Day late and a dollar short week in this This Week in Reaction… Not a whole lot of news, but some interesting stuff going on, if one knoweth where to look…
Michael Anissimov thinks everyone should be non-pseudonymous now, asserting “The main problem that the neoreactionary Right faces right now is anonymity.” This is wrong on so many levels, I scarcely can comprehend it. Far from being a “main problem” “right now”, it isn’t even a “problem” at all. In fact, I could wish neoreaction were more anonymized. It plays to our strengths, which lie principally in being correct than any measure of public support. Full frontal attack on The Polygon is suicide. Showing your commitment to the cause by volunteering for suicide may be admirable, but it doesn’t make us all any less dead. The day we have a Stable Institution, an unassailable position (however cramped), is the day the masks can come off. Mark Yuray says “Nein!” Oriental Neoreactionary says, “Hayır Ya.” Donovan Greene bids a Nietzchean No-way. BW Rabbit gives his own apposite Reflections of an “Anonymous Coward”.
Dante has some very encouraging news about the Hugo Awards. He thinks the coup provides a workable pattern for #Gamergate. The thought of SJWs, like Lady Macbeth, scratching deep wounds to cleanse themselves of insufficiently progressive filth is priceless. Jim, too, is pleased with the Evil League of Evil’s coup.
CWNY has brief thoughts in Christ is Risen!
The organized churches think that by jettisoning the European people, their different versions of intellectual Christianity can survive in a multicultural world. But you can’t surgically remove the European people from the Christian faith without killing the heart of the faith. There is only one true faith: It is the Christian European faith that is celebrated so gloriously in Handel’s Messiah.
Emphasis mine. And since this post is so late, I get two weeks’ worth of CWNY for the price of one: Against a Peace with the Rationalist Regicides—in which he has great praise for Edmund Burke and great condemnation for Hillaire Belloc.
The Social Pathologist has a few words about neoreactionary memetic sovereignty in A Sovereign Mind.
Sarah Perry has a chapter (?) up at Ribbonfarm entitled The Essence of Peopling. A tiny taste:
Greeting, sunshine, dancing, singing, touch, face-to-face talking, fire, laughing, stories – we likely have special brain adaptations for all of these, indicating that they are good for us and core to our existence, but how well do our present cultural patterns make them available to us?
The social groups that used to provide these things have gradually faded from existence, because they are not economically viable, and because the economic, architectural, and media patterns that dominate our lives do not support them. The individual is not the appropriate unit of peopling, but it is the only unit that the tiling systems understand. If there are kinds of groups that can help us provide these valuable things for each other in our modern context, without strain or embarrassment, they probably don’t exist yet.
As with all of Sarah’s big work, I can’t quite do it justice in summary. Suffice it to say that her work is a building block to the neoreactionary reboot of social sciences. Please do read the whole thing.
Ash Milton delivers a nice formulation of realist metaphysics in his The 100th Post: An Ontological Return. Is that a good-bye to the whole blog at the end?
Malcolm Pollack considers The Problem With Singapore.
Speaking of The IQ Shredder, Atavisionary has some videos and some substantial thoughts on Reversing the Demographic Winter.
Filed under Dang-I-Missed-This-Last-Week, Arthur Richard Harrison’s No Such Thing as Sacrilege in the West over at Theden was quite good:
In the West, it’s not just our temples that are no longer sacred—it’s our homelands. It’s our homes themselves. Everything must be shared with everyone. It doesn’t matter if our homeland is lost—it’s just dirt, no better or worse than any other dirt. It doesn’t matter if our people are replaced—they’re just Social Security contributors, no better than the Social Security contributors being imported to replace them.
The spirit of equality is fundamentally opposed to the idea of sanctity. Equality wants a mass of identical men, none set apart from the others, while sanctity fundamentally means the state of being set apart. When nothing is special, when nothing is our own, nothing is sacred to us.
Nick Land catches Peter Thiel in the act of Abstract Thought-Crime. Also another installment of strangely strange fiction in Deadlines (Part 2).
Filed under Well-Someone-Was-Bound-to-Notice, Free Northerner asks, if University is The Rape Gulag, why do we keep sending our girls there?
