling Corner: Summer Fun.
And a finale for Anthropology Friday: Our Moslem Sisters pt 4/4.
By way of Audacious Epigone: Running the numbers on the Pennsylvania Abuse Cases: It’s the Sodomy, Stupid. And GOOG employee Presidential campaign contributions in 2016. And my… aren’t you surprised?! I sure am surprised!!
This Week in Kakistocracy
First up this week, Porter extrapolates the trend of corporate censorship and ‘hate speech’ monitoring in The Freedom to Destroy You. And no, you likely can’t just “Build Your Own Platforms:”
And if you don’t like what corporations are doing to you then just build your own Internet backbone, data centers, payment rails, and global logistics chain. I mean did it stop Sergey Brin, Jack Dorsey, or Jeff Bezos when they were denied income sources, commercial outlets, and marketing platforms?
Then, he has a great deal of fun biting back at a Twitter firestorm that erupted when he was retweeted by Ann Coulter or something, in Diversity Dogma. Lots of good quotables this time. Diversity is Our Strength. That is, it’s a powerful weapon for destroying You.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Echoing President Lincoln, J. M. Smith prophesies that just as a house divided cannont stand, It Will Become All One Thing or All the Other. In other words, Leviathan endures forever. He has a very fine piece on The Handmaiden of Leviathan. It is “university” synonymous (originally) “corporation.” This one earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Professor Smith was on a roll this week… He also asks what is the difference between a Bystander or Busybody? At issue is the standard litany of “hostile environment” feminist mumbo-jumbo. Who’s hostile to whom? Smith amplfies:
The prudent rule would seem to be that one should step in whenever a woman is suffering a reverse, but step aside whenever she is advancing. It should be needless to say that the methods by which a woman advances are nobody’s business, but her reversals are every white knight’s cri de cœur.
Courtesy of Baron Zach.
Bonald briefly weighs the common man’s intuition of God against rational arguments for His existence.
Briggs writes about an academic Math Paper Scuttled By Angry Feminists & Frightened Effeminates: With Critique of the Paper Itself. Then he urges readers toReport Me To The Wanker South Yorkshire Police (@syptweet), who solicit their jurisdictions to report “hate speech.” On the surveillance front, Governments Demand Encryption Backdoors. Then it’s silicon valley’s anti-trump rebellion and Beatles circle jerks (seriously) in the Insanity & Doom Update LIV—Big Tech Midweek Special Doom Edition. On the academic front, UK Universities Threatened: Give Blacks More Degrees Or Else. Finally, sins of the fathers, GOP boycotts, record-breaking STDs, George Soros’s social media, and “Catholic” Colleges rebelling against the Church, all in this week’s second Insanity & Doom Update LV.
Mark Richardson asks, Has the left resisted market values? Of course not. They have to earn a living here just like everybody else.
Bruce Charlton writes about Finding the hidden Albion.
If hidden Albion is certain people, places, and things—then you could take 99% of people to them, show them, pick up and handle them, speak with them… and the average person would see nothing except the usual disenchanted, normal, mundane ordinariness…
Dalrock gives good advice to young women seeking a husband: Don’t let yourself become Empowered to avoid responsibility. He gives an example of how to make good use of natural Feminine wiles.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with more Sydney for the Saturday Sonnet, and on Sunday, Hopkins. Whose syntax can be a bit difficult to unpack if you’re reading it like prose. Read it like he’s preaching to you instead.
Courtesy of Baron Zach.
At The Imaginative Conservative, Mitchell Kalpakgian writes about, who else? Gerard Manley Hopkins. Who brought a bit of God’s light to a literary world of Victorian doubt. Speaking from experience, it’s a lot harder to write poetry about joy and goodness. And throwing the Benedict Option aside, Casey Chalk brings up the Augustine Option. Which the author admits is ill-defined. It seems like he’s advocating standing strong against the coming ‘Fall of Rome’ if only to inspire the generation who rebuilds.
