This Week in Reaction

In a close contest for the biggest news this week, Social Matter started up on Monday. Purporting to be “Not your Grandfather’s Conservatism,” this group blog is brought to us by our good friends at The Hestia Society, and is a collaborative effort of columnists Bryce Laliberte, John Glanton, Henry Dampier, and Hadley Bishop. Now those first three are instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been paying attention to the New Reaction, as they rank near the top of a very short list of best minds within it. I don’t know who Hadley Bishop is, but based on his inaugural column he is no piker.

Okay, it’s been one week for Social Matter, so let’s see what we’ve go so far:

Laliberte kicks it off on Monday with Life begins at Conception, life—your adult life, the life of society, get it?; then we’ve Dampier on Why you Can’t Have Both Autonomy and Security; Laliberte with a review of Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance; Glanton on Leftists and Mental Illness; and as mentioned above Bishop’s awesome piece How Toxic Memes Allow for Subversion. Look. This thing is just 33 flavors of awesome. If they can keep up this rate and this quality, we could power a small city on the exhaust fumes alone. Go read the whole damn thing. Go… I’ll wait.

Well! Have we hit Peak Witch Hunt yet? Jim reports on the latest (gee, I dunno… what time is it?) purging of a poor, apologetic centrist, who made the mistake of thinking aloud:

Now, not only can free speech get you fired, supporting people’s right to free speech behind closed doors with the blinds drawn, while piously deploring what they say, can get you fired.

Apropos and right on schedule. (LOL.)

First they came for the Nazis… See also. Jim’s thesis of the Left Singularity might not admit of falsifiability, but history rhymes far better than one would expect from plain chance alone.

Michael Brendan Doughterty’s Catholics must learn to resist their popes—even Pope Francis was one of the very best things I’ve read this year. An instant classic for traditional Catholics distressed by their, at best bumbleheaded, Pope:

Party membership and church membership are not alike at all. Party bids its members to spin, minimize, and explain away supposed contradictions between one party leader and the next, to hide deviations by party leaders from the party platform. Because party members cannot know the outcome of the next election, crimes, oversight, or simple mismanagement by the party leader are treated as much less serious offenses to the cause than the scandal that would come from admitting or publicizing them in the sight of the opposing party.

The comments section, however, is comically bad. A majority, Catholics and Protestants alike, seem to see it as some sort of Catholic hit piece, to finger wagging tsks and dogpiles of joy respectively. MBD is Catholic, very Catholic. (I’ve been reading him since Surfeited with Dainties days… 2006-7 timeframe… before he was a Rock Star). The only The Week commenters that seem to “get it” are agnostics, atheists, and the occasional Catholic theologian… tho’ I would not recommend scouring the sea of toxic sludge for a few grams of gold. (Geesh, and I thought the NRO commentariat was bad… I’ll have to recompute.) Rod Dreher plugs the piece at TAC here, and quotes a mild corrective from an anonymous Catholic theologian here. I have to suppose that the theologian wanted to remain anonymous because he agreed so fundamentally with MBD’s diagnosis and therefore feared the vengeance of The Catholic Party.

Speaking of birthdays, a belated Happy Birthday to Moreright. Only one year? I have a sense that More Right was around long before I was. Apparently only by a couple weeks. Well, they were a long couple of weeks (IIRC).

Michael Schleyer offers an interesting preface to reactionary social studies. More to come. I hope.

From Aaron Jacob, an interesting perspective on Sociolinguistic Prestige in America. Also a somewhat humorous, alternating with depressing, dispatch from the front lines of the American Education Industrial Complex. (That reminds me, I’ve added “Linguistics” as a blogroll category on the right. As I said on the Twitter the other day, the Cathedral may have the Death-Star, but we have Linguistical Wizards. Now if we can just train them to fly X-wing fighters, we’ll have a solution.)

Filed under Why Am I Always The Last To Know, Peppermint has started a blog—a real blog with WordPress and everything. Not only that, but he’s publishing some pretty deep stuff: his inaugural piece on the rape culture full of history and insight; one on his understandable if misplaced ambivalence about abortion; a piece on Condomistic “Sex” wherein he comes off sounding more like a Catholic Agnostic than an Agnostic Catholic; and recently a tour de force survey (and skewering) of the transparent scam of student loans. Welcome to existence, Pep!

Take it away, Henry Dampier:

Unfolding how crowds go mad is a trick statement: the default status of the crowd is to be mad, that is, in the terms of Thomas Szasz, to be morally ill relative to the historic standard of social health. The anonymous crowd is a maddening condition because it is alienating for people to be strangers among strangers who have no inkling of their true history, their relationships, or their character.

In this, the crowd is as much of an incubator for moral sickness as it is a risk factor for the sort caused by micro-organisms. To say that it is forbidden to restrict entry into any formal organization for any reason is to annihilate any possible form of organization other than the crowd.

And in case you think it doesn’t apply to “us”, think again.

Filed under Wow! Japanese TV is Weird, via Isegoria, 50 amateur fencers go up against 3 world class ones. I won’t spoil it for you, but it leaves you wondering what would have happened if actual death (or dismemberment) had been on the line. Also, Isegoria finds Handle in Tyler Cowen’s comments… being brilliant of course.

It is going to be very interesting to watch The Cathedral digest Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance over the coming weeks and months. They will. I’m just not sure how.

Filed under Not Exactly This Week, I thought this was a pretty good on underexplored tendrils of the Cathedral. Don’t know who Post-Nietzschean was, but I’d like to hear more.

So that’s all I got time fer… This was supposed to be out yesterday by CoB…. Keep on Reactin’… Get over to Social Matter and keep on reading Theden. If you’ve some change to spare, donate to them. Til next week this is TRP… over… and… out!