Well… this was the week the NPC meme hit. And boy did it hit! A Memetic Killshot. Even the Grey Lady noticed. Breitbart is fairly authoritative on the matter.
Venerable Victor Davis Hanson is over at Amferican Greatness predicting A New Era for the China-Russia-U.S. Triangle. Which are, of course, the only three truly independent states in the world. “Being friendly with a big stick [Trump] is far wiser than being obnoxious with a twig [Obama].”
Arnold Kling suggests that hysterical sociologists write as if Mrs. Clinton had won. Kling also offers commentary on the 2008 Financial Crisis and makes some replies to Eric Weinstein’s thoughts on immigration and Bernie Bros.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Titus Cincinnatus, who has the habit of posting very late in the week (as demarcated by the TWiR schedule), managed to post late enough last week to lead off the next! He takes an optimistic view of the fallout from the Kavanaugh hearings, inter alia, predicting: The Spell is Broken. Well, we certainly hope so, but this wouldn’t be the first time The Left have overplayed their hand. Cincinnatus has his reasons…
[D]espite the occasional aberration from the general trend, the American Left has had an increasingly difficult time obtaining true electoral success since the mid 1990s. Yet, this has obviously not proven to be much of a hindrance to the Left obtaining and using power to push through its own agenda. Even though the Republicans have had near-continuous control of Congress since 1994, and occupied the presidency for a good share of that same period, the tendency in American policy (especially social policy) has been ever leftward.
Why is that?
It’s because the Left has been able to gain control over various institutions which allow it to shape public policy directions even without control over the formally-defined legislative apparatus. One of the primary institutions for doing this is the judiciary.
The judiciary, he notes, is “uniquely suited to procedural subversion“. Certainly true, but I suspect this was more important in the Warren Era. These days, most of Cthulu’s water gets carried by academia, media, and permanent government. But back to the significance of Kavanaugh:
The procedural system for doing end runs around recalcitrant legislatures has suddenly fallen into the “wrong” hands.
And that’s why Vox, among others, is focus grouping various workarounds to their readership: How to appear to be principled while violating principles? A popular game among the verbal elite… Much more there, including what he thinks is the key to “breaking the spell”, but I don’t wanna spoil it for ye. This earned an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
And Titus offers something completely different: A second article for the week about something completely different: Why the Democrats Want to Outlaw Time Travel. A bit of speculative fiction about a cranky old Hungarian physicist and his invention which would permit unfettered forensic investigation of the past. You can probably guess why that would be unpopular.
Our friend Helen Andrews reprints A Loving Ambivalence, which appeared in this month’s First Things. If you’re not a subscriber, this will be new to you. She shines a lot of light on Spain’s own ferocious debate on the moral rectitude of Spanish Conquest in the Americas. Very worthwhile read.
Alf writes a full-throated defense of Paranoia. The fact that Mao and Stalin died natural deaths lends not a little credence.
[P]aranoia is healthy. Keeps us alive and kicking. Should be cherished and respected.Obligatory girl smoking pic.
It is a lonely emotion. With whom will you share your paranoia? Surely not your enemies. Probably also not your in-group, for paranoia concerns your safety in relation to your in-group, so if they assure you nothing is wrong, you are stupid to take it at face value. It is all the more dangerous because professing paranoia to your in-group professes doubt, insecurity, weakness, which heightens the possibility of betrayal.
Paranoia deals with the unknown. You don’t know everything that’s going on, you can’t know everything that’s going on. Your enemies will often feed your paranoia as to make you fear them more than you should, but other enemies might downplay your paranoia as to make you fear them less than you should.
Alf earned an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for this one.
This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam asks, “What would a market, built into which is an acknowledgement of the market’s dependence on central power, on the one hand, and the long term moral and ethical life of workers and consumers, on the other hand, look like?” This too was an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Right Scholarship announces a leap forward in his translation project: Ketteler and the Kulturkampf. His work is here. Those fluent in German are invited to critique.
Our own Aidan MacLear sets about propagating his pet heresies by Disowning the Greeks. I prefer the hermeneutic of continuity to that of rupture, but MacLear’s case will have to be answered by someone more capable than me.
Sarah Perry returns to Ribbon Farm with a deep dive into the problem of map scale: Light of the American Whale. She focuses on “the nineteenth century”, but I think the scale problem applies to any time or place.
