This Week in Reaction (2015/10/04)

The main Hestia Society website stepped out of 2007 and into Into the Teens. It’s purdy!

Over at The Future Primaeval, Basil Rowny makes his debut with Social mobility and discount mates. This is a review of sorts of Gregory Clark’s new book The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Interesting research. Interesting implications. Interesting because of implications. For example, be careful how you treat ethnic and religious minorities, because you might just be helping them to become market dominant.

Warg Franklin outlines the Levels of Agency in Society. There are three. Not one. Any social system built on the assumption that there is only one is gonna have a bad time.

Over at Nick Land’s, the mainstream media engages impressive Mental Gymnastics to admit to some racial differences too obvious to ignore, while ignoring others too obvious to ignore. Also an illustrative analogue in The Dark Forest.

Water Margin Movie Poster, 2011

Spandrell has a couple this week. Male Culture—an extended meditation on the quazi-historical 15th Chinese novel Water Margin. Well, the popular movie series mostly. He also has a completely non-ironic Communism Appreciation Post. The CCP has banned egg-freezing for single women. Single. Oh, the humanity!

Well the Communist rulers of China have enough sense to discourage this sort of harmful feminism. Egg freezing is only available for cases of womb disease. You are not to play with your reproductive system. If you must, if you insist in being irresponsible and rubbing your irresponsiblity on everybody else, well, go to the US. And get reported on US newspapers, they trade on everything bad. Sure, you’ll have your pretty face on the front page. But you will still be a barren, leftover woman.

Jim is… well… Classic Jim in On cuckolding:

It is not really in a woman’s nature to belong to herself. Like a dog without a master, it makes her nervous.

That was an instant ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

And, although it isn’t quite over yet, Jim’s calling winners & losers in Arab Spring. OK. Well… losers.

Bashar Assad’s strength is that his religion is the only religion in Syria, other than Christianity, that is tolerant enough that it can be trusted to refrain from massacring minorities and his political organization is the only one that has the basic competence to keep the basic services of a modern society functioning and the will to keep the hands of subhumans off those basic services.

Because of this, he is an evil tyrant. As is anyone who would dare make a system function as designed for the benefit of all. Genuine sovereignty outside the wagging fingers of the US Department of State is actually just a special case of Competency Privilege. So it will have to go.

Free Northerner talks about Tending Your Garden. Cuz if you’re not tending your own, you’re probably tending someone else’s, and very likely not doing a very good job of it.

Look at the consequences of when everybody tries to do big things: Young people waste years and huge dollars in college to “pursue their passions”, men turn from family and productive work out of frustration of ‘not accomplishing anything’ or in hopes of pursuing ‘greater things’, men think of themselves as losers for doing honest work and raising a family, women turn against family formation to pursue “accomplishment” and become miserable and childless working to achieve that coveted high-impact job, people get parasitical jobs in the ‘non-profit’ sector, billions are wasted on ineffective foreign aid, wasteful status competitions ensue over who is the best or the most impactful, short-term missions waste valuable resources, ineffective Twitter campaigns provide an illusion of dogoodery, etc.

For his efforts on this one, Northerner wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Filed under This is Where Friendly Protestants Do Come in Handy, Northerner also does an in-depth study of The Bible on Refugees. Or “Sojourners” in the biblical term of art. The Old Testament is a real dick about bringing in foreign gods. Funny that.

The “new guy”, Migration Period has good Definition of Insanity: US Middle East Policy. Also this: America’s Market-Dominant Minority.

Reactionary Ferret has some thoughts On Conspiracy Theorists. Branding those opposed to your conspiracy as “Conspiracy Theorists” is an excellent way to advance your conspiracy.

Mark Citadel has a big review of the little known, and he thinks under-appreciated, Austrian economist Othmar Spann: Pre-Mercantile Economics. That’s Austrian in both senses of the word.

Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Alfred Miller contemplates Salvaging America. He says “we” a lot. There’s a lot of conflict within that “we” left unaddressed.

Sarah Perry has a new essay up over at Ribbon Farm on Meaning and Pointing. As always, hard to excerpt. But also very good. Always iconoclastic, especially about iconoclasm.

Antidem has a preview for Heart of Autism. Honestly, I have no idea what this is about. Really. But it’s Antidem. So I cover it.

#NRx showed up on some commie’s radar screen: The Darkness Before the Right.

CWNY, as eloquent as thoughtful as always, with Like to a Tenement or a Pelting Farm.

This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry brings his Weimerica meme to Social Matter with Tales From Weimerica: Have Sex With Who We Tell You To. (((((We))))). Porn, that well-known bastion of old-fashioned bigotry and skirt-clutching hangups, is the next great front for Social Justice Holy War. And Bryan Matthew (((((Sevilla))))) is this theater’s Anita Sarkeesian.

