This Week in Reaction (wherein the ostensible “Death of the Manosphere” is examined)

I’ve never been terribly comfortable with the nearness that some women bloggers and frequent commentators have maintained with the manosphere. Too many men cannot themselves stay out of tawdry and adolescent drama; a temptation made even more difficult with women present either participating or taking sides. Now there has been apparently a campaign of gossip and poorly or not-at-all substantiated facts going on for some time about Sunshine Mary originating with LG Robbins and some commentator known (inter alia) as Lena S.

Disclosure: I link both SSM and LGR over there on the blogroll and have, as yet, no actual reason not to. I consider both of them among the most capable anti-feminist spokeswomen out there. What they had, if anything, to catfight about or who started it are immaterial to me.

Had I known of this campaign, and set of accusations and counter-accusations, I would have averted my eyes and pretended to ignore it. I am not their husband, nor am I their father. It was, and is, none of my business. How then legendary amygdala hijacker, Matt Forney managed to make it his business is entirely beyond comprehension. Forney not only “doxxes” SSM, but throws Danny from 504 under the bus for good measure and proclaims, in comically hysterical terms, the “death of the manosphere”.

SSM has set up a temporary blog in which she, convincingly in my opinion, answers these allegations. But the damage appears to have been done.

As for Matt: Dude? You convinced the world for months that you were a woman who liked Christian Domestic Discipline just a little bit too much to be taken seriously. Good show! But now are you trying to convince us that you are a thirteen year old chick who wants to hang out at the mean girls’ table? Who’s amygdala got hijacked here? Matt’s seems rather exorcised. One thing’s for sure: Anyone who’d ever want to meet the “Real Matt Forney” in real life is going to think at least twice about it.

The Manosphere is dead, you say? Long live the Manosphere! (Whatever.)

In other news…

I cannot heap enough praise upon John Glanton of Bourbon et Veritas. The output on his ask.fm feed alone is of a quantity and quality that most bloggers (including me) could only dream of. Glanton brings polished prose and a certain “below-it-all” Southern charm to many of the central and seething problems of New Reaction. He often begins with some sort of broad denial of any expertise in certain area (often of a technical or economic nature) and then proceeds to deliver deep, incisive commentary anyway. And where Glanton does have some expertise? Hoo boy! Consider his essay Against Critical Thinking:

The notion that everyone should be taught to “think critically” about their values is a utopian vision, a delusion of grandeur about the efficacy of education to make of any old raw materials an accomplished and competent philosopher, or even a passable one. It’s only by degrees less insane than assuming that proper schooling can produce an unlimited number of theoretical physicists or Fields Medal contenders. Education is not all in vain, but it’s not without limits either.
…
Where I’m going with all this is a pretty simple conclusion. There are good reasons behind a lot of moral dicta, ones that are cogent entirely independent of whether or not you buy the divine provenance of those dicta. Morality sustains civilization. Civilization sustains morality. The two interact in complex and sophisticated ways. In many senses, morality and civilization may not even be functionally separable. But these are kind of demanding, high-falutin analyses. Not for everyone. The good part, though, is that you don’t have to be able to comprehend the various societal rationales of morality in order to produce benefits to your society by acting morally. All you have to do is adhere to the moral code.

It’s easy to train students to be critical. Much harder, alas! to get them to actually think. More from Glanton’s follow-up:

[Y]ou can see that what curricula geared towards critical thinking actually achieve is an ersatz version thereof, a facile antipathy towards the virtues and values of civilization masquerading as mature skepticism. This is why it ought to be opposed. This is why we ought to be against critical thinking. Sane, moral behavior is encouraged in the majority of our fellows through the transmission of functionally opaque moral dicta, through the transmission of dogma, official or otherwise. This is all well and proper. It’s natural. But a hyperbolic emphasis on rational verificationism treats such a transmission as suspect or outright evil, and it seeks to cure us from it. Lord, save us from our betters.

Deep thinking about “Deep Heritage”.

SOBL on slave auctions, treatment resistant STDs, and the one-way ratchet of government programs. See also: the finer points of race hustling and insightful commentary on Sabelius. Good grief! SOBL is a gosh-darn machine. Great stuff!

