This Week in Reaction (2015/05/31)

Over at The Future Primeval, here is a repost from Anton Silensky that takes a look at Conquest’s Second Law. Not only do organizations not explicitly right-wing become left-wing, but so too organizations explicitly right-wing. He offers a few plausible, and not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanations. Conquest’s Second Law is really just a special case of Cthulu Swimming left. Finding out why he swims left is one of the chief aims of the new social science.

This one was new: Functional Institutions Are The Exception. And absolutely fantastic. It defies summary, but I’m thinking ☀☀#NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ goes to Anton with this one. RTWT!

Nick Land expects more (and moar more) from the Great Decoupling. I’ll remain skeptical of that (for a while at least). This bit of economic-ish dialog was pretty funny.

Also via Nick Land: Jack London on Gnon. Also Land links and comments on Malcolm Pollack’s perspicacious musings: Don’t Worry. Despair and No Exit. When looking at the whole of what was once Christendom, this prognosis is inexorable, and only a sort of maladaptive denial prevents the conservative of any stripe of conceding the point. What remains for proponents of Christendom is to salvage what remains of this glorious civilization and be prepared for the onslaught. Pockets of civilization will persist. Create them, find them, nurture them. Think locally! Act locally!

Jim takes another look at The Moron Elite. It’s not pretty. Along the way he revisits Michael Ferguson’s The Inappropriately Excluded , which so far has been one of the most influential papers within the neoreaction this year. Solutions are difficult, but also probably better than nothing.

Simply re-instituting the [IQ-heavy government] exam would dramatically improve elite function, and one could simply make it a substantially tougher exam for anyone in the system at a level likely to make policy. On the other hand, the Chinese mandarinate tried this and it worked extremely badly. The mandarins were not all that smart. It is hard to make a filter that works when everyone is trying to game the system. But it is not as hard as making a filter that works when you are trying to be inclusive.

Well, a healthy dose of good ol’ nepotism certainly couldn’t hurt.

Related, Land finds a particularly piquant sentence in Ferguson’s work.

Also from Jim, coverage of the burgeoning feud between Pinker and Taleb.

How do you know which racial group has net privilege? Isegoria digs an important clue. Still more and more on boxing.

Filed under Reading Books (Old), Ash Milton puts up a 5th in his series of Excerpts from the Latter Day Pamphlets. Saith Carlyle:

[I]f really excellent human speech is among the best of human things, then sham-excellent ditto deserves to be ranked with the very worst. […] For alas, much as we worship speech on all hands, here is a third assertion which a man may venture to make, and invite considerate men to reflect upon: That in these times, and for several generations back, there has been, strictly considered, no really excellent speech at all, but sham-excellent merely.

This was 1850 folks. And things have certainly not improved. And then in response to the age-old question if God is so great why does he require our worship, Ash a passes the the pagan answer, which is pretty much the Christian answer.

Butch Leghorn was busy over at Propertarian Forum this week. First, this: Propaganda Science – Ingroups and Outgroups. The propaganda being La Wik and its pay-no-attention-to-that-800-pound-consanguinity-in-the-room approach to the topic. When you get social psychology wrong (as with Iraq), people die. And no one deserves to die for the sake of pseudo-science. Except perhaps the pseudo-scientists.

And then Butch considers Huntington vs Fukuyama, or Clash of Civilizations vs. The End of History if you prefer. Huntington seems to have quite a bit the better of the debate in the approximately two decades since. Following Curt Doolittle’s work, Mr. Leghorn offers up a significant point:

The truth is that political ideologies exist to perpetuate and justify group reproductive strategies. Each group, having slightly different reproductive strategies, will justify those strategies with political ideologies. The ideologies themselves should be seen as reflections of the reproductive strategy.

NIO has a big political theory piece up: Katechon and Gnosticism as a Civilizational Battle. He proposes Phronima as an analogy to the behavior of gnostic sects

Phronima are therefore Gnostic style systems which function as parasites on productive and effective civilisation metaphysical structures. Progressivism proper is a phronima. To this effect Jim’s observation that

Progressivism wears the religions it has devoured like a monster that dresses itself in the skins of people it has eaten.

Is apt, very apt. Genius in fact.

Other phronima include post-modernism, feminism, multiculturalism and all of the other sects which make up the progressivism super structure. All of these phronima are independent and separate entities united in their parasitic format directed at the central structure of society. Western society is producing them at a prodigious rate.

This was a supremely strong contender for best of the week and probably would have won 9 weeks out of 10. I am hereby granting: ☀#NRx Best of the Week Official Runner-Up☀ “Phronima” it is then. Spread the meme.

Filed under Logic Made More Rigorous, Neocolonial has up The Elect: Scope for Delay and Anomalies. From the former, possibly the best single sentence of the week:

Democracy is a system of government that consumes culture in order to create temporary wealth.

