This Week in Reaction (2015/08/16)

Atomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)

In response to James Miller’s somewhat overwrought A-Bomb deontological handwringing, Neovictorian tells us: Why I Don’t Feel Bad About Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I absolutely agree. Not that I think America should have been fighting that war at all, mind you. But “we” don’t need to feel bad about what “our” leaders did 15 minutes ago, much less than 70 years ago. “They” are not “us”, and never were. And confusion on this point is a profound problem in modernity. Also some kind words for Dr. Bruce Charlton who “gets” Neovic’s (and NRx’s) fascination with magic.

Social Pathologist Slumlord brings us some more thoughts on Rod Dreher, Christian Masculinity and the Benedict Option. He’s not at all pleased with how the #cuckservative meme has been turned into an explicitly racialist one. I dunno about that, you dance with the one who brought you. I think much good can come from the removal of the word “racist” from the Left’s Book of Black Spells. And the more non-bigots we have arguing for the mild-preferences for their own racial and national interests, the better. Whether #cuckservative can do that seems unlikely but remains an empirical question. Slumlord’s main point here is to contend for a more masculine, more manly version of Christianity that will name it’s enemies and stand up for itself. On this point, we are absolutely agreed!

The not altogether indefensible monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos en Burgos

As if on cue, over at Imaginative Conservative, John Horvat (whose name I recognize from somewhere) pens The Benedict Option & the Barbarians at the Gate. He voices very similar concerns to Slumlord, noting:

Those who adopt the B-option of Benedict must find a way to deal with the B-challenge of barbarians.

Such a task consists of understanding the nature of the barbarian. Historically, barbarians were those who gave in to their whims and destroyed indiscriminately. They devastated ordered society and redistributed its wealth. They did not leave Christians alone, but rather sought them out, often coming from afar, to loot and plunder their communities wherever they might be found.

There can be no doubt that we live in a neo-barbarian world inside a culture of death. Today’s tattooed and wired neo-barbarians are likewise aggressive. They also redistribute the wealth, albeit through taxes and entitlements. They do not live and let live, but insist that all approve their disordered lifestyles. Indeed, it is the very brutality of the neo-barbarian mandate that impels those considering the Benedictine option to flee.

I don’t disagree with that either. But I’ve never interpreted the Benedict Option to include no provision for the defense of territory. The reason Christian particularism is under threat is because in pluralistic Western liberal society, we are contending for the institutions where leftists and liberals have incumbency. That is a fight the remnant cannot win. The better option, my interpretation of the Benedict Option (which may not jive with Rod Dreher’s whom I read on the subject many years ago), is that we stop contending for those institutions and build our own. Period. This is the essence of passivism. Over many generations such institutions, being built without the modernist delusions that weaken them and their people, will become powerful enough to create an alternative polarity of power in society. But by that time, it will hopefully be too late for the Empire to do much about it.

Neocolonial has some well-targeted bullet-points for Ritual Observance. And then Frontier as Foundation really looks at the dynamics of the frontier in social psychology. Are the harsh selection effects of the frontier necessary for civilizational improvement and growth? I think it’s very hard to say otherwise.

This was interesting. Via Atavisionary: Green Peace Founder comes out against the Climate Apocalypse Prognosticators. If I cared about the environment the way Patrick Moore does, I’d be concerned too. Not least because the alarmism, chilasm, and fraud of the Global Warming Movement will eventually serve to discredit actual pressing environmental concerns. Though I’m not about to start an NGO because it, I too am concerned for the environment. And so is Atavisionary. This goal—this good—accessible to people of good faith everywhere, used to called: Conservation. Then Cultural Marxists got ahold of it.

Nick Land is always looking for Theonomists to join in the fight. Brought to you by this Oldie but Goodie. In addition, some rather Moldbuggian ideas making it into Huffpo, for the purposes of illustration of course. Also, this bit of big data analysis was pretty interesting.

From avant garde of Universitystan, Nick Land brings us the future, and the future is worrying. Worrying mostly about worrying: Worrying². This is not the disposition of a civilization with confidence in itself. Or anything else.

