This Week in Reaction (2015/11/15)

This goes on top. This in a week of outstanding articles throughout the Greater Reactosphere® In light of the Islamicist Paris Attacks, an anonymous contributor to Social Matter addresses an open Letter to France from America. In it, he outlines the procedure and plan of neoreaction to return France to its former glory as a sovereign nation. Strong medicine to restore national health, not a prescription for an already healthy patient. RTWT. Here it is en français. Anonymous’ unusually (for him (or her)) well-edited letter was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Speaking of useful enemies, Jim offers an analysis of the Bay of Pigs operation.

The purpose of the Bay of Pigs operation, as actually implemented, was to prove that communism could not be rolled back because of the direction of history and the glorious liberation of the oppressed masses. History is supposedly on the side of the left, and if history fails to conform to script, it gets a helping hand.

One remove closer to the events in Paris, Jim notes: Yes, we are at war with Islam. A rather one-sided one these days:

When France rounds up illegals and dumps them in Africa or the Middle East, then France will be beginning to get serious. But no one can imagine such a thing, let alone propose it, for to imagine such a thing is a thought crime.

France is absolutely unserious about dealing with terrorism, and to even think seriously about dealing with terrorism is a crime no Frenchman will admit to committing.

Malcolm Pollack offers his advice in the aftermath of the Paris attack: What Now?

Harold Lee offers a deep meditation on Servants without Masters. It’s about how we in the west are perfectly comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, with master-slave relationships when (and only when) they are mediated by impersonal institutions.

It’s pretty perverse that our culture celebrates individualism and yet condones submission only to inhuman institutions like schools, companies, and governments. It’s a sort of inverse Confucianism – a system where authority can only be exercised by people who deliberately do not engage in one-on-one superior-inferior relationships. And while a principled liberal might dislike hierarchy in all its forms, if you’ve got to have one or the other, we’ve settled on the greater of the two evils. Both institutions and personal authority may have incentives imperfectly aligned with yours, but only personal leaders may disregard their incentives in the interests of their subordinates. And for the most part, institutional authority feels less human-shaped than personal authority – compare a visit to the DMV with filling out paperwork with a trusted secretary, or a minor pay raise compared to a minor pay raise with a handshake and word of thanks from a long-time boss and mentor.

For this singular and unexpected contribution to neoreactionary theory, Harold takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Nick Land is warming up to Calvinism. At least sufficiently severe strands of it.

Spandrell offers some devleopment of his Social Points theory: The Relentless Pursuit of Advantage. Also: Paris.

Sydney Trads have up a nice quote from Irving Babbitt who saw (and excoriated) Hyphenated Justice in 1924.

Professional right-wing woodland creature, Reactionary Ferret, has up some passing thoughts on Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie. Also, he notices (as did I last week) Hurlock’s excellent comments over at Xenosystems. As well remarks regarding last week’s attack in France. He sounds a hopeful note:

The entire world could benefit from the West adopting a more realpolitik stance. 1) Because we maintain strength by not allowing others to take advantage of us, 2) we also maintain strength by not stretching our resources into moralistic crusades, and 3) everyone else gets to live their own way because we’re not inflicting our moralistic policies upon them. Furthermore, when other cultures/nations/sovereignties begin to fail under the weight of their own stupid policies, the West would no longer continue the dysgenic practice of saving them from themselves and just allow them to decline – “evolution in action”

E. Antony Gray presents Cold Sun—inspired (#Triggered?) by this. “And let the cows flatulate….” So say we all. And inspired by the Paris events of 11/13, an imprecation: 11/13.

Image from within the Randall Park Mall at a more optimistic time.

Antidem, thoughtful and thought-provoking as always, writes about The Day They Tore Down The Future. The Future™ that is. Also, an essay observing last week’s 40th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald carefully named Sinking. His thoughts turn to the sort of men who died that day, and how they are becoming an elusive species:

As hard as this may be to remember, leftism was actually founded in order to protect farmers and factory workers from bourgeois, decadent, effete, overeducated, libertine urbanized elites. That’s why its symbol was a workman’s hammer and a farmer’s sickle. As one might have expected from a philosophy so ignorant of both economics and human nature, leftism ended up doing the exact opposite of what it set out to do; it has come to be used as a weapon by the people it deplored against the people it was trying to help. The working class has been abandoned. The Republicans never cared about them, and the Democrats were last seen even pretending to care about them in a Dick Gephardt speech sometime around 1989. The face of modern leftism is upper-middle-class white women with Master’s degrees in economically useless fields complaining about the content of video games, while what used to be the native-born working class sinks deeper into poverty, hopelessness, purposelessness, welfare dependency, oxycontin and/or methamphetamine abuse, and self-destructive sexual irresponsibility.

