That all seems to have somehow led up to this, which turned out to be the biggest news of all: #NRx decided it has boundaries after all, and it’s a little perturbed that folks are steaming up its tail.
Now let’s see… what else?
Wow, that Sarah Perry chick keeps showing up in the strangest places. Well not really that strange once you think about it. Here is her Praying in the Streets: Ritual as an Urban Design Problem over at Front Porch Republic. FPR is the closest thing I have to an old stomping grounds, tho’ most of the names have changed. But I cut my teeth on alternative conservatism with the likes of Caleb Stegall, Rod Dreher, and Jeremy Beer. Anyway, like most of Sarah’s pieces, this one is roughly equal parts education and deep meditation; in this case on how an impoverished urban design, ruled more by machine exigencies than aesthetics, can starve a people of a sense of sacred public space.
Mark Yuray points out that The Side of History has not been terribly kind to the fashions those who invoke it would have us adopt. He also makes a good point that History has even been rather unkind to various leftisms. Only one, the insanest, yet remains viable: Anglo-leftism. Also from Yuray, a big sweeping piece on education, HBD, and culture: Rote Learning Rocks, Critical Thinking Sucks. Rote learning as the retention of facts cannot, I think, be said to be all of a good education; but you could hardly have one without it.
In response to Yuray’s essay, Bonald offers some praise as well as mildly corrective thoughts. Legionnaire offers a few of his own. Critical thinking is more than just being critical based on your feelings. And if you don’t have a good grounding in the (rote) facts, that’s all you’ll ever do. Critical thinking in the modern pedagogical sense is neither.
Jim notices The Elephant in the Living Room. When he says women are “sex obsessed” he doesn’t mean obsessed with the sex act, as a man would understand it, but obsessed with relations between the sexes. This alone explains women’s underachievement in historically male-dominated roles; and the closer a woman gets to the glass ceiling, the more the theory explains. Jim also takes note of The Bubble in Government Paper. If only future generations could vote.
And Filed under Doh!-I-Totally-Missed-This-Last-Week… (Dammit Jim, get a follow button!) Jim pens a treatise on Sex and Natural Law. The comments alone are worth a read. I think it’s fair to say what Jim considers natural law and what Natural Law Scholars consider it to be are somewhat different. Where nature ends and grace begins is sometimes hard to pin down, but I think it remarkable how close Jim ends up to traditional church teaching relying on natural-and-I-mean-really-natural-dammit law.
I get my sports and entertainment news from SoBL, my Russian news from Mitchell, my China news from NIO and Land, and my Japan news from Spandrell. But when I want my Thailand news, and I don’t just mean for the sex tourism, I never look further than Watson, who reports this week on The Thai Inquisition. Apparently the crown prince has not quite lived up to expectations. This gives Watson pause to ask:
1. Under what conditions should aristocratic status be revoked? Who makes this decision? What should the consequences be outside of revocation of privileges?
2. How should the Royalty be portrayed in media? Both how as in through what means and how as in, through which frame?
3. Are there any tried and true methods for producing virtuous and wise aristocracy? This of course requires both an eugenic and pedagogical answer?
Hereditary aristocracy in the West lived almost long enough for science to make it better. Unfortunately, it shot itself in the head just about 100 years ago. Hopefully Thailand will not make the same mistake. Also from Watson this week: a Happy Belated Robert E. Lee Day.
The Anarchopapist posits A Hylomorphic Theory of Everything, which I take to be a central player his major theme of Teleology! Bitchez!
This Week in Social Matter
Surviving Babel and I got a heart-to-heart chat with John J. Glanton on Ascending the Tower, Episode 1 (our second episode, in pointer arithmetic) last weekend. This may be a two parter. If so I’m not sure what number the part deux will have, nor when it will come out. They don’t tell me these things.
