This Week in Reaction

Wunderkind Aaron Jacob has dusted off Graaaaaagh with a music review, a chicken gizzard recipe, and some further commentary on his (as always) excellent Theden contribution: Rednecks are the New Kulaks, wherein AJ is positively brilliant:

The overlapping social jurisdictions of the United States’ various systems make it very easy to disregard poor and rural Whites and rather difficult to criticize, let alone punish, anyone for doing so. But as the progressive revolution continues apace, we cannot help but notice how thoroughly unrevolutionary it really is. This is a class of spoilt-rotten bourgeois narcissists pissing on those less privileged than they. This is a political paradigm that cares whether your chicken sandwich is pro-gay enough. The supposedly great issues of our time are matters of bourgeois trivia, while the structural decline of our cities and countryside is denied or ignored.

In his blog afterword, Aaron looks behind this War on White Proles at the Brahmin motivations:

Brahmins want authenticity—rural folk live it. Not to mention that these same genuine, sincere, simple people do not at all share the thedish norms of the yearning progressive, let alone his utmost convictions. There was once a rural Left, but that’s long gone. Any good progressive in 2014 hates the White working class his ideological grandfather championed. They’re hicks, inbreds, bigots, racists, homophobes—and they’re more authentic, more real, more legit, than the typical Brahmin can even pretend to be. That’s got to sting.

The dude really does a mean Lenin.

Egalitarianism destroys labor markets. Henry Dampier tells us how. Amongst the ways:

It is entirely possible that there are many people who would be better off working as gardeners, maids, and nursemaids in a bonded servant relationship rather than in an expressly wage-labor relationship. But the state prefers to reward the 40-hour-a-week format for standardization, ease of taxation, and in a vain attempt to create a worker’s paradise on Earth. The notion that ‘full employment’ is even desirable rests on a set of strange quantity-before-quality assumptions about the nature of work and human society.

It is also a difficult frame to smash: it is shared by all the people of quality, and only rogues believe otherwise.

Ryan (SoBL) Landry lays down a challenge (also at Theden):

Some commenters on my random posts say modern men wouldn’t fight the Mexican invasion or step up to fight the Muslims. Bullshit. I’ll take the other side of that bet. One condition. I’ll do so if you give me control over the media and freedom to make propaganda posters like the above. Imagine Auster’s small immigrant crime or Muslim dysfunction posts but writ large.

Landry also pokes quite a bit of fun at People Magazine’s World’s Most Beautiful Women^**.

After two months, Karl is back with the latest installment of Radish, wherein we are transported, as if by pack burro, to the scary (racisty) mind of HP Lovecraft. To be clear, I consider atheism to be a moral fault. But I consider dishonesty to be a greater one. There is hope for an honest man, even an honest atheist.

Jim:

Democrats are the inner party, Republicans the outer party. They are all one party, the party of the state, preaching the religion of the state.

See also: Jim’s thoughts on Sunshine Mary’s defenestration and on raising fertility, wherein we find a formula upon which it would difficult to improve:

During the short period that the new [Mexican expat] brides were relatively powerless, they were extremely fertile, creating a baby boom that knocked the hell out of the California school system, a baby boom that swiftly subsided as they legally and socially got a stronger hand. I assume the husband said “No oral contraceptives for you, no abortions for you, no condoms for you, and we are having sex whenever I am up for it. Also, toast me a sandwich.”

And the bride said “Yes dear”.

Daily Caller Opinion Editor, friend of this blog, bassist, and occasional Tolerator of Neo-Reactionaries, J. Arthur Bloom, has set up a blog (a real blog) over at The Mitrailleuse. See! WordPress is so easy even a journalist can do it!

Brandon Bruce’s (@fumiousblog) humorous cartoon led (I think, at least plausibly) to this relatively sane reflection on the latest vigorous brownian motion within the Neoreactosphere™.

So what am I getting at? Basically this: If we here on these obscure right-wing blogs are correct, then if the West has a chance in Hell of being saved it will be by Brahmin, progressive elites in positions of power seeing the light, and finding it in their self-interest to do away the cultural and political narrative they were raised in. No one should be better aware of the Iron Law of Oligarchy than the head of a major corporation or a military officer. “Reaction” isn’t some esoteric, ethereal ideal. Its basic common sense applied to social and political arrangements.