Some views are better than others for different purposes—obviously! But here is the question: if we managed to somehow add all the views together – the zoomed-out globe/satellite views, the costume drama views, the recorded views of novelists and diarists, history and science papers that sift through the fossilized traces of an earlier time—if we somehow fused, summed up, superimposed, or otherwise managed to merge all the sources—would we wind up with a true view of the nineteenth century? Of any part of reality?
A fortiori, if we did all that, would we have a view of the nineteenth century that anyone living in the nineteenth century had? Surely not. Maps aren’t territory for a reason. As usual, Mrs. Perry is hard to summarize, but this is a very good read. Sarah takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award.
Over at Jacobite, Robert Mariani uses the Kavanaugh affair to ponder Epistemology at Scale.
Malcolm Pollack finds the IPCC crying Wolf!! for the bazillionth time.
By way of Isegoria… Why Paul Romer and William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in economics. John McWhorter explains why English is so weirdly different from other languages. Dementia starts in the ICU, which is a darn good reason to stay out of ICUs. Probably file this under life hacks: Learn at night and relearn in the morning, for those with the discipline to practice at least. Finally, a “new tradition” courtesy of the San Fran school board.
Finally this week in Cambria Will Not Yield: The Heart and the Hearth Fire.
This Week in Social Matter
Crickets…
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochran notes that egregious examples of… erm… Y-chromosome replacement are commonplace. The Iberian conquest of the Americas barely ranks, for example, with Iberian conquest of Iberia.
Handsome guy.
Evolutionist X introduces Nandy, Neanderthal Skull for 3D Printing. Fun for kids of all ages, I think.
Next up, a very fine meditation on Invasive Memes, benign and harmful ones, and what, if anything can be done about the latter. I think one can be immunized against harmful memes, but you need to truly get a live dose of it. Immigrants from the former Eastern Bloc, for example, seem particularly skeptical of democracy and mainstream media propaganda. Many, perhaps most, have an immunity. Converts to one religion from another seem particularly immune to arguments from the perspective of their former religion. The Committee were impressed with this ramble and bestowed an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
And Anthropology Friday picks back up again with The Crackers of Apalachee, Florida. Excerpts, with commentary, from the doctoral dissertation Suwannee River Town, Suwannee River Country : Political Moieties in a Southern County Community (1976).
By way of Audacious Epigone… Support for affirmative action by race, surprising perhaps only in a general lack of support across all groups (even them). Percentages identifying “social issues” as most important for voting. Yes, it looks bad with the under 30 crowd, but what did the under 30 crowd look like 10 or 20 years ago? Or 50? Judaism is the whitest religion in America—“whatever white privilege is, Jewish privilege is it on steroids”. And: Is Twitter bad for your mental health? Answers may not surprise you.
This Week in Kakistocracy
With outrage enough to go around, Porter returns this week to full posting capacity. Leading off: the subject of tariffs in Protectionism for CEO Bank Accounts:
Ideally this would be a symbiotic relationship. Society shelters its merchants, and those subsequently profitable merchants then reinvest in society’s capacity to shelter. Instead, merchants avail themselves of American society’s shelter, and then reinvest in Chinese plants, Indian engineers, and inebriated Mexican landscapers.
He also has a final word (or maybe not) on the Kavanaugh hearings and ¡Believe Wamen! With a little tongue-in-cheek advice: Always Get It In Writing:
Though in the case of the unnamed complaintant [sic.], the prosecutors did have an iron-clad point in refusing to drop the case. Said a spokeswoman: “None of the emails show the accuser denying that she was raped.” See? Checkmate. She never said you didn’t rape me. And when women don’t explicitly offer that disclaimer in the course of their romantic communiques, an observer can only conclude that they were in fact raped.
It looks like even the accusations against Weinstein are standing on shaky ground. Not that he’s a man worth spilling much digital ink defending, of course.
Also, a look at the street anarchy (anarcho-tyrrany to be precise) of Antifa in the Red Metropolis of Portland in You’re a Little Whitey, Aren’t Ya?.
And finally, he shares a story relayed to him by a crypto-shitlord in West Coast tech about his encounter with the embodiment of NPC in Think Different:
In fact, you could see the seething rage in him when he talked about using his marketing to get back at the rednecks of the world. In his mind, anyone not to the left of Mao was a redneck and needed to be dealt with. It was good to be reminded that these people really do hate our guts and want to see us in prison or dead. They won’t stop until they get that.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith contrasts the values of right and left liberals, distilling them with the phrases Muh Merit and the Nepotists.
