This Week in Reaction (2015/11/08)

Meta Week this week in This Week in Reaction…

Never one to pass a cleavage line without notice, nor fail to set up a drilling rig on the site, Nick Land wonders aloud about Corrosive Individualism. As usual, the real meat lies in the comments. (Especially Hurlock’s.) Because of its importance to #NRx internal culture and pathfinding, Land earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for that one. More on that topic here. To wit:

Free societies are a product of deeper things, all feedback complexities aside, but they are — from the perspective of techno-economic functionality — an evidently desirable one.

Also by way of Land: We told ya so.

Free Northerner takes a stab at What is Neoreaction? Formalism and neocameralism, he says. I think it is not merely those. It is also a critique of The Enlightenment, and a way of looking modern history from the perspective of evolutionary psychology and group/game dynamics. Thus it is a new foundation for social sciences—one devoid of, and hostile to, revolutionary advocacy. I’m giving this one an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ because of its importance to #NRx internal culture and metastate.

And another excellent essay from Free Northerner: Order and Freedom. It puts blue jeans on all that neoreactionary talk about social trust. Transaction costs are really the price we pay for people who refuse to live up to their handshake.

Order is freedom, chaos is tyranny.

Female Kurdish fighters prepare to fight to the death to defend their homes against ISIS

Seth Long has an interesting perspective on The Kurds: Undead Leftists from a Bygone Era. And nothing is more embarrassing to present-day Leftists than Bygone Leftists. Being bygone disqualifies you from the rank of Freedom Fighter.

Resist your secessionist urges! There be dragons!

Zombie-like, the Kurds are undead revolutionaries from a pre-globalist era, an era when leftism still had use for blood and soil. That makes them as untrustworthy to the progressive and neo-liberal elite as any redneck with a Confederate flag and a cache of illegal firearms.

Ross Douthat drops Moldbug’s name on the way to reviewing Houellebcq’s Submission at NYT.

Briggs will like this one… Warg Franklin talks about The Perils of Data Optimism over at TFP. (With a big Carlyle quote to boot.)

Also at Future Primaeval, Harold Lee The Mentorship Deficit. Now you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting someone saying, “Be a MENTOR!!” But there’s a catch nowadays…

[W]e’ve effectively placed a price ceiling on mentorship. Mentors can still teach individual skills and recount old war stories, but they are no longer allowed to be highly demanding of their protégés. And without a credible way to promise hard, dependable labor, it’s harder for would-be apprentices to justify their demands on the master’s time and efficiency. The supply of intensive mentoring dries up. And so people turn to self-help books, seeking guidance through the very choice-based mechanisms that rendered mentorship untenable.

True mentorship—where the mentor gets to be demanding on the mentee—has pretty much been bureaucratized out of existence (along with much else). In it’s place, the romantic notion of mentorship, with none of unpleasant obligations. Harold earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ with this one.

Reactionary Ferret warns against Confusions. Specifically conflating pragmatism with moral relativism.

E. Antony Gray has some very freshly minted verse: Holography.

Church? Or Courthouse?

Sarah Perry has a nice one at Ribbon Farm: Ritual Epistemology. What if the Justice System were primarily about making almost everyone feel more or less good about legal outcomes, and not really designed to achieve justice or find the truth? That’s probably what a Martian would think, if he examined it. If we doubled down on truth-finding and justice-achieving, would it make the system better? Probably not. Other things, muy expensive things—like medicine and education—can be given a similar treatment. What other things are not very much about what they’re putatively about? Sarah Perry has the special X-ray glasses. She earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this brief, for her, article.

Good stuff from Giovanni Dannato this week: A Creative Culture Requires A Leisured Elite. A word to the wise:

One small group of creative peers who needn’t fear for money are a more powerful force than an entire modern hive cluster of hundreds of millions where everyone is slave to money. Constant busyness at pointless jobs is one of the biggest drains of productivity, the slayer of creativity in a population. The overworked do not tolerate idle creativity in others. Like-minded people are the substrate on which the individual grows. Just as guerilla insurgents cannot survive without a sympathetic population to harbor them.

Related, he also wonders about Crowdsourcing as a Modern Patronage System. The introduction of Patreon funded youtube channel The Great War was alone worth the price of admission.

Also from Signiore Dannato: some excerpts from Uri Avnery’s essay The Obsolescence of the Nation State.

Esoteric Trad goes meta all over #NRx with Primary Loyalties, and earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This was timely: Mark Citadel’s Ruminations on Pan-Whitism. He says “yes” and “no”. I think he gets a lot right there. Also from Mark: Addressing Again the New Paganism. Paganism achieved its apotheosis in Christianity. Restore Christianity and you get the very best Paganism at no extra charge. For this pair of excellent articles, Mark earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Argent Templar stops by West Coast Reactionaries to look at candidates for the Year Zero. Adam Wallace also has a very unusual post: Nobody™ and Postmodern Antimodernism. Unusual, but worthwhile.