And then, in what was probably the best single set of bullet points of the week, Dare to Stand. ☀#NRx Best of the Week Official Runner-Up☀

Watson talks about Cultural Memory and the Unprincipled Norms. He sees a danger in becoming too civilized:

Not all the world is civilized not even everyone in our country is either. Our principled response, the privileges given to the great among us have been wasted upon our dregs. We forget what people are like, looking only to the model among us, ignoring those below. It is in these times that I question our principled exceptions, are they sustainable? In a society of reason we can decided whether this or that poor sap is deserving of a 2nd chance or a thug who needs to be hanged, but there is no such society of reason. How long after the first principled exception, does the 2nd come, not from reason but from the pleading and the emotional games as the feminine among us wail on their knees for mercy? Can we maintain the hard resolve to do the right thing when it is so easy to make another exception and then another? How long before an unprincipled exception becomes the rule?

Wasenlightened continues his Letters to a Young Programmer. This time: UFOs and other things people believe because it gives them social status.

Venerable Trustee of the Neoreaction, Anomalyuk makes an appearance to talk about Twister as an alternative to Cathedral-owned Twitter. Twister is a peer-to-peer blockchain protocol like bitcoin that bypasses central control entirely. It’s the type of thing that could prevent capricious bannings like Chuck Johnson’s, were it adopted by a wide enough base.

Leave it to Based Prots to correctly apply just war principles. Free Northerner certainly does in the case of Just War and Breivik. Here he takes on Broken Identity. “Lookin’ for identity in all the wrong places…”

So let’s see what was up over at Neoreaction’s Flagship Publication™ shall we…

This week at Social Matter

Remember we said last week how SoBL was going to move his Phat Sunday pieces over to Social Matter? Well this was the week that started to happen. Taking up his old Theden nom de plume, Ryan Landry delivers Thailand: The Coup So Quiet You Could Hear A Pin Drop. The Western media has had difficulty getting this story to tug at our hearts, even less so the people of Thailand.

Not all coups are the same. This coup does not resemble the Cold War era coups. This coup also had quite the amount of popular support, as the prior regime was becoming increasingly corrupt. The New York Times even reported how the entire class of educated people had become concerned about how one man one vote gave a bit too much power to the easily persuaded poor. Just publishing those evil, anti-democratic thoughts is dangerous for the New York Times’ readership to imbibe.

After all, what “short term” gains like peace and prosperity can compare to the “long term” gains of populist agitation and incompetent governance? Ever the optimist, Landry makes a delicious prediction:

Progressive elites cannot risk our armed forces, one of the last institutions with widespread public support, to remove from power and punish elites who can win one man, one vote systems, since they can persuade just enough low-information voters to pull the lever for them in November. Thailand is just one nation, but a reliable long time post-World War II ally of the United States.

The domino effect against the shrinking USG system will start on the edges but slowly and surely make its way back to American shores.

Emphasis mine.

Henry Dampier returns to his normal Tuesday slot with Re-Educating the Educated. There actually is an important place, Henry points out, for the Humanities in society. It just isn’t the one it has right now.

Bjørn Vosskriger, whose Gentrification as Total War was considered by many the Best Neoreactionary article of 2014, returns to Social Matter for an encore: Why Thrust Agency on Those Who Neither Have Nor Want It? The practice automatic conferring of “adulthood” on people is clearly harmful to the very class of people who think “adulthood” is tantamount to “muh freedum”. He has a solution: a legally binding Master Agency Contract (MAC):

Merely the act of applying for the MAC demonstrates agency that many do not have. Some people could go through their entire life as wards of their parents, or later, a trustee. They would be free from burdens like jury duty, conscription, credit card debt, date rape, marriage, and voting. Once they sign that contract, however, they are assumed to have agency. Their decisions become meaningful and binding. Take out a payday loan and later regret it? Tough. Buy a house using an Option ARM NINJA loan with a 0% teaser rate? Tough. Regret the prior evening’s drunken escapades? Tough.

Do it for the children… of any age.

On Thursday, John Glanton waves a good-bye, at least for now, to Social Matter. Perhaps Hestia’s formalization over the past couple weeks put him an uncomfortable spot. I don’t see why and certainly hope not. But I’m certain we’ll be seeing him around. He’s too talented a writer not to be noticed.

Also on Thursday, we are treated to a “very special” episode of Ascending The Tower, in which SB and I are joined by Anton Silensky and Warg Franklin to explain last week’s “Putsch”.

This week in Henry Dampier

Travels over, Henry Dampier settles back into his regular (furiously) fast blogging routine. He starts out the week with a somber message: Millennials Aren’t Likely to Make It. The west has munched its way through much of the civilizational seed corn. Turn homeward folks, and save yourselves.

