This Week in Reaction

Leading with Theden… Greg Allmain reports on the incomprehensibly violent death of Jessica Chambers. Her father is quoted as saying, “I don’t know how someone can hate someone that bad.” Indeed. In crimes like this, it is very hard to see the perpetrator as fully human; a mere animal would not do this.

Also two great pieces from Robert Joyner regarding the Eternal Media Offensive Against Malevolent Imps & Goblins: Media Malfeasance: The Double Standard on Police Violence and Race and Another Nail in the “Cops are Racist” Coffin. From the former:

One of the chief shortcomings of the progressive Left is that it attributes all sorts of behavior to “racism” or some other such slur term. The actual motives behind the behavior might be complex or subconscious or even perfectly understandable, but they still get jammed into the -ism box due to the demands of the social justice worldview. Having recognized this conceptual error, though, it is important for those of us on the Right not to recapitulate it.

…

[T]he media does not bring up police misconduct in order to redress police misconduct. No, the media reports on police misconduct in order to propagate the idea of institutional racism, which is a useful meme for its purposes. And while the story of Saylor or Roupe could be useful to an investigation of the former, they are totally worthless to a story about the latter. Hence they get dropped.

A narrative looking for events, people, and places; instead of the other way way around. Also:

Middle America would just say, “Perhaps if you produced fewer Black male gangbangers, then Black males as a whole would receive less police scrutiny and interference.” And what good would that do for the liberal media establishment?

Welp… no good at all, I don’t suppose.

Deep State—Deep Schmate: Finally, someone deigns to tell me What It Even Is.

The [Deep State (DS)] must be a power center whose intents and aims are, to the degree its form is unacknowledged, likewise unacknowledged. This means its own interests can be in isolation and separation from those vested in the official government. The official government, or Shallow State, is generally permitted to operate with autonomy, pursuing its own interests and serving the purpose to the Deep State of acting to maintain legitimacy for its institutions and policies, on which the DS piggybacks. In other words, the DS effectively outsources legitimacy.

It seems to me that, in spite of the obvious uselessness, incompetency, and complete paralysis of the Ceremonial (i.e., elected) Government in DC, the United States still has a functional government. This alone is proof of Deep State. And on balance that’s probably a good thing, tho’ one could wish for a nearer correspondence between what everyone believes to be The State and that which is actually The State, such that it may by some sloppy definition be considered truthful.

Also, Bryce shocks the world by declaring: Capitalism Sucks! Well, yeah… but double-entry accounting is alright… right? Perhaps this is yet another corollary to Sturgeon’s Law.

Watson has up a terrific piece on Sweden Oh Come Ye All Faithful to the Promise Land: Blue pills soaked in Red #11—in which we learn the Tea Party has quietly taken over, whilst American Left continues to see it as a Socialist Paradise. Sweden’s biggest advantage, of course, has always been that it is chock full of Swedes. An advantage they are slowly trading away. Watson also takes a stab at reactionary poetry in The Golden Goose.

Antidem explains The Basis of “Based” and a whole lot more. Also a really excellent piece on Puritanism (qua Americanism) Roofs And Closets. He highlights a signal failing of Puritanism as an ideology in which genuine tolerance is impossible:

To tolerate something does not mean to celebrate it, nor even to approve of it. If one hears that somebody has “tolerated” an experience (perhaps something like a business-related social function), the meaning is clear enough – they put up with it, but they didn’t enjoy it. To tolerate something means not that one likes something, but merely that one has chosen not to punish over it.

For those in whom the will to punish is strong, this is an untenable proposition – they must punish, for to them the desire to do so is irresistible. For the ideological Totalist, it is an insensible position – something must either be celebrated or punished, with no options in between (one is reminded of the description of Mao’s China as a place in which everything that was not forbidden was mandatory). Puritans are always the latter and frequently the former (for Puritanism attracts such people into its fold and gives them social status, and thus authority, within the Puritan in-group). But that does not mean that Puritan Totalism is the only, or is even a very desirable, way to order human affairs, and it does not mean that society would end up in moral chaos were we to order them another way.