The left has always understood loyalty in a way that the right has not, and this is one very large reason for its success in our “civil broil.” The left has understood that it advances by boosting its friends and burying its enemies. Right liberals have operated on the contrary principle. Under the malign spell of muh merit, right liberals would promote their own assassins if those assassins were the best marksmen. This is why right liberals so often lose in the “civil broil,” why our institutions are now largely staffed by leftists, and why our cultural graveyards are filled with men of the right who have knife wounds in their backs.
Along the ways Smith sprinkles in some very choice quotations from the past. He’s one of our very favorite writers and he snags an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention for his efforts here.
The Prof. Smith goes on one of those whimsical fantasies, this one about Teaching Democratic Truth, that comes a little too close to touching reality. Next, he discourses
On Stuffed Shirts and Pushy Squirts, that is, the generational gap between men and boys. And in an uncharacteristic black-pill he asks (giving only two options), is Christianity in a state of Retreat or Route?
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes a sprawling essay contemplating the past and present of the national epic poem and it’s relationship to Identity—The Future of a Paradox.
Richard Cocks efficiently surveys the problem of Utilitarianism: a new kind of evil.
A small minority of students remain in favor of killing the victims no matter what scenario is introduced. They want to kill the potential organ donor, to push the fat man and to pull the lever. But when these students are asked if every time a victim is needed they would volunteer to be killed, they always say no. They are willing to condone the murder of others, but not their own murder. This is a clear case of violating the principle of fairness—“do unto others as you would have them to unto you.” They want to be protected from immolation but not to protect anybody else. They are willing to murder, but not to be murdered—to sacrifice the victim, but not to be the victim. When this is pointed out, it puts an end to their willingness to voice their support for murder.Courtesy of Baron Zach.
Matt Briggs reports that ìDoctorsî Suggest Hacking Up Live Patients For Their Organs, Then Killing Them. And regarding Road Rage: Paper Says Living Near Road Causes Dementia, but Briggs is skeptical. Then he gives us the statistics On Witch Hunts throughout modern history and suggests we come up with a better term. And new frontiers in social justice reforms at universities in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update LX
Mark Richardson notes how liberalism incentivizes Power without justice. A particularly pathological species of divorce.
Instead of men and women working together selflessly for a common good (e.g. the family, the nation), and thereby creating stability, trust and improving social standards, the left is pushing a vision of a “nationalized polarization” with men and women standing against each other in competition for power and social resources.
At Albion Awakening, Wildblood describes The Elizabethan World Picture and its conception of the condition of man. Then he meditates on the mysterious nature of First Principles.
Dalrock writes about male curfew laws agitated for by women who are Angry with God, envious of men.
Over at Gornahoor, Cologero offers a tour of the Spirit World with The Bondage of Spirits, with stops at human cognition along the way.
From One Peter Five, a very detailed primer On Deposing Popes: A Historical Review. Timely!
Hapsburg Restorationist has a Novena for the Canonization of Bl. Karl of Austria.
And by way of Faith & Heritage a rather bitter and surprising takedown: Good Ol’ Boy, Bad Ol’ Economist: Spare Us Your Lectures on Jobs, Mike Rowe. Not sure what to think about that.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale is still migrating his troubled blog over to a new host, and will be back with us before too long.
At City Journal, Bob McManus pens a piece that may be of interest to us: how New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has attained effective Kingship over his state. Though not necessarily as an example to be emulated.
By way of Imaginative Conservative this week, G.K. Chesterton’s A Ballade of Suicide. Which is excellent, as one who’s never read his poetry. Chesterton, it seems, had been quietly erased from the literary memory. Bradley Birzer recalls Anti-Catholicism in Early America and the Burning of a Nunnery, almost as if our great nation were founded by savage Puritan anarchists. Joseph Pearce publishes what seems to be a monthly trend of Imaginative Conservative: an introduction to Saint Augustine’s “Confessions”. Daniel McCarthy contrasts two Suicides of the West, one by James Burnham and the other by Jonah Goldberg. If the “West” according to Goldberg is liberal capitalist democracy, then it has decided to commit suicide after an astonishingly short life. And Dwight Longenecker with a review of the excellent Western, True Grit. The Coen Bros. one. Which was pretty faithful to the old one. Both were great.
