This Week in Reaction

Well the news this week was full of Rape and Rumors of Rape. Mostly rumors—if not outright fantasies. Atavisionary says “Enough is enough” in The Girls Who Cry Wolf. The author behind the now fully discredited Rolling Stone article, Sabrina Rubin Erdely deserves an outweighted portion of scrutiny. (“Rubin”: It figures. Double-named: It also figures.) It appears that journalism is now far more a narrative searching for facts than the other way around.

Career in journalism? Pshaw! How ’bout a lucrative career as an Academic Consciousness Raiser?!! (They’re like Community Organizers except they make far fewer punctuation and grammatical errors.) Brock Landers’ son offers the most complete run down of which I’m aware on the well-manicured and fortuitous connections between Rubin-Erdely and UVA’s own Emily Renda, a rising star in the Feminist Narrative Industrial Complex.

Rape culture does actually exist, of course. But it never seems to be in the “overwhelmingly blond” enclaves of privilege, in which progressive journalists hope to find it.

Let’s see, what else…
Oh! They’ve cleared out the dust and cobwebs, and burnished the hypertext transfer protocols over at Unamusement Park! All with a criminally negligent amount of fanfare. Unamused has a long, one might say Radish-esque piece on Haitian History; a tale of media duplicity and the on-going moral debacle which is America’s refusal to have that long overdue adult conversation about race; and more on the late martyr (Dindu Nuffin) Michael Brown.

Michael Anissimov has finally responded to David Brin’s intemperate 2013 rant about neoreactionaries. See also Michael’s thoughts on Democracy Vs. Monarchy.

Bryce Laliberte returns from an hiatus with an instructive thought experiment in Angelic Language. Also a great piece on The Tyranny of Value, which if I understand it correctly seems to be saying the probability of actual attainment of a desired moral outcome should at least enter into the discussion of value. The Shakers moraled themselves right out of existence.

Nick Land takes note of how the PRC is tackling the problems of superstimulus head-on. Most of the BBC documentary is up on Youtube here (while it lasts). Also from His Outsideness, Distrust which seen as a principal mover of social technology. I don’t disagree with that assessment, but it seems that social systems nevertheless seem to run ever better with less of it. See also: Deep thoughts on Deep State—Susan B. Anthony dollar and Amtrak notwithstanding.

Reactionary Tree extends an olive branch to constitutional (“If we could just elect our guy…”) conservatives in Stuck in the Middle With You.

Mark Yuray pens a nice paean to James D. Watson and his new found patron Alisher Usmanov.

Jim Donald says Christianity is dead and unfortunately Islam isn’t. It’s hard to argue with this from a purely material standpoint. Yet Jim does admit that “a remnant small as mustard seed” of true Christianity, the sort that built the West, persists. I guess you go to war with the mustard seeds you got.

At Theden, Robert Joyner talks about Eric Garner and the Respectable Right. It strikes about the right tone I think. Unlike the Michael Brown case where it is abundantly clear that officer Darren Wilson acted within the bounds of the law, his training, and ordinary prudence, too little is known publicly about the Garner case to pronounce one way or the other. The only thing to be gained for “respectable rightists” is a few dry crumbs from Progressivism’s table. Not even enough to choke on, Mainstream Conservatives. Unfortunately.

Also Greg Allmain’s WaPo, MoJo: Racial Bias is Only a White Problem, Really! In a saner, more gentle time, Chris Mooney would probably have been doing something more honorable, like selling real estate in south central Florida.

SOCIAL MATTER

Sneaking in over last weekend at Social Matter, Hubert Collins tells How I Learned to Stop Chain-Smoking and Love #Ferguson. To be honest, I don’t see why you’d have to choose between the two.

Mark Yuray, of all people, shows up over at Neoreaction’s flagship e-zine to discuss Modernity’s Debasement of Language. Indeed, it has gone pretty much as Orwell predicted save in one particular: The largely successful effort to control thought in the modern age hasn’t consisted so much of a vast conspiracy with government at its center, as a vast sea of unintended consequences in a system bugged by perverse, largely pseudo-moral incentives.

On Tuesday, Henry says Mass Media is Over. It’s not mass anymore, but customizable and therefore fractured.

For this reason, the mass media finds itself in crisis, because it no longer performs the same social function that it once did. If before, it resembled a sermon — people of previous times often refer to getting the newspaper with breakfast as part of a ‘morning ritual’ — it now resembles something else entirely, with each parishioner receiving a different message tailored to them.

Hadley Bishop strikes the right balance of kindness mixed with disgust toward one of the more messed up identity groups in Someone Gassed the Furries:

You need a strong culture to oppose a culture, and if you sink a man’s boat, you’re obliged to toss him a life raft.

Glanton outdoes his, usually awesome, self with a positively stimulating review Meditations on “Meditations on Violence”:

One of the reasons why the Left perpetually sets the agenda is that they’re the ones acting, and so the Right gets stuck in perpetual re-action mode. Because we still tend to think of all this as a sparring match rather than a violent assault. It’s certainly not a war. It’s a civilized disagreement. I mean we’re going to resume harmonious relations with the progressive coalition at some point, right? They’re not going to displace us entirely and throw our children to the dogs, are they?

All is fair in love and war. And I’m not entirely sure about love.