Seth Long has parte deux of his series on the Kurds From Marxists to Center-Left Liberals. Also, the real reason women can serve in combat units now: Deep State has decided it doesn’t need combat units.

Intellectual Detox has up a rather comprehensive Worthy Books: A Reading List.

Atavisionary shares some experiences with and examples of Standardized Tests and Propaganda. The term “sloot” is new to me, but immediately and obviously useful. His commentary on the excrable Margaret Mead is quite wonderful.

Nydwracu has (what I hope is purely) an allegorical story about putatively lucky boxes of termites: A difficult question.

CWNY’s epistle this week: Democracy Must Die So Our People Can Live.

This Week at Social Matter

Coming soon to a suburb near you.

Ryan Landry talks about How Uncle Sam Will Move Blacks To The ‘Burbs. He sees Wall Street Big Money, bound to the hip of Democratic policy for about one generation now, playing an outsized rôle in the process.

The progressives in charge of the federal government have a desire: disperse the blacks and free up the cities with minimal public confrontations. Wall Street has a need: maximize yield and reduce risk. What major force will represent the interests of exurbanites and suburbanites from seeing their neighborhoods get a taste of Detroit, St. Louis and Gary, Indiana? No one. Sorry, exurbs and suburbs, but the DC-Wall Street axis will use your safe, quiet communities to experiment with for profit.

Sonja Sonnerström had a controversial article this week: What The Right Gets Wrong About Putin. So controversial that it got ((((“Shut it down”)))). It was surprisingly screed-like, which for Sonja is surprising, because she is not much of a screeder. Safe to say that navigating the Putin Question is a choppy and difficult one for the Alternative Right. Others have pointed to Candide’s Putinophilia as a balanced alternative.

Rounding out the week, as mentioned above, a very special contribution from “Anonymous”: A Letter To France.

This Week at 28 Sherman

USA and Israel

Over at his home blog, Ryan Landry kicks off the week being a fly on the wall at Catalina wine mixer. A whole lotta love for Marco (((((Rubio))))).

Filed under writing the Second Draft of History: Who Attacked Benghazi? Who stood to (((benefit)))?

Another one of Landry’s kooky, but never altogether implausible, story ideas: Batman: On the Couch.

This set up is Bruce Wayne gets in a scrape, and despite his wealth buying his way out of any whiff of jail time, as a first time offender in a fight, he gets court ordered psychiatric help for anger management. Wayne is annoyed by this, but the 10-12 issue arc explores Bruce Wayne’s mind, how he compartmentalizes the Batman personality, the game he plays with the shrink to hide his identity, how his relationships with the rogues gallery of villains have taken on the role of friends and ultimately, Bruce Wayne changes a little bit but he is still Batman.

It practically writes itself!

Finally in pics from WW1 A Spy Is Executed. The only one publicly tried in either world war.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter has Mizzou Silliness coverage in A Sheep in Wolfe’s Clothing.

Filed under Damn Lies & Statistics: Sophistry’s Maine Problem.

Birth tourism takes a turn for the worse, but with cash and prizes to compensate, in Sleeping with the Certainties.

This Week… Elsewhere

Right Scholarship delivers part 3 of his Mystical Bodies series: “Every spirit that dissolveth Jesus”: The anti-Christ in electronic media. The divorce between real action and reward centers comes in for particular scrutiny.

The closed media environments of the Mystical Body of anti-Christ, on the other hand, simulate the world, replacing the sacred with the simulacral and the incorporeal with the merely virtual. The religion that blossoms in these environments is a sort of digital Gnosticism–an echo of the Docetist heresy fought against by St. John and later St. Augustine and others. The believers of Docetism, who represent one variation of the larger Gnostic heresy, managed to “dissolveth Christ” by claiming that Jesus was an entirely spiritual being, and that His human body was merely a convincing simulation.