So… Let’s see what was up over at The Flagship Journal of The Neoreaction™.
This Week at Social Matter
This week in Ascending the Tower features Free Northerner and has lots of sex talk. (Well, “lots” for us.) So get over there and improve the stats!
Henry Dampier has just a gem of a post up on Tuesday: Social Justice Momma’s Boys. Mock them relentlessly and without mercy… for their own good, and the good of those women on whose behalf they debase themselves.
Mitchell Laurel arrives on Wednesday to ask The German Question (GQ): Is Germany willing to do do what it takes to go from a great economic power to a Great Power? Mitchell outlines the reasons he’s inclined to say not.
John Glanton outlines the Rules of Engagement for the Great American Culture War. Whatever’s left of it that is. Or perhaps: Whatever may be rebuilt of it.
Friday brings Ash Milton’s post Vancouver: A Demographic Destiny. It turns out Vancouver is not quite the multi-cultural paradise that we’ve been led to believe. And affordable family formation, the absence thereof, appears to be a main culprit. Ash presents a good analysis and some genuinely commonsensical reforms to stem the flow of social capital.
And for weekend reading, David Grant on Tacitus On Why Marriage For Love Is A Bad Idea. It would appear that the ancient Germans has a stronger patriarchal order than the soft and softening Romans, which I think explains a lot.
So what was the ol’ piratey Henry the Pirate up to, yarrgg?
This Week in Henry Dampier
Over the weekend, Henry Dampier’s Unhappy, Mad, Soft Moderns is astute commentary on the bleak modern-day moral landscape. And how the moral world getting subsumed under the aegis of social scientists so-called bears much of the blame. Also ‘Authenticity’ Is Bullshit, which isn’t very authentic now is it?
Monday’s Senses, Sensibilities, & Sensitivities is a chapter on how the medium is the message, and how human brains and moral culture are not keeping pace with the technological media:
So, we have a culture in which more text is being published than ever before, but the majority tends to be indifferent to printed text, regardless of the medium that it appears on. A minority of people consumes text voraciously. They tend to be smarter and more knowledgeable, because text is a denser medium, with the book being the most efficient means of transmitting knowledge from one person to many people ever yet devised.
I’d like to think Henry’s Me, Me, Me was Neoreactionary Horrorism with a moral at the end.
On Wednesday, Dampier describes How Egalitarian Education Misleads Parents, and ain’t so hot for kids either. After outlining the many ways and reasons the Evolved Prussian School System manages to fail, he concludes
The long term goal ought to be to pressure the formal schooling system until it becomes much more like the prison system — mostly for the lower classes and criminals. This requires less political activism, and more of a significant change in mores.
Rather than attempting to reform the reformers or to scream and moan about the latest outrage of Common Core, instead, let the future generations of your enemies become stupider. Treat them like they belong to a foreign country, because they do, when you boil down to the essence of it. It’s not worth the effort to rescue them from themselves, especially when you have your own to care for.
Educate your own to their advantage. And never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.
The totalitarian Reign of Terminal Niceness comes under fire on Friday in Men Sharpen Men. Androgyny is just another a brick in the Ateleological Wall.
And this late breaking: Henry’s forthcoming The Unnamed Book is still in the works, but meanwhile he’s planning an electronic course: The Autodidact’s Guide.
This Week in 28 Sherman
SoBL’s Sunday Big Piece of the Week is Nixon Saw What We See. Nixon’s stature as a leader, marred though it is, is greatly enhanced by standing up against the Lilliputians who’ve taken over:
Nixon did not live to see the horribly inept women we have as a foreign policy team, but Nuland, Powers, Harf, Rice, and whomever are all products of the affirmative action infusion into the American Empire’s organs. As Jim stated in his post “The Stupid Elite“, the only competent members of our elite are much much older now, remnants of that power structure of Nixon’s day. The crop coming up now have been selected not for pure skill and intellect but for their extracurricular activities, gaming the admissions system, conformity, polishing progressive apples, etc. An elite paralyzed by second thoughts and slouching will be usurped and replaced by eager beavers that want power and prestige. They will not know how to do anything, but they want the levers of power. After all, with all the cozy work and Wikileaks revelations about talks between Google and the State Department-White House, who is running who?
