Isegoria on the remarkably unromantic Napoleon Chagnon. Also the difference between mean and median as applied to pension planning. Makes too much sense to ever work.
Jim on Keynesianism, firing on all cylinders, as usual.
Nydwracu (writing under the more plausible pseudonym Wesley Morganston) and friends have gotten Theden up and running. Nice looking site. Coverage of L’Affaire Schwyzer and L’Affaire Trayvon. Best wishes guys. The world needs more dens.
Karl F. Bötel at Radish on Sir Henry James Sumner Maine on Popular Government.
Dennis Mangan on the world’s current oldest man. Bananas and Anacin apparently have worked for him. “World’s Oldest Man” is a tough title to hold onto though. The only title statistically more short-lived is “World’s Most Beautiful Woman”.
Anarcho-Papist peels more of the banana on anarchy and neo-reaction. [Crap, this guy’s a posting machine: this just in.]
Anonymous Conservative has a couple posts on narcissism (disturbing story), and narcissism and liberalism (Yeah… pretty much synonyms…).
Continuing in the Islamic Vortex, Nick Land on John Kerry’s milque-toasty defense of the Egypt’s Neo-reactionary reboot. There’s democracy and then there’s “democracy”.
Rising father (congrats!), Audacious Epigone, on how the best places to live seem to do the crappiest job of keeping people out (and thereby keep them the best). My guess is that there is a certain level of average smartness that is just stupid enough to assume everybody is “about as” smart as you, and therefore desirable—an error avoided by both the really smart and the pretty dumb. Of course it goes without saying that Cathedral Catechetical Development (CCD) plays a formative role in the mid-wits’ “thinking”.
I can’t remember if I mentioned this one or not: Anissimov’s 7 Qualities a Country Should Have. Yep.
Bonald on the necessity of the Holy Trinity.
Zippy speaks sensibly on modernity, which in a sane world wouldn’t be so unusual.
Sunshine Mary needs traffic from me like a dog needs fleas, but her confessional Be a low maintenance wife was good:
Being high maintenance may demonstrate to the world that you have control over your man. However, it will also kill his love for you.
I think it will also kill a wife’s love for him. It is far from clear that a woman can romantically love someone she controls. She may have a great pet, but not, in the words of OT Saint Sarah, a lord and master.
Catholic convert and priest, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, comments on the problem with Pope Francis.
Middle America correspondent, Mr. Roach, commentating on Douthat, notices some possibly green shoots amid the volcanic ash of American political life.
Feminism has been thoroughly rejected by the latest generation of young men, in part due to the very success of that war on the family. So this pox on the entire nation is now mostly championed by baby boomers and gen xers, even as young men reject marriage in droves and generally fine careerist vanity by middle management drones of both sexes as “old school, white knight ‘Cathedral’” thinking.
Let’s hope that marriage—traditional marriage—makes a bit of a comeback once the market readjusts.
Elusive Wapiti on Rape in the Military. Also, more on anarcho-tyranny. (Or is that tyrano-anarchy?)
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Some folks in the Twitterosphere are tweeting about a Meetup in the Boston area this weekend. I know nothing more. Contact @Survivingbabel or Francis St. Pol if you’re interested. Hopefully we’ll hear how well down that went next week.
That’s it for now… til next “week”… The Reactivity Place, Over and Out.
There is a marked lack of Humility regarding Intelligence in Neo-Reaction Dear Sir.
This will cost ye in a Trial.
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How ya figure, VXXC? I am about as mid-witted (for an Electrical Engineer) as they come. I escaped the pretty little lies of the Cathedral by hard work and perseverance alone. The error isn’t mid-wittedness. It’s in assuming a passably articulate and rather unreflective recapitulation of the thoughts of others counts as a valid opinion. I.e., the error is in the twin pathologies of equalism and demotism.
In a sane world, no one would care what a 120 IQ college grad thought about public policy. Not even him.
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Dr. Krugman responds: “That’s silly. They would all catch on fire if you did that.”
“As of last week there was… 441 TRILLION dollars in interest rate based derivatives. 441 trillion dollars folks. That’s rough 6 times the GWP. Meaning.. Gross World Product. The GDP of the whole freaking planet… times 6. . you could take 5 dollar bills and lay them end to end… and stretch all the way to sun… 459.5 times.” — Vox comments
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Clearly some folks are not as rich as they thought.
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@NICK,
I said marked lack of Humility in Neo-Reaction.
Not NBS.
If you are going to be a aggregator for Movement X thought THIS WEEK, then if a comment however pointed if not personal should not be taken as personal. Unless your actual supersecret identity is named “Neo-Reaction”.
Which explains things, you’re Neo.
So to avoid future confusion and the appearance of ad hominem, I’ll call it Reaction.
I hate the Neo part anyway. Which doesn’t mean I hate you Neo. I mean Nick.
This is an interesting defense: disarm ad hominem by making generalized comments about a school of thought personal.
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“In a sane world, no one would care what a 120 IQ college grad thought about public policy. Not even him.” Nor 220. or 1200.
Politics is a trade. Statesmanship an Art. They can be learned not taught.