Whether it’s having fun on “the Sabbath”, or smoking in bars, if somebody’s trying to ban it, you can be sure he’s Puritan. And they’re still working on banning Christmas.

Bonald makes a couple of posts on the epidemic, lately resurfaced, of False Media Narratives: Why the media keeps highlighting dubious racist police murder stories and a followup Why I don’t believe in rape culture. He also notes, helpfully, that Catholics are allowed to notice how bad things really are. Perhaps obligated.

Jim says, “The Vast Majority of Rape Accusations are False”. I think that’s probably true if you add a qualifier: “rape accusations against white men“. He also points to the (rather feminist IMO) Ann Coulter taking notice of the trend. Ah well, enemy of my enemy-n-all-that…

Scharlach, with his second post in as many weeks, considers A Monopoly on Violence, with some ice-cold sanity thrown over the ever popular, but never entirely coherent, panacea of exit:

What does the neoreactionary society do with internal threats? It is not enough to answer “Exit” for every internal threat, for there is no escaping the problems of internal criminality and violence. We must address those internal threats. How do we address them?

I don’t happen to believe well-ordered societies require a monopoly on violence. In fact, I suspect that the best ordered societies spread out the permissibility of it rather liberally among its more powerful classes, among whom it will be so rarely needed and utilized as to make it appear that the sovereign indeed holds a monopoly on violence. But he will know if things get bad enough he won’t.

This Week in Social Matter

Let us see what happened this week at Neoreaction’s Flagship Publication…

Peter Stone shows up in Laliberte’s Monday chair describing The Logic of Political Correctness—which is ultimately that political correctness is disharmonious with reality, and therefore prudence, on every topic that it touches. Listen to what your Moral Masters say… and then believe and do the opposite. Works as a first order heuristic at least.

On Tuesday, Dampier delivers Can’t Let Our Diversity Be a Casualty. In teasing out modernity’s spiritual autism in dealing with traditionalist strains of thought being, Henry offers this gem:

The dominant strain of thought in Western government tends to not about the effects of diversity per se (it’s simply stated as dogma that diversity yields benefits, without ever providing corroborating data), but about the idea that people are empty vessels that can be reshaped at will. To acknowledge that religious belief actually does motivate behavior is to acknowledge a competitor to high modernism. It isn’t just that people respond to incentives, but that people respond to all kinds of incentives, including those that involve their beliefs in intangible things.

Bishop tries to make sense of ‘Islam Is A Religion Of Peace’. He distinguishes cleverly between capital-I Islam, the abstract theoretical body of doctrine with which protestants are very comfortable; and small-i islam which is the sum total Islamic lived experience, which is a big messy mixture of religion proper, culture, language, traditions, and history. I’d call it projection bias: Anglophones have the audacity to believe that the rest of the world is psychologically just like them and therefore privileges and takes from a body of abstract doctrine in the same way they do. <Bonk> Wrong answer.

John Glanton’s A Match Made in Hell is a meditation on how the left-liberal educational establishment betrays its own principles in foisting its wares increasingly on a population less likely to benefit from them, less likely to be able to afford them, and less resistant to the sales pitch. If you ask a plastic surgeon whether you might benefit from “a little work”, you know what his answer is going to be. If only we were so wise about college educators.

This Week in Dampier

Just a ton of good stuff from Henry Dampier’s own place this week. Honestly, I don’t know why I bother. Just go there and read the whole thing….

In Was Gruber Wrong?, Monsieur Dampier notes:

Among conservatives who were unable to muster a strong intellectual and moral case against socialized medicine from the word ‘go,’ instead tending to oppose it because it would threaten existing socialized medical care programs, it’s foolhardy for them to act as if they were really on the right side all along. Republicans and Democrats are fundamentally on the same side of the great debate over socialism, as they must be, because the people also favor socialism, whether they know it in those terms or not.