On Monday, SoBL follows up with his phone interview with the great posthumous man himself in When Nixon Calls.
Upon reflection, and comparing notes with Donovan, this two-fer on Nixon may have been the best thing I read all week. Tho’ Sarah’s article mentioned above was also really good. Let’s give SoBL the Readers’ Choice Award and Sarah the Thinkers’ Choice.
In political news, SoBL reports Bloomberg is not eligible to mayor of London, but he sure as hell could be the 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee. The only downside of that is he alone might very well navigate this decrepit nuclear aircraft carrier of state for 8 more years, thus prolonging our agony.
Wednesday our attention turns to Duke B’ball’s Grayson Allen, up with whose unbearable and manufactured whiteness Grantland shall not put.
And SoBL leaves us this week with a look back at That One Weird ’80s TV Moment… in which cognitive dissonance hits a generational maximum, only no one quite realizes what happened.
This Week in A House With No Child
A Carrot To Iran, A Stick For Yemen is a study on America’s trouble zones and how, somewhat surprisingly, USG is rationally prioritizing among the various shitstorms that it’s had a hand or two in creating. Also, Ask Mitchell Anything (AMA). He deigns to answer a few of mine.
One big question is How Will The Ukrainian Crisis End? Actually that’s several big questions.
On Thursday, Mitchell reads and comments on Solon Against the Rich:
Most important is Solon’s take on the wealthy elite. Solon derides them for their greed and shortsightedness, giving all the perfect reasons why one can never allow a primarily mercantile class to rule. They eat away the state from the inside. I’ll have to dive into this topic some more, if only to turn a few technocommercialists down a more realistic path.
Mitchell gives an introductory view of the the burgeoning weakness of the American Military. There is, no doubt, much ruin that remains in such a large and powerful institution. But there’s little doubt that they’re eating that seed corn at alarming rates. “With soldiers like these, who needs an enemy?”
And this late-breaking: Extraordinary Labors Are Food for the Soul.
This Week… Elsewhere
This Week in Drama: Is Nick Land Actually HP Lovecraft? Well, it hasn’t become very dramatic yet. But just wait until Land starts denying it, eh?!!
This Week in Doom: All Things Gay & Equality. Uggh. The word “tolerance” has lived a long, productive, and virtuous life. Let us take it down to the south 40 and put it out of its misery. Also from Briggs: What Evidence Would Persuade You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real? A model, i.e., a theory, that made accurate predictions. Ya know, actual science. Wow, what a concept!
Scharlach chimes in the Gay Cakes & Pizzas Kerfuffle. For him its not so much teh ghey, it’s the accelerating totalitarian leftist singularity.
Wasenlite has got some praise for the inimitable and invaluable Godfrey Elfwick in Friends Not Allies. Also he offers a theory to compete with the Gell-Mann Amnesia Model to explain why people actually believe the news media in spite of the fact that they’re almost never trustworthy.
And while it’s true people shouldn’t be shot for fleeing routine traffic stops, just because you’re fleeing a traffic stop doesn’t make you a saint.
Watson has an extensive set of Selections From a Puritan Diary.
RealGarySeven is taken aback by The Mindless Intrusiveness of Small Talk. Hey! Well at least he got cashiers who tried.
This week in #SRx… Skyagusta puts up a nice excerpt clarifying Democracy and Natural Rights in the Antebellum South.
It is still Easter (the 6th day of the octave if this post goes out on time), and so in the spirit of the season, Isegoria tells us how plush bunnies got so awesome and cheap at the same time. Also, in a blow to sexually integrated military enthusiasts, hand-to-hand combat remains surprisingly common in combat.
I liked this brief note from Kristor: Wrongheaded Reduction Redounds. He says, “Proper reduction never explains away; rather, it increases the specificity and concreteness of our understanding of things.” Also from Kristor: Beauty.
Dr. Peter Blood shoots a lot of shit over at TRS but the dude can do some heavy lifting. This week he pens a review of The Collapse of Complex Societies. And it’s good.