… so don’t be weird. Well, starting an intentional community in Idaho is not that weird. And it isn’t like anyone is running off with the Neoreactionary Crown Jewels anyway. Bruce is correct to note that Brahmins, the socio-political apex predators of the last four Western centuries, will inevitably be near the top of any future reactionary power structure. But they will have to be reformed Brahmins, contrite Brahmins, Brahmins who have adopted the noblesse oblige:

@ProfessorZaius @MikeAnissimov @antidemblog I don't disagree. Attract elites, but be very, *VERY* WARY of elites.

—
Nicholas B Stevenson (@Nick_B_Steves) April 25, 2014

For what it’s worth, my own thoughts on Tranny-gate:

Any sexual minority willing to talk to #Nrx already knows he’s one not of them. I find that even most non-trad straights get remarkably righteous when they bump against folks who are walking the Burkeo-Darwinian Walk. I think of it as a vector toward virtue, beauty, and (eventually) truth. Some of THEM say they’re on that vector. I can no longer count on one hand the number of secular, pagan, atheist reactionaries known to me who are in various stages of coming to the Church [often in spite of her current appearance (I might have added)].

I’d be worried more about Justine’s elite status than his personal perversions, for that would be the stronger basis of entryism. But I’m not worried about that because the air of neoreaction is permeated with traditional living… all who enter if even for a brief consult will respect it, irrespective of their phenotype.

Scott Alexander seems concerned that some of the most fashionable people he knows are rather shockingly conservative. The only world where actionable beliefs may be used principally to signal status is one where people taking such risk have sufficient wealth and power to insulate them from potentially horrible decisions. (Or one where the laws of physics do not apply.)

Bryce offers up a rebuttal (of sorts): Neoreaction is Hipster. I assume this was some sort of Agree-n-Amplify tactic. If Neoreaction is hipster, then to hell with it. (But I’d be happy if people thought so, even if only to get them to nibble at reactionary memetic rat poison.) See also: Now to Make Someone Crazy (i.e., by rigging the game that way).

Speaking of crazy, Spandrell posts upon the same:

This is an idea I’ve long toyed with, even though it’s quite counterintuitive from a reactionary point of view. Part of most critiques of modernity is the idea that modern people are especially dysfunctional, that modern life is unnatural and dehumanizing, and that people today are full of mental issues which were unknown to our more wholesome ancestors.

Well what if that’s completely wrong? I have relatives not very far removed from a medieval peasant lifestyle, and while they are free of many of the psychological ills of modern people (they don’t get depressed, they are not lazy nor obsessed about minutiae, and gender roles are crystal clear), but I wouldn’t say they are all models or psychological wholesomeness. They drink copiously, are often irritable, non cooperative, and act in their own selfish interest without the slightest sign of introspection.

The standard riposte, I think, is that moderns are especially dysfunctional considering where we should otherwise be, ya know, given technological and material progress, elimination of lead, yada yada. Data on psychological dysfunction long ago is awfully hard to come by, I suspect. Prior to the Century of the Self, no one seemed to be paying much attention, of the statistically valid kind at any rate. Horror stories of course abound. I and my wife both have grandfathers who committed suicide before we were born. On my own side, my grandfather may have inherited severe clinical depression from his own father, who killed his wife and, after having set fire to his house (inadvertenly killing one child and severely maiming another), himself. So, yeah, bad shit has always happened, but what didn’t happen is we didn’t have 24-Hour News and Federal Apparatchik’s bearing down on every one room school house trying to “fix the system” so that these rare events would never happen again. In the Age of Psychology, we became a people permanently in therapy. Maybe less bad shit happens per capita, but are we truly happier? Are we more human?

Fascism is one of the most abused words in the English language. Isegoria helps us out:

Fascism is an offshoot of Marxism that repudiates most of the tenets of Marxism, in much the same way that Unitarianism is an offshoot of Christianity that repudiates most of the tenets of Christianity.

Free Northerner provides appropriately aloof comments on Sunshinemary-gate.

Sorry this is so late. I aim for Thursday to get more traffic. My humblest apologies, therefore, to those of you who won’t see it on account of it being Friday night.

That’s all I got time fer (I got some non-ironic work done at work this week… that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it). Read (and DONATE) to Theden. Be awesome to each other. Keep on Reactin’. TRP… over and out!

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^**—women, that is, over 30, whom People’s readers may remember being somewhat beautiful a decade ago, and/or who may require some career boost.