Next Henry asks Why Mass Surveillance? In lieu of actually competent government, mass surveillance may be the best worst option. Like the bank bailouts, it doesn’t matter how unpopular it all is: That which serves the needs or preserving the present order shall be implemented.

From surveillance to The Shape of Censorship, M. Dampier adds some insightful commentary to Anomalyuk’s (mentioned above). Indeed the dangers of the mass surveillance state lie principally in the fact that a mass surveilling state is ipso facto a weak one. Since the state knows this, and wishes to not remove all doubt about their lack of legitimacy, they’ll tread carefully. US corporations, the news media, and influential individuals will have no such compunction. They actually do the bulk of the government’s dirty secret policing work for them, enabling the state in its pretense of openness.

On Thursday, we get a nice lecture on Expropriation and Elite Insecurity. It is awesome. Here is some:

Long term investment — in a society which expropriatory legal norms — is an invitation to expropriation. This is one of the reasons why many third world societies have trouble igniting lasting economic growth: pockets of wealth will tend to get looted rather than respected.

When the state effectively takes half of every dollar that a company brings in, the short term needs of the enterprise become more acutely felt, especially because it’s harder to accumulate funds. In turn, the state creates vast classes of exceptions for its favored friends — the ‘corporate class’ in modern America falls under this umbrella. For example, a pharmacy conglomerate like CVS is in part more able to crush its local competitors in most markets because it’s more capable of negotiating tax credits, regulatory compliance, and supplier deals.

B-b-but “corporations are people”, right? Well, yeah, but not exactly the point.

On Friday, Henry contemplates The End of the Student Loan Bubble. He says it’s hard to tell exactly how it will play out, owing to the governments options to influence that market. That said, the government can only put lipstick on a pig for so long.

And finally on Saturday, Henry says More On Negative-Sum Publishing—a pattern that seems to arise when a people care more about reading new books than about making new readers for them.

This week in 28 Sherman

In his customary (two-fer) follow-up to his Social Matter piece, SoBL discusses how Thailand Looks For New Patrons.

On Wednesday, SoBL pens HIV/AIDS, Gays and Reality. Progressives want us to believe that gays are just like us. It is amazing how much truth needs to be supressed in order to create that impression.

In Paul Singer Tips the Elite’s Hand, SoBL argues that the great US Treasury bull may finally be coming to an end, or spat of severe inflation intended to prevent it. After what nearly 35 years, it’s about time.

This week in A House with No Child is no house at all

Mitchell has Understanding the Balkans in 60 seconds or less—assuming you’re a fast reader. Took me about 200 or so. Still quite helpful. And fast. Given his prognosis, the Balkans isn’t something one would want to dwell upon for too long anyway.

Mitchell left out Macedonia of that 60-second overview. Apparently this is why. And I don’t think he’s talking about Leb i sol either.

Also Why little countries become big symbols. Like Macedonia, for example. Or Novorussia…

Novorossiya has become a David against America, like Cuba before it. A small nation serves as a big symbol in the fight against Pax Americana and her mighty empire.

This week… Elsewhere

Briggs is fantastic here: Lancet Editor: Half Of Science Is Wrong. An Underestimate?

Ballpark? That might be the wrong metaphor. It implies a game with rules, winners and losers. Science may have been like that, once, but it’s now, far too often, a mechanism to provide support and cover for faddish politics and speculations.

Also, quoting self-described “liberal” Steve Goldberg:

Particularly in sociology “we find large and increasing numbers of ideologues who act as if nature is not something to be discovered no matter what she should turn out to be, but a handmaiden whose purpose is to satisfy one’s psychological and ideological needs.”

It isn’t clear whether the “social sciences” (in the era they’ve held that name) have ever been anything but advocacy of radical politics. Hestia Society for Social Studies is making a challenge to that definition. Also Matt is keeping up with the on-going climate change train wreck at the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences (yes, there are two): Junk Science and Cheap Moralism on the Tiber: The Church And Global Warming. This is a whole nuther level of Holiness Signaling.

Also This Week in Doom: Science Edition. Speaking of travesties of science… Official science is not science; otherwise, it wouldn’t need to be official.

Speaking of science, Kakistocracy pokes some well-placed fun at better anti-racism through science.

Sonic has exhibit #473 of so just who are the “racists” here?

Filed under Better Living Through Google Ngrams: Real Gary looks at some puzzling Word Frequency and Historiography. Also some Russia Times footage of armed anti-islamic protestors in Phoenix. Funny how progressives didn’t complain so much about armed protesters of Maidan.