Monday brings 5 feet, 7 inches of fury with Bryce Laliberte’s Surrender is not the Solution to Islamobarbarism. He get’s everything right in this one I think:
A Muslim who believes in the superiority of Islamic society and the evil of Western societies can only find this kind of polarization in the West positively delicious. Not only that, they are likely to be encouraged this. This inability of the West to unite itself to ward off a warring invader corroborates the thesis of its essentially heathen nature. An ardent Muslim that might not have otherwise been persuaded to join in terrorist activities will now believe that these asymmetric, violent acts against Western nations are effective for securing the triumph of Islam over infidels. Poetically, Western societies even humiliate their own citizens rather than merely turn away the fiends. The West is weak, and Islam is strong.
The West—Christendom—having been taken over by an ideological virus, is losing; has all but lost.
And Social Matter delivers a two-fer on Monday. Mark Yuray also chimes in with Income Inequality Exposed: the Cathedral Lives. Winnie Byanyima: Engineer Manipulator of Procedural Outcomes.
On Tuesday, Henry Dampier asks Can the State Supplant the Family? States have been trying to for a long time and for various reasons. On one hand, states do actually need strong natural families to offload the massive costs. On the other, strong natural families don’t very much need, and therefore vote for, encroaching states. Henry says,
The family is a thorn in the side of political idealists, who hope for a human race without natural tendencies, a race which can be designed in the same way that an engineer might design a suspension bridge or software program. It is both a problem and a necessary tool for the state to defray its expenses, which is why speech-writers so often appeal to ‘making families stronger’ regardless of what the policy being advocated is.
Inexorably, even if slowly, states ultimately pursue short-term economic and political policies that erode the family, until such time as there aren’t enough strong natural families to pay for it all anymore.
Hadley Bishop offers his Wednesday Chair to some dude named Reed Perry, who looks at Blowback: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Schemes. He provides an excellent rundown of the ways the left-liberal establishment continues to shoot itself in the foot in its War on Reality. WW-R, has that been that taken?
John Joel Glanton offers his, as always perspicacious, commentary on Social Justice and Selective Attention. Noting “[s]ocial justice progressivism is inconsistent even in it’s inconsistencies,” Glanton packs this wallop:
In both instances [of Native dispossession and African slavery], whatever we do now is morally suspect because of what our ancestors did back then. And it doesn’t matter at all that our ancestors only did what was common to man. It doesn’t matter that mass population movements, that conflict over territory, that wars between genetically and culturally distinct tribes, that subjugation of defeated people, that slavery have all been with humanity for as long as humanity has troubled the earth. It doesn’t matter that they are still with us today. It doesn’t matter that they will be with us until the Day of Judgment. We are supposed to take the times that we lived up to historical norms as special evidence of our unique historical culpability and our own unique moral illegitimacies.
The Dutch called and they want their 60 guilders back.
Ash Milton closes out the week with Marine Le Pen: Lessons for the Anglosphere. Mostly this is an exposition of the traits of the Anglosphere, its denizens and thought, that make it more distinct from the Continent than most of us imagine. As fish, we understand wetness really quite poorly.
This Week in Henry Dampier
On Sunday, Henry Dampier tackles on the question of Education and Distinction. Basically, how you can’t have everyone be genuinely distinguished. Or genuinely educated. But someone’s bound to extract an increasing fraction of GDP if they can maintain the cargo cult of people buying education in the hope of gaining distinction. The truly distinctive know better.
In Obama Cares, he takes note of westerners’ superstitious, albeit unacknowledged, faith in their staggering gods. Perhaps superstitious because unacknowledged.
Dampier shows that Egalitarian Pretensions in Art lead logically to the ultimate abandonment of real art—divorcing it from it’s telos— in favor of egoist self-expression. He notes:
There’s a reason why internet-daters list their favorite television shows, movies, and novels on their profiles: they’re hooks to use for conversation. A shared comprehension of art, that which symbolizes human experience, is what makes bonds between people possible.
Given that that notion of shared comprehension has been badly battered by mass subjectivism, the means by which we can forge real connections with one another have been similarly obliterated.
And with so many channels of 24 hour egoist self-expression available, that shared comprehension, even of popular art, even as conversation starter, is getting harder and harder to come by.
