The big news this week was Rachel Dolezal, aka. Soul Woman. It’s getting harder and harder for anyone to tell who’s trolling whom anymore. Godfrey Elfwick got onto BBC (a second time BTW) claiming to be #WrongSkin. (Beeb thinks he might be a prankster, but they’re curiously cautious about declaring trans-racial officially not a thing.) Someone set up a fake, but on the surface convincing, twitter account claiming to be Ms. Dolezal, replete with praise of Weev for his heart of gold in understanding.
Jewish Chinese (or is that Chinese Jewish?) girls doing unutterably dull preachy pornos can’t hold a candle to this. I can add little to the discussion other than amazement… and some advice to short The Onion stock.
In other goings on…
Spandrell has a few words about Emotion and why it works. Among other things,
Microagressions are felt because they are profitable for the microagressed.
Filed under Dang-I-Missed-This: MG over at Those Who Can See discusses Why Re-Colonization? Future Orientation. As always, a well-documented and magisterial piece.
CWNY is eloquent as always with his weekend post Rage, Rage Against the Murder of White Innocence.
Nydwracu has some excerpts about The Trade Union Unity League. A lot to see there. An early 20th century radical feminist living vicariously through her daughters is one of them. And rather disgusting.
A few of reposts over at The Future Primaeval of some classic works: Entryism as Exploited Containment Failure Between Subcultures; The Dark Side of the Weak Galt Hypothesis; ; Social Technology and Anarcho-Tyranny; and The Pensioner and the Aristocrat. That last one is somewhat dated perhaps by an assumption of a “conservative 4% safe withdrawal rate”. With the Fed’s 7 year long total war on yield (with no real end in sight), 4% is not that conservative any more.
Atavisionary takes a quick look at the Jay Queue in We’re not in Kansas anymore. I think he’s mostly right. I left my quibbles there.
Wasenlightened has part 5 up of his Letters to a Young Programmer. Ten questions (some in two parts). And no, they’re not rhetorical. And “Wow, just wow!” is not an acceptable answer. This one, in particular, speaks volumes:
7. Do you know any progressives who prefer to be modest or even anonymous when acting on the dictates of their beliefs?
Permitted anonymity drives conversations rightward. Enforced anonymity massively reinforces this effect. Who’s in power again, comrade?
Scharlach makes a rare appearance to talk about Non-Discriminatory Lending. Non-discriminatory in name only. The people who can pay back are definitely going to be discriminated against. But with malinvestment, just about everybody ends up losing eventually.
Sonic seems to have gotten the same memo, so he applauds the guy who by burning his “loan card” reminds everyone student loans are not actual net inflows for the government. Not that that’ll stop USG accountants from treating them that way, but…. Also “Good Schools” and what that’s a proxy for.
Donovan has some notes about Interesting Times and the aesthetic it created. And as always Friday Frags—Mattress-Girl-Porno-SJWs-Really-Were-Prohibitionists-All-Your-Pools-Are-Belong-To-Us Edition.
Speaking of pools and who builds them for whom, Jim is excellent on the subject of Degentrification:
Resistance to this process is fundamentally incompatible with democracy with universal franchise. If it does not happen in this coming round of movement ever leftwards, will happen in the next or the one after that. If you oppose this outcome, you have to reject democracy with universal franchise. If you reject democracy with universal franchise, have to deny that all men were created, and that women are equal to men. The eradication of white people was inherent in the enlightenment, and our continued existence has only been possible by one unprincipled exception to the enlightenment after another. In the end, unprincipled exceptions always yield to superior holiness.
Here’s to hoping that unprincipled exceptions become moreso. Also some not at all sanguine thoughts On utilitarianism.
Jim also has up Into Darkness. This is about the humane option of taking away choice from people who make bad ones:
There are a great many people who just are not capable of making the choices needed to navigate the modern world, most of them female or black. They should be under the control of someone else.
Nick Land puts Moldbug to work at laying the notion of exit guarantees six feet (1.83m) under. He and his commentariat pay respects to the great Godfrey Elfwick in #WrongSkin. This could be very bad news. Maybe giving a species control over it’s evolution isn’t such a great idea.
E. Antony Gray pens The Two Before The Storm , which is beautiful and insightful.
This Week in #StrangeLoopGate
#StrangeLoopGate was only getting started last week. There’s more…
Ted Colt has some great commentary here in An Open Letter to a Closed-Minded Progressive.
