This Week in Reaction (2015/10/25)

Malcolm Pollack spots a convergence of Second Laws. Nick Land notices the noticing. Are all Second Laws like that?

Nick Land catches Steve Sailer in an, even for him, rather poignant interrogative Sentence.

Also from Land: “Yglesias seems to think the Republicans might do something with the presidency of right-wing significance“. LOL!

Sydney Trads have a seminal quote from Thomas Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets.

Last week, Malcolm Pollack’s A Functioning Nation: System Requirements got an Official Honorable Mention in the round-up. This week, Dividuals provides some astute addenda to Pollack’s themes. Dividuals not only invariably makes a lot of sense (even when drunk), but deserves a lot of credit for this pattern of making blog-post worthy “Re:” responses to others’ posts. It’s a fantastic way to keep important conversations going, and going at a high signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks for that, whoever Dividuals are/is!

Also from Dividuals, a decent start to a theory: Virtual And Real Status, Left, Right.

So maybe just subjectively feeling you have status, “status wireheading” is a thing. See also. But I just wonder if it is more of a leftie thing and the rightie thing is to try to get perhaps less good feeling, but more permanent, solid and useful status-giving things.

Moralistic rants look like a perfect example of status-wireheading, so going for virtual, subjective, not real status. People who get to judge people IRL are high status – imagine a king passing judgement on accused subjects. Or pastors delivering moral exhortations. So basically just delivering such exhortations, just on a blog, even when hardly anyone is listening, may subjectively feel like having high status.

Finally some musings on MM’s Urbit And The Impatience Principle. I certainly hope that they at least had the good taste to include a Delorean in the design.

Jim Watches female oriented video porn so you don’t have to. He’s senior enough to approach such subjects soberly. (Wet) Bottom Line on the porn women, who happen to like porn, like?

Either way, the porn sends the message loud and clear that emancipation was a disaster for women’s sex lives. Every male that they beat themselves off on cheerfully oppresses women, often in a brutal and degrading fashion, whether as thug, pimp, or patriarch.

Also from Jim this week: The Jewish Problem. You’ve heard this all before, but rarely put so well all in one place. I think we’re ready to put this question into the Official Asked-n-Answered Box. Jim has done more than anyone else to answer it. In public at any rate. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Warg Franklin comes on TFP with Postrationalism. This one goes out to all #NRx perma-skeptics. As well as all other interested observers.

We can’t really replace common sense and intuition as the basis of reasoning. Attempts to virtualize more “correct” principles of reasoning from math and cognitive science in explicit deliberative reasoning are unrealistic folly. We can learn useful metaphors from theory, and use mathematical tools, but theory cannot be the ultimate foundation of our cognition; practical reasoning is either based on reasonable common sense, or bogus.

Empedocles wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ here: Sex is not a social construct. This was in response to Evolutionist X’s (to me incoherent) Transsexuals Prove That Gender is Real. This seemed at first to be rather taking a chainsaw to a hangnail, but along the way the Darwinian Reactionary makes powerful and generally useful arguments for telos in our understanding of the world. Especially our scientific understanding. No physics without metaphysics.

Richard A. Brookes takes One alternative view of the future. An alternate model of psycho-social dynamics really. In a very strong and compact article. A taste:

If conservatism were to go away[,] would the “unprincipled exceptions” continue to be eroded, until society collapses? Or would the cis-feminine softness of the holier-than-thou left metamorphose into a trans-liberal Brianna-Wu-like “Our culture, you fuck off” strongman culture that rejected the Dead-White-Male liberalism of the Founding Fathers and the Kit-Cat Club in favour of a bit of healthy intolerance and cultural uniformity?

If so, Brooke’s extrapolates, conservatives may not be merely an ineffectual right inadvertently helping leftism’s grand sweep, but the actual honest-to-gnon left. Brookes wins his first ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. First, we hope, of many.

Scott Alexander goes Archie Bunker all over the ass of those who would be Against Autism Cures. Land (rightly) applauds.