John Hoyle makes his debut and rounds out the SM week with Pitying Your Enemies Is Just Pragmatism—a laundry list of the victims, more and less witting, of Progressivism and how the proper disposition toward victims is pity. Of course the main thrust of Reaction™ must be aimed at the true Power Brokers of the Cathedral, but we should not entirely discount campaigns against the lesser fish, either. Who knows whether we might A) snatch some from the jaws of their own demise, or B) demoralize them and thus chip away at the legitimacy of the Education and Media Industrial Complex.

DAMPIER

On Monday, Henry Dampier notes “Believers In Markets Out-of-Step With Markets”. Sure, markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. But that’s not really what’s at work here. The markets are perfectly rational; it’s the incentives that are perverse.

Here is John Paulson’s Puerto Rican Exit Strategy. Anarcho-tyranny works with both kinds of unintended consequences. Capital and tax flight are less brutal but arguably more expensive.

In Baby Boomers Will Be Kicked To the Curb, Henry argues for responsible government that would control the crisis before it controls government. Sadly, that is the one thing we’ll almost surely not get.

Dampier’s Why Millennials Are Garbage is a passionate call to sanity:

We’re what happens when you have classes for middle schoolers that explain why promiscuity is healthy and masturbation is a great idea. This was a bold social experiment, and now we know what the results look like. It’s not just the chemicals, but the pioneering psychological theories pushed onto people without much thought about the potential damage that might be done. Libraries have been filled with books of untested notions, and then those ideas have been promoted at scale at schools, universities, clinics, and hospitals.

RTWT! Henry is always good, but when he’s this good, it’s actually painful. This is the kind of pain without which there is no gain.

Then, in what would have seemed humorous (and completely obvious) 100 years ago, Dampier notes Feminists Need Support From Men:

The key question is how long that feminists can enjoy their positions of influence. The answer, didactically, stupidly, is as long as men permit them to enjoy their positions of influence, and not one second longer.

And this, very late breaking: Henry posits Social Justice Warrioring as Justification for Student Loan Expenses. This seems a particularly pathological (and expensive) case of “Where your treasure is (or went), there will your heart be also.” It’d be far far cheaper to just give all 10 year old girls a pony.

ELSEWHERE

Nydwracu pops his head up from his studies to ask Five Questions on Secession.

Scharlach talks about Torture.

Bonald explains why your religion had better have a problem with evil, otherwise it would be truly evil.

SoBL points out over last weekend how closely the dystopia portrayed in 80’s Arnold flick The Running Man parallels our own:

The media is part of molding opinion, but in Running Man, they let it be open and overt. Arnold’s character was framed as the terrible Butcher of Bakersfield, massacring peaceful food protestors. They used digital video edited to make him look like the bad guy. Raw video proved him innocent. Later, they trump up fake crimes to manipulate the audience. Sound familiar? George Zimmerman heard his 911 call be carefully edited by NBC to make him sound like an evil, racist stalker. It added to the narrative. It made him the bad guy, not just for the trial, but for all of America to hear. Raw audio of the call revealed that Zimmerman sounded like any other guy calling 911 in the rain slightly confused and very concerned with what or who he thought was out there. In the Running Man, they make you the villain by using fake video and audio to build up your negative profile for the viewers at home to hate you. We are already there.

He also talks about how competition for super low prices comes at a price, perhaps too great, in Deregulating Air Travel; Sam Brownback’s surprising (or maybe not so surprising, who knows?) success with Hispanic Kansans.

Also: How They Progged the Music Video to “Take Me to Church”.

prog – (v. tr.) to selectively modify a message, by misdirection, selective use of facts, or outright lying, to tell a story that fits with the regnant narrative.

Mitchell has taken up a sort of round-up scattershot style with Chernobyl 2.0? Ebola-Chan on the Live Ebola Map, House Resolution 758, and Israeli Collusion and Zionist Collusion, Shifty Bulgars, Cash Amnesty, Feminist Foreign Policy, Privilege & Agency, and Good Mikhael Khazin. And his focus, over the last month or so, on international relations continues with The Turkish Pivot: From West To East.

Watson has a magnificent piece up 4th Generation Warfare is Whig Propoganda. Magnificent in all but name, that is. It isn’t that the existence of 4GW is Whig propaganda, but that 4GW, i.e., warfare in which “public opinion” plays a signficant role, exists because of Whig propaganda. It runs on the stuff. Moldbug 101: Conflict + Uncertainty = War. Conflict has been and remains relatively fixed over vast epochs of human history. Uncertainty is exacerbated by, as they say in the fancy-pants literature, “deontological” considerations, which invariably seem to have a peculiarly Enlightenment “aroma” to them. Eliminate the uncertainty and a lot fewer babies will have to die.

Filed under weighty questions, Matt Briggs discusses The Philosophy of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Also from Briggs, the inanity of attributing an event to climate change. How much weather does it take to make a climate? Let’s ask the owl.

Filed under not exactly from this week, I think I missed this one from my favorite anti-anti-natalist, Rorschach Romanov: Conservatism Mugged By Reality—the reality being “There is nothing left to conserve”. I think that is not entirely right. At the micro-level there remains much to conserve: family, community, organic bonds, local things that one rightly loves; but at the large-scale level this analysis is absolutely correct. The cultural equivalents of the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki have already occurred. The large-scale Culture War is over and “we” lost. Harvard men are imprinting their ideology over the face of the entire earth. Escape with an eye to preserve and strengthen what yet remains is the only play left. Let us not waste it. We must live to fight another day when conditions are more favorable.

OK. Well that’s all I had time for this week, given my goal (rarely met) of getting the TWiR post up while people can still read it at work on Friday. Keep on Reactin’! TRP… over and out!!