Sydney Trads discuss The Defenestration of an Apparent Heretic. It includes a nice introduction to Moldbug’s ideas and personal style for those who may not be familiar with him. The editors there conclude with a supremely well put point:
[I]f the first decade of the twenty-first century has taught us anything it is this: to the mind of the cultural Marxist, everything is secondary to modern political sensibilities.
And that is the greatest fascism of all.
(See also Sydney Trads’ Bryan Caplan vs. Winston Churchill.)
Over at Slate, David Auerbach considers the The Curious Case of Mencius Moldbug: A software engineer’s odious political writing got him booted from a tech conference. It shouldn’t have.. He takes principled stance against “no platforming”, and calls for Alex Miller’s resignation from Strange Loop. Good on him.
David French over at NRO stands Athwart History pleading with Slate, “Wait for me… my feet really hurt.” Confessing to “never even heard of” neoreaction until the Slate article, French simultaneously strikes a pose of childlike innocence and criminal negligence to not be aware of the avant garde of his own putatively conservative movement. Nevertheless if Slate can argue in Yarvin’s defense, then so can David French… with a conspicuous hold of his nose.
Nick Land has Strangeloop II with some choice tidbits of this Y-combinator thread, which features several of the major parties of the scandal in the same virtual room.
On Wednesday, @ClarkHat, in a much anticipated essay, discusses Two Kinds of Freedom of Speech (or #Strangeloop vs. Curtis Yarvin).
Somebody on Quora was asking: “Was it proper for Alex Miller to disinvite Urbit from the Strange Loop conference based on political views espoused pseudonymously and years ago by one of Urbit’s principals?” I left my answer here. [Update: I thought this answer, in the affirmative was even better!]
Free Northerner takes an in-depth look at the perpetrators of Yarvin’s No-Platforming: Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne, Support of Terror and Mass Murder. It ain’t pretty. These are the men speaking power to truth, and they are well paid for it.
The Duck was brilliant (as usual) with this:
Dark Brightness has some apposite thoughts on the matter as well. (HT Land.)
Summer slowdown at Social Matter? Let’s see what made it out over there…
This Week at Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week with The Reality No One Wants To Admit About Heroin Addiction. The reality being that victims are rarely blameless, and that our mainstream media’s obsession with painting them that way is likely contributing to the body count.
The news will not mention any of this. Instead we get a reporter asking family members softball questions for boilerplate answers for a puff piece. These types of pieces are a paint-by-numbers routine that no one will ever learn from, but everyone will feel a little sympathy for a dead young mother. “She’s cute like my girl, her family cared for her, like I do; they didn’t want to see her die of an OD, just like me!” This spin, and these answers, are the junkie version of the ghetto “he dindu nuffin, he a good boy, he goin’ to church erry week” post-crime answers to media questions. No one ever wants to admit something that reduces their social status, and no one wants to admit that they are part of the problem.
“Addiction is a disease,” and the word disease is thrown around in that reporter’s article. What disease–heroin or modernity? What was she running from? Why was she escaping reality for hours in a heroin induced abyss? She was 19-years-old with a little baby. Why was the pull of heroin stronger than the joy so many young mothers speak of when discussing their little ones? Why was her kid not enough to stay clean? Why is her town ravaged by a drug that everyone knows is highly addictive and kills? What was so horrible about her town, her friends, her family, and life that she would die just because she had to get high? Why is her social circle littered with heroin addicts?
For the quality of his research and writing in this piece, Ryan Landry wins ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. That (and $5) will by you a nice cup of coffee at Starbucks.
David Grant takes the WordPress editor on Monday with Patching The Holes Of Monarchy With Social Technology. As usual, Grant packs together a whole lot of history, and points at the lessons which we can draw.
Henry Dampier outlines The Real Student Crisis. The lack of opportunity for millennials to achieve even a modicum of independence, much less “do better than their parents”, and the ensuing despair this has wrought in our culture, has become so profound as to become a largely taboo subject. So while our leaders push ever harder on the strings of education and ZIRP, what’s really going on is left completely unaddressed:
You can’t solve a problem with the declining genetic quality of a population with new education policies or bold new ideas about re-regulating the already hyper-regulated banking system. Because intelligence is in large part as heritable as eye and hair color, merely focusing more on providing more training-as-education to a population of declining mental quality is unlikely to achieve the hoped-for results.