Over at City Journal, John Tierney digs deep into the filth of the modern University in Reeducation Campus. Which is actually a pretty good pun, and more than a bit accurate. I see a lot of reeducation camps that could easily be appropriated to brainwash our enemies with a few changes in staff.
Richard Carroll has just his weekly episode recap of Serial Experiments Lain for us this week.
At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless rounds up noteworthy fiction from around the web in his weekly Fiction Circular. Or slightly more often than weekly; he also published a second Fiction Circular. But it was a quiet week for Logos CLub, excluding the daily writing prompts that I encourage you to go check out if you’re into that sort of thing.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Over at Heterodox Academy, they’ve an update on The Evergreen State College—the “The” (pronounce “thee”) always cracks me up. A rather extensive (cliff-notes size) review of Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind. And an actual scientific study on Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead . Or about as scientific as that sort of thing could be, at least. I think they should call them “Heresy warnings”. That is what they are. And then, hey, maybe Universities shouldn’t be going around spreading heresies. Or maybe they should. But at least we’d be having an “honest conversation” about them.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dennis Dale fisks Bernie Sanders’ Guardian Op Ed. Bernie’s heart just wasn’t in it: He knows darn well that Trump represents a rejection of Billionaire Caste than a capitulation to it.
Our favorite demographer, rueful liberal Lyman Stone, looks at the RFP for world’s second biggest retailer and concludes No Room at the Inn for Amazon.
More “Analyses” from Thomas X. Hart. Short but sweet about the longer the better: Psychological Analysis | Seduction, comedy, storytelling, and orgasms. Another Psych Analysis | The psychology of explorers and adventurers. And some self-experimentation (the best kind): Psych Analysis | 8 hours staring at a white wall. Fascinating. Hart would be an interesting addition to the Bro’ Science Laboratory.
And Hart has Big Think Essay as well: Fascism before fascism: Lenin’s genesis. Here is but a taste…
Lenin had contempt for intellectuals and people with moral qualms, and dismissed these as mere “wets”. This attitude has a Nietzsche-like or fascist tang to it. The intellectuals were weak and out of touch with the vital spirit of the age, and they had no national loyalty – only loyalty to ideas. They had to be pushed aside, if the revolution was to succeed. And such thinking is precisely fascistic in nature—or perhaps we should say it is precisely Bolshevik in nature, and that fascism is a poor imitation of Bolshevism.
Lenin was, in this sense, the first fascist. It was merely that his revolution still played lip service to Marxist internationalism and the working class. But neither figured heavily in the Russian revolution, and the system’s true form quickly cemented under Stalin: nationalistic, socially conservative, authoritarian, and so on.
The Committee were impressed with this one and gave it an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
To the strains of the amazing Lzzy Hale, Ace files some observations: “I don’t wanna be saved, I don’t wanna be sober; I want you on my mind…”
Al Fin spots some rather glaring trends in prices over the past 20 years. Why is it That They Can Only Destroy? And by “they”, Al doesn’t mean us—at least not yet. And Just One Reason Dangerous Children Avoid Degrees in “Fine Arts”. Not advice we’ve heeded thus far, but then we’ve never had illusions of our kids making a remunerative career out of music.
This week’s Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Nationalism in the Shadow of Empire—Nick Griffin.
At Zeroth Position, Nullus Maximus dons his lab coat and proceeds to offer a diagnosis of a political disorder with An Overview of Autistic Conservatism. Dr. Maximus’ psychiatric credential list is short, so he calls upon some keen insights from the late Charles Krauthammer.
Maximus also provides Eleven Observations on the Brett Kavanaugh Hearings. The whole confirmation spectacle is a lot like a boxing match between two feeble, old men—each is sent reeling by soft punches but neither can muster even the small degree of power required for a knockout.
Heartiste gets his Kipling on: The Sass of the Pupating Bugman.
PA poses his The Fundamental Question. Much more fundamental still: the power to pose it.
Welp… that’s about all that was fit to print. Many thanks to David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and Aidan MacLear for making this possible. Congrats Aidan the birth a fine new baby blog! We know there’ll be plenty of good stuff to come there. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/09/16) appeared first on Social Matter.