Mind you it’s about power and money. Not “Public Policy”. I don’t put those words together now.
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Never been a fan of the neo- prefix myself. Mostly greasy kids’ stuff… used by greasy kids. They’ll come around. Moldbug never used “neo-” (AFAIK).
Mind you it’s about power and money. Not “Public Policy”. I don’t put those words together now.
I think most well-placed Cathedral Clerics genuinely believe that their use of power to advance “public policy” is righteous and pure and ordered toward the “common good”. They are not in it for the money part. (It obviously helps to be comfortable, but few Univ. profs and Journos are filthy rich.) They are, of course, useful idiots for the banksters who run the whole damn game. The latter should hang; the former be rehabilitated if possible. (Tho’ in cases like Ygesias’ I have my doubts whether that’s possible.)
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There’s degrees of sanction between hanging and rehabilitation. Plate glass windows for one.
I mean he bought it up.
I think you or someone linked to narcissists being dangerous when it’s over.
I’d add self-loathing and psychopathic. They’re also cowards.
When the horrific consequences of their policies upon the public are made clear to them, they do not change course. In fact what they did was: proceed openly to profit. That’s the 90s, that’s Clinton reinventing government: Clinton accomplished two important things: 1) He privatized the core functions of government such as benefits wealth transfer [SNAP/EBT is handled by financial firms such as Goldman], and 2) He criminalized government . These two are not identical, but they are probably related. You may look to the Great Post USSR fire sale and Mr. Soros et al for an example. An.Example. Neither one is widely known although neither is secret.
Of course we spent most of Clinton’s Presidency talking about his Bank/Real Estate swindles and coverups and of course Clinton’s WhiteHouse.com pron show. And the Republicans minstrel impeachment that followed. But actually criminalizing the government and making welfare transfer payments a privatized industry and hence an untouchable constituency for the Repubs was genius.
Evil Genius.
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Over 9 in 10 purported sexual assaults in the military are of an identical nature and, if any ‘investigative journalist’ ever cared to, you know, actually look at the case-files and records of trial, then they would see than the vast majority of exoneration / acquittals (of cases no civilian prosecutor would ever take when they happen every single day on every college campus) are based on the very standard defense of reasonable doubt through a combination of the following:
1. No physical evidence
2. No witnesses to any criminal activity
3. Plenty of witnesses to extremely slutty behavior
4. Fragmentary, inconsistent, often contradictory with other evidence, memory from being black-out drunk.
5. Intense motive to fabricate (social embarrassment, or cheated on a boyfriend / husband)
In other words, sexual assault is the only crime where, in the preponderance of prosecutions, no one disputes what actually happened, only the state of mind of the woman at the time.
Here’s a great sample quote. “So, Mrs. X, I see you’re wearing a ring today in court. Is that your wedding ring?” – “Yes” – “And do you wear it all the time, or just here in court?” – “Well, most of the time …” – “But you weren’t wearing it that night at the bar, where you were by yourself, without your husband who was working that night?” – “Well, no, but …” – “And then you have over ten drinks and started grinding and french kissing every guy in the place including the Accused?” – “Well, I don’t really remember … “, “But in your opinion, and from your extensive intimate experience of his attitudes and personality given your marriage and years living together, you knew that you husband would be angry to hear about what occurred that evening” – “Well, yes, but …” [proceeds to call a slew of witnesses testifying to this and even more egregious conduct] –
Here’s the bottom line: What exactly do people want the military to do to ‘protect its women from the scourge of sexual assault’ – something it is not, apparently, doing to a sufficient degree – when this is the fact pattern. If you say ‘training and awareness’, then you have no idea how much it already does, in fact, has done for over a decade – to the point of nausea.
There is no – I repeat, NO – special sexual assault problem in the military. There is a cultural and moral and modern-dynamics-of-sexuality problem in broader society (seen with much greater frequency, but prosecuted much less, in the same age-cohort in higher-education institutions), the aftermath with which we have to contend, but about which the military can do nothing. Unlike the schools or the Jesuits – it doesn’t get the child at 6 to mold them into men. The military gets whatever the American system spits out at age 18, with only limited remaining malleability. And so it gets all the problems too. This is one of them.
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Great blog. Following now. Thanks.
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Handle – you left out a big one, the biggest one: FEMALE SOLDIER FACING DISCIPLINARY ACTION. That’s absolutely a driver for instance on sexual harassment complaints. Routinely against the entire chain of command and everyone around her.
UCMJ for totally unrelated matter, such as drinking on duty. And suddenly everyone’s a rapist.
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“To overthrow a flawed ruling class,” — Why Mr. Douhat!! Heavens.
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Wapiti on Rape in the Military: Love that he used the “Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone”, which is indeed a staple of military diet. Especially for the non-combatant part of the Military. Which is far larger than people realize.
There’s something else he missed – the Witch-Hunt as another military staple. If you’ve been in the military for any length of time you’ve been thru one. UCMJ’s rather awesome powers combined with Lower Church Cathedral Generals and Lower Vogon subordinates are a heady mix for underdeveloped craniums.
This is probably the biggest witch-hunt I can recall, and I’m glad I’m out.
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