M. Dampier asks Who Has Freedom to Speak? The depends mostly on the bonds of social trust, both horizontal and vertical.
Henry announces a New Project: Commentary on the Classics. List here. “Remedial education” he says. Heck, I ain’t even gotten medial yet in most of that.
Thursday brings a book review commentary, extensive at that, on The Oresteia — Justice and Fatherhood.
Switching back to the theme of education, Henry considers Making the University Irrelevant. He makes the point first that a good 90% of what Universities now do, vocational training of one sort or another, is now stuff that were not traditionally seen as legitimate university work 100 years ago. In most cases, the names of some of the degrees are the only link to classical education that remain. Like Doctor of Philosophy… (having a mellifluous ring)… in Engineering! Woops! But how do you fight this well-funded, overgrown machine with friends in all of the highest places? Henry says, we must focus on what skills rising working age people will need in 2048, which is when the dollars academia is taking in to-day will finally run out.
And finally, M. Dampier rounds out the week with Feminism Enters the Terminal Phase—in which we find NYU playing the role of pimp in a massive prostitution ring, and The Atlantic offering advertising at below cost. It’s time for this 150 year-old shit test to be over.
This Week in 28 Sherman
For sports and entertainment, SoBL’s got us covered this week. He starts off with Foxcatcher, Sports, Brotherhood
He’s got the latest politically sanitized turds of TV news in ABC’s Feminist Disconnect Agent Carter-The Bachelor and Conspicuous Progressivism – Chicago Fire
Stuck in Boomer Mode, Paglia Doesn’t Get Gaga. Feminist infighting is of course de rigueur, but this is not a stupid catfight or really at all about the soul of feminism. People Paglia’s age (nearly as old as my parents) still think of an artist as person with an occupation. In Gaga’s case, the person and the occupation have merged. Lady Gaga is not so much artist as art. (Not terribly great art, mind you.) The message was and is the medium. Now the artist has become the art. Seems miserable to me. But I’m old.
And SoBL rounds out the week with some reasonably good news as he thinks aloud about Clint Eastwood’s Handling of Violence like, for example, in American Sniper. It seems Eastwood’s approach in his directing is the exact opposite to what he became known for in his acting career. Not that either one of them are bad. But is star as a true American hero, on- and off-screen, continues to rise.
This Week in A House with No Child
As threatened last week, Mitchell Laurel gets his own sub-section. Mitchell’s all over the Russia/Ukraine situation like a cheap suit. First he goes in for some adulatory background in The Russian Long Win, The Russian Long Way. Next an update on Ukraine’s internal strife in The Poles Are Soldiers, Petrodollar Woes, Gerlich’s Spectacles. It’s a remarkably brutal that Foggy Bottom managed to kick off there. Next up, his Prediction Confirmed: Ukraine Resumes Its Invasion Of Novorossiya.
Turning away from Eurasia, Mitchell thinks he has A Solution To The Holiness Problem:
The answer is deceptively simple: Create enormously high barriers to entry into fields where sacredness is concentrated. While we cannot control sacredness as a resource, it does tend to congregate in certain places rather than others.
This sounds suspiciously like what I’ve been saying all along. (Although, alarmingly, never well and never in any one place I can find. Doh!) Certainly what may be termed “religious enthusiasm” is remedied either barriers like the priest-lay boundary, or channel excessive religious enthusiasm into monasteries where it can be contained and possibly even put to positive use. Both of which require high-church polity which has been thoroughly abandoned in most of Protestantism (with unprincipled and unsustainable exceptions) and, truth be told, not getting quite the MPG it used to in the Catholic Church.
Back onto Ukraine, Mitchell says, As Expected, The Mobilization Was Called. Some thoughts on France’s Trudging Down The Dark Path. And finally Mitchell closes out the week with Russians Are Forgiving And Jean-Marie Le Pen Is A Real Statesman.
This Week Elsewhere
This week in D… oh, I’ll let him announce it…
Indeed, Herr Duck made quite a splash at Le Château with Who Bitch This Is?!—now the rallying cry for a new generation of hipster patriarchs everywhere.