The sight of Mr. Gruber abasing himself, abusing himself, before congress is at once laughable and supremely instructive. Mr. Gruber’s error lies in revealing, among devout believers in the righteousness of left power, the inner workings of this beast known as USG—of which a major feature (or bug) is the outsourcing of consent manufacture to the university and media industrial complex, by which its mandarins receive security, money, and power. So why did he reveal it? It was his pride, of course. He is a major player in that complex. He is a one-percenter… when it comes to manipulating procedural outcomes. So now Gruber must go back and retract the truth he intemperately spoke, because to admit the way the system really works bears no resemblance to the mythology of how the system works, popularized by Schoolhouse Rock, would be an immediate to end to the source of his power.

We should henceforth be skeptical of all public apologies which do not end with the offender falling on his sword.

In Hard Money Future, Henry admits there are some advantages to soft money, but never the ones its advocates like to advertise:

The benefit of the soft-money system is that it allows the central state to mobilize for total war using mass armies. Just about all of the alternative economic arguments for soft money systems are facetious. There is no multiplier effect, ‘deflation’ is not damaging, and Keynes was just a glib pedophile with no special insights into economics.

And moar:

The soft money system co-exists with monopoly systems on the legal use of force. Hard money systems coincide with breakdowns of those monopolies. It’s no coincidence that depreciation and Empire are so often coincident: when there is a sole, central government, even the wisest leaders have trouble maintaining a hard money regime.

In Haxx0rs, Dampier explores the possibility that USG is simply unable or unwilling to do what it takes to survive a new regime of crypto currency and finance.

Why People Drop Out of the Edgysphere takes realistic stock of where we, the razor edge of the alternative right, sit in relation to the power lined up against us, and how to not go insane.

The future may be hard money, but we live in The Soft Money Present in which corporations, responding to perverse incentives like nearly interest free money, wreck significant damage to natural and particular social bonds. Is the corporate world part the Cathedral? Formally, probably not as it is fundamentally agnostic about the Progressive religion. But the tune corporations play to their piper advance the latter’s millennialist causes. Here’s Goldman Sachs (rhymes with Tucker Max) doing its part. (HT Mr. Scientism.)

Next, Henry speaks of Selling Out to Jeff Bezos, which I don’t really understand, but seems to have something to do with making a couple bucks off his very fine blog. So more power to him.

And finally, in Industrial Success, Dysgenic Failure, Dampier talks about how short term corporate profits are no promise of any kind that our civilization is not getting stupider and worse.

The same people who will snicker at Texans and Kansans for being hicks who don’t believe in evolution will accuse you of being an evil bigot for believing in human evolution.

One of the reasons that this might be is that, politically, it’s difficult to suggest that the consequences of the Green and Industrial revolutions may not have been entirely benign. By weakening selection pressures on the species, we have been deteriorating ourselves in terms of genetic quality.

What do bible thumping conservative Kansans and Nietzschean race realists tend to agree on? What they can plainly see with their own eyes.

There’s more super good stuff:

The idea of human evolution is also quite threatening to the pretensions of the egalitarian left, which holds that anyone can be remade into anything with the right education. If it in fact takes generations for major changes to happen in generations, absent strokes of fortune, then many egalitarian pretensions must also fade away, and traditional emphases on family, family quality, and child-rearing become more readily understandable.

In particular, with knowledge of evolution, which is not entirely out of step with traditional emphases on blood and family honor, feminism turns from an important moral initiative into something that’s easier to perceive as a dire social problem. To the extent that you encourage the smartest women from the best families to turn themselves into dissolute corporate strivers, you also encourage the race if not the species to destroy itself in terms of quality.

Smart Women of the World, Have Babies! (Please.)

This week in Son of Brock Landers

Not to be outdone, SoBL layed down a boatload of, as always, well-researched posts this week…

Hot on the tails of a blistering exposé on the Renda-Erdely connection last Friday, SoBL follows up with some remarkable narrative and linguistic parallels between Jackie’s now thoroughly discredited story of rape at “overwhelmingly blonde” UVA and Emily Renda’s own trademark claim to fame.