IOW: Wireheading. Right Scholar earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Matt Briggs rips apart That Study Claiming Religious Kids Are Less Altruistic. Also: When Colleges Divest, Who Wins? Hint: Not The Colleges. And at The Stream: The Joys of Divesting from Reality (And Not Just Oil). And let us not forget: This Week in Dooooom—Mizzouo & Paris Edition.

The Orthosphere welcomes Professor Richard Cocks (and with a name like Cocks you know he’s gotta be good (and careful about sexual harassment)) aboard, who has a big and excellent article on Cultural Diversity. Then in light of Friday’s Paris Attacks, some updates here.

Also at The Orthosphere Kristor is very good On the Delicacy of Civilization.

Even the criminal and the gangster must feel, and enact, a certain loyalty to the civil order, upon which after all their own depredations depend for their profits. And this is a loyalty not merely nominal, but also, and primarily, personal, and indeed moral. Gangsters will go to war for the nation they love. What more is war than this, after all? What is it, more than men of all sorts and conditions burying their familiar and tribal disagreements and banding together in a coordinate connational gang to defeat another gang?

[…]

Civilization is tremendously robust so long as the culture and cult that subvene it defend themselves consistently and thoroughly against their challengers. Practically speaking, the success of that defense depends upon unanimity – upon a pervasive, general, even pre-conscious loyalty to the basic propositions of society, and to the fellows who embody them. Men commit to each other, as friends and brothers; but friends and brothers are known in the first place by their shared loyalty to the cult that, as expressing the logos of their polis, they all love, and would if put to it die for. Such is morale: confidence that one’s folk is in the right, and that right must in the end prevail, nor death nor harrowing nor heartbreak.

Kristor earns yet another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Coming soon… to a college campus near you.

In light of the latest round of hysteria unleashed on college campuses, Bonald has a superb essay on Academic Freedom.

[T]he freedom in question has always been understood as the autonomy of the academic guild against interference by some outside force like the Church or the state. It has little to do with the freedom of individual scholars against their peers, even though it is often formulated so as to seem to be about this. In other words, “academic freedom” is the defense of a particular authority, which makes it easier for me as a reactionary to get behind it.

Institutional sovereignty. You don’t like this institution, go find another. Can’t find one? Build your own. But do not think you have a “right” to have a voice in this one. This is formalism at it’s finest. Now neoreactionaries criticize academia hard. Really, really hard. We want not one stone of Harvard left upon another, for example. This is not figurative language. Anton Silensky says he would turn Harvard into a shoe company. This is not because we feel we have some sliver of say, some epsilon of ownership in Harvard, but because Harvard is the sovereign territory of our enemies. Bonald gets a well-deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Evolutionist X digs up a lot of data for Pre-Civil War Election Results by State in support of the hypothesis that “conservative” people left New England in say the century leading up to 1860, leaving a behind a more “liberal” population to oppose slavery. Defining terms is, obviously, a huge problem.

The first difficulty in compiling this data was deciding who the “liberal” candidates were. I eventually decided to dispense with the notion entirely […]. Rather, there is a very clear pattern in the data of Massachusetts and Virginia voting for different parties; MA and the other Puritan states tend to vote together, while VA and the rest of the South tend to vote together. Taken over the long haul, the voting pattern looks more like two ethnically-based parties than two ideologically based parties. Since I am not interested here in some Platonic ideal of “liberalness”, but merely the ideas that prompted the Northern attitudes toward the Civil War, I decided to regard whichever party was dominant in MA (the most consistently anti-whoever-won-VA state) as the “liberals.”

Ding ding ding ding ding. It’s a chicken and egg problem I think. Here’re Moar Data.