Butch says a polite, “How do you do?” to Pete Dushenski in The University of Neoreaction. Dushenski was noticed by Nick Land saying, “The Revolution Was Fiat. The Reaction is Bitcoin.” Well, certainly, The Reaction® is hard money, of which bitcoin is no doubt a species. With Butch, I’d like to extend a hearty handshake to Dushenski, but I do think there are better ways to meet new friends than by subjecting them to overwrought (and under-researched) insults. To say nothing of “improve the world.”
Over at the Orthosphere, this bit from Kristor: Homeostasis & Cultural Health was a tour de force on the hidden (occult) social forces that work, sometimes against all odds, to preserve accumulated wisdom and skill. Really great essay.
Briggs shows that a “1-in-27 Million Chance That Earth’s Record Hot Streak is Natural” isn’t so much the wrong answer as the wrong question. Just give me the lies and damn lies, thanks!
Reactionary Tree notes that Feminism is for Ugly Women. That… and unfeminine women. Which does make you wonder how it ever got its name.
Following wars G and T, Free Northerner calls World War P as the next front in the progressive onslaught against natural gag reflexes. He also notes: The whole creation/evolution debate is an example of both creationists and atheists being pwned by modernity. Yes. This. A million times this.
Hurlock considers Patriarchy and Fertility: The Case of Spain. A heartening and very recent example of how traditional cultural values go hand-in-glove with economic growth, even when using modern aggregate measurement standards.
This was cool. (HT Land.)
You’ve heard of tofurkey. It’s a running gag around our table to come up with as many to-<thing> edible ideas as we can. As you know turkey is often used as a substitute for stuff like, oh, pork, right? Well you knew it had to exist and Malcolm Pollack snapped a picture of Meta Meat.
Actually, that’s not nearly as bizarre as you could get. What if you really love tofu—one of the more disgusting “edible” substances known to man and used only as a protein substitute in the most dire cases—but are worried about soy? Nofu:
That’s protein substitute2.
Bonald takes note of Russia’s mild turn-around in birth rates and also how remarkably well Monarchy gets portrayed in the movies. When opposing forms or ideologies lose enough power, they often come to be seen as quaint by the ruling elite. Let us hope this apparently harmless potion they’ve permitted comes back to bite them big time. And also, this just in, In which the pope is reminded that you don’t have to always log in as root, and probably shouldn’t. LOL. Not that that’s gonna stop the guy.
I wasn’t thrilled with Legionnaire’s theology in this one. But I suppose arguing about the nature of Nature or Nature’s God (or Both) is the entire reason the construction “gnon” came about anyway. Also, he beats me to the finish line with this week’s Friday Night Fragments. Really quite good.
Atavisionary takes a break from his book on sex differences in intelligence to pop in and say hello. He outlines a sad and cautionary tale of a divorce gone bad worse. Well, at least the golden goose escaped in this one.
Neovictorian ponders Neoreaction the World ‘Round. Certainly there’s enough progressivism the world ’round to inspire it. And lo! The Oriental Neoreactionary—a Muslim blogger from Turkey. Posts thus far: The Reaction from the Orient and A Brief History of the Ottoman and Turkish Modernization (part 1). (HT Antidem
Looks like friend of this blog, Mark Citadel, has escaped my rather decrepid reactionary radar for a while. He has a blog. Who knew? I liked this piece: The Ranks of the Extreme Riseth Now. Mark’s recommendation sounds a fair bit like Phalanx but with a more overt religious themes. More power to ’em!
Seriously I am missing tons of reactionary stuff. I really cannot keep up. The reading and prep that goes into this post is very nearly a full-time job—given my distractability, slow reading speed, and laziness. Anyway, I’ll keep it up, but I rely on you, dear readers to point stuff out. And be sure to de-point when necessary. That’s all I gotz time for. Until next week… Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!
Don’t beat yourself up, you cover HUGE amounts in every weekly update, the collection is phenomenal. I am humbled by your shoutout as well! Thank you.
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