Over at Briggs’, besides me and my wife showing up for a dinner party on the wrong night,… World Statistics Day! It’s practically SCIENCE-TASTIC! “Who said the UN doesn’t do anything useful?” LOL. Lies, Damn Lies, and UN Propaganda. And this, filed under In Service to Humanity, David Stove’s magisterial essay The Intellectual Capacity of Women had been unceremoniously de-hosted on University of New South Wales hard disks, because… bytes can be hatreful, presumably by some midwitted apparatchik (emphasis on “chick”). So Briggs’ said he could host it. Voilà:

An opposite belief has become widely current in the last few years, in societies like our own: the belief that the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole equal to that of men. If I could, I would discuss here the reasons for the sudden adoption by many people of this opinion. But I cannot, because I have not been able to find any reasons for it, as distinct from causes of it. The equality-theory (as I will call it) is not embraced on the grounds of any startling facts which have only lately come to light. It is not embraced on the grounds of some old familiar facts which have been misunderstood until lately. It is not embraced, as far as I can see, on any grounds at all, but from mere prejudice and passion. If you ask people, “What evidence is there for the equality-theory?”, you do not get an answer (though you are likely to get other things).

Rather, the question is felt to be somehow improper, morally or intellectually, and is thought not to deserve any answer.

PDF here.

Briggs also takes A Wink And A Nod At #Synod15. I wouldn’t have thought the thought of Arius pooping to death in the crapper would ever be quite so comforting.

And, over at The Stream, for whom Briggs is apparently generating a lot of clicks, he’s got Academics Increasingly See Christianity as a Sickness to be ‘Treated’.

Idaho Royalist is Still Around. Just busy with school.

Esoteric Trad has some timely remarks on Hating your ancestors. Also the podcast: Mists of Albion Episode 2: “Londonistan”. Podcasts are great. Everyone should get one. ET’s have the special virtue of not being overly long.

It’s come up before, but Free Northerner, uses an unforced, snarkier than thou, Cracked article to drive home the winning run on Male Physical Intimacy. King David, Abraham Lincoln, buddies horsing around in black-n-white pictures, all almost certainly not gay.

In a non-gay society, you could slap your friend on the ass after the game, and walk to the showers with your arms around him. In our gay society, this sounds gay to you (and to me) because male intimacy has been colonized by homosexuality. This is one vague, virtually invisible, unquantifiable harm the homosexual movement has done to the majority.

Thanks to Free Northerner for making it slightly less invisible. Anthony Esolen wrote a seminal essay on the topic a while back: A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution. Also required reading.

Also at Free Northerner: The Wages of Aspiration—a case where a “leaning in” careerist-type woman needs to be told, “NAWALT!”.

Spy in the House of God (Certified), E. Antony Gray pens The Stone on the Shore.

Cambria Will Not Yield takes White Nationalism to the woodshed in Breaking Free of the Pagan Wheel of Fire.

There is no strength, no blood, in our Nordic, Greco-Roman heritage if we see that heritage as an end in and of itself. Those pagan civilizations only have significance because in the end the best of the pagans bent their knees to Christ. Europeans do not have a Nordic, Greco-Roman heritage, they have only one heritage, just as there is only one God. Christ became the Europeans’ hero God, the one true God to whom all the heroes of the Norsemen, the Greeks, and the Romans gave way.

Filed under Goto Church LOL, Count ∅-face has some Ruminations on the Nature of Sin, riffing on some dialogue in Arthur Machen’s The White People and Other Weird Stories.

The true horror of The White People lies in the fact that one could even recognize wickedness and “have to reason yourself back into horror.” The presence of evil may not be obvious to us. In fact we may find ourselves easily drawn to it.

Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Alfred Miller comes Out of the Darkness. I think this is a completely unjustifiable strategic error. But I certainly wish him well.

This Week at Social Matter

Good luck with that.

Ryan Landry’s Big Sunday Piece™ is Rand Paul, Icarus, and You. The “Libertarian Moment” was never meant to be. Well it might have been meant to appear to be. As Landry notes:

That is all history now, as they have been absorbed by the Establishment and co-opted for the elite’s goals.

Lessons for the wise observer?

Rand did not have to be squashed. He did something worse. Did he sell out and play ball? Did he shed the thing that so many people liked about his father and the message? Nah, he just showed you that the system is complete, that he was part of it and wanted to lead it. He wanted to win their game and play by their rules. What’s worse is he showed you for the hopeful believer in democracy’s redemption that you still are.

So don’t be that guy.

David Grant brings us Separate Ways, which is (I think) a meditation on knowing when you’re defeated and making peace, interior and otherwise.

Henry Dampier is simply fantastic here with The Logic of Civil Rights. It begins and ends largely with a war on property rights. This is ironic because the ideology of abstract rights begins in classical liberalism chiefly as a defense of property rights. Sometimes children grow too big for their britches. RTWT. This wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Not an unusual occurrence for Monsieur Dampier.