Mark Christensen returns with a blockbuster: Heimat, Freiheit, Tradition: An Interview With The German Identitarian Movement, aka. Identitäre Bewegung. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

And, speaking of Sarah Perry, part two of my and Anthony’s talk with her came out on Tuesday: “The Trampoline to Ultimate Knowledge”.

This Week in Henry Dampier

Henry Dampier was amazingly productive this week. He kicks it off talking shop with Clickbait, Clickfraud, and the Open Internet. A lot of the internet remains free, but we get what we pay for.

Henry used to do a book review each week. A hopeful sign that that may be coming back is Tuesday’s review of Sydney Fisher’s The True History of the American Revolution. I.e., the one they don’t teach in the text books, assuming they teach it at all these days.

With an assist from Michael Strong, here is A Roadmap for Cheap Private Education. Basically Do-it-Yerself, with help from good tutors. Why not top tier private school? Top tier ain’t what it used to be:

A year at a top high school for most middle class families who won’t qualify for financial aid often exceeds $40,000 per year. That’s more than enough to seed a business or just to maintain the family assets. It also means that your kid will be associated with a lot of high-achieving dope smokers, sluts, and irredeemable nerds whose parents can afford tuition.

Next he tackles the problems ZIRP and Youth Unemployment. Well there’s only one problem: the first causes the latter. If you think it sucks that you can’t get attractive enough rates on savings to retire, just imagine how much it sucks to not be able to generate any savings in the first place.

Dampier’s The Media Hall of Mirrors drops down a level to look at how the consensual sausage, upon which liberal democracy ostensibly runs, is made.

[D]emocracy generates a pervasive mental pollution which wouldn’t be present otherwise. The media isn’t an entity independent of politics, despite all the pretenses about a free press. The reason for this is because every man is supposed to be a political micro-sovereign. Each person is, at least in theory, supposed to be sufficiently educated so as to be able to ably exercise their tiny slice of authority. And the only way that sovereigns can act with confidence is to accumulate enough support from all those micro-slices to do whatever it is that they wanted to do in the first place.

Henry earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ with this one.

A lot of people actually believe this.

On Saturday, he points out Smarts Are A Scarce Natural Resource. Not news to you and me, of course. But an unthinkable thought to our cultural masters, who will therefore waste endless dollars to convert otherwise fertile ground into the monoculture of academia in which, it is falsely believed, smarts grow on trees.

The more common view (which predated Darwin), historically speaking, was that many important traits are heritable. Curiously enough, almost all right-thinking people believe that most important traits in nonhuman animals are heritable. It’s noncontroversial to say that a certain breed of dog is more intelligent than another, or more capable of performing certain feats than other breeds. It’s a firing offense to state something similar about people. Even prestigious scientists and journalists can’t get away with stating what was once common knowledge.

If we saw intelligence as a scarce resource, we would have to think harder about how to foster its promotion, and to protect it from being overwhelmed by the unthinking and envious majority. Much of the ‘meritocratic’ sorting machinery we use now to try to discover talent would become superfluous, because nature does much of that sorting for us already by bestowing smarter children on smarter parents.

Capping off a remarkably productive week, Henry walks us through the myth-making process in Strong Female Characters and Women in the Military.

This Week in 28 Sherman

On Monday, Ryan Landry has a whole nuther article to add to his Social Matter piece: Tales From Weimerica: Pedophiles And The Kid Dildo. It’s getting harder to sell the “We’re normal just like you” act, not least because, in contrast to the not (yet) existent advocates of the wondrously wonderful cuckold lifestyle, these pedos actually exist… and don’t seem to mind writing about their propensities. But really, one wonders how hard our Media Masters even try anymore.

This does not qualify as one of the progressive’s “angels with dirty faces” problem where everyone they turn into a martyr or saint is really a scumbag. This is a scumbag representing a scumbag group in a scumbag manner. The trans-thing making a kid dildo is a monster pushing their perversion out into the open and on the young. This does reveal part of the problem with pushing ever creepier kinks. You may clean up a queer and give him a handsome beau to adopt the cute Chinese baby, you may find the MTV lesbian who is Just Like Us!, but eventually you end up with the carnival acts like Bruce Jenner in a dress and pedophiles who want to fuck kids being your new cause du jour.

Weimerica continues on Tuesday as Landry runs down all you need to know about Coskink. Well, “need” is a strong word. But he keeps it SFW.

Here is some advice for budding new musicians: Duplicate The Police for Music Success. The Police the band, not the racist crackers who are constantly shooting unarmed, innocent black men. As with most pop culture suggestions Ryan makes, this too has a distinct air of plausibility. So get right on that, Young People.

Finally, in This Week in WW1: One Man Tanks. He has pics and an animated gif for your perusal.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter brushes off his finance chops in Put Money in Thy Purse—commentary on interest rate suppression, the damage it does, and the flimsy justifications our central planners make for it.

Some astute commentary with Supremacy Turns East. Poland is accepting refugees. Polish refugees. Now that makes sense.

