This Week in Reaction (2015/05/15)

Well, it’s been a quiet week in The Reactosphere®, my home town…

Jim is back after his brief hiatus, and fit as a fiddle as expected. First words out of his mouth: “The point of the dark enlightenment is to understand the world, not to change it”. Also he paints a not so pretty picture of “After White Male America”.

Liked this bit from Robert Mariani over at The Mitrailleuse: The slave morality of sexual liberation.

After knowing him through his writings for many years, I finally had the pleasure of meeting Malcolm Pollack the other night at an Undisclosed, Officially Classified meetup. He’s a total gentleman and at least as interesting in the IRL format as in blog. This week, Malcolm reports on a rare Glitch in The Matrix—a phenomenon I’m expecting to see more of in the coming years. Also some thoughts On Baltimore which are similar to my own in many respects: “Color-blind” Civilized America is not only a brain drain for the third world, but for America’s own minority communities. (And it hasn’t done shrinking Civilized America much good either.)

Free Northerner has a couple addenda to cap off Aesthetics Week. The All-Pervading Ugliness of Modernity: Ugliness is energized by our own society-wide refusal to believe in the existence of objective beauty. Beauty, when it exists at all is identified as mere attractiveness, and thus fails to receive its proper incentives. The mean suffers, and ugliness is advantaged. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Degrade.

And then to really bring it all back home: Beauty, Function, and Reproduction:

Women are beautiful, they are the most beautiful thing in the world. Why? Because Woman’s intrinsic biological purpose is the highest aim of mankind: to reproduce. Woman brings forth and nurtures life; her intrinsic purpose is to create the Imago Dei, anew, again and again.

The function of Woman is to create new life, an intrinsically transcendent task. Her form signals her reproductive capabilities. Her beauty is a product of where her form and function points to this purpose.

I wholeheartedly concur. This is not mere, beauty in the beholding eye, opinion. But a fact. In fact, one might even suspect Northerner of reading my ask.fm answers.

Isegoria extends the red pill to protective sports gear. I guess if you protect a weapon, like a fist or a head, you’re just making the weapon more useful. More juicy bits from Gottschall on Why Men Fight here, here, and here. Also from Isegoria a compilation of Elon Musk Quotes and some beautiful (and historically interesting) Japanese woodblock panels.

Nick Land catches Deep State being pretty much all that’s gonna end up being left.

Nydwracu tries to imagine what it would be like to be in the upper quartile of Vox readers. It ain’t pretty. But pretty humorous. Also some valuable notes on something called “the rationalization of the Balinese religion”. History rhymes amazingly well.

Wesley provides some quote notes on Dealing with abnormality, a right way… in contradistinction to the stupid, hyper-rational, insane ways that Puritans (and their victims) are constrained to do it. Also this: The making of a Communist.

Mark Citadel does a great job exposing The Illusion of Neutrality.

Via Neocolonial, Tasmania is starting to sound positively awesome compared to the alternatives. Also bullet points on Rights and Ritual.

Butch contributes an operational definition of Heroism” to the Propertarian Lexicon. That’ll do.

Antidem discusses What To Pray For, and along the way marks a clear cleavage line between Puritan/Leftist and Catholic/Rightist dispositions of thought. None of which means an ontological Puritan cannot think like a Rightist, nor that an ontological Catholic cannot think like a Leftist. Which would be retarded stoopid to say. (Gotta stop saying “retarded”. It’s unkind to retarded people. I’m actually serious.)

Atavisionary writes admirably in defense of the fallacy of Lewontin’s Fallacy, and documents the vast tonnage of words Wikipedians will spill to obscure it.

Last Week’s Friday Frags—On-Lives-Ya-Didn’t-Know-Ya-Saved-Every-Week-is-Neoreactionary-Aesthetics-Week Edition. These are this week’s. Also, Donovan rarely passes up an opportunity to talk about sex. So he doesn’t.

Ash Milton was just brilliant here with Jacobin Dreams (or Why You Should Watch Les Miserables). I won’t even attempt to summarize him, but this little nibble was too delicious to withhold:

The Revolution is a demonic mistress. She seduces with her beauty and then devours her lovers. Her children lead the unwitting back to her.

In The Reaction®, every week is Aesthetics Week.

This Week in Social Matter

E. Antony Gray closes out Aesthetics Week at Social Matter with a beautiful wrap up of the core ideas: Beauty in Function, Function in Beauty. He really digs deeply into this idea the beauty of usefulness—meta-usefulness… meta-on-meta-usefulness. And I thought this (acknowledged) digression was especially perceptive:

Moreover, we trick ourselves when we consider adornment as without use. People should be encouraged to not be overly concerned with outward adornment, as this optimizes for appearance of beauty over substance, for effect over cause, and so forth. But this does not mean that outward adornment is useless (or forbidden.) We talk about the importance of social signals (and deride our opponents using them as though they were not adornments) but yet somehow ‘utilitarian’ accounts of use do not consider this ‘useful’ – I can only conclude that Utilitarians are slightly stupid.

Next, in what has developed into a minor rash of mysterious strangers writing Social Matter, a lonesome stranger by the name of James “AntiDem” Rustler arrives on Monday to opine On The Creation Of Unicorns. It is an entertaining meditation on the way things have essences—usually quite stubbornly and essentially so.

Henry Dampier sidles up to the WordPress editor dialog on Tuesday to speak his mind On Self-Hating Gentrifiers. Gentrification is definitely a nice thing to have, but at hipster spear tips are not as nearly strong as one would like.