Finally, Anthony and I join up with E. Antony Gray (aka. “River C”) and Neocolonial for a jaunty Descending the Tower.

This Week at 28 Sherman

Over at “the place you will always long for but never be able to go”, SoBL starts off the week Burying Playboy, who has apparently been so soft-core for so long, that they’re just not gonna bother being any-core anymore.

Well… not exactly.

Speaking of voluptuous women of yesteryear, here he has Delusions of American Women: “TIME Magazine’s Perfect Body in 1955”. A good bit of insight in this one as SoBL tears apart contemporary female body image rhetoric crimethought by smirking crimethought.

6. They will blame a male conspiracy, but who are these models/actresses selected for? Who really is the target audience for rom-coms, fashion and network television? Women. The women selected are trying to fit a female ideal. Women project themselves into these roles. They want to be the lead doctor in the ER that is still skinny enough to slip into something sexy for a date with George Clooney. They want to think they can be the single mom still skinny enough to go on a date after a long shift at the precinct. Why? Because being thin is a female status marker. Being thin is associated with being young and sexually attractive. Being thin gets you better men.

TBH, I think I’m prole enough to consider Aria Giovanni is a pretty fine looking woman. For his investigative efforts and red-pilled analysis, Ryan wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

And SoBL has a pretty expansive piece about how the media has been Smearing Soda Like Tobacco. Soda use is down. Great. So we should be getting thinner, because all that soda was making us fat right? Bonk. No, I’m sorry. </AlexTrebekVoice> Underclass vices have been under attack for a very long time. (Truancy laws anyone?) Probably forever. What’s weird today is that the vices our Cultural Masters go after would are so… non-vicious… at least compared to all the ones they positively encourage.

Finally, in This Week in WW1 in Pictures: Gas Attacks, which tho’ potentially horrific, hardly seem to put an M in WMD.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter begins the week going meta on the stubborn “Performance Gap” with America’s Frontal Cortex Status: Disabled. Konking Whites and Asians on the head to make things equal really was just a joke, folks.

In Looking for a Place Called Lee Ho Fook’s we find the latest example of late ladder climbers trying to pull up the ladder.

Porter pokes a good deal of well-targeted derision fun at expansive definitions of “we”. If you’re not “we”, you must be “you people”.

Filed under Reads the Newz so you Don’t Have To, Porter has the… well not complete, but probably more than anyone wanted to know… story of Tikkun Olam on Crack: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Finally, One Slightly Used Outboard Motor. Apparently European law enforcement has gotten caught red handed, at least occasionally, not napping until their pension kicks in:

So a witness claims to have seen a European border guard actually halt an alien in broad daylight? I assume the officer was promptly cashiered. Yet just what does a how-do-you-say-it “bor-der gard” do exactly? If their responsibility is to usher in aliens who might otherwise soil their loafers, I can see why refusing entry is cause for journalistic concern. Though maybe they are intended to function as pylons, keeping the tsunami in manageable lanes.

This Week… Elsewhere

Evolutionist X wonders whether gender dimorphism is a luxury good. To some extent it certainly is. I think the ability to pretend gendered do not arise principally out of biological factors is even more expensive. Also, a lot detail here in Judeo Ethnogenesis.

This too was spot on: Increasing Diversity => Fascism: the difficulty of enforcing social norms via rules, tho I could wish that we did not, after the pattern of our enemies, use the term “fascism” to describe generically authoritarian regimes. Diversity + Proximity = Conflict is the Maxwell’s First Equation of #NRx. “Better living through more comprehensive law-making”, said No One Ever.

This one, Theory: the inverse relationship between warfare and homicide, was worth the price of admission just for the very the first sentence:

That whole myth about hunter-gatherers being peaceful and non-violent probably got its start because hunter-gatherers tend not to be as good at organized warfare as the Germans.

And it sums up her points well. Wonderful data and picture rich article outlining the difference between organized violence and the less organized kind. RTWT. EX is receives the garland of an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

In Tesla vs. Edison, parts one and two, Evolutionist X is sick of all the prog dumping on the insufficiently titillating Edison. Tho’ the far more brilliant, Tesla had many psychological problems that normal human care and contact helps to ameliorate. Civilization needs both types.

HBD Chick has a reminder that human evolution is ongoing, recent, pretty rapid, and can be local.