Nice graphic from Mark Citadel

Mark Citadel continues to impress with Diminishing Returns on Grievance Investment. He chronicles the precipitous decline in the quality of our revolutionaries over time.

Since the end of monarchy and aristocracy, the hierarchy of man has been put into an upside down orientation with its most degenerate elements in control of the revolution, giving the orders, writing the laws, forging the cultural taboos of tomorrow. This is not enough however, It is not enough that the lowest caste is in power, no, the lowest elements of the lowest caste must be brought to prominence: the outright freakish and certifiable, the talentless and evil, the pathological and deceitful, those who just yesterday, the revolutionaries wanted to hide and keep below the plane of attention and respectability. I doubt Martin Luther King would have wanted to be associated with the ‘transracial’ Rachel Dolezal. Similarly I’m sure the Founding Fathers would have beaten Betty Friedan with a shoe and told her to get back in the kitchen. At the level of individuals rather than macro-societal degeneration, we can actually see entropy in action almost in real time. Why does the Cult of Progress have no George Washingtons today? Why are they stuck with the condescending smirk of a Hawaiian/Kenyan charlatan who was once a member of the ‘choom gang’?

Never have so many mediocre hacks competed so fiercely for so little power.

Free Northerner uses an internet idiot’s snub to give us a fantastic cultural history lesson on Canada the 51st State. Also a read-back on the Tindr generation from Vanity Fair entitled Sexual Liberation. Not easy to read about people who know something’s wrong, but whose crime-stop circuits prevent them from guessing the obvious answer.

Nydwracu riffs on a deep track from Robin Hanson in The future belongs to whoever shows up for it. And the way those who show up get there.

The Sydney Trads call the Aussie conservative governing coalition’s decision to not allow a “conscience vote” for its member on gay marriage (and therefore force them to vote with the party against it) a A Mere Holding Action. I think that’s right. In fact, I don’t think they go far enough. Anything politically achievable will be at best a holding action. That doesn’t mean not to take such actions. Australia has been doing better than most in politically resisting the left onslaught these past few years. But a way out, i.e., of democracy itself, must be found.

This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry marvels over The Absurdity Of America’s Devotion To India Israel. And also explains it. For example:

I like how Israel manages its nation for its people. I do think they go overboard creating problems for themselves because they never know when to cool it. America destroyed any sense of a balance to Middle East foreign policy because Israel’s cousins in America run our media.

And, at the very root of the matter:

At the base of the issue, who does a nuclear capable Iran threaten more, America or Israel? Israel, not America, yet tens of millions will be poured into blocking or pushing this deal over the top. The system of democracy allows money to pull the USG leviathan in directions it should never go and protect interests that have nothing to do with American risks.

Government is always for sale. Democracy just makes it cheaper. But inevitably you get what you pay for. Ryan earns the coveted ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his work here.

On Monday, David Grant returns to Reply To Alrenous On Anarcho-Capitalism. I have always been impressed with anarcho-capitalism as a descriptive phenomenon, never as a prescriptive one.

Henry Dampier back in his Tuesday slot with The Post-Historical Bias. He tells us how once you’ve gone all in for history working things out to bring us perfectly to the current moment, it gets increasingly difficult to come up with “tricks” to “hide the decline”:

Liberals have to portray themselves as continually winning against remnants of traditional evil, even when the struggle becomes absurd. Stopping the triumphant parade of new rights threatens to bleed off the momentum of the entire project, which is why new ones need to be invented constantly, and why more enthusiasm needs to be redirected to uplifting and importing the third world. This frenzy for liberalism has to die out when the people who promote it, themselves, die out in larger numbers, which they will, because they prefer the promotion of the political story of liberalism over their own lives.