This Week… Elsewhere

Evolutionist X’s Clarifications about “As the Peacock Struts” is a welcome clarification to her article, which was a bit muddled. Her point here is a strong and salutary one: people’s political views are contingent and tribal. Even smart peoples’ views. This was interesting: Some statistical notes—more precisely the perverse effect of random noise on survey results.

Harley Davidson motorcycle (blonde chick not included)

Here is a bit of analysis on Harleys, Exit, and Thedic Signaling. And here is a review of Time Preference: the most under-appreciated mental trait.

What distinguishes humans from all other animals? Our big brains, intellects, or impressive vocabularies?

It is our ability to acquire new knowledge and use it to plan and build complex, multi-generational societies.

Right Scholarship is starting an interesting new series: Mystical Bodies Part 1: Incorporative Media. In which, Marshall McLuhan meets Pauline Theology.

At The Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen deems Corey Robin’s actually-intended-to-be-taken-seriously The Reactionary Mind in The Left’s Caricature of Conservatism. Here is a very thorough review of Tradition and Modernity in “The Godfather”. And Eva Brann is back with another big essay, asking What Has Athens To Do With You? And Joseph Pearce has some thoughts on Revolution vs. Revelation: France & the Faith.

Briggs takes names in Who’s Supporting The UN’s So-Called Sustainable Development Plan? The #BigPush. And also who’s not. Also, filed under Shakin’ Muh Head: The National Embarrassment Which Is Bill Nye.

Dr. Briggs also has also has two over at The Stream this week: Academic Calls for a Return to Eugenics (to Battle Global Warming); and A Newly Discovered Ocean Cooling Process Implies the Climate is More Stable than We Knew.

Bonald at The Orthosphere talks about Why modern men don’t want to believe in heaven—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. I found myself nodding in agreement with this part:

Many atheists imagine that the promise of happiness after death is what attaches people to Christianity, that we put up with the metaphysics and the moral restrictions just so we can, as they would put it, cling to this absurd fantasy and avoid facing our mortality. In many cases, my own included, it’s quite the reverse. My continued existence after death is the one doctrine I can’t make myself really, viscerally believe. I accept it for the sake of the others, the doctrines about God, morality, and the sacraments that really recommend themselves to me. I certainly don’t look down on my ancestors for whom the hope of heaven was a natural part of their imaginative universe. I would not even scorn what are deemed vulgar visions of heaven, ones that mostly involved being reunited with lost family and friends. So many of our ancestors had to bury their own children.

And with this:

The Christian agrees that we only have one life. Heaven or hell is not another life, but the ultimate significance of this single life revealed and made definite. Thus, in my own apologetic work, I emphasize the doctrine of a final judgment, which provides a resolution, and hence a new level of intelligibility, to each life story.

Very strong article. Also, over on his own blog a brief note on “near-universal sociopathy”: “National loyalty is a lot like modern marriage, which frowns on adultery but not divorce.”.

Chris Gale discovers Catholic hatred of Jesuits. Oh, let me count the ways!! Also, I liked this: Notes from a modern funeral in a post modern time. “From” being the operative word.

Over at 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace has a few cant-clearing thoughts on female “objectification”—which, if it a real thing at all, is at least as likely to be desired as otherwise. Also a gentle reminder: never give a woman the keys to your dignity, your happiness or your soul.

Here is Darlock with a study from the Book of Proverbs: The Crafty Harlot. The Bible, the actual one, brooks no illusions about female sexuality.

Cane Caldo shares some (apparently real) vignettes from a recent trip to Frisco.

Esoteric Trad has some apposite thoughts on Neoreaction’s elephant in the room. That’s one cool high-tech elephant.

Mark Richardson has dusted off Oz Conservative. He pits hipsters vs. hipsters When worlds collide.

Reactionary Tree has a sit-down with his old boss An Interview with Brett Stevens of Amerika.

Where Jonathan Haidt sees a lack of political diversity as a problem we need to fix, Greg Cochran just sees too many social psychologists a “just no damn good”. Could be both.

In This Week in Getting Fed Up, Real Gary has The Germans. And… even the Americans.

Man-Sized Target finds a lot to like in Russia’s rhetoric and purposes in Syria. His thoughts on the Pope Visit were supremely well and succinctly put. Also Remember the Rosenbergs. Remember they were commie traitors who deserved to die. Not heroes or martyrs as the NY City Council would have you believe. Well, NYC Council always has to ask: “Is it good for the Bolshies?”

James E. Miller expects demonization by the $PLC for having the bad taste to ponder White Plight. Being on an SPLC is a badge of honor, Mr. Miller. Good luck with that! Also at The Mitrailleuse, gettin’ all ancappy on us! Why private cities? Because that government is best which profits the most from good government.

Al Fin answers: Why Do Dangerous Children Study Crime and Criminals? It’s important work being more dangerous than the Bad Guys.

Welp. This isn’t late, because it’s still Monday somewhere in the world. Have a great week. Try not to waste too much time at work reading this. Keep on reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!