This Week in Reaction (Christmas Edition)

In this the Season of Peace on Earth, Jim has up a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece reminding us Peace is hard, war is easy.

Bryce notes Santa Won’t Save Us— Santa qua Wishful Thinking, that is.

Nydwracu wakes briefly from his long winter’s nap to jot down some thoughts on Christmas and its Music—specifically the worst Christmas song ever. Ya know, I never really knew the lyrics of It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas. Who knew? (BTW, Baby, it’s Cold Outside is a Christmas song? Really really, who knew??)

Speaking of holiday cheer, Nick Land works the horror angle on Santa Claus. He also offers an explicit review of Snowpiercer, and implicitly a review of Singapore Airlines. And yet another courtesy of the airline!

As to the former movie, SoBL has decidedly contrary thoughts to Land’s. (I’ll let them duke it out.) Plus, I really like SoBL’s alternative ending to the X-Files!

Speaking of movie reviewsdeep thots, Antidem, a recent visitor to Casa Estebanos and temporary stayer in Greater NYC-area, has got a lot of them about Interstellar. I may just have to break down and shekel-up for a movie ticket. Waiting for Netflix is, at times, just too slow.

NIO has big theory piece up, Speculations on nRX in which he teases out a unique strength of neoreaction tentatively called teleological rationalism:

[T]eleological rationalism is extremely differentiated from constructivist rationalism in that a strong stress is placed on an analysis of the teleology of the reasoning. This cannot be overly highlighted. One of the key areas in which Neoreation attempts to do so is by tempering any proposed structure by reference to what humanity and humans are biologically capable of, and also by reference to previous successful forms of social organisation from which a guide is sought

Back to SoBL… He has up a profound piece of political commentary, filtered through a poignant sporting lens, Progressives are Red Sox Fans. 2014, you see, has been a bad year for Progs, and they’ll never let you forget it…

[The Red Sox] were consistently contenders who usually lost out to the Yankees. They never were quite lovable losers like the Chicago Cubs. One big reason for it is their obnoxious, insufferable fanbase.

As a Yankees fan, I couldn’t agree more.

Also from SoBL: Looking at Two Lynchings from old New York Times microfilms. “No justice, no peace,” you say? Are you sure you wanna go there, SJWs? Are you sure you’re sure?

And in Media Megaphone Contributed to the Brooklyn Cop Killing, borrowing NIO’s excellent compilation of August NYT articles, SoBL launches another guided missile against the Media Industrial Complex.

This Week in Laliberte
Back to Bryce, who’s been writing a lot since last Friday. He notes Racism is as Prevalent as Ever:

The surest evidence that racism operates with as much force as ever is the suburbs, products of white flight resulting from the inability to exercise discrimination by other means. Racism is innate, and its reflexive expressions cannot be eliminated without intensive conditioning.

As prevalent… and as mild… as ever, I’d say. Although our solutions inspired by it (like suburbia and the War on Drugs) have become far more expensive and unsustainable.

To be honest, I don’t really feel the horror of Epistemic Horror. Perhaps I am not paying good enough attention to my own brain. But this is an excellent essay on knowing about knowing (and so forth):

Most of our knowledge is inferred without being consciously registered. We have in mind a kind of “education model” of knowledge, in which knowledge is something that was at some point explicitly instilled into us through the words of an authority. This is, of course, simply incorrect. We have been trained to believe and respond to numerous environmental cues which we have never contextualized in our conscious episteme and which we can only ever retroactively discern and explicate. Our ability to change belief is so difficult not because the task of understanding a worldview consciously is difficult, but because seeing outside our own worldview for the implicit beliefs we do not even recognize as beliefs … is so difficult. We are much better at pretending to ourselves that we have reasons for what we believe than we are at really finding out our reasons.

Indeed much of what we (think we) know, and practically all of it that is supremely important, comes to us by the authority of others (who, in turn, thought they knew). And by this undoubtedly lossy process, we nevertheless end up knowing something rather than nothing, tho’ to be certain, never as much as we think we know.