Well… at least over their own offspring’s lives. Maybe we just haven’t collectivized agriculture quite enough? Henry earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This Week in Henry Dampier

Henry Dampier says Western economies are Not Post-Industrial so much as Post-National. Massachusetts has always been at war with just about everyone else:

[T]he often difficult & dirty existence of a factory worker was deemed to be insulting to human dignity, so it had to be pushed on to foreign shores. Putting people on welfare rolls who might otherwise be working on an assembly line at least comforts Americans that they will never find themselves working in a factory no matter how poorly suited to other forms of work they might be.

This shift also tends to be portrayed as a directed form of history—labor agitation ended ‘abusive’ labor practices (in reality it just shifted the ‘abusive’ practices overseas), universal education granted everyone more opportunities, and now no one needs to work in a grimy factory for 16 hours a day, except that plenty of people still do in order to manufacture the same products, just that much of it happens in other countries rather than domestically.

Why can’t this wrong sort of white person be more like us? Also Henry has a fantastic quotation from de Toqueville. There’s good and bad sides of bourgeois respectibility (or striving). But pretending it’s all good, or that it’s the only good, seem to be among the bad sides.

And on Thursday, Monsieur Dampier brings us: The ‘Wake-Up’ Moment is Total Destruction which would seem to contain a prophecy. First some good sense:

Agitation is usually something that’s better directed against your enemies, which is what it’s typically used for even when some idealistic cover story or another gets adopted. The point of agitation, properly understood, is to undermine the authority of some state or another that you want to destroy. It’s not something that results in an improvement, properly understood.

Right. So using agitation to destroy your enemies is perfectly acceptable under the passivist norms of neoreaction. But doing that doesn’t get you one step closer to actually building something by which to replace your enemies’ institutions. Next he gets to the prophecy part:

Popular sovereignty is the legitimizing myth, which the actual process of ruling in a modern state then undermines. After this happens, the people whose job it is to generate that legitimacy — the press — have to stoke up more demonstrations of popular sovereignty. People marching around in the street, yelling, and burning things has come to be identified with popular sovereignty, which, come to think of it, is appropriate considering democracy’s historical record. There’s no such thing as actual popular sovereignty, but it’s easier to pretend that there is when you have mobs of ‘the people’ manifesting themselves to burn things down and complain.

This is a recipe for constant civil conflict, and constant civil conflict weakens a civilization against external enemies, and those external enemies will eventually overwhelm it. Awareness of this does nothing to stop the process.

In other words, “No, this will not make it easier to deal with.”

On Friday, Henry continues on that theme by asking: Why Kill the GOP? Lo! Let us count the ways.

Fundamentally, the existing GOP and its auxiliary media organizations act as a legitimizing outer party. Trump, like every other GOP candidate, supports radical progressive initiatives like graduated income taxes, universal education, and the other raft of alphabet agencies instituted during the second Roosevelt regime.

The substance of the candidate’s platform matters less than the demoralization that the campaign inflicts on the Outer Party and the actual administrators of the regime. This is one of the reasons why he’s so entertaining. If Trump wins the presidency and succeeds in creating a lot of internal confusion and conflict within the administration, then that’s mostly a good thing rather than a bad thing.

This Week in 28 Sherman

Over at SoBL’s place, he follows up his India Israel article over at Social Matter with the underreported (in fact news to me) Attack on Senator Schumer. Seems he’s even more pro-Israelier than Obama. Which is… apparently… it’s own reward. And besides, his is a safe seat for Democrats.

SoBL has A Note for Gavin McInnes . It seems McInnes is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain Edgelord status.

Tuesday brings the Nixon Post-Debate Phone Call. Nixon plays modern day Virgil to SoBL’s poetical Dante.

Not a photo this time, but an artists rendering of WW1 Aerial Torpedoes.

And this was an unexpected Thursday outpouring: Erickson, Buckley, Will and Conservative Purging. First of all… THIS:

Jesus said love your neighbor, not love some third world family flown in on DHS planes to create a fake crisis to push through immigration reform to turn America into a third world country. Take a stand for once. Christians once colonized the world and brought civilization with force and a message. It is okay to be masculine and defend one’s territory and kin while still being Christian.

