The centennial of WWI’s Armistice was still very much in the headlines this week. Hapsburg Restorationist offers A Requiem for Old Austria. The Great War seen as The Great Cull—i.e., of high-quality men from the population.
Stan Lee died this week. American Greatness pays tribute.
And VDH recounts the latest leftoid outrages: Maybe We Could Use a Civic Hippocratic Oath—i.e., for journalists, celebrities, and all those in position to tell people what to think. Related: The Progressive Synopticon.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Parallax Optics’ interview with Woke Capital got a lot of quite deserved attention early in the week. Amazingly good stuff in here. Like:
Havel’s Greengrocers—this is a reference to Vaclav Havel’s seminal essay “The Power of the Powerless”, wherein a greengrocer puts a “Workers of the World, Unite!” sign on his store in communist Eastern Europe not because he believes it, but because it’s the party line and he wants no trouble. The analog to today’s Woke Corp is the Pride Flag, or the Black Lives Matter sign, or some other iconography of the Progressive (Cathedral) Religion. The motivation for these types is to stay in business; it’s basically a risk mitigation strategy, as any company perceived as insufficiently woke may be penalized with lawsuits or boycotts, etc. Pay some lip service to the religion, pay the danegeld, pay the mafia protection money. It’s the path of least resistance, and it’s unsustainable, but one can understand this impulse. It’d be wrong to call it a coward’s impulse, because heretics truly can be (and have been) destroyed. If you’ve got a family to feed, or employees who depend on you for a livelihood, you swallow the bitter pill and do what you think must be done. There’s nothing brave about being destroyed, where your “martyrdom” would just encourage others to try even harder to avoid that fate.
Clearly the man’s read his Moldbug. Do RTWT, if, on the odd chance, you haven’t already. On the strength of Woke Capital’s content alone (no offense PO!), this one won an 
“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award.
Alf is “inspired by Jim” to update some male archetypes: Warrior, Priest, Merchant, Lover. Also there: What are false prophets? Specifically, who is selling lies to young men these days?
And great news! Late in the week, Alf’s Orb of Covfefe continues with Part X—friends in high places. In which, the story leads (coincidentally, I’m sure) to the Netherlands.
Rich Greenhorn continues to republish his lost Thermidor pieces: Devil’s Bargain: The March for Life and the Novus Ordo Church—a “Best of the Week” Award winner when it appeared back in February of this year. And Spirit of a Spiritless Situation: On the Right’s Failure to Organize, which earned an honorable mention in March.
This week in Generative Anthropology, Adam is his usual awesome self as he considers: Hostages, Proxies, and Moles. He is pleased with the expansion (or recapture) of vocabulary, especially with regard to natural hierarchies, spawned by various pockets in Dissident Right. While Liberalism focusses on collapsing hierarchies and reducing all preferences and obligations down to the atomic individual level, natural individual identity suffers a death by 1000 cuts in the process:
It is belonging to a team that makes sense of qualitative “identities.” Teams have captains, and most team sports have more central figures, the one who controls the ball or initiates the action. Liberalism can’t do much with such an approach, because a team needs to be very clear about qualifications and roles. Imagine a wide receiver insisting on the “right” to play fullback. But if social orders are teams (really, teams within teams), what’s the game? It’s easy to get tripped up on that question, because it implies the existence of some external, “Archimedean” point from which one could “choose” among different games, different ways of “winning.” But we can always ask the questioner what game he’s playing in asking the question. Or what leverage within some other game he expects from that move. We’re always immersed in games, that is, and all we can do is solicit and elicit new moves within them. The new moves might eventually become new games. Of course, someone will come up to you and say “life is serious!” or “look at what’s happening—this is no game!” To “gamify” such moves is then an important act of deferral: yes, I can see there is real danger, people might get hurt, maybe they’re getting hurt, there’s no time to lose—still, though, the more we place people in clear-cut roles where they can show what they are made of, the more we find the right measures of tacit and explicit cooperation; in other words, the more team-like we are, the better we’ll handle the emergency.Obligatory girl smoking pic.