Because these education certificates — which are often at least partially falsified by inflated grading or pervasive cheating — declare all students to be equal, employers and others have trouble separating the good prospects from the bad one. Everyone becomes skittish, and therefore less willing to trade.
These are not the interesting times we were looking for.
Speaking of Henry, let’s see what he was up to at his home blog…
This Week in Henry Dampier
Henry Dampier starts off the week writing about The Parochial Western Left. In which we find Mrs. Jellyby alive and well:
The way that ‘act global, think local’ works is that strategists, mostly in America, apply their local thinking about their own societies — usually a pastiche of egalitarian ideology, tinged with sentimentality, without the internal consistency of even a system like Marxism — and then apply it globally, while ignoring it in their immediate area.
Wait! I thought they hated us for our freedoms?
This one was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Runner-up☀: On Wednesday, Henry pokes some fun at Vox with Not Your Pool. Making the (once) obvious point:
The entire point of private property is having the right to select who can and can’t make use of something. If you say that you can’t use even reasonable amounts of force in defense of property, then it’s not private property anymore.
Hamfisted Red propaganda makes its return as the state conscripts indoctrinated children to wave signs condemning the ‘intolerance’ of the inoffensive suburban bourgeoisie.
And that is not all. Oh no… that is not all:
If anything, not enough force was used to clear the pool. To claim to uphold private property without being willing to use as much force as is necessary to demonstrate that claim is to give up the claim. Proclaiming that you support private property in the abstract, while condemning the defense of those rights in the concrete, is to be worse than useless as an ‘advocate’ of those rights. It is to say “I will defend this” while unchallenged, and then to back away when that principle is actually challenged. This is more obnoxious even than an open Bolshevik who openly opposes the existence of private property.
Finally, M. Dampier has more to say on propaganda. As a professional propagandist, he ought to know. When a regime’s power is dependent upon public opinion, it is an iron law that that opinion will be manufactured in service to the regime.
So what was up over at SoBL’s place?
This Week in 28 Sherman
In really big news, SoBL gets into Taki’s with The Zombies of Fishtown, which is a follow-on to his Social Matter piece this week. He doesn’t think, however, it will become a regular gig. I kinda hope he’s wrong about that.
This one was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Runner-up☀: On Monday, SoBL covers NYT’s coverage of Japanese media coverage. Prime Minister Abe is making the Times very nervous.
The big brouhaha is that per journalists and political experts (pundits journalists rely on and employ), the Abe government is trying to change the media-government relationship. Complaints! Sushi lunches! Oh my God, the Abe crew is trying to shape the behavior of the very people who shape the behavior of society at large! Forget everything else, the media is just pissed that the media will not get to run the show the exact way that they want to run it.
Abe’s cronies have taken a sharp approach, and this is one that President Nixon even hinted at, which is partly why he was removed. Everyone has a weakness, the problem is finding it and threatening them with it.
If you want fair and balanced reporting about the news media, don’t expect to get it from the news media.
Here is a bit of screenplay for A Boomer Marriage of Convenience. Ripped from the headlines and not a little irreverent.
On Wednesday, SoBL points us to a good article by non-tin-foil-hat-wearing John Hussman “When Paper Wealth Vanishes”. This is about what the Fed has managed to do (and not do) with it’s ZIPR∞ policy, specifically to valuations in equity.
Another WWI pic: Christ of the Trenches.
This Week… Elsewhere
Free Northerner has a guest post from Curt Doolittle on Strategy. Pretty radical stuff:
We require: A goal. A plan. A moral justification for violence. And the will to pay the high cost of saving our civilization from the age of lies and propaganda made possible by the introduction of women into the politics of our high trust polity under open enfranchisement representative democracy, without houses of government that represent our competing class and gender interests.
Our opponents’ strategy is purely verbal – so they need numbers. We don’t. We need a few good men willing to risk life and liberty. Because the liars have created pervasive fragility that can easily be exploited.
I don’t think the Cathedral’s strategy is purely verbal. They own not only the opinion-making organs, but the governments, courts, police forces, and militaries of the West. Virtually all corporations and certainly all financial institutions, are beholden to its whims. Can it be killed? Yes. By a “few good men”? Depends on what you mean by “a few”.
Briggs has an interesting review of George Gilder’s Information Theory Of Money. He is also unbearably elitist in Democracy And The Inevitable Erosion Of Standards: Racist Tests Edition. In which we find that sweeping racism under the rug, it will, by implicitly confirming negative stereotypes, in fact be made worse. He was also at the Heartland Conference in DC this week, penning missives for day 1, day 2, and day 3
Kristor has more political theory up (although I’m not sure he’d call it that) with The Familiar Society. This is an extended meditation on how economic systems work more or less well in how well they accord with primordial human nature.
