This Week in Reaction (2015/03/13)

A neat and orderly garden.

Well the big story this week in Reaction is that we didn’t really have a THE big story. So… no drama, except for some new and exciting reporting on drama. More on that below…

So let’s see. What did happen? Well…

Mark Yuray conducts the Post-Mortem on his divorce from ethno-nationalsim. Sometimes the best argument against national socialists is 15 minutes in a windowless room with one. Also: The Mind is the Soul.

In What is Neoreation? Pt. II, Yuray takes (yet) another angle:

Any sustained attempt to articulate the principles of Tradition will necessarily result in an “a tradition,” and a sustained attempt to articulate and act them out will result in a civilization. Neoreaction, being a sustained attempt to articulate the principles of Tradition using the vocabulary and mentality of the post-Modern West of the 21st century, represents a new and developing tradition of civilization.

Some disturbing news from Hurlock. He is rightly troubled about some things. We’ve got to remember this is a very long, multi-generational game we’re playing here. We should not become overly optimistic, nor overly pessimistic.

Skyagusta tries to make sense, as an interested outside observer, of the recent nationalism dust-up in -Isms and the Many Faces of the Enemy.

Free Northerner says Conservatism is Always Doomed. Yep. And its not contingent upon conservatism’s strength of ideas or marketing. It’s a law of social physics. Also this week, he writes Against Usury. I am sympathetic. Truly, I am. But I busted my brain a while back on the Usury Question (UQ) and spent 6 weeks in brain traction. I think the solution to the UQ is of a piece with a comprehensive realist view of money and wealth.

Matt Briggs is fantastic here in a spirited and principled defense of necessary evils:

The Doctrine of Unintended Consequences is one of the few hard won, adamantine, indisputable moral truths known to us. Yet we eagerly cast it aside in the pursuit of Beautiful Theories which hold that if only we pass enough laws or implement enough regulation human perfection, or something rather like it, will be ours at last.

And yet this doctrine is routinely ignored, deemed retrograde and the domain of the merely grumpy, because it is not beautiful, nor part of any comprehensive meta-strategy. And so the bodies continue to pile up.

What’s wrong with America, Wesley notes, is too many characters are political figures. Or, in the case of Black America, 100% preachers who happen also to be political figures. Also some snippets and musings on that Sense of Us I was talking about.

Pie are round.

As a public service, Nick Land wishes gently to remind us whence NRx sprang. Also tomorrow is Pi Day… omigosh, that came up quickly! Better dust off my roundest hat. An especially significant one this year, as we get the first 5 digits of the transcendental number π in today’s date, for the last time most of us will be around. So celebrate… with whatever, or whomever, one celebrates Π-Day

Scharlach chimes in to say, “Yay Intersectionality!” Only, of course, insofar as it seems perfectly designed for pushing The Edifice over the cliffs of insanity.

Speaking of those self-same cliffs, more stream of consciousness from Peppermint in Endgame News.

Jordan Bloom wonders Did The New New Republic Even Fact-Check Its Cover Story On Pope Francis? (“New new” is sort of a meta-inside media joke, I guess.)

Bryce chimes in with some not entirely flattering words about television in The Ministry of Approved Thoughts—even the edgy, transgressive thoughts are approved. Oh yes, especially those.

Donovan’s Friday Frags: “No (Patriarchal) Pain-No Gain Damn Right Imma Atlanticist” Edition.

This Week at Social Matter

Let’s see what happened at Social Matter this week shall we?

Well… Part 2 of SB’s and my chat with Hurlock made it up last Saturday. It’s entitled “Nobody Intrinsically Trusts Economists”.

Bryce Laliberte is back on Monday with Civilization and the Chain of Being. He stakes out some nice ground here:

[S]ociety is definitely an order of its own. It is not an aggregate of human wills; though its individual parts are possessed of will, to suppose that it is itself an aggregate of these wills and as such takes its form through human will is the fallacy of composition. Society is an organic being which arises as a network of interacting parts and systems solving problems imposed by the constraints of space and scarcity.

