This Week in Reaction

Some apparent socialist @Erasmuslijn, who appears quite allergic to defending anything he has written, has penned the latest in a dismal series of breathless warning pieces about the “Dark Enlightenment” and “Neoreaction” memorably named Dread Techlord: Why to Worry about the Dark Enlightenment. It is a remarkably well-documented and articulate failure even to describe that about which potentially sympathetic socialist readers should worry. Short shrift of it is made here and here. Are there no worthy enemies of Neoreaction? Shall we be handed the crown by forfeit? Stay tuned…

Well, among the modern pathologies, Fascism would seem to be among the milder ones. But it is still modern. And still a pathology. Also by way of Nick Land, the question of are we getting stupider is getting less and less stupid; and painful-to-watch Progressive dementia of one Arthur Chu.

Although generally more comfortable in a charcoal doom, Land permits himself briefly to walk on the sunny-side with a few happy thoughts following David Brat’s GOP primary upset over Eric Cantor:

The Dark Dream scenario up to and beyond 2016 isn’t hard to piece together:

• GOP lock on Congress to ensure maximum obstruction.
• Tea-Party insurgency driving the GOP into right-wing extremism®.
• Secessionist ambitions spreading like a forest fire.
• A radical progressive Democrat in the White House, to keep a Cathedral clown-face glued onto the collapse.

Jim Donald has his own perspective on Brat’s upset. See also Jim’s excellent compare and contrast essay on Slavery and Abolitionism.

Peppermint has a nice piece up echoing the hip, new right wing stylings of one, Scott Alexander: Malicious Inter-Community Transfer. Now who could ever support something like that?

Missed it last week, but check out LA of Moonster’s Dunbar’s Fraction: staying upstream of social technology. For an expansive view of “social technology”, I might add.

Ash Milton seeks to clarify the meaning of “Neoreaction” in Our Marx, Only Better.

In response to Milton, Kantbot pens Our Marx, Same as Ever.

At Social Matter…

Laliberte People are Different. No duh, of course. But Bryce here highlights the actual cruelty of pretending that they are… and that they are equally like our elites want them to be.

Bishop pens Progress with a Capital-P—an extended meditation on elite signaling and the ways people “fake it”. This bit from Hadley was I thought particularly insightful:

Liberalism is internally robust enough to permit mutations, so as to perpetuate itself.

This is a wonderful way to engender societal values change, since elites traditionally own, control, and dole out resources and status, so playing the long game means memetic hijacking on the elite level, at which points those values filter down through top-level institutions. In order to drink from the fountain, you have to dance the dance of elite values. Outward behaviors of the lower (but especially middle) classes change to come into alignment. Without full awareness, without steadfast mental resistance, outward behaviors slowly morph into internal beliefs, usually within a generation or two, if not within the immediate generation. Trickle-down economics, trickle-down values, trickle-down Progressivism.

Glanton, On Pandering, of both GOP and Southern Baptist varieties:

In the end, true conservatism isn’t necessarily religious, but it ought to be serious in the sense that religions are. It deals with weighty truths. It engages with the complexities of tradition, history, ethnos. It dares to instruct people on how best to live their lives and orient their thoughts, rather than simply leaving them to navigate by their own lights. Facelifts don’t really befit its dignity.

So say we all.

Dampier’s Inhibiting Violence is a meditation on the better and worse ways societies attempt to limit or channel innate male violence. Suffice it to say, Western societies are currently doing it in one of the worst ways. Universal male conscription continues to look attractive to me—a visage that is, however, marred by recent attempts to bring the US Military under the reigns of Political Correctness.

At Theden…

Morganston University College London Bans Student Club For Being Anti-Marxist.

Allmain and Morganston collaborate on Rainbow Coalition Fractures in Schools on Both Coasts, wherein, we find diverse stripes of the rainbow locked in an interminable game of More Oppressed Than Thou.

And Aaron Jacob delivers a beautiful piece on The Assortive Atomization of America. Liberalism serves to weaken and deracinate particular sensibilities. Leftism demands all particularities be given equal rights. The lack of particularity most of all.

Elsewhere…

Laliberte, over at his own spot, pens a Chaos Theory of Signaling.

SoBL talks about Israel talking about going cashless, probably for all the wrong reasons. It’d probably be a big boon for crypto-currencies. He asks What’s Up with Gold? That could very well be gold itself. Also, an interesting piece on from Hidden History: The French Mutinies of 1917 (landed at Theden as well). I’d never heard of them.

Briggs staples up a public health notice regarding Educators’ Disease, which has induced some to conflate pop-tarts with guns.

Bruce Charlton digs up a gem of an op-ed waxing nostalgic about the Oxford of the 70s and 80s. Of interest, it appears to have been a point of pride among tenured in professors there in the 70s to not have received outside grants for research. Today, of course, obtaining outside grants are a veritable halo of sanctity, ostentatiously displayed, like notches on bedposts. And so it is that Oxford University, with nearly all of her lesser sister institutions, marches ever more leftward culturally, simultaneously playing the whore to big institutions of government and commerce. Capitalism is not the opposite of Marxism.

Audacious Epigone discovers that even national prime lending rates be rayciss.

Esoteric Trad digs up a 30-year-old fossilized British curmudgeon who just couldn’t get hip with the vibrancy of the times and who, like so many of his type, has been utterly vindicated by historical events since the days of their prognostications.

Sorry this is so late (again). There goes them stats… Keep on Reactin’. TRP… over and out!