She has part 3 of Ruminations upon Calvinsts and Indians: The Attempt to Convert the Indians to Memetic Puritanism. This was a really interesting article and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Moar Good Stuff® from Evolutionist X as she considers The architecture of communication. The Bay of Pigs serves, perhaps not incontrovertibly, for the dangers of group think. Either way, group think works well, until it doesn’t. No one wants to be an “asshole”, until the assholes are the only ones making it out alive. Anonymity proves key to getting honest opinions, divested from reputation:

Places like 8Chan run completely anonymously, eschewing even reputation. You have no idea if the person you’re talking to is the same guy you were talking to the other day, or even just a few seconds ago. Here, there are basically no negative repercussions for saying you think Ike’s invasion plan is made of horse feces. If you want to know all the reasons why your idea is dumb and you shouldn’t do it, 8Chan is probably the place to ask.

Next she asks Is Genius Fragile? Or rather: How fragile is it?

Over at Imaginative Conservative, a nice essay Why You Should Stay in Your Hometown. All things approximately equal, it is much to be preferred. Unfotunately these days, the forces militating against growing old where you grew up are strong. Most of them unintended consequences.

Chris Gale reflects upon Whither the Church goeth, so doth Society follow.

Cane Caldo outlines The Trouble with Chicks Teaching Submission.

With an assist from Free Northerner’s (award winning) “Order & Freedom” essay last week, Anathemitized Truth has some solid thoughts on the hidden costs of deviancy tolerance in Order, Liberty, Unwritten Rules, and the Specter of Butt-Sex: Varieties of Social Decay:

At first glance, it looks like irony, but on closer examination, it is obvious. The societies in which sodomites are thrown from buildings are precisely the ones in which two men can hold hands without suspicion.

So what about pedo-tolerance?

Even if pedo-acceptance never increases the chance of children being abused (which is hard to imagine) and it somehow stops at the part of the slippery-slope where the desire is acknowledged but not acted on (it won’t), we are still building a world where every uncle, every clergyman, and every little league coach is constantly under a cloud of suspicion and eventually, no-one will want to interact with any child who isn’t their own.

Since social trust doesn’t come with a price tag, the liberal takes that to mean it’s free. The reactionary realizes that it means it costs more than he can afford.

B. W. Rabbit is planting his flag not so much on right as white. “No Enemies to the White” is a clever turn of phrase, but runs into some immediately obvious problems. I do wish him the best though.

Real Gary has a glimmer of good news: UNESCO Rejects Kosovo Membership. And… a fantastic opportunity for trolling here: Have You Encountered Racial Conflict On Campus? Also a post-Paris Attacks prediction that rings rather plausible: The Globalists will not let this crisis go to waste.

Greg Cochran has a few comments on Clever Silllies.

Brett Stevens has some well-targeted remarks on Science and Neoreaction.

[T]he children blessed with the riches of science have squandered an inheritance of Croesus in a manner reminiscent of the Prodigal Son. The monetization, the politicization and the deification of science have all deflected intellectual inquiry and watered down its rigor to the point that it no longer successfully assists human endeavor. In attempting to immanentize the eschaton* through the mystical invocation of some sciency, far-out science god, the newest of The Modern have deliberately missed the point.

He also has a whole lotta thoughts on Death through Altruism: The European Achilles Heel. Pathological altruism is, I think, a failure mode of Christianity, but not Christianity itself. Also Why do Universities Still Exist? Good question.

On again, off again Dennis Dale is definitely on with The Brown Inquisition, commentary on the Academic Black Advocacy Industrial Complex:

Black culture is powerful—which is not the same as saying it’s good for us. Before civil rights blacks were compelled to emulate white norms but were not expected to excel whites in achievement. To essentially be second-rate white people.

Now, due to the seductive power of black culture and the perception of black superiority in those things a decadent society values, or at least obsesses over–sexuality, physicality, brutality even–blacks have managed to flip the American script. Faced with the same obvious racial differences but with the old restrictions removed, black culture is winning. Instead of a country with a minority black population emulating whites we’ve become a country with a majority white population emulating blacks. Uncle Tom is out; Uncle Tim is in.

This Week in Croatian Reaction: Terorizam. Reakcionar certainly has this bit right:

Bez političke volje za očuvanjem zapadne civilizacije rješenja nema.

Al Fin asks (and answers) What’s Wrong with “Higher Education?”

Simon Wolfe has a pretty solid Reaction to the Paris Attacks.

Only a day late. I’m improving. See you next week. (Hopefully on Monday…) Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!