Wesley (over on the Twitter) linked to some political theory at gnxp from David Boxenhorn, called the Universal Law of Interpersonal Dynamics: S = P + E. An elegant way to view a very complex, and as yet poorly understood game theoretical social process. This could be the socio-political stochastic wave function. With any luck, HS³ can get right on that.

Some anonymous Jew-hater over on the ask pointed me to E. Michael Jones’ Culture Wars magazine. Haven’t read enough to form much of an opinion yet except to say Jones is definitely Catholic and the site is pretty interesting.

Jim spots the real (vis-à-vis Astroturf) protestors in Ukraine. Related: One may hope that a President too lazy to fight an actually dangerous war can rein in the leftist hotheads in Foggy Bottom.

Malcolm Pollack excerpts a big chunk of perfectly sane reasoning from a man who’s paycheck may in part depend upon Climate Hysteria™. Men, with chests, may still be found even in unexpected places. Speaking of chests (and Malcolm), he offers this delightful aside on the sublime beauty of this time of year in this part of the country.

I understand why people are interested in identitarian religion. But it is, I think, one step too far. Proper—i.e., historical small-o orthodox, small-c catholic—Christianity is not antagonistic toward identitarian preferences or even large-scale national movements. And alas! too many Christian churches and sects today are. But we don’t fix it, I think, by trying to graft a foreign ideology, however principled and sensible, onto Christianity. It won’t take. The Christian religion was not designed to dogmatically enforce and encompass every possible good. If you require a religion to do that, you’re doing it wrong.

Dampier:

The leveling effect that Keynsian policies are intended to have (by disrupting entrenched fortunes and cycling through business classes) has the unintended consequence of decimating the middle class, empowering new classes of foreigners, and crunching the proletariat. What has happened is that the former middle class gets trapped in the tax policies designed to reduce the large fortunes, while the large fortunes purchase exceptions, and the poor lose all security.

Ergo: Die Techie Scum Rage—most of it perfectly justified, but “they’re digging in the wrong place!”

Geesh, you wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find some mildly suggestive picture of Audrey Hepburn. But it was. One of the world’s most beautiful women in spite of her (often annoyingly) short hair (to say nothing of her embarrassing and idiotic Marxist politics later in life), her image must have been very carefully cultivated and closely guarded back in the day.

Darwinian Reactionary finishes up his 5-part series on marriage (see parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). It deserves a much wider audience. He concludes:

Conservatives made a further terrible mistake in thinking they could win the argument by defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and they put all their eggs in that basket. Such a definition appears merely arbitrary and discriminatory, and since the argument was whether such a definition was arbitrary and discriminatory, conservatives handed their opponents victory. Instead, what should have been done, and would still be worth a try, would be not to define marriage, but to declare that the social function of marriage is to prevent the problems that result from the production of children, just as the function of the police is to enforce the law, or schools are to educate the young.

I wholeheartedly endorse this view. In fact I may (under my ** REAL NAME **) be found contending for just this Darwinian view of traditional marriage as far back as 2006. Social conservatives, many of them notably evolution-allergic, invited the gay foxes into the marriage hen-house generations ago by contraception and divorce acceptance. Unprincipled special pleading (“muh religius freedom”) against homogamy never was going to work.

Via Isegoria, this is what, according to John C. Wright, you’d get if John Galt wrote your car commercial:

Probably true. But with all due respect, Mr. Wright, you say that like it’s a good thing. And by the way, no, pretty sure we’re not going back to the moon.

Last weekend, the Globe-trotting Anarcho-Papist visited Casa Estebanos on his whirlwind Neo-reactionary Tour of Doom. Unfortunately, Bryce had to contend with an excruciating bout of sciatica for during about half of the 40 hour visit. The condition miraculously disappeared thanks to the intercessory prayers of Saints Gemma, Rock, Augustine, and Peregrine, plus a 3.5 hour ride in my PoS car. Bryce is back “home” in MN now, purportedly scheming to make his next trip. Home is where your heart is, Buddy!

May you all have a blessed Easter Triduum, Pascha, and/or 3-day weekend.

That’s all I got time for. Keep on Reactin’! TRP… over… and… out!!