Maybe the “game” is… Fewer People Get Hurt in The Aggregate. Are you really ready to be concerned, Concerned Citizen? Adam turns his attention the ways teams operate for their own advantage. Tremendous insights ensue. For example in the HLvM dynamic:
The high uses the low as proxies against the middle. Let’s see if the concept of hostage taking can enrich our understanding of the process. To activate a proxy, you need a group, or a team. In order to turn the team into a proxy, you need to interfere with its exchange system—and exchange systems within groups work primarily on the gift and honor model. Members of that team get humiliated by members of another team. This lowers their value on the team—if they are humiliated enough, it’s not worth it trying to redeem them. The way to leverage the team as a proxy is to elevate the value of the humiliated members, to redeem them as hostages by making their humiliation shameful, not for the team to whch they belong, but for the team from which the humiliators come. This can only be done by the “highs,” i.e., an external and more powerful group which has, for example, the means of publicizing instances of humiliation and framing them as shameful, pressuring the team to repudiate them, that is, refuse to pay ransom in added scrutiny of the team. It even becomes possible to induce members of the targeted “middle” group to offer themselves as hostages, by allowing their value to be determined by the team from which the humiliated come, which really means determined by those with the spotlight to shine on (or turn away from) all of these doings. The humiliated ones then acquire the highest value, which they can leverage within their team and on behalf of their team. Within this economy, the interchangeables become irreplaceables.
Plenty more where that came from. Superb piece and an obvious “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Aidan MacLear sets another record straight: Bullying Works.
Life itself is low-level stress and conflict. When kids fight, they learn to fight back. Absent, of course, the supervision of catladies who punish the victim for defending himself, the bullied often become friends with the bully.
Anecdotally, this is very often the case among boys. I wonder if social psychologists have caught up with Bro Science yet.
Social Pathologist pastes a really fine bit of analysis on Hiss, McCarthy, and the Red Scare. More from Whittaker Chambers: The Enemy Within, wherein the decline of the West is seen as a foregone conclusion in the first half of the 1950s.
Late in the week, Shylock Holmes reviews Empire of Dust, which wasn’t intended to be a comedy.
To a western audience, it has the wonderful frission similar to playing cards against humanity—hearing someone utter hilarious taboos, but here with the possibility that they might be true. Eddy gives textbook rationalizations, but with a look as though he doesn’t really believe them, and just smiles as he’s called on them. Meanwhile, Lao Yang has the easterner’s qualified immunity from charges of racism that forces the audience to listen a little longer. Of course, modern progressives would say he is racist (I think—it’s hard to keep track of whether minorities can still be racist in The Current Year, or whether the Chinese count as minorities). But in any case, even if one could address him directly, one knows with certainty that if you accused him of racism, neither he, nor his employers, nor his countrymen, would give a flying fig. Take away the power of accusations of witchcraft, and watch how quickly people lose interest in the whole topic of witches.
A less advertised takeaway from the film, according to Holmes, is that Chinese imperial domination over Africa is not going as well as we’d planned. Maybe they could hire the Belgians. This too was an .“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
About 2 hours later, Titus Q. Cincinnatus shakes Neo-Ciceronian Times awake with a superb analysis of Omnipolitics and the Limits of Formal Power. There’s a whole lotta personal to be made political. Which in no wise benefits formal power. Which is why the revolutionaries insisted that the personal be made political in the first place.
It’s reached the point where literally everything is involved in some way with politics. Your choice of restaurant now signals your political inclinations, and thus who will harass you while eating there. Businesses themselves feel compelled to virtue signal, usually in a leftward direction, lest they bring upon themselves threats of boycott, bad publicity, or worse. It has escalated to the point where being the public face of the “wrong” side earns you harassment and menace to your physical health, as Tucker Carlson and several Republican members of Congress have found out. Expressing the “wrong” opinions in the workplace or online can get you reprimanded or fired.
How did we reach that point?