Following St. Paul implicitly, Laliberte sketches an analogy between society and the human body, between social health and individual human health.

A political theorist should be nearer a medical theorist and a politician nearer a medical doctor. The tendency of modern political theorists to set aside the intrinsic purpose of society and of politicians to make every possible intervention counts against them. Were it to be responded that they simply do not believe in intrinsic purpose, especially not of society, then they admit there is no standard against which their work might be judged and their work is entirely without purpose.

Monday’s a two-fer, with Mark Yuray delivering a right cross to Laliberte’s left jab.

All these signs [of war within living memory] are signs of Gnon. They are evidence of natural selection, not necessarily genetic, though often so. More often, and more importantly, they are evidence of the natural selection of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks. As right-wingers, we are familiar with the idea of Darwinism as it applies to free enterprise and evolution. These are just the two most obvious examples of the principles of natural selection…. One’s beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, delusions and outlooks are under constant selection, though the effect is not as glaring and well-studied as in biology or economics.

You think war is hell? Well, Henry says Peace ain’t so great either. Especially when it’s enforced by the barrel of a really big, really expensive gun.

War is to states as bankruptcy is to corporations. Loss in war clears away or weakens states which are no longer capable of effectively governing. By attempting to abolish war in Europe, for example, all that has been accomplished is a promotion of mass-misgovernment. Weak, inefficient, and essentially corrupt governments stay in power whereas they might have been cleared away through conflict in previous eras.

By suppressing small, regular conflicts, the international system permits resentments and hatreds to fester. By attempting to force different groups together, forbidding any sort of reasonable exclusionary principles, it develops mild dislikes into loathing. In the same way that a strong preference for comfort in the day-to-day leads to the development of a deadly obesity in the individual, an overweening preference for peace and cooperation leads to a guarantee of far worse destruction in the future.

“We came. We saw. He died. <cackle>”

It’s fragility… all the way down these days. You’d think the schoolmarms that they put in charge of the Global Order would eventually recognize that, wouldn’t you? That’s three days in-school suspension for you, Muammar!

Mitchell Laurel drops by Wednesday to notice North Korea is Russia’s Pacific Pivot. He paints a picture in which a predictable Nork regime—in which crazy drunk uncle is induced somehow to sober up—is in almost everyone’s best interests… except America’s.

John Glanton talks about Weightlifting and the Threading of Needles. It’s a meditation on various ways the efficiencies (accidents) of civilized life separate us from its essences:

Many of the people whose lifestyles no longer include exercise of necessity simply let themselves go. They drink beer and binge watch Netflix in the evenings. They get skinnyfat and wake up at forty on the road to cardiac arrest. In the same way people whose lifestyles no longer demand that they put forth cognitive effort, and precious few do in any compelling sense, often forgo it, let their faculties atrophy, sink into the popcorn-brain confusion of social media stimulation and push-button entertainments. The pageantry of the world passes them by and they comprehendeth it not. There are other analogues as well. Those who don’t need community ties for survival don’t forge them. They subsist on a “significant other” and the occasional office party. Those whom the grocery feeds never learn to produce food. Those who don’t need children to care for them in their dotage don’t have them. And thus all those relationships and pursuits that have been our satisfactions since deepest antiquities, the ancient health of man, go unnoticed by the wayside.

Thoughts like this, not at all far removed from those of Marshall McCluhan, lead naturally to the genuinely horrific question: Are the seeds of a civilization’s inevitable destruction sown in the very mechanisms of its birth? Or… How does a people refrain from eating its seed corn? I wish I knew. In the meantime, could everyone please stop nibbling on the seed corn. I know it’s tasty, but c’mon. Just sayin’.

Friday at Social Matter… woops. But stay tuned cuz Ascending the Tower featuring Henry (Da Fonz) Dampier will be coming soon… I hope.