Dante makes an argument that #GamerGate should be interested in #FreeChuck. So far, it seems to be falling on deaf (pozzed?) ears in that community. But I have reasons to believe that the Great Alt-Right Twitter Purge of 2015 has only begun. I cannot discuss those reasons publicly.

CWNY has The European Undines. I found this bit particularly insightful:

When Stalin discovered, during World War II, that the Russian people would not fight wholeheartedly for international communism, he let the Orthodox priests out of jail to bless the troops and pray to God for the deliverance of Mother Russia. A small cabal of utopian lunatics will fight for universals, but the bulk of mankind needs to feel that what they fight for is local. (1) There was no great desire amongst Americans to get into World War II until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. You are not a conspiracy theorist if you say that Franklin Delano Roosevelt engineered that Pearl Harbor bombing, because his actions leading up to the bombing are too well documented to label the anti-Roosevelt historians conspiracy theorists. They were simply accurate recorders of a historical event. But the point is that Roosevelt, as a card-carrying utopian universalist, needed to make the war seem local before he could safely label America-First patriots such as Charles Lindberg, who wanted America to stay out of the war, as unpatriotic kooks.

Filed under Dang! Missed this Last Week ‘cuz Blogspot Don’t Send Me Emails: Orthodox Laissez-fairist pens a Horrorist Manifesto. He hits so many strong points, it’s almost impossible to pick just one. Well here’s one:

During the October Revolution, law was outlawed and replaced with “judges” ruling according to the “revolutionary consciousness”, whereby “judges” ruled arbitrarily by whatever they believed would advance the revolution. Lenin described dictatorship of the proletariat as “Power that is limited by nothing, by no laws, [Power] that is restrained by absolutely no rules, [Power] that rests directly on coercion.” Court is not to eliminate terror, but to provide justification for it, to substantiate [it,] and legitimize it. Counter-Reformation and Spanish Inquisition were nothing compared to the radicalism of the Reformation. Counter-Revolution was mild-mannered, play-by-the-rules and somewhat cowardly […], oh, but not the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks. That is why Revolutionaries and Reformationists won, and that is why they will always win, unless the Right radicalizes.

If it weren’t real, we’d call it collapse porn. He could use an editor perhaps. But his is concentrated, if controverted, #NRx thought.

Donal Graeme, with a fantastic assist from Ace, considers the Friendzone as a Consolation Prize. It isn’t. (HT Northerner.)

With a hat tip to @BuckeyeinIdaho news of a deep disturbance in the military air: US Military and Civilians Are Increasingly Divided—divided physically, politically, socially, and culturally. Not a happy divergence, I wouldn’t think.

Speaking of BuckeyeinIdaho, the ol’ Idaho Kaiser poasts two this week after an extended blog break. Revisiting an Old Question: What would have happened if the Byzantine Empire had survived down to the present day? Alternate histories are notoriously difficult, as the Kaiser makes clear. Would Protestantism have developed, for example? But the Byzantine empire has much to commend itself to us. Then on Friday, he commemorates the 562nd anniversary of the fall of Constantinople.

Kristor finds one thing that may be done as part of the “Benedict Option”: Samizdat Classical Education. Also he is fantastic here: Sex in Church…

Thus a church that ordains women, and so doing muddles the roles of the sexes in the liturgy, is effectually enacting an argument that at the highest pitch of human embodiment, sex is irrelevant. It is proposing that in the final, ultimate, and perfect analysis, and in the judgement of Heaven, our bodies do not matter. It is, in a word, gnostic; for it rejects the whole inherently sexual aspect of our being, and so of our cosmos (that some organisms are sexual entails that among many other things that it is, the cosmos itself is sexual, at least in them…, and thus throughly – nemo dat quod non habet). In respect to her Lord, the whole cosmos is feminine; so likewise is the Church a Bride to her Lord, and each church to his vicars. Rejecting the order of sex, we reject the order of embodied being.

Skyagusta may have twitter-cided (we hope temporarily), but he’s not gone. He’s posted (at least a sizeable chunk of) Kevin MacDonald’s preface from Culture of Critique, in which he focuses on European Individualism and Altruism.

This was neat: Robert Mariani has a nice map of political media over at The Mitrailleuse. Axes include “Left-Right” and “Reasonable-Insane”. LOL. Social Matter and brand-spanking-new Future Primeval both make it onto the map.

Speaking of maps this was incredibly cool: Detailed map of the world showing predominant religion and scaled for intensity. (HT: The Lab.)

Seems to be another new blog on the alt-right: Crass.us. Friday’s piece: Old people often hate taking welfare so much that they’d rather die. The Right-to-Die movement will help them onto an ice floe. Decent piece. I’ll be keepin an eye on this one.

Well… that’s all I had time fer… Try not to waste too much time at work. Your productivity benefits us all. ‘Til next week, Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!