A complex society will start collapsing when, faced with challenges, the implemented solutions stop yielding benefits beyond the cost of the solution; in sum, when a society’s solutions hit the point of diminishing returns. It’s a basic economic concept applied to a society, not in terms of money, but in general terms of inputs and outputs.
Social ROI. Do economists have an aggregate for that? And another review, of a bit more lighthearted material: Casino Royale.
Skyagusta has a book review of his own: The Mind of the Old South by Clement Eaton. Eaton, writing in 1967 sounds conflicted:
The problem which Eaton cannot overcome is that his dual goals, to highlight the nobility, virtue, and open-mindedness of Southern liberals, and simultaneously the “stifling” conservative culture of the Old South, cannot be reconciled. Either his examples serve one stereotype while contradicting the other, or he finds that his subjects are, quite inexplicably to him, liberal in one aspect of their thinking, like business or education, while conservative in others, like slavery or religion.
Trying to admire the Antebellum South whilst hustling to stay on the right side of history is a task probably too difficult for anyone.
Kakistocracy takes on the Double Standard That Hath No Name in **** **** ******. Also some great commentary in Emotions in Oz. And a look at some the faces that weren’t so lucky as to be ushered to the front of the line for a heart transplant.
James Miller’s got a nice round-up of Indiana’s Religion Law and the Liberal Left’s Intolerance. I’ve never cared for religious liberty except as a strategic fallback. And it is becoming apparent, sadly, that this tactical retreat is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on. Secession, orderly and bloodless, is I think the only practicable alternative for the culture war vanquished.
Speaking of that merry band of secessionist crunchies, J. Arthur Bloom was the token conservative to address the National Press Club on the topic of The Socialist Party and the Old Right.
Welp. That’s all didn’t have time for… Until next week, Keep on Reactin’! TRP… over and out!!
Nope, not a goodbye. Just re-affirming. This Rough Beast will be around a while yet.
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Good to know Ash. You sounded a bit mysterious in that last paragraph. I figured since you have the gig at SM maybe.
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Hugo Awards coup most definitely biggest story. It is a repeat of #gamergate but with more actually tangible results. I have my fingers crossed it drives traffic back to the Reactosphere. We’re the unseen hand.
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One thing that the incident this week with Bryce proves is that Mike is totally, insanely wrong about the whole anonymity thing. The internet is full of amateur detectives, and if they have your real name, someone *will* dig up some dirt on you and use it to either destroy your reputation or drive you away in shame. And that’s *if* they don’t use it to get you fired and rendered unemployable in your chosen field. There’s virtually no advantage to using real names (seriously, no one *did* care who I was before I put on the mask), but tremendous potential downsides. Nobody should feel even the slightest need to use their real name.
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I don’t think you’re wrong Antidem. The weird thing is the mass Twitter attack on Nrx was conducted by StormFront types rather than actual leftists. The result I’m afraid to say is not good. As an outside observer (I’m simply a Reactionary), Nrx has not weathered this storm well. The fact that they went after Bryce and now all his material is gone definitely indicates that Anissimov is wrong, but the dynamic would have been the same regardless of whether Bryce used a pseudonym or not, so you can look at it in more than one way.
I was considering joining Twitter after my blog got to 10,000 (very close now), but I’m forced to reconsider. The potential boost in exposure is probably not worth the mass trolling there that swamps any Tweets with the word ‘cuck’ (a term Peppermint uses regularly weirdly enough). There’s no intellectual exchange there, even what could be had within the tiny word limit.
Two problems seemed to have plagued Nrx in this area.
1) Putting Nrx on Twitter as a presence probably happened too early, when there weren’t enough supporters ready to bolster its ranks.
2) There was a massive entryist breach. I don’t know who #orcbrand or #lordhumungus are, but they don’t actually sound like #Nrx, and yet they went under that title anyway. Hard to police on Twitter.
It seems to me the people on Social Matter should actually have some kind of conference amongst themselves on the matter, and how this could be prevented in the future.
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I’m pretty sure the orcbrand folks are good hearted trolls. (I could be wrong I haven’t investigated thoroughly.)
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