This Week in Henry Dampier

Speaking of Monsieur Dampier… on Saturday, he shares a video of Sean Gabb speaking at last year’s annual conference of The Property & Freedom Society on the topic of Enoch Powell and the Three Words To Get You Fired.

Sunday, more video (this time from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) speaking at that same conference) and some commentary from Henry to the point that Freud was a Liar and worse.

Although today, you might think that Freud’s ideas are not in wide use, you would be mistaken. Freud and the psycho-cults which he inspired continue to have enormous influence on social mores, the practice of religion in America, and the course of professional medicine. Americans often speak in the language of Freud without knowing precisely where it comes from.

Don’t be fooled by the cigar.

No scientist, qua scientist, could ever have such an impact on society. Indeed, Freud’s science is bunk and almost universally criticized by academics of various stripes. Yet strangely the memes he excreted into public use have arguably shaped the past century of social chaos more than any other force. And if that bothers you, perhaps you are “anal retentive” or “closeted homosexual”.

Henry puts in a good word for A Struggle For the Future of Some of the English-Speaking Peoples, emphasizing:

We can no more elect to stop being English any more than we can elect to become frogs or wombats.

I think that’s true. Even for me. Even though I am 0% English.

Henry takes note of the existence, as I do below, of the existence of wasenlightened, as in “The student was enlightened.”

On Wednesday, Henry highlights some Businesses That Separate Working Women From Their Savings. They are so effective, that you’d think young women would be wising up to it and looking for better options (like traditional marriage). But that would be silly, because how then could a young woman of 18 every fulfill her dreams of filling in TL9000 bubbles for 40 years.

Thursdays book report is on an oldie: The Iliad. But a goodie:

The consequence of abandoning the lineage of the Greeks is total annihilation — not metaphorical ‘annihilation,’ but physical destruction; the machete to the neck. People who fear the physical and spiritual West do what they can to suppress this culture because it is so vastly superior to most of its competitors, at an almost incomprehensible relative scale. It is the difference between the rocket ship and the rain dance, the steel cuirass and the cotton jaguar warrior costume.

And finally from earlier today, Henry pens an Ode to Exclusivity—that hateful social equilibrium that is unleashed wherever laws prohibiting “the right of the people peaceably to assemble” are peremptorily banned.

This Week in 28 Sherman

Son of Brock Landers starts the week by asking Why Are Blacks Homeschooling? Because homeschooling is cheaper than moving into the suburbs to escape black—or hispanic—schools. LOL about Kansas being “more racially diverse”. Diversity is a codeword for “less spics” now, apparently.

Next SoBL warns: Get Used to Selma 50 Events, It’s the Boomer Farewell Tour. And the horrors are just getting started:

This Boomer farewell tour will continue with made for tv special events like the “50th Anniversary of the Summer of Love”, “50th Anniversary of the Chicago Democrat Convention Protests”, “50th Anniversary of Woodstock”, “50th Anniversary of Kent State”, and of course the “50th Anniversary of Watergate”. The Boomers will miss the comedy to their vanity with each special. When will it end? My guess is that it will end right at the 250th anniversary of July 4th in 2026 with the “50th Anniversary of Disco”, but that will be to market a fashion or music trend and to throw younger Boomers a bone. One long shot to an end to it all would be the USA cracks up, breaks up, and a Governor of a secession republic uses Reagan’s ’80s election and Morning in America for nostalgia propaganda to the Reagan Democrats (really the Nixon coalition) that set off the ’80s.

The lovely Valentina Vargas

On Tuesday, SoBL says Don’t Mind China. Just keep refinancing those houses and getting butt implants.

Then SoBL gets personal and historical (and meta) with his spot on the trichotomy. That’s about where I am too, maybe just a couple of pixels closer to the center.

On Thursday, he posts a big sweeping story on Grantland and Porn. A) I thought Grantland was s’posed to be about Sportzball, but I guess porn and sportzball are getting to be pretty much the same thing nowadays. Also, B) Is it just me, or is it every freaking female journalist’s big dream to cover some porno crap, just to prove how enlightened and not grossed out she is. It’s like a big compliance test from the editors: “You don’t need to show me your titties and blow me, just prove you’d be totally emotionally okay doing so.” Welp… Vive la difference I guess.