If you think US foreign or tax policy is hard to manage, try adding transgender bathrooms to your To-Do List. Governments leak power, on thermodynamic principles alone. But divided governments leak power like a sieve.
Once power has become fully, or at least substantially informal, then control over the formal organs of government is relatively meaningless. This is why Trump and the Republicans have been able to accomplish little over the last two years, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government. Losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats did little to change the actual overall power structure in Washington, other than to provide that party with a formalised way to endlessly investigate and impeach the president and his judges. Overall policy-making capacity remains largely unchanged since policy was being made by bureaucrats and quasi-governmental organisations under progressive control anywise. At this point, the president can’t even control the composition of his own press pool anymore, much less ram through The Wall or enact meaningful First Amendment protections for social media users.Gabrielle Marlene as Lola Montez.
Cincinnatus does offer a solution to the problem. But it’ll take more political moxie than we’ve seen in the last couple of lifetimes. He takes home an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award for his fantastic work here.
Tamara Winter is up at Jacobite with a critique of The Amazon HQ2 Scramble: The Wrong Kind of Jurisdictional Competition.
Malcolm Pollack has a useful roundup of sorts: Freeman Dyson On Scientific Tribalism, Jordan Peterson On the Idiocy Of Climatism, And NASA on Cooling.
By way of Isegoria… A fuel cell that runs on methane at practical temperatures. The shockingly high percentage of The Class of 1914 that died for France. Do the rich capture all the gains from economic growth? The answer may surprise you. No really, it surprised me. How Russian history has been a godsend for literature. The bitter fruit of Czar Alexander II’s liberalism. More than you thought there ever was to know about the original animated Lord of the Rings movie. A little known but crucial turning point in 19th C Russian history. Further on down that road: How the People’s Will, the world’s first modern terrorist organization, killed the czar, and why It is impossible to draw a line between revolutionary and criminal action.
And finally this week’s epistle from Cambria Will not Yield: From Darkness to Light.
This Week in Social Matter
Bastiaan Niemand debuts at Social Matter with superbly crafted essay on Jugaad Ethics. Jugaad here comes from Hindi and means “cobbled together” or a “hack”. The horse-drawn (formerly functional) automobile is analogue. The real subject is cobbled together progressive ethics, which 1)are, upon reflection absurd and; 2)don’t really serve anyone very well. Old social technology for sexual relations, for example, …
… were as backwards as they were boring—a kind of sexual horse-drawn buggy if you will—so we scrapped them for something faster and more exciting. Then we discovered that the new technologies require a lot of competence, special parts and disposable income that perhaps aren’t always available. They also have a tendency to run people over and dump toxic waste into the atmosphere. Yet even after the new tech proves itself unsustainable, the new chassis is the only thing you’ve got left lying around. So you bolt the old engine on as best you can and get back on the road.“Waiting for the ferry”
Once you have the image of the jugaad car in your head, a lot of modern preoccupations start to look like jugaad social tech.
Oh, like “affirmative consent”. And good and holy NGOs running Africa, instead of evil and greedy colonizers. This was a really artful essay and snagged an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award in an incredibly competitive week. Don’t spend that all in one place, Mr. Niemand.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Mysticism and Greater Male Variability—i.e., two explanations of why men are “overrepresented” in noticeable positions. Only one of the explanations, of course, makes any sense, but that one don’t bring in da gimmedats.
Next up: Neanderthal DNA–hey!—what is it good for? Mrs. X counts the ways in which Eurasians have (or may have) benefitted from cross-breeding with Neanderthals back in the day.
Finally, Race: A Clarification.
People may tell you that “race is a social construct,” but human population clades are not.
By way of Audacious Epigone… A series on American Secession, or it’s burgeoning popularity at least. Spurred on (presumably) by: New York Magazine contemplates secession. AE looks at polling data: Severing the Southwest seems least implausible. And then by age: It’s Not your grandfather’s America when it comes to secession (or just about anything else for that matter).
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith notes how The Baneful Sway of French Philanthropy currently seeks to pit patriotism against nationalism, but in reality seeks to eliminate both. Very profound critique on Macron and the modernist zeitgeist, and an “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention.
