This Week in Reaction (and only this week… more or less)

The Last Psychiatrist is back with a yet another trademark presentation of Better Narcissism Through Aspirational Consumption.

“Well, feminism has emasculated men.” Really? A girl did that to you?

I certainly hope not.

This just in: Facebook’s Company Town:

A Facebook spokeswoman said employee retention wasn’t a major factor in the real estate push. “We’re certainly excited to have more housing options closer to campus, but we believe that people work at Facebook because what they do is rewarding and they believe in our mission,” she said.

Translation: “The only way we can get employees working 50-70 hrs/wk to step it up to 80-100 is to provide on-campus housing. And, my, aren’t we awfully nice!” (via: Handle.)

And speaking of Handle, here he is tackling the perennial reactionary problem: If Progressivism is really as bad as you all say, why do things really not suck that bad, and pretty often not suck hardly at all?

My simple answer is that I view technological progress as an almost orthogonal phenomenon to contemporary progressive politics. Good R&D, and the consequent improvement in living standards, has occurred for centuries in almost every kind of advanced society, and under all sorts of ideological and political systems.

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The best thing about technology is that, unlike a lot of the pretense at ‘knowledge’ you’ll find in other intellectual fields, technology actually has to work in reality. Not just work, but work better than all competitors. The combination of the constant competitive pressure provided by this kind of reality-test market discipline (both for nations and enterprises), and the unidirectional preservation of past achievements, is what gives us actual progress.

None of this applies to politics or ideology.

These days if it applies at all, it’s probably the opposite direction: the least efficient, most pathological anti-civilization ideas win. Well, natural (market-ish) forces should apply, and probably do, but only on much longer, multi-generational timescales. Which is why they invented Culture and Very Long (i.e., low) Time Preferences (VLTPs).

As a bonus, Handle counts the ways Libertarianism be Rayciss, and pulls out his LaTeX (for non-math-geeks pronounced “luh TECK”) plug-in to prove it mathetmatically. (A LaTeX plug-in… for WordPress? Who knew?!!) BTW, Handle is pure gold.

Sadly, Chuck reports:

Rap has become mainstream, and its artists come along with it, and so they should and will be treated like all other mainstream acts. Nobody is punching down towards them. They are not the underdogs they like to pretend they are.

For my money, rappers were easier to like when they were an exotic, outsider class of illiterate thugs.

In case it was in doubt over these past couple years, Bruce Charlton is officially un-officially Mormon. (Explicit admission here.) Just as there never was such a thing as Mere, i.e., abstract, Christianity, Charlton is living proof that there is no such thing as Mere Traditionalism, no matter how hard and eloquently one wishes for it. Bruce Charlton, one of the original Orthosphere Players, has declared his loyalties to lie well outside the “Ortho-” part of the Christian religion.

I bear no animosity towards Mormons. Their religion is patently successful in the adaptive sense. (Perhaps even moreso during their “polygamy” phase.) But it is laughably outside the faith as promulgated in the first 1000 years of Christian history. And, though my faith does not require it, I firmly believe that the True Faith will be adaptively successful for any particular nation. But with equal firmness, I doubt that adaptive success is necessarily contingent on having the True Faith. The biggest irony to me is that Bruce Charlton, who consistently argues, contra Moldbug and the “Secular Right”, that the decay into leftism far predates the Protestant Reformation, that the truest and best expression of Christian society lies in Byzantium and the Eastern Orthodox faith, would fall for an evangelical über-low-church Protestant heresy invented from a whole cloth not 200 years ago.

Quants-R-Us. Yeah, that’s not gonna end well.

Jim on how the G-men hacked TOR.

Scharlach on war by other means:

In its general, ill-defined sense, “pressure politics” was introduced by whichever hominid first realized that the easiest way to influence his leader was to gather a few malcontent males to look intimidating so that the leader decided, Ok, yeah, you guys are right, we’ll move to the next valley in search of food even though my harem likes this valley because it’s close to the river.

Therein we discover that early mass media attempts at pressure politics were adroitly utilized by some obscure forgotten organization know as the Anti-Saloon League. (Probably never got anything they wanted, right?) Of course, before there were telegrams, there were Pamphlets. The successful vector does, however, seem to be quite strong in the direction of fewer words with fewer syllables each.

MM’s timeless classic A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations is now available as a book quality PDF. I think I’d heard of it before, perhaps via private email, but Anissimov refreshed my memory of it. Anissimov’s also re-tweeted–blogged Foseti’s classic review of Pinker’s Better Angels, which has no doubt contributed to the illusion among reluctant reactionaries mentioned above that things don’t suck that bad. Hey. If it’s new to you, it’s not a re-run.

From Wunderkind Laliberte, we learn Stereotyping is a Feature not a Bug. Yep. Also, I linked to his The Soft Trauma of Standardized Education before, but it was absolutely excellent! Behold the inhumanity of standardized (public, even if in all but name) education. I’ve made many wrong decisions in my life, and others could’ve gone different ways, and I’d be perfectly content. But the Steves Family’s decision to homeschool, made long before I or anyone I knew was Catholic or Reactionary, and before we even had kids, has been one thing I wouldn’t ever, ever in a million years, change. Homeschool. Or die.

GBFM embedded this over at Heartiste’s. Thought it was pretty good.

… lllololzooozlzoozolzozzzz

Welp… that’s about all I got time for… Don’t ferget to visit The Den, which is always full of new and good stuff!

Til next week (or whenever)… The Reactivity Place, Over and Out.