CWNY continues his meditations upon sentiment in More Precious Than Gold.

This Week at Social Matter

David Grant takes a wrecking ball to Enlightment myth-making with Inventing The State.

Traditionally, these origin myths for the state—and they are myths—are held to be antithetical: Locke advocates a limited, constitutional state, while Hobbes calls for authoritarian absolutism. However, the antinomy of Hobbes and Locke is just as much a myth, a myth justifying Leftism’s ideological ascendancy today.

He proceeds to outline a neoreactionary origin myth that gets a fair amount right.

Hadley Bishop makes a rare visit to analyze NPI’s recent Hallowe’en conference: Social Matter Visits #BecomeWhoWeAre In Washington, DC. A lot of good stuff there, especially about the antifa “protestors”:

You’re anti-racist? Edgy. I’m sure you’ll lose your job when that comes out.

Jack Donovan’s talk?

If you can ignore the androphilia and former associations with Satanism, Donovan is a good role model for young identitarians, which no offense, is perhaps the greatest possible indictment of ‘traditional’ American culture and masculinity you could ever dream up. The Bane reference in the talk was appropriate and hilarious. This is a must-watch talk.

Re: The meta?

[W]hat direction will the alt-right take over the next five years? The answer is that it will continue to explode, but will inevitably encounter the same obstacles as any burgeoning thede, namely that fame and media attention will attract parasites. It’s imperative those folks don’t gain status in the community, and it’s also imperative that the thede continues to build and attract high-status individuals.

Another point of concern is women, particularly cries for we need moar wimmenz.

Leave minority outreach to the GOP and libertarian crowds. Bring in or train up high-quality males, and the women will follow. Independent outreach to women as such is verboten. A helpful bit of social technology to avoid internal divisions is to consider girlfriends or wives in the thede as non-transferable property—that is, if Julie is with Greg and the two decide to part ways, she’s still considered off-limits to the rest of the group. This goes a long way in preserving the health of the thede. It preserves male friendships and avoids inefficient drama.

Henry Dampier comes on Thursday to discuss Why the Web Is Disappointing. Meet the New Revolution, just the same as the Old Revolution… only worse:

That it’s easier to access information of variable quality about any conceivable subject is true. What isn’t true is that that accessibility has much impact on the ability of people to become more knowledgeable.

If anything, the opposite happens – because people believe that they can retrieve relevant information from the internet whenever they need to, it creates the illusion that the painstaking accumulation of real knowledge and skill is no longer necessary.

Moar bad news:

Rather than peer to peer networks destroying media companies, they have instead proven largely irrelevant. Part of the reason for this is that companies like Facebook have enlisted that peer to peer communication in the cause of spreading the centralized corporate culture that early internet thinkers expected the new culture to rout around.

So what’s the take away?

Given that it’s challenging to change the whole of society in a positive way, the best that we can do as individuals and communities is to be discriminating about how we use technology, how we think about it, and how much we commit to big prophecies about what technology can really accomplish for us.

In particular, technological predictions tend to be either utopian or apocalyptic. The historical record shows that technological changes tend to be more complex.

This Week in 28 Sherman

Ryan Landry kicks off the week at his home blog with a deusy: When A Russian Mafia Is Not A Russian Mafia. A review of Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. Well “Russian” Mob, if ya catch Ryan’s drift. Along the way he has a nice point by point synopsis of the ’90s Russian Looting, and many under-told stories that the upper echelons of The Cathedral would prefer stay stay that way. This is a fantastic amount of good writing on a history that has been memory-holed from just about Day One. For the importance of the subject matter and the amount of work that went into this, Landry takes home the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Next up we have coverage of The China Two Child Policy Announcement. In spite of the absurdity of having an N-child policy ∀ N, China gets much right in family policy.

The Chicoms set up obstacles to bastards being allowed in schools. This is key as without the education track, kids cannot advance. Shhh, but it’s the same reason why whites keep their heads down about prog PC control (practice ketman). Bastards do not have the same rights. Therefore, women do not have kids out of wedlock. It seems simple to say that a child who has no investment or protection from the father should not have the same investment and protection from the state that a child with an invested father would have. The BBC calls it pro-patriarchy but we would look at that and say it is pro-civilization. Do not set up bad incentives.

Duh. I’m skeptical of the two-child policy doing much for China’s own coming demographic winter. Many other nations, including Taiwan, have lower total fertility rates, without any N-child policies, than China does with one. I suspect a brief boom for maybe 3-5 years, and then China will lock horns again with the deformations that inhere to modernity.

Here is Ryan on a Podcast With 2Kevins. I hadn’t heard of them. They sound Canuck as Hell. Pretty good show tho’.