Matt Briggs gets a head start down the slippery slope, arguing that Bestiality Is A Sexual Orientation. Then he messes around with Some Curious Results In World Poverty Rates, leaving us to draw our own conclusions as to why poverty rates are falling in Africa as they rise in Europe. And finally it’s no-fap fascists, female-exclusive professoriates, wiccans surpassing presbyterians, and male surplus news filters, all in This Week In Doom—Deranged Psychology Edition.
This week in Albion Awakening, Bruce Charlton explains why he thinks Agnostics are (even) worse than atheists.
To be an atheist is to introduce some precision to one’s claims about the triviality of life; and to leave the matter open to further analysis. The atheist opens-himself to a demand to explain how he knows that God does not exist, that reality is meaningless. There is a possibility that an honest, rigorous atheist may come to realise his error.Beautiful deck.
But to be an agnostic is to relegate the whole question to triviality, and to avoid saying anything substantive about it; and thereby to relegate Life to triviality, forever.
And William Wildblood laments the societal loss of reticence: An English Virtue.
On the legal front, Dalrock highlights some of the ways and reasons Our family policy is designed to weaken married fathers.
Interesting thesis over at Faith & Heritage: The Trenches in Perpetuity: The First World War Never Ended. In a sense, Mr. Malsbury is quite correct. Seen as a war between Ancien Régime and Liberal Democracy, of course, WW1 was quite decisive, and WW2 triple exclamation point. But seen as a war between Civilizational Order and Satanic Anarchy, the Great War may be seen merely as a more violent than usual interlude in the now 350+ year-old English Civil War. We all Anglophone now!
And Cologero has a deceptively practical guide to Demonic Possession and related spiritual disorders.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale begins the week with Sydney’s poetry on Saturday. And more C.S. Lewis on Sunday.
At the Imaginative Conservative, Paul Krause on Virtue and the City. And Dwight Longenecker sees the podcast as the Return of Storytelling.
By way of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple thinks Red Britain Looms. More red than it already is, anyway. And Edward Glaeser with a long piece on Reviving the Rust Belt.
Over at the Logos Club, Kaiter Enless on the Future of Fusion. And he begins what looks to be a truly massive project: The Singularity Survival Guide. In too many parts to link here—but if you’re interested, head over and check it out.
Chris Morgan pens a succinct and humorous Cocktail (napkin) Discourse.
This Week in the Outer Left
From Social Ecologies, Craig Hickman posts highlights of an interview with Nick Land: Modernity, Blockchain, and the Intelligence Explosion.
Also there a really top notch essay on The Myth of Homo Faber: Prometheus, Epimetheus, and the Predictive Mind.
[I]t is this very theft of technology from the gods that has shaped and formed humans from the beginning; our fate and our catastrophe. It is this theft of technology that lies at the core of the human condition; in spite of our self-sufficiency, our lack of an essential nature, we as humans are bound to our supplements, our tools, our technological wonders. And it is this original relation to technology that has shaped us into the very antagonistic world we see around us. The very hubris of our need for supplements binds us to a world where the making and re-making of ourselves and the world around us condemns us to a never-ending war of perpetual re-creation of the very means of our existence.Bonus girl smoking pic.
Obviously technology—our growing toolbox of supplements—has made man very powerful. The missing piece of the puzzle is I think a hidden “supplement”: “social technology”. Human cooperation, vis-à-vis eating each other, is what made that technological advancement possible. It remains to be seen whether social tech can keep up with the material tech. Great power comes with great responsibility.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Heterodox Academy is very concerned that you’ll misunderstand them: They’re not using the term “academic freedom” as a cloak for Nazi scumbags. Really they’re not. They mean it!
This was really well done: Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. We persist in the belief that America is as polarized as her Cultural Masters, wish it to be; but it’s nice to know smart folks are keeping a plausibly independent eye on it.
Arnold Kling is not sanguine about the future of economics on the Road to sociology watch.