This was great: “Thekingdude” over at The Mitrailleuse reposted Mike Church’s Modernism is evil’s spell and we must defeat it: Pius X’s demolition of liberalism (original here). Pope St. Pius X was truly a great hero of both the faith and of well-ordered society. Tho’ I doubt you can get one without the other. (How Mike Church squares his advocacy of Based Pius X opinions on liberalism with his own cheerleading for the American Revolution is another matter entirely.)
Speaking of defense of the faith from the Disordering Solvent that is Modernity, Mark Citadel has a great, affecting essay: Somnambulists Must Become Subversives . This one was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Runner-up☀. A call to fight fire with fire in the Culture War, which is a species of real war:
Desecrate and tear down what the left considers holy. Be inflammatory in word and deed, and slay every one of their sacred golden cows, the memes they perpetuate across the nations in which they have dominion. Do not be strangled by the chains of acceptability or political correctness. Have they ever done us any good? If the left attacks, launch the counterattack wherever you can and give no quarter for the enemy has none for you. Find the like-minded and band together in recognition that we are in a war of the cultural variety, a war of ideas and of cunning strategy, and most important of all, a war of self-defense. You will never hear about centers of leftist iconography and rat’s nests coming under threat from rightists with an axe to grind, because we are too passive.
Bonald notices Some lives mattering more than others. He starts with the disparity in both funding and interest between a Holocaust Monument and Victims of Communism memorial in Ottowa. He compares this with a certain asymmetry between the Jewish and Catholic religions.
At The Orthosphere, Bonald talks about The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.
This one was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Runner-up☀: Idaho Royalist left for a 42 mile hike in Utah, but not before he left us giant missive on The European Progressive Conundrum. Anglo Socialism is has never been more entrenched in power. But before socialism can run out of other people’s money, it may just run out of people.
Afro Traditionalist has some analysis of, and objections to, Liberal Whites’ “White Knighting”.
This was interesting and a whole lotta work: What do people think of democracy around the world? And does it matter?
Theden returns with a couple this week: Robert Joyner’s The High Costs of the Racism Misdiagnosis is a fine bit of commentary. Anti-racist zealots probably harm the groups for which they advocate more than any racism could. Next Joyner looks at the Watsoning (more or less) of Tim Hunt and the Unprincipled Left.
For mainstream political coverage make Crass.us your one-stop-shop: Has Lindsey Graham found the secret to boosting Republican support among women? He also has Advice to fugitives in NY from a guy who saw The Fugitive: Find the real killers. But first…. This part was particularly funny:
Another clue that the authorities don’t know what to do is that they are overly eager to give the appearance of doing things. Governor Andrew Cuomo is posing for dozens of Kim-Jong-Un-style photos of himself inspecting random things.
And he’s got the pics to prove it. LOL. Crass.us dares to ask Whither Shemales?
Over at The Kakistocracy, Porter has some good commentary on the two major American political parties, and which side their bread is buttered on. Traditionalists of any stripe have no horse in that race. No horse at all. Also Nice Neighborhood You Have There.
Dante has a review up of Hatred—the video game, not the noun.
Frost suggests Using Meditation To Develop Super Powers. No joke. Well, it couldn’t hurt.
Ace has got a nice meditation with “…’Tell me, mother, will I die?’ ‘Yes, my child, and so shall I’…”. About flowers, their beauty, and how that beauty perfectly serves their telos.
Dalrock says, “Don’t blame Heartiste for the equation of Alpha with virtue”.
Welp. That’s all I had time fer… and this is already past “fashionably” late. Keep on reactin’, folks! Let me know if I missed anything. Til next week: TRP… over and out!!
Truly honored, Nick! Thank you! A species of real war indeed. It really was inspired in some ways by discussions I have had over at FreeNortherner’s blog with restless Reactionaries.
Landry’s piece on the Empire’s Man in Brooklyn is very good as well. Essentially confirms all that had been suspected about the ‘Maidan’ revolution. Bought and paid for by the international ‘community organizers’ in pay of the Prog Borg. Why am I not surprised?
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LOL… Yeah well Landry isn’t gonna be able to win the big one two weeks in a row… or might he? Hmmm…
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Thanks for the encouragement, Nick!
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