Richard Carroll reviews Neovictorian’s novel Sanity, and approves. A novel by a reactionary must be primarily art, and not propaganda. And in the close, optimism about the ability of the Right to produce art.
At the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless publishes an essay on Spectral Horror & The Insurrectionist Charnel House. As dense as the title suggests, it is about revolution and the specters conjured to incite it. And another, The Artifice of Always, seeking to break the lie of a dualism between “nature” and “artifice”. All of the natural is artifice, and all of artifice is natural.
Finally, University of Chicago’s Ada Palmer publishes her 2018 Campbell Speech, How New Authors Expand Fields. A pretty deep dive; fans of Japanese animation will certainly be interested.
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This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Over at Heterodox Academy, “moderate” coverage of the “Sokal Squared” paper: Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.
Jordan Peterson steps in some poo with his tweet about Kavanaugh. The good doctor offers some clarification of his thought process.
This Week… Elsewhere
For those with the stomach for it, Dennis Dale provides play-by-play expletive laden insult-by-expletive laden insult in the Portlando-Tyranny.
Al Fin offers a bleak possibility: You Want to Cry About Inequality? I’ll Give You Something to Cry About. A version of the Dire Problem, which I happen to think is more a problem of governance and social technology, than any problem with the laws of physics or economics. People without the ability to care for themselves are, by definition, wards and therefore do not have reproductive freedom. Problem solved, for those with the will to solve it. Speaking of solving problems: Columbus Brought Peace to the Violent Americas. Happy (belated) Columbus Day, everyone!
People, even of extreme right sympathies, have in the past complained of Columbus' excessive not niceness. Could be true, I'm not an expert. But the way to look at is: You conquer the world with the Army Ya Got, not the one you wish you had.#HappyColumbusDay
— Nick B. Steves, 2.9% Thal DNA
(@Nick_B_Steves) October 8, 2018
(@Nick_B_Steves) Heartiste is not the first to notice the existence of LRV: Liberal Radio Voice, but one of the best to lampoon it. Also, the persuasive power of the word: Imagine. When it isn’t John Lennon singing, that is… And National Review Admits Shekels Come Before Nation, without even a hint of irony.
Real Gary poses a provocative koan: Have you ever noticed… I’m not sure it’s exactly correct, but I can’t argue against it without spoiling it. Food for thought, though.
Some guy going by (R/dec)inthefuture on The Twitter posts A Few Quick Thoughts On Individualism. Relatively new to the sphere. Still haven’t made up my mind about this guy (except obviously he needs an actual pseudonym). See what you think. This too: A Review of “Anarcho-Fascism; Nature Reborn” by Jonas Nilsson. The book sounds interesting despite its contradictory (and perhaps misleading) title.
PA is quite on point here: Natalism for your people: what you get when you have a country of your own. He relays some mildly optimistic fertility data from Poland, and sketches out a minimum necessary set of conditions for it. And analysis and and almost unbelievable video, to Anglophone eyes at any rate, of Bolsonaro Making A Feminist Cry. He’s like Trump Squared. Bra- si- lia! Bra- si- lia!
Tom X. Hart is back on Medium with Clash of civilisations: Donald Trump vs. Sadiq Khan; the latter being the mayor of London, a former British colony. Kahn’s principal role seems to be reassuring folks that terror attacks are now normal: Nothing to see here folks! And with that, Hart suddenly announces his retirement from Medium. Can’t say I blame him; Medium in the aggregate is a complete shit-show. We wish him well on those other projects. And if they happen to be public, we’ll link them here.
This week in Myth of the 20th Century podcast: Catholic Power in the American Empire.
We were pleased to see a response from Zeroth Position to item here on Social Matter about libertarianism. Nullus Maximus takes issue by claiming that Henry Oslo Misunderstands Libertarianism. Maximus admits where he thinks Oslo is right, but his critique leans heavily on his own good-but-idiosyncratic ideas about corporations.
Late in the week, Ace weighs in on the Men vs. Women vs. Cat vs. Dog debate.
Welp… That’s about all we had time for. And this is already very very late. The lateness was all on me. Many thanks to our faithful (and timely) TWiR Staff: David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, and (budding heresiarch) Aidan MacLear, we couldn’t do it without ye. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/10/14) appeared first on Social Matter.