This Week in Reaction

Mark Yuray, at no small risk to life and limb, attempts to answer the age old question: What is Neoreaction? It is either:

1. Neoreaction is the utter rejection of the current secular dogma, of “democracy,” of “freedom,” of “rights,” of “secularism,” and so forth;
2. Neoreaction is a bunch of guys from the English-speaking world of the early 21st century who have rejected the dominant dogma of their civilization as untruthful and are seeking the real truth; or
3. Neoreaction is the first slight stirring of a civilized order from a civilization deeply entombing itself in its own decadence … the search for objective truth, for true reality, that can be explained and understood and, most importantly, survived.

This, at Mark’s specific behest, unleashed a Class 5 Twitstorm. Nick Land captures the highlights (with some tentative conclusions) here. (See, especially, the comments; Land has an unsurpassed commentariat.) And my question is: Doesn’t this take us back to Butch’s definition of neoreaction as Right Brahmin Signaling?

To answer the question definitively is perhaps to collapse the wave function and end neoreaction as we know it.

Well. As I predicted last week (honest, I didn’t have side knowledge about this), Henry Dampier has penned a missive directed to advocates of the nationalist branch of neoreactionary trichotomy in Who Needs Nationalism?. First, the good:

The reason why nationalism still has an appeal is because the internationalism that replaced it has no popular appeal. Educators can train the elite to love foreigners more than their own people, but natural love for the familiar tends to overpower the ambient propaganda to favor the foreigner over the neighbor to people who aren’t exposed to elite indoctrination.

It works mainly as a corrective to the unworkable notion of the universal brotherhood of man. Nationalism becomes attractive as Western elites declare over and over that there is nothing worth preserving in Western people or Western culture, that all principles must be subordinate to the unworkable principle of human equality. Nationalists will say that this is not so, and that a given people should value their own close relations more than they value those who have no relationship with them.

Then the bad and the ugly:

There would be no need for the dolchstoß focus if there was a genuine cultural affinity there among ‘whites.’ The attempt to cohere a complaint of ‘white genocide,’ as if Ban Ki-moon could be convinced to deploy blue helmets to Germany to defend the human rights of ethnic Germans, is funny.

“Ow, my ass, it hurts so hard from all the times I’ve been stabbed there,” is not an effective rallying cry. Up until relatively recently, the liberals have been making a stronger appeal, if only because they’re more willing to appear confident & powerful.

You don’t muster the strength to defend against an assault by whining louder than your enemies whine, by whipping yourself harder so that you can win the gold medal in the Victim Olympics. You win by defeating your enemies.

Henry also compiles a series of great reasons not to vote. And a brief reflection on strategy now that Progressives may be incrementally more likely to be crying in their beer. Don’t worry Progs, you’re still in charge. Understand why, and you might be swallowing a pill on the redder side of the spectrum.

Where M. Dampier fails to speak for me, it is only because he does it so much better. The Mental Incoherence of Multiculturalism amounts to a thorough takedown of the modern academy. If we cannot burn it down, at least we can mock it:

When people take this to this pattern [eying the merely fashionable] of cultural accumulation, what happens is that their cultural exposure becomes broad but simultaneously shallow and haphazard. This is only exacerbated by the à la carte approach to university education taken since the 1960s revolution, in which different graduates of the same liberal arts program may have no shared base of knowledge.

An undergraduate might be an expert in French homosexual novels, anal themes in Jamaican visual art, and about BDSM themes in contemporary Islamic film, but be ignorant of Dante. That’s actually the more likely outcome, because the Muslim bondage professor gives out easier grades.

And in another strike against The Academy, Henry offers A Masters Degree in Whoredom. This is about what you’d expect from generation of overeducated, under-competent women with an unshakable belief in the myth of their own empowerment. Puts a whole new connotation to the word: “Princess”.

In all things Jim… Jim urges us not to vote, explains what happens when people do, advocates lynching instead of furtive murder for vibrants who get suggestive with white women, comments on the second closure of silk road (or is that the closure of the second silk road?), and points out one of Mac OSX Yosemite’s more unusual bugs features. Ugh. Glad I stopped using Safari. Now I’m using TOR. See the Silk Road story. I can’t win.