This Week in Mitchell Laurel

Well, it’s only Saturday, March 7, right now. I just published last weeks TWiR 12 hours ago, and Mitchell’s dropped two more articles on me. One on new Egyptian discoveries: The Magic Of Luxor: Aten, Amun, Ra, Nefertiti, Amenhotep, Akhenaten…, wherein he has few kind words to say about the “science” of Egyptology. Another one on unforeseen applications for cryptocurrencies: Rising Tides: Crowdfunded Insurgency. Or a few rich donors-funded, for that matter. They’d probably be more interested in obscuring their transactions via BTC than crowds of small donors.

Make it two more… just last Saturday. In the first, Mitchell explains the theory, to which he often alludes, that ISIS is an American Foreign Policy Tool. Next: The Secret of Power:

With regards to the question of NRx as a private or public ideology, Power is Success. NRx is currently private and that does it no good. Why? NRx wants to facilitate change in the public at large scale. It wants to change the world. Its subscribers are currently a small, private group. That’s nice, but that’s not the purpose of NRx. The purpose is to change the course of Western society and set it on a better path. For that, Power is necessary. Power to change the public. And the public includes all members not currently deeply familiar with NRx.

I think Mitchell is not considering the power wielded by occult influence. The vast mass of the public has no idea why they get moral status points for supporting “Marriage Equality”, nor in fact that they even do, nor a fortiori where such memes came from. Someone’s wielding a huge amount of power but who that is is anything but public knowledge.

On Sunday, he jots down some thoughts on the potential for Repetitions Of Violence: Yugoslavia, The Ukraine, Etc.

On Monday, Mitchell brings us The Rise Of The West, Mark 2, a guarded but optimistic take on revitalization in the west. Also The European Union’s Barely Veiled Secret. The EU is a textbook illustration of the failure modes of feelings of inclusiveness:

All Europeans were promised prosperity but who has received it? The Greek economy has shrunk dramatically. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian continue to struggle under crippling economic conditions to attain mere parity. The financial system in the whole of Europe has lost its credibility and is so vulnerable that should any tiny country leave the Eurozone, such as Greece, then the whole system will come crumbling down. The European Union has shown its true colors: A geopolitical disaster, designed to ensure bondage and servility, not sovereignty and prosperity. That’s the European Union of today.

On Tuesday, Mitchell points us to Roger Devlin’s magnificent Home Economics Primer.

In on-going coverage of the Nemtsov murder, Mitchell brings us The Chechnyan Plot Thickens and The Key to Putin’s Chechen Response

Serbo-Croatian Tech from the 80s

Colored revolutions are coming so fast, the US State Department is running out of colors (and they don’t have a Fed for that). Also, Mitchell provides some advice for the CCP in The Chinese Tilt Their Hand.

On Friday, Mitchell talks about why The South Slavs Need A New Yugoslavia. But Hurlock talks him out of the idea. I was gonna say, “Ya think Marshall Titos grow on trees?” Also, in round 3712 of Debt Payments: My Big Fat Greek Wedding Style, Greece is Pushing, Germany Pushes Back.

This Week… Elsewhere

Cambria Will Not Yield talks at length (as always) on the crumbling right of white self-defense.

Ted Colt posts A Brief Adapted List of Recommendations for Self-Driving Cars. In other words, training for drivers of self-driving cars should be far more rigorous than training for driver-driven cars is now. I agree, but… good luck with that. Basically, it’s going to come down to body count. If self-driving cars kill fewer people, even if the ones they do kill are helpless victims of programming incompetency, then I think they win. It would also be nice if self-driving cars could avoid traffic jams. I think this is a very realistic possibility since jams due to volume are always created by bad human driving habits. Also from Ted, A Message from the Patriarchy: Marriage Secures the Welfare of Children—a gnonnic meditation on the meaning of marriage.