Then, in Cooperative and Defective Communication, Bryce waxes all game-theoretical over this phenomenon of people sharing of information via this neat invention called communication. “Defective communication”, as in defecting from a gentlemanly agreement to communicating in good faith, is a term, I think, for The Lexicon. This notion explains a lot of my consternation regarding certain internet wizards, with whom any disagreement is linked to some hitherto unknown moral or intellectual (but usually moral) defect.

Back on epistemology, Bryce contrasts Omniscience and Microscience, wherein we find: “The state of human knowledge is in disarray, but then again it started from utter chaos, so relative disarray is not that bad.” I’m almost always a sucker for epistemological humility.

From earlier today, Laliberte offers Vulgar Equality—a meditation on the sort of equality that egalitarians everywhere fail to believe in.

Bryce also hints at something extra special for tomorrow. But, alas, tomorrow is after today…

This Week in Social Matter
An abbreviated week at Social Matter this week is a mixed blessing insofar as it helps me get this TWiR post out in a reasonable time…

Ash Milton’s An Introduction to the European New Right is very extensive and informative. I come away from it with a renewed appreciation for how different the Anglophone (and especially American) culture is from the Continental, especially in the responses to the progressive memeplex. In America, even the most culturally conservative people have progressive memes seamlessly affixed to their worldview. Just look at Pat Robertson or Richard J. Neuhaus; no skeptics of liberal democracy there. And yet in Europe, exposure to the same memetic virus causes, for lack of a better term, revolutionary revulsion among otherwise pretty modernist people. At one level, near the surface, Europe (and even Canada) is far more “liberal” than the USA; but on a deep, visceral level, Europe is far more viscerally conservative than Americans can possibly imagine. I’m certainly sympathetic to those impulses, even when they are expressed in ways I couldn’t or wouldn’t necessarily choose.

Henry Dampier’s Tuesday thoughts on Reproduction and Its Substitute, recount America’s relatively late color-blind admissions policy and the attendant loss (or purposeful forgetfulness) of what it actually means to be American, all in non-racisty terms, digestible for the average conservative. Left unanswered, and unanswerable, is on the backs of whom shall fall the burden of cushy, relatively trouble-free retirements over the next generation of two.

And on Christmas Eve, Hadley Bishop offers The Christmas Trigger: Value Horrorism, a morality tale about a “libertarian structural utopia”—a neglected topic in the folk tale genre to be sure. To misquote a once-popular philosopher: “Selection pressures may come, but woe unto him through whom they come.”

This Week in Dampier
Henry Dampier continues to unleash a tsunami of digestible good sense…

First, he notices the once vaunted, and no doubt powerful, Protestant Work Ethic slowly being supplanted by The Progestant Work Ethic.

The Protestant Work Ethic, as understood by Max Weber, has since come to fade, along with Protestantism more generally. More congregations have either become indistinguishable from secular progressives, or have otherwise ceased to even continue to exist.

What has replaced it, at least in spiritual similarity, is the TED revivalist sentiment towards work. TED actually stands for:

Technology
Entertainment
Design

The mythos of “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop”, which was never quite true but quite productive for most under its spell, has given way to a more spiritualized, and therefore more fragile mythos of “Sacred Mission” in one’s work. Woe unto him who merely works a job. To get money. To feed his family. No you must have a Vocation®. Often, exorcised by an overflow of devotion to this Calling®, a man may work at it for a time for free, just to be around it. Nice work if you can get afford it! The principal difference, I think, between TED and Scientology is that the latter is widely recognized as a power cult.

More words of wisdom for millennials in Aaron Clarey, Rent-a-Dad for Millennials: Control your expectations. Youth is not nearly the asset you’ve been conditioned to think it is.

In Entitlement Programs As Nation-State Glue, Henry traces the occult forces that conspire against the Natural Family.

The suite of entitlement programs and regulations put into place before, during, and after the New Deal have all been dedicated to the weakening of the family system and the strengthening of the nation-state and the corporate systems that feeds resources and manpower into it in a rationalized fashion.

Bill Gates: White Renegade excerpts Greg Hood’s recent American Renaissance article which notes that Bill Gates is “obsessed with IQ”. Henry wonders why, if that’s true, “Gates has poured billions into a fruitless effort to change traits which are genetically determined.” Perhaps he doesn’t believe IQ is genetically determined and that if we can just get every child on earth to complete Algebra II, we’ll all be smart.

