This Week in Reaction

Mitchell informed us he was not done with China yet. He dropped three more installments this week: China on the Razors Edge in which he notes tangentially:

Democracies add a peculiar kind of resiliency to their states in that they defuse some citizen frustration with an appeal to inclusiveness. The state messed up? Well you put us there, and so you are responsible for it and have no right to get angry!

I think that it is probably true, but it is unclear how much an otherwise high living standard plays into that dynamic. A vague sense of inclusiveness doesn’t actually put rice on the table.

Then on Tuesday we got Purging, Han Style; Bye Bye Bo Xilai; and on Wednesday The Fifth Column in China: Jihadis, Buddhas and British Gifts; Part One. The “Part One” implies more to come. This is an epic series, educational with a neoreactionary lens. See also a prediction for global cooling (now THAT’S scary, Mr. Gore), and experiments with that more beneficent of drugs: nicotine.

Ummm…

Legionnaire goes meta² in Theory of Theory of Mind: Part One .

In what may have been a review (if so, a very short one: “awesome”), Nick Land apparently liked Lucy. Interesting graphic here in Politics on the Job. I remind the reader that an x-axis may be scaled to fit an arbitrarily small portion of the real number line.

Nydwracu delivers some profound thoughts on Disunity and Decline. Which apparently everyone failed to quite get. A cross that many wizards are forced to bear: Omnipotence is harder than it looks.

Jim remarks the upon Scott Alexander’s sad but altogether predictable disappearance from matters political.

Mark Yuray wonders whether Neoreaction would not be better off communicating in Latin. Well, as I always say, “Omnia dicta fortiori, si dicta Latina.”

… And over at Social Matter

Back in his normal Monday slot, Bryce pens The Hawks of Democracy—a game theoretic analysis of American (and more generally Western liberal democratic) politics. Cooperation only works while people cooperate. People who pursue dove strategies get eaten by people who pursue hawkish ones. Hope that feeling of moral superiority was worth it.

Tuesday has Henry Dampier on The Unconventional Conservatism of the Left. Once you’ve conquered just about everything, you find yourself having to play defense. This is where the GOP is at its best: Guarding the gains of leftism.

On Wednesday, Hadley Bishop reviews Face To Face With Race which appears to be a set powerful anecdotes in what Bishop calls “Close Encounters of the Minority Kind”:

Everyone’s heard about the drunk relying on statistics as he would a street lamp—for support, rather than illumination. Face to Face with Race provides the illumination.

And:

Affirmative action kills those unprepared for the rigors of the job, and it bankrupts the rest of the department. Diversity is a breeding ground for transmission of the disease. You see it here viscerally.

John Glanton arrived Thursday with a brilliant piece on Vicious Chimp Warfare. Politics is, always, at least tribal. It should be more.

And Sonja Sonnerström returns for Friday’s slot with Hong Kong: If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It. (How do Swede’s hear of such American idioms?) Educated, middle class young adults? Check. Facility in English? Check. Abstract ideals? Check. Umbrellas work reasonably well against pepper spray. Not so well against tear gas. And, alas, not at all against bullets.

… More and more Dampier…

I tried to offload the Weekly Dampier Report with a midweek update. That helped, but he’s still writing at a furious (strangely inhuman) pace. Until the meth runs out or his keyboard breaks, this is going to be a full-time job (for somebody).

On Thursday, we get Globalization and War—staking out a measured position on the doctrines and practice of free trade:

Most of the arguments around free trade in the United States are of a torpid quality, because they either rest on impossible assumptions (a war-free world for the foreseeable future) or logically invalid propositions (like arguments against the positive-sum nature of trade). In modern America, as with everywhere else, there’s a tendency towards going after lazy solutions that can be simplified for the TV audience. Why international diplomacy has always been so complicated is because of these complex needs to balance the goods of trade with the risks of war.

And finally, for to-day (Friday), and in view of President’s recent executive Man of Action actions, You laughed, but the Amero is back!