Much has been made Shoshana Roberts’ 10 hour walk through NYC. It is, of course, positively delicious, and totally predictable, to see one set of pleading special interests (hollaback) collide head-on with another pleading special interest (where are all the white guys?). On a serious note, perhaps Shoshana wouldn’t have gotten quite so much attention if she had worn more modest clothing. On a slightly less serious note, she seem to have a figure specially chosen to appeal to men of color. It was therefore clearly a racist setup on the part of Hollaback. Shame on you.

This 5 Dimensional Political Compass appears to be among the more astute fishes in the dismally idiotic pond of political quizzes. It is the first I’ve seen capable of classifying political beliefs that are well outside of the mainstream (Fox News vs. MSNBC) spectrum. Michael Anissimov is tabulating the results of known, self-identified neoreactionaries here. So tweet your results at him if you wish. No purges, for insufficient x-itude, are planned so far as I know.

…and over at Social Matter…

Laliberte starts out the week with Democracy and Marginalizing Voice:

Not only democracy, but the entire discourse surrounding its operation and telos is rigged against white men. White men are forbidden from complaining at the appropriation of their wealth and social status produced by their forebears.

Henry Dampier laments the decline of father-led family structure in A Nation of Bastards.

For Wednesday, Hadley Bishop pens an endzone sack of feminism (in both its “nice” and not-so-nice forms) in Why Pat Robertson Was Right About Feminists And Why Housewives Are Still The Best. Gotta love that 18th Century Tl;dr overly descriptive title convention.

Glanton delivers Stopbullying.gov with his usual perspicacity. His is a thoroughgoing takedown not of so much the nanny state as the hyper-rational bureaucratic religious fetish that pervades virtually every institutional arrangement in our society. Calling that a nanny-state is an insult to nannies. In the end, calling all unequal hostile social interactions “bullying” has about the same effect as calling all dubious sexual encounters “rape”. It harms genuine victims and misidentifies the guilty.

Finally, on Friday, my good friend Bjørn Vosskriger makes a monumental contribution to the neoreactionary canon with a hefty Gentrification as Total War or “Triumph of the Williamsburg”. What a debut! It covers both the history of gentrification and practical strategies and tactics to make it work. After witnessing at relatively close range the spiritual and economic renaissance of DC and NYC, I’ve made a habit of never counting a city out. Even in Detroit, even in Birmingham, green shoots of civilization will take root and grow. It is the will of gnon.

… Elsewhere…

In what appears to be shaping up to be a book (or at least a thick pamphlet), Laliberte delivers the second installment of Humanity, Capitalization, and AI. (Part I here.) And also from Wednesday, Knowledge as Image as Equilibrium. A lot of stuff fascinates Bryce; equilibria more than most.

Nick Land says: “If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode, who just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it would make an ideal present.” “It” being his new book: Templixity. And here, in the book’s second day, is Henry Dampier’s brief but generally positive review.

Over at The Orthosphere, Jim Kalb articulates well what’s not to like in Pope Francis. Plenty. Nothing worth dividing a Church over, of course.

Phalanx (#NRx) now has a tumbler. But it still seems a little up in the air how tightly and centrally coordinate various neoreactionary values fraternities will be. The current guess is not very much. No matter where you are seek to be a solution to what ails society (beginning with one’s own self).

Don’t forget to check out Post Anathema over on The Tumbler. This is a project sponsored by Hestia Society for the promotion of a neoreactionary aesthetic. Tons of cool art (some admittedly cooler than others), and updates a lot.

Filed under “Well, it was this week for me”, Those Who Can See returns with There’s Something About Teutonics. As always, we are treated to a fact backed and packed narrative journey in measured non-inflammatory language. What could be more a fitting to state: Those Teutons are totally freaking awesome?!?! And our awesomeness may yet be our undoing.

That’s genuinely all I got time for and I’m sure I’ve missed something really really important. But I can’t remember what. Please jog my memory in the comments section. Oh crap! I’ve completely left out Theden and SOBL. Well get yer sorry arses over there and read everything they write. Til next week: Keep on Reactin’… This is TRP, over and out!!