And then its just astute, inspired, and prophetic writing from there. Documenting how our current batch of so-called conservatives continuously fellate the left whilst stabbing the backs of anyone perceived to be slightly to the right. And how this pattern has been going on for a couple generations now. SoBL wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. RTWT.

This Week in World Crass

Crassus has more on Jon Stewart’s irrelevance. Good riddance Jonathan Stuart (((((Leibowitz))))).

Filed under Orwellian: “Peaceful protest” is journalistic euphemism for “riot”.

And filed under Anarcho-Tyranny is Almost Complete: What citizens know that the state knows that citizens know can hurt citizens: shared knowledge in a surveillance state may be more damaging than secret information gathered by a surveillance state. This is exactly what you’d expect:

It’s a cycle of conformist behavior raising the police expectations for conformist behavior. This leads to most of us to conforming even more, and to others of us getting shot.

Some hope on this front: R/C drone “officer” to police San Jose. Here are design ideas for toy soldiers. I cannot tell whether Crassus’ design ideas are altogether unserious, but, in view of Anarcho-Tyranny, robo-cops will no doubt be found to have a disparate effect and thus mothballed. Here’s more on drones: To inoculate America against a pandemic of sophisticated drones that spy on all of us, what if we give just a few crummy drones to the police?

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X reads Ivy publications so you don’t have to in Update(s) on the Cathedral. Aka., This Week in Speaking Power to Truth. I hope she keeps this series going.

One those Ivy Review items take on a life of its own here: Is Humor Some Sort of Man Thing? Ummm… yeah.

She allows herself some musings about America and the Long Term. This land of plenty has some rather negative social effects:

Long term, I expect one of the effects of abandoned children surviving is that the gene pool ends up with a lot more people who lack a genetic inclination toward monogamy. At first, these people will just be publicly shamed and life will continue looking relatively normal. But eventually, we should get to a tipping point where we have enough non-monogamous people that they begin advocating as a block and demanding divorce, public acceptance of non-marital sex, etc.

Another effect I would expect is a general “masculinization” of the women. Women who have to fend for themselves and raise their own children without help from their husband have no practical use for femininity, and the more masculine among them will be more likely to thrive. Wilting, feminine flowers will fade away, replaced by tough dames who “need a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Implying most of that hasn’t already happened?!! Humans, via the development of culture, play a huge role now in their own evolution. And this is not the future we should be choosing.

This was quite good: Everything Adults say about Bullying is Bullshit.

Bullying is not just something sad kids do to entertain themselves. Bullying is an emergent feature of the control mechanisms of the social order. Or to put it another way, where there is hierarchy, someone is at the bottom, and that is the kid who gets bullied. Bullies, by definition, are higher-status than the kids they bully, because without status, they could not get away with bullying.

And bullies do not have low self esteem; people with low self-esteem hole up in their bedrooms and don’t talk to other humans except via the internet. Bullies have so much self-esteem, they believe themselves entitled to violently dictate the entire social order around themselves.

Seriously, have you ever looked at a picture of Hitler and thought, “If only he’d been a little more self-confident, he wouldn’t have invaded Poland.”?

For her efforts (and transparency) here, Evolutionist X wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Really tan, cute white girl.

Next she asks what’s up with all these white people tanning in Melanin, aggression, and sexuality. This is a big ass research piece. (The research I mean, not the ass.) The results seem inconclusive at this time. I sorta think tan looks nice, but it’s impossible to tease out whether that preference might be wholly socially constructed. I think the skin cancer concerns are a load of hooey, given the fact that skin cancers appear to be inversely correlated with virtually every other kind of cancer. But ladies, please keep the sun off your faces. It does age you.

By way of follow-up she dips her toes into the fever swamps to look at Black reactions to white people tanning. Umm… yeah. Fever swamps. I’m stickin’ with that.

Speaking of black reactions, this was quite sad Black Friends and White Tears. Sad because all too common. Whites are the least racist people on earth. Yet they are racist. As soon as everyone can get around to admitting everyone is racist and this is a good thing, the better off everyone will be.