More About Millennial Grass-Eaters is another extended meditation on how much millennials suck, and why, and at least a hint about what to do about it:

It’s remarkable how many of the aesthetic criticisms of Communist life apply to the contemporary social scene: the dumpy, disheveled Soviet woman is the dumpy, disheveled American woman of today, putting in time to meet her quota, putting on her serious face in an ‘important’ meeting and then sobbing in the bathroom.

In Attacking the Credibility of Journalism, Henry suggests that attacking the entire industry might be more useful than attacking individual journalists.

The pretense of maintaining an informed public was always a relatively thin one, but it becomes even more challenging when public-interest newspapers are increasingly struggling to maintain their market positions. The notion that people want to be informed about the goings-on of local, national, and international political affairs becomes less and less sustainable each day.

Next, Henry pens a fantastic review of Tremble the Devil, by an anonymous former NSA spook about terrorism and a whole lot more. Not least, that the Drug War remains a proxy for black segregation, only a lot more expensive and a lot more harmful to blacks.

And from earlier today, Dampier notices Alber Jay Nock noticing the Cathedral in the act of turning. In 1931.

Elsewhere
What could be stupider than Social Justice Warriors going after Gamers? Going after Heavy Metal. Hey, cis-het-white males seem to love it; it must be eeeevul! Nick Pell has the Straight Dope on #MetalGate over at Taki’s. I swear, these #SJW idiots are picking stranger and stranger hills to die on. A taste of cask-strength Pell:

Later that month, VICE also gave Theis Duelund a platform for a hyperbolic sermon about black metal’s “bottomless capacity for misogyny.” Mr. Duelund is apparently unaware of the existence of gangsta rap, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or any actual examples of what hating women looks like.

And (be sure to swallow your coffee fully before reading the next one):

Mock horror surrounding metal is about as fresh as three-day-old tuna steaks.

ROFL! The evolution of VICE from… well… vicious to… more Highlights for (Enlightened) Children… is, itself, a story that deserves some coverage.

You’ve heard of First World Problems. Well just try fighting a war as the World’s Only Superpower. Sort of a military strategy version of gout. Also, from Isegoria’s Activist Vs. Passivist:

[I]f you feel an obligation to give back to the world, participating in activist politics is one of the worst possible ways to do it.

While I tend to think the activist-inactivist axis aligns pretty closely with the left-right axis, which explains why right-activism almost always moves leftward, it is certainly true that they are not identical axes. To move rightward, first actively embrace inactivism.

Nyan Sandwich has got some thoughts (a lot of them) on Post-Rationalist Religion over at More Right. I picked on it on the twitter, but really it is an excellent piece—very well written, very well thought out. It deserves a blog post type of response. Jim offers a few wistful thoughts.

Watson has up a “for fun” video I’m a Good ‘Ol Rebel, which strikes me as being at least as much astute political commentary as fun. Well, no reason one cannot do both I don’t suppose. Also, Don’t Go Full Retard is nice bit of dissection of Rolling Stone’s rather mossy “Mrs. Grundy”-ism.

In response to Alrenous’ Steel Anarchism Mitchell offers Against Steel Anarachism. Plus a followup (no extra charge) in Hobbesian Equality is a Myth. Some interesting musings on Ataturk. He also talks about Nicotine from Lesswrong, DOJ Rape Stats, Stratfor Admits the Obvious, and Byzantine Heirs.

Legionnaire finally delivers of his Theory of Theory of Mind (part deux).

Brigg’s takes a 4-gauge fisk to The 10 Secular (but suspiciously moralistic, sunday-schooley) Commandments.

Filed under: Finally!! A very thorough, very nuanced, and very (small-m) magisterial piece on Catholic perspectives on torture—an issue that I had been waving off as too complex and controverted upon which to opine. (HT Jim Kalb.)

Friend of this blog and Daily Caller opinion editor Jordan Bloom takes a bow over at Front Porch Republic.

That’s all I had time fer… If I missed ya, let me know (and if you don’t have a “follow button” blame yerself at least a little). Merry Christmas! It lasts til Epiphany: January 6. So, by all means, don’t stop celebrating now! Keep on reactin’! TRP… over and out!!