… From Theden …

Regarding #ShirtGate, Allmain covers a new angle of it (new to me at any rate) in LOL: Atheist Feminist Pornographer Used as Moral Authority in T-Shirt Row.

Colin Liddell on the too-advanced-for-its-time poll in Time Magazine Overturns the Ostracism of Feminism. Apparently, feminism is simply so obvious and assumed that perhaps we don’t need the word any more. Time, apparently, forgot to inform feminists.

And from just to-day, Allmain is back with Milwaukee Police Chief Drops Mask, Tells Truth About Crime Victim Demographics. Wow! Give that police chief a medal!! He actually gives a rat’s ass about victims (black victims included).

… Elsewhere …

At his own place this week, The Anarchopapist delivers: Progress is just Bad Science, Material Dependency and Individuality, and Ecology Exploitation and Equilibrium. Time has prevented me from composing pithy summaries of Bryce’s work this week. He is among the more difficult to summarize in the neoreactionary sphere. And I’m preeeety sure he’d consider that a compliment.

Butch asks questions about Roosevelt & Stalin inter alia, which to ask is to answer them. Which is why they are not often asked.

Free Northerner notices one group with the singular privilege of rarely having their privilege noticed.

Atavisionary’s got a strong piece up on Stereotype Threat and Pseudo-Scientists.

Jim says No Peak Oil. That little peak in ’07 had been deemed by some to be the absolute global peak. An early critique of I recall reading about in the Peak Oil literature was: The stone age didn’t end because people ran out of rocks. Eventually, of course, there will be a peak extraction rate for oil and all fossil fuels. Hopefully by then we will have found a better, i.e., cheaper, way to capture and utilize the energy on this planet. Also a very funny Barbie book. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have taken it down, but it appears to be on sale here and here. Get yours while supplies last. Must be a troll, but a good one.

Bonald finishes up (part five) of a series: One God, Many Peoples that I hadn’t been aware of. (Parts one, two, three, and four.) I haven’t yet read all of it, but Bonald is a fantastic thinker and writer, and his part five is a must read for our fellow right-wing travellers who tend toward a “Let’s dump Christianity for paganism” view:

Where do we see these propositional people? Where don’t we see them? Islam. Freemasonry. Reform Judaism. The United States of America. The European Union. Each represents an attempt to make a tribe of anti-tribalists, a brotherhood of those who don’t believe in brotherhood. Muhammad is the closest thing the world has had to the warrior Messiah dreamed of by the Prophets. Be honest: doesn’t the Messiah sometimes sound more like Muhammad than like Christ? As we’ve seen, historians agree that Islam is, in its essence, more individualistic, egalitarian, and cosmopolitan than Christianity, Christianity being the religion that defines itself around its “scandal of particularity”. The reform of Judaism undertaken by eighteenth-century German Jews was an attempt to repackage Judaism as a carrier for moral universalism, a boiling down of the Jewish faith to nothing but the Prophets. America and its European copies you know all about. And you know that the people who spout the most ludicrous nonsense about America being “exceptional”, as being based on “an idea” rather than “blood and soil”, are the people most drawn to “blood and soil”. They are people who are looking for some excuse to affirm their own people and land while holding fast to the moral principle that one may not affirm one’s own people and land.

By the way, The Legionnaire has started up a Friday Night Fragment’s series. He offers more commentary and stream of consciousness than I, with correspondingly fewer links. I once joked that he was sorta stealing my schtick. But he’s not. More diversity in the reactionary link love space is I think quite welcome. It is a virtual social binding agent. And in a herd of cats, you can’t really get too much of that. Nick Land also makes a irregularly regular habit of it with his Chaos Patches, which if I call correctly didn’t start out as link fests. That property must have emerged. And of course all of us are in debt to the King of Reactionary (and near related) Linkages: Free Northerner. He also runs The Aggregator. This is no coincidence.

That’s all I got time fer. God bless you and have a great weekend. Keep on Reactin’! Till next week… TRP… Over and out!!