JBP, authentic believer in Liberal Democracy, pens a fake apology from The Democrats for their being unprincipled. Social shaming is what victors do to the losers. Winners are immune to it. Win first, Dr. Peterson.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dennis Dale has the latest edition of the Pozztown Dispatch.
Z-Man is on point in his analysis of what passes for the right these days. A Real Right hasn’t existed in the US since it was persecuted and dispersed in the war for American independence. Also there: pulling back the curtain on Prog Taqiyya.
Al Fin is bearish on China as she Pursues Weapons with Abandon (Of the Economy). Related: Japan Suddenly Becomes a Major Military Power Again. About time we think. Also: Human Slavery and the Coming Automation Age, in which jobs should be plentiful for those with sufficient cognitive capacity. The rest will be slaves (or “wards”) as they always have been. Related: Great Human Die-Off: How Low Must Average IQ Go? Which need not happen, so long as wards—being unable by definition to care for themselves—do not have the freedom to procreate.
Cobbled together but and important and interesting piece from Heartiste on The Shitlib Nonprofit Money Laundering Industrial Complex. Introduces (to us at least) a new and very explanatory concept: The Fiat News Index:
Fiat news is about the press telling you how to think about issues. Fiat news is about the presentation of opinions as facts, regardless of whether they consistently favor one group or another. If you want a bit more of a primer, including why we call this fiat news, the original piece Ben wrote in 2017 is located here.
“The unit of the Fiat News Index is the Vox“, for hopefully obvious reasons. It is insufficiently edifying for news outlets to simply present the news qua facts. If you really wanna be close to Jesus, you need to explain to your postulants readers how to think about the news. Also there liberal op-eds accidentally working for us: Where Is The Lie?. And Reframe Of The Day: The Regressives.
Later in this week at Heartiste, for those who refuse to believe their own lying eyes: A meta-study of scientific literature invalidating the Contact Hypothesis. And a beautiful synopsis of Bro Science: Lift Weights, Cut Carbs, Intermittently Fast. Bro Science™ is real science.
This week in Myth of the 20th Century podcast: The Big Fraud—Savings and Loan Crisis. A little lower energy than usual, but as always an interesting and astoundingly well-researched take.
TUJ has some advice for the President: Trump should replace Ginsburg with a Bitch, not a Barrett. Let’s hope that’s sooner rather than later.
And over at Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton offers a hearty three cheers for Private Imperialism and Colonialism, which we fully endorse. Except for the ceremonial, but otherwise meaningless, adjective: “Private”. He recounts the sufferings of Portland State professor Bruce Gilley who let his altruism get just a little bit too effective in making “The Case for Colonialism” last year in Third World Quarterly. (It headlined the TWiR roundup here.) It was, of course, withdrawn to shouts of outrage. Well, whaddaya expect from a magazine with such an overtly racist name anyway? Who ya callin’ “Third World”, bigots? Today, no democracy is going to “vote for” imperialism—under the nurture and care of anglophone media at any rate…
How then can imperialism be revived? A possible answer lies in imperialism without the state. There are at least two models of non-state imperialism from history which could be resurrected in the modern world. More importantly, these stateless empires could appeal to libertarians, despite the oft-cited contention that libertarianism and imperialism are diametrically opposed to one another.
Welton’s models of non-state imperialism turn out to be species of state imperialism, but po-tay-to/po-tah-to, so long as we get our imperialism, we’re satisfied. Jokiness aside, he makes a strong case for the great and natural good that imperialism is. This “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention certainly deserves your attention.
PA has a report card on Trump’s Administration and it really doesn’t look very good: Which Way, Mr. President? Also: some inspiring coverage of Poland’s Independence Day march: “We understand how hard and costly it is to regain our country”.
Ace tackles the “Smile More” dilemma: “As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive…”
Welp… That’s about all we had time for, folks. Many thanks to Hans der Fiedler and Aidan MacLear for helping me get this all together. David Grant was off this week. Looking forward to his swift return. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
The post This Week In Reaction (2018/11/18) appeared first on Social Matter.