Sabrina Erdely wrote this line, “But like most colleges across America, genteel University of Virginia has no radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy”. “Genteel”, so you can picture young patriarchs in white suits or seersucker suits sipping cool drinks in the shade of their antebellum mansions. This is all part of Erdely’s narrative pitch. It is a narrative with major holes though. “No radical feminist culture” sounds fake to me.

Fake? I find it far more plausible that UVA’s student dining room lacks a salad bar than UVA lacks a “radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy”—the latter being one of the most prominent drab monotone features in the history of academe. You’d likely find more diversity of opinion on the nature of the Holy Trinity in 14th Century Italian universities than we find on the topics of feminism and The Patriarchy™ in 21st Century American ones.

SoBL has really grabbed the Renda connection by the horns and it keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. How Many White House Visits for Emily Renda? Isn’t it well past time that Ms. Renda step down from her Chairmanship of the Virginia Governor’s Task Force on Sexual Assault? (Umm… that’d be a yes.)

Also the rapes that the NYT deems not news and why.

SoBL also asks Why Would China Announce Their Gold Reserves? They’re probably enjoying the ultra-low prices.

In sports news, find out why progressives no longer hate the Heismann Trophy. Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

And finally from earlier today, How Quickly Progs Forget. Help me out here, are police the good guys or the bad guys? I think every people gets the Police State they deserve.

And Elsewhere

Butch notices neoreaction noticing propertarianism. (Well… at least Nick Land noticed). I’ve watched the video wherein Doolittle discusses propertarianism. It seems quite appealing, but I haven’t made full sense of what appears for now to be a very esoteric intramural dispute within the “Liberty Movement”. I’m allergic to “movements”… what can I say?

Mitchell offers more reasons to smoke, and more reasons not to not to, in Crimethink & Nicotine Toxicity. I’m not quite ready to declare it to be our positive duty to smoke, but I’m getting closer. Also Why Vietnam Wins All The Wars. Mitchell says, “Asabiyyah”. I’m a bit skeptical. The standard narrative for America losing to VC is that it hadn’t the collective will to win. There is nevertheless much to admire in the Vietnamese and in their regime.

Reactionary Tree makes a reductio ad absurdum of reductio ad hitlerum in Embracing Cultural Marxism. Hey! Don’t forget the pegging! Also, a few thoughts on Romance, sex-realist style.

Malcolm Pollack reports on the recent lowering of standards FDNY, or the Department Formerly Known as New York’s Bravest. Diversity is our strength. Apparently even in fighting fires.

Also by way of Land, Nick Szabo makes a rare, but as always deeply edifying post: The Dawn of Trustworthy Computing—in which Szabo imagines the novel technology underlying Bitcoin, viz., peer-to-peer byzantine consensus with cryptographic hash chains, applied to a wider set of network computing problems. In theory, all of them. RTWT.

Nyan chimes at More Right with a very thoughtful piece Sub Specie Aeternitatis:

Despite being near-universal among intellectuals, and often justifiable (for scientists especially but not at all universally), this pattern of isolating oneself within the “one true school of thought” is usually pathological.

Beware the warm, seductive call of the echo-chamber. Good advice for all of us.

Briggs takes note of NYC Protesters: ‘What Do We Want? Dead Cops!’ What They’ll Get Is Something Else. If you try to understand protesters logically, you will go insane in the attempt. They are not out for logic or justice or any other good, whether unalloyed or derivative. Protesters protest because it is the sacrament of a desacralized people. The pseudo-religious nutters merely give cover to the few who see clearly enough to know what protest is really about: violence.

Atavisionary pours another shot of cask strength sex realism.

Filed under Dense Millennial Mysticism: Legionnaire’s Love the Way You Lie…. It seems to be about something other than what it’s about. Also this week’s Friday Night Fragments. He beat me to the publish. Doh!

Filed under really really not-from-this-week-but-anything-from-Anomalyuk-is-a-must-read: Neoliberalism. Sorry to have missed it previously. Moar trumpets please!!

That’s all I got time fer. If I don’t see ya til then, have a Merry Christmas. Keep on Reactin’! TRP… over & out.