Academic papers follow where Calls For Papers (CFPs) lead. JM Smith has a few in his field of geography over at The Orthosphere. One fav: “Legacies of Black Feminisms”. In geography. For real (apparently).

Russell Kirk lived long enough to see the “Information Society”. And comment upon it in Education and the Information Revolution.

Except for the learned professions, learning a trade is ill-suited to a college campus. If we convert higher education into technical training mostly, we may find ourselves living in what Irving Babbitt called “a devil’s sabbath of whirling machinery.”

That would be bad. But expansion of college education has managed to do even worse: these trade school grads are under impression that they are moral thought leaders. Also at Imaginative Conservative, Eva Brann talks about Understanding Imagination. Also a big sweeping article: Why Nixon’s Still the One.

The most dangerous thing, according to Al Fin, about Dangerous Children™ is their Dangerous Minds.

Dangerous Children learn contrary thinking by way of stories, songs, games and role playing, mock debates, and various creative productions written and produced by the Dangerous Children themselves. Independent, contrary modes of thought become second nature with very little — if any — prodding from mentors, parents, and coaches.

As the child grows older and ventures further into the larger skankstream, he will already have developed a natural immunity to the groupthink consensual delusions that abound out there.

“Skankstream” is one for the memebooks. Also: Why Dangerous Children are Taught to Build Their Own Weapons.

[I]n the end, we are all evolved from killers, else we would not be here at all. Violence — including lethal violence — will play a role in the coming expansion of an abundant human future.

Pacifists are not truly pacifists, if they are still alive. They have simply not thought the matter through yet — or have not yet been confronted by the harsh realities that await.

Al, who was very busy this week, also tackles the question: Where is Best Place to Raise Dangerous Children: City or Countryside?

Kill to Party has a trip down on-line dating memory lane with some recent updates in Online Dating and Post-Modern Reality.

Sunshine Thiry tells us about The Worst Mother-in-Law: Susan “Jeffers”, nee ((((Gildenberg)))).

Divorce regret is not something that’s supposed to exist. Dalrock makes sure it doesn’t go unremarked.

Real Gary outlines the ways in which The Episcopal Church Is Anti-Christian. A key step—perhaps a first step—on that path, is a failure to observe “the religious issue that temporal political issues are not matters for the church at all”. Also, Kosovo as a model for the European end-game: Crusade Or Jihad: Pick One. Also getting fed up this week: The Germans. In contrast, looks like Slovenia is getting not getting fed up enough. (Amazing infra-red looking video in that one.)

Chris Gale links and talks about a psychiatric study on very types of child abuse. Types of abuse are correlated, but not all in the same way. Interesting.

The Full Cane Caldo takes an admirable stand. All involved were (presumably) edified.

James E. Miller runs over-unders for our current crop of presidential candidates versing Putin. Trump may the best we have… from a very shallow pool.

The sad truth is there may not be any leader in America who can face down the steely-eyed Putin. We’re a nation of wimps. Social liberalism has rendered us cuckolded and ineffective.

Speaking of Putin, Pat Buchanan finds a lot to like in the guy. Me too.

J. Arthur Bloom is guy who connects a lot of people together. (Hopefully he’s got a deadman trigger on his iPhone.) So he pulls out a chair for Adam Gurri over at Front Porch Republic, who pens a fine article: An Ordinary Life and the Pitfalls of Greatness.

Looks like a younger Tony Iommi

I just have to link this from Ace. Because… Chris Cornell. Who is my favorite new (to me, LOL) artist. Wow: “The greatest weapon in a man’s arsenal is absence.”

Brett Stevens no longer buys Climate Change™ Hysteria, seeing it more as a cover for a far more insidious assault on nature. Also some thoughts on Truth & Consequences… and education. Which used to have a lot to do with truth. But not so much anymore.

Right Scholar has up Part 2 of his Mystical Bodies series: The Mystical Body of Christ and the Mystical Body of Anti-Christ.

Filed under Man of Diverse Interests, Cheshire Ocelot reads Consolation of Philosophy, Mangan’s Muscle Up and Hobbes’ Leviathan. At practically the same time.

Welp, if Peppermint wanted me not to link him, he’s gonna have to be way more needlessly offensive (and woefully mistaken) than this.

That’s all I had time for, folks. Keep those links coming. Support your local insufficiently progressive meetup and don’t go Alt-Right Donatist all over on it. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week, TRP is over and out!!