And in This Week in WW1 Pics: Gallipoli

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter muses about bumper stickers in Slogan Supremacy. Some are more insipid than others. “Content of Character” sloganeering earns a special level of contempt:

For example, a petite white woman who finds a hulking black man following her from a club could either promptly find safety, or pause to evaluate the content of his character. It’s a task she may have the rest of her life to complete. Assuredly the SPLC and mainstream conservatism know its proper resolution: in the absence of perfect and unbiased knowledge, make no judgements at all. That is how gazelles end up in intestinal tracts, petite white women in obituaries, and societies in museums.

Speaking of ostentatious white pieties: Lymphocyte Cool.

Porter also has a new chapter in Hyphenated Justice. If it needs a hyphen, it ain’t justice we’re talking about.

And to round out the week, this is what happens when some liberals notice other liberals’ feet not keeping up with their words.

This Week… Elsewhere

Bonald is his usual fantastic in Conscience: Catholicism’s contribution to world sophistry. Which goes something like: “The pastoral thing to do is to keep the sinfulness of peoples’ actions secret from them.” How to kill this monster? Bonald lays out the plan. Also he has a few remarks On nerds.

Dalrock:

Most social commentators wonder why roughly half of first marriages end in divorce. However, the more relevant question is how can marriage stripped of all legal force survive in a culture where it is more moral to encourage divorce, or at least threats of divorce, than to encourage honoring marriage vows. How is it possible for so many marriages to survive when everyone agrees that divorce (and not marriage) is sacred, and the family courts back up this new morality with offers of cash and prizes to any woman who does the right thing and blows up her family? What is the “evil” that threatens our sacred institution of divorce?

Evolutionist X wonders Did Westward Expansion Cause the Civil War? Interesting piece. A lot more in there than just westward expansion. There’s a lot simpler way that westward expansion caused the civil war: Western states were not terribly interested in preserving the balance of the Missouri Compromise and the South saw the electoral writing on the wall. As for me, I’m becoming allergic to the word “cause”.

Thoughts upon the golden age of socialism (the 1910s) along with much else in Frida Kahlo and the Library.

Parts one and two (of something) over at Evolutionist X’s: Oppression is in the eye of the Beholder and Species of Exit: Pilgrims, Memes, and Genes. The latter delves into the role ethnicity played in the settlement of British North America. And not all English were created equal.

HBD Chick has a big research article on the various Germanies: eastern germany, medieval manorialism, and (yes) the hajnal line.

Ace puts it beautifully and succinctly:

Men must be strong.
Women must be resilient.

And if you think those are synonyms, you’re probably a woman.

Briggs calls down a pox on both wings of the house of Satan, but I have to admit the social justice do-gooding kind are way more pathetic. Moar on Mainstreaming Pedophilia. He goes down to The Stream with Environmentalists Who Dream of a World without Themselves. IOW, people who don’t need people. Gotta be a Broadway song in there somewhere.

Also Briggs brings down some rank denialism upon models of economic losses due to “climate change”. Denialism is another word for logic coupled with clear language. And a review (of sorts) of The Pope’s Favorite Novel: Lord of the World. Finally: This Week in Doom—Global Warming Propaganda Edition.

Malcolm Pollack has a new analogy for the American body politic: Viscoelastic Liquid. It’s better than most… analogies that is. He also links to this fantastic (apparently undated) essay about wolves, sheep, and sheep dogs:

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed.

A nice essay from J. M. Smith on not being a nut—in other words taking a balanced approach to life, which seems increasingly unlikely to be rewarded in the current regime, and so will have to be its own reward. And a second (in one week) from Smith: Our Vaunted Loveliness, Alas&mash;apposite thoughts on the sexbot and chatbot so-called revolution.

Eva Brann critiques Kant’s Opus Postumum. Also at Imaginative Conservative, a timeless and matchless quote from Russell Kirk.

Chris Gale gets a lift from Mark Christenson’s magisterial Social Matter article last week to discuss The Petunia Spiral. Also some thoughts on some less well-advertised costs of the War on Men. Hint: women hardest hit.

This week in Getting Fed Up: Polish Football Fans. Real Gary also wonders Is Donald Trump A Progressive Globalist? Yeah. Not really any surprise there.

Brett Stevens has a nice piece on The struggle for balance between church and state focusing on South African history as a way not to do it. Also a meditation on the ways Liberalism self-destructs. “Diversity” proves to be a particularly spectacular way. And then here Brett has an extended conversation with Dividuals, inter alia, in Success for me, but not for thee — the secret of guilt culture.

Al Fin has a lot to say about the importance of Curiosity in the heart of a dangerous child.

Filed under Hey It Was This Week For Me, Iparallax (who did not die) has a big piece on The Dangers of Categorized Thinking.

Terribly sorry this is so late. I may need to take an hiatus week just to catch up. At any rate, I’ll be back. Til then, keep on reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!