Hipster hypocrisy — and part of the reason why no hipster will usually call themselves a hipster — exists because the pretense is itself something that’s part of their adaptation to political conditions in American cities. Speculative hipster classes have cropped up everywhere, but trying to use the same strategy endlessly in cities where it’s not actually adaptive usually ends in hipster brains getting spilled out onto the pavement. In the end, hipsterism winds up being a bad strategy, because it essentially relies on parasitism upon the ‘Giuliani-time’ type policies which American cities have attempted to put into plays uniformly.

David Grant sets The Record Straight: Homosexuality Portrayed In ‘300’ The Movie with a nice bit of historical commentary along side.

Papers all graded and spring now fully in the air, John Glanton recovers his former dominance among Thursday reads with his Baselines for Virtue and Vice. Indeed there is a certain level of humanity required to accomplish either. And it’s the Devil’s goal to depress human agency, but not so much that they cannot be damned.

Closing out the week, Mr. Grant returns with some moar history: The Role Of Elites In The Fall Of Rome In Late Antiquity. Rome rotted from the head more slowly, yet perhaps more inexorably, than most.

This Week in Henry Dampier

In some final notes for Neoreactionary Aesthetics Week, Henry has some pointed words for Comic Book Culture & Diversity.

Next, HenryDampier.com gets a facelift. Blogging been berry berry good… for Henry.

On the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fátima, Henry talks About Progressive Situational Dominance. And it’s quite situational, and probably shrinking on net, if you know the right ways to look at it. His is a gentle reminder not to waste ammunition and keep yer powder dry. (Oh, and also don’t shoot yer friends.)

In contrast to Africa, Ethnic Cleansing in American Cities is less bloody and far slower. And all performed with an understated poise characteristic of Anglos. But it’s just as effective and probably longer-lasting.

This Week in 28 Sherman

SoBL’s Sunday Think Piece advises Think 180 From Vox + You Find Truth. Max Fisher’s article on Putin gets everything so exquisitely wrong, that one can really learn a lot from it.

Continuing on that theme, SoBL finds that Putin is the West’s Creation. And not just the cartoon Putin that western media outlets create as a totem for their bilious emoting. His rise to power stems directly from popular Russian resistance to Western cultural and economic hegemony. RTWT.

From Tuesday, Whole Foods Prepares for a Darker Future—darker in more ways than one. One of the problems Whole Foods faces is that its most loyal customers do a particularly bad job at creating future customers.

Wednesday, SoBL shares some notes from his experiments with Intermittent Fasting.

Here is a photo rich (and kind of creepy) window on Kids Play War, Leon Gimpel, Paris 1915. 100 years might as well be 10,000… except with photography.

And earlier today, SoBL’s attention turns back to China and who lost it:

There are no allies only interests, and our ruling elite’s interests diverged from China’s a while ago. The biggest change was when the Anglo-Soviet split ended, and the US did not need to use China against the Soviets any longer. No real shared interest after that, and what slowly built up was a Mutually Assured Economic Destruction… but even that has changed. Politically and socially, Harvard and the NY Times might dream up new perversions and new schemes for breaking domestic political enemies under the guise of equality and rights, but these have no use for China. We call a childless single working woman at age 29 an “independent, strong woman”. The Chinese call them “yellowed pearls”.

It remains to be seen whether natural Chinese culture can hold out against all that modernity has in store. But they seem better positioned for it at the moment.

This Week… Elsewhere

Over at Theden, Greg Allmain has a couple of good pieces up: the first an exposé on Twitter’s Hypocrisy: Promoted Tweet Doesn’t Get Banned When “White” is Changed to “Black”. The second is like unto it: WaPo’s Ridiculous (and Lazy) Map About America’s “Most” Racist Places.

Brigg’s pulls out a Can o’ Whoop Ass on Hypothesis Testing as Artful Forgetfulness. Also this bit of commentary on the New Pew Religion Survey was quite astute.

Real Gary VII ponders European Football and the Organized Right. Not organized enough by my estimation, but the persistence of particular loyalties, in the face of extreme prejudice, among a certain class of relatively high-functioning men, is certainly a reason for hope.

Sonic knocks down Noah Smith’s assertion that economists don’t have Physics Envy because everyone takes them Seriously?

Speaking of a science of science… well, Kristor talks about The Science of Science:

But if there is no God, nor therefore any metaphysics, then neither is there anything else, either; including materialist metaphysics, that boasts to abjure metaphysics altogether.

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists,” said de Maistre. Kristor finds a corollary: Wherever there is civilization there is Sacrifice… making it possible.

Skyagusta is experiencing A Slight Interruption. The trouble with all these capable guys in Da ‘Sphere is that they’re off being capable an awful lot… usually for pay. Dissident Politics isn’t known for its lavish salaries and benefits. (Faux Opposition politics, however, is a different story.) Come back soon, ya hear!

CWNY is eloquent as usual in The Counter-Revolution: The Time of Our Peace Is Past. A taste:

A conservative ought not to be concerned with preserving the democratic process. That is only a means to an end. If it is a means to an evil end, the conservative should oppose it; he should not — as is the case in the European nations today — defend a revolutionary, tribunal government just because white people are allowed to vote for their executioners. Voting is not a sign of liberty or of Christianity. In fact, Christianity always declines in thoroughly democratic nations, because everyone but Christians are given the liberty to practice their faith: Religious liberty for Muslims, Jews, tree-huggers, and voodoo priests and priestesses, but no liberty for Christians.

Dr. Peter Blood is back with another book review: Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

The Kakistocracy waxes eloquent on the Joys of Diversity: American Airport Style. Also full coverage of the White Supremacist Asian dude at UCLA in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Welp, that’s all I got time fer… Here’s to another quiet week. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… TRP over and out!!