This Week… Elsewhere

Carlos Esteban takes a Spaniard’s eye view of the election kerfuffle thus far: No es Trump, sino lo que ha traído. In Spanish (or chrome auto-translate which ain’t bad).

Cheshire Ocelot reviews St. Robert Bellarmine’s (1542-1621, Doctor of the Church) De Laicis in his XLth review of LXXV books. Bellarmine’s conclusions about the nature of human society and government align surprisingly well with those of modern secular rightists. Surprising given his overt appeal to the Bible and Church Fathers. Showing, once again, there are multiple ways of getting at correct answers.

Matt Briggs has got a vid up of him giving a talk: The Crisis Of Evidence, Or, Why Probability & Statistics Cannot Discover Cause. He’s available to give a talk to you, too. Also, filed under B-but Real Science is So Hard, good to see him take this “study” to the wood-shed: Having A Kid Worse Than Divorce Or Death? Wee P-values Say Yes

Bonald carries his pet heresies (i.e., against modernism) to The Orthosphere with Tribal Christianity: the legitimacy of loyalty in the life of faith.

Also at The Orthosphere, Kristor has a post-script on his Disutilitarianism. His conclusion: There’s no such thing as a pluralistic society:

Society then is not just a bunch of men with raw preferences rubbing elbows with each other. That’s just the matter of society. You need form, too, and a telos of the whole shooting match that all its members can apprehend as transcendent to, and superordinate of, and thus informing and ordering, and indeed ordaining and commanding, their own personal preferences.

Thus the cult. It is the fundamental forecondition of society, the sine qua non. And what is a cult? It is a joint understanding of the order of being, and of the proper way to orient oneself thereto. Lack that, and you cannot even talk to each other in the same language.

I like this a lot. Not least because he puts things so well and so succinctly. This earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Porter has fabulous coverage of Trump vs. GOP in When You Wish Upon a Star. I’m still LOLing over his description of Erick Erickson as “cuckservatism’s corpulent castrato”. Also a fine essay here: The Infidelity of Change in which the age-old question arises, “Is it really a good idea to bring in Mexicans to take care of your Negro Problem?”

Kill To Party has the straight dope on Ben Weasel and The Hulkster: The Fascist Police State of Social Justice.

HBD Chick has got an extended excerpt from Ed West’s Asabiyyah: What Ibn Khaldun, the Islamic father of social science, can teach us about the world today.

I thought this was pretty interesting: over at Front Porch Republic: From the Multiversity: Three Reformations.

Stephen Masty over at Imaginative Conservative has an extended meditation, with Göbekli Tepe as a backdrop, on essences and our troubled materialistic zeitgeist: Lost Temples, Giant Spiders & the Death of Western Civilization.

Never assume that the hunter-gatherers were much different than we. Both civilizations arose thanks to the religious catalyst that Dawson described. While you long for a computerized watch they may have wanted a goat, but we share longing. Mothers-in-law never changed since the Neolithic. All civilizations wither and die.

Also, Eva Brann returns with a very interesting lecture on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: The Problem of Romantic Reaction. Also reviewing Neil Peart’s Far and Near: On Days Like These . I was a huge Rush fan as a kid, and still have a soft spot in my heart for some of the best stuff whenever it comes on the radio. I knew Peart was smart and wrote great lyrics. I had no idea how smart and versatile.

And here’s that ol’ commie Ike himself warning us against letting the Red Empire win. Need to let the Soviets have a fighting chance.

Nice essay from Adam Wallace over at West Coast Reactionaries. He deconstructs deconstruction and constructs Constructionism, Spirit and Character.

The tools for raising “dangerous” children are only getting better. Al Fin has Perspectives on Immersive Learning. Also Purpose and the Dangerous Child. Very inspiring stuff.

Sonic has example #7,325 of Why All Large Calculations are Wrong courtesy of Bryan Caplan. Also awesome video. Hope the guy really is running for something. Somewhere.

That’s all folks. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… TRP: Over and out!!