Filed under “This week to me“… I was e-lerted to the existence of Was Enlightenened, which is a delightful olio of Darkely enlightened observations from a Googler (apparently that’s what employee’s of the corporation call themselves). Here is a bit this week on GOOG’s flirtation with its own left-singularity. Inspired by some Jimian observations, this bit from couple weeks back was funny and apposite:

It’s been a very long time since I watched Gilligan’s Island … but my recollection is that The Professor (the best looking man on the island) does not inspire disgust in Ginger and Maryann, but rather resignation that he is more interested in his bamboo chemistry set than in paying attention to a pretty girl.

After having cycled through the show twice in the last decade for different cohorts of children, I can attest to the accuracy of your memory there. Speaking of the hopelessly out-of-fashion 50’s he takes on the notion that they were sexually repressed:

Repressed? If you’re actually dumb enough to believe that Americans six decades ago did not like sex, were afraid of sex, please go stand in front of a mirror and say that until you become suitably ashamed and smack yourself in the face.

I LOLed. That’s high octane #NRx smirking right there. Keep an eye this one. Also: ISISish.

Kakistocracy is brilliant here poking, great green gobs of fun at this heartwrenching story of anti-Jewish bigotry in the UCLA student council Judicial Board. UCLA: Of the Klan; by the Klan; for the Klan.

Over at The Orthosphere, Bonald takes the “worse” position on the question Are people getting better or worse at taking others’ perspectives?, and throws a bucket of icy water on the notion of a Moral Flynn Effect.

Speaking of Bonald, over a his home blog he tackles the question of Vatican II as a “new Pentecost”. He says, “Nein!”

We should be grateful that the Fathers of Nicea, Trent, and the rest never imagined that they were instituting a second Pentecost or thought they needed to concoct a new “spirit” to guide the Church.

Such a claim cannot possibly be taken seriously in the hard light of reason. They are either hopelessly lost in cognitive and emotional biases toward recency and their own elightenment conditioning, or they have a barely disguised hostile agenda to destroy what the Church is. Actually I’m not sure which condition is worse.

Hic Svnt Dracones

Filed under: “Interesting, Nevertheless”, William Upton, who remains securely in the neoreactionary doghouse, comes to The Mitrailleuse to poke some fun at Barron’s study guide for the AP European History exam. Reactionary ≈ fascist is wrong, but entirely to be expected. KKK ≈ Clarence Thomas is pretty damn funny. Within the mind of the progressive, the political map of everything to the right of GOP elected officials is marked by a simple one-size fits all descriptor: “Here be dragons.”

In disturbing news for gun enthusiasts, Mr. Roach reports on the ATF Getting Aggressive Again. Also: Eric Holder and Obama Have Incited a Riot. Wasn’t Holder resigning like a year ago or something? Just had some unfinished “business” to attend to I guess…

Speaking of Ferguson Riots, Kakistocracy has the coverage on the coverage with Ferguson.

Well, who knew that The Neoreaction had a token fag? I certainly didn’t. (Token??) But Dante, of The Right Vidya fame (his other blog I didn’t know about til now) announces a side project: Introducing The Right Drama!. Already he has covered Aurini’s break up with Jordan Owen and the Bootleg Girl (who hath penis) who is obsessed with Justine and thinks Moldbug is Catholic. Top notch comedy gold, few escape the spray of smashing watermelons. (<beardstroke type=”evil”>Cept me… hmmmm…</beardstroke>) Beats the carp out of covering #Gamergate IMHO. With any luck, this should offload a significant fraction of my work each week. Thanks, Dante!! (Also: WHO THE FUCK IS GENOPHILIA? LOL)

I put up a Code of Conduct for Neoreactionaries as a permanent page. It was a collaborative effort. It barely qualifies as news, however, since they all reflect social equilibria within the Neoreactionary community anyway, and therefore almost everyone knew them already.

Well, that’s all I got time for… Keep on Reactin’! Till next week. TRP… Over and out!