This Week in Reaction (2015/11/22)

My apologies for being so late this week. Will attempt to catch up over this long week-end… It was a tremendous week this week in the sphere. Fantastic articles, some of which you may have missed. If so, I am here to help…

Jim describes How to deport eleven million people. If Australia’s modest successes along these lines form any sort of pattern, it’s not as hard as you might think. I love especially his construction: “the merely elected government”, which no one much notices until it’s aims conflict with the real (unelected) government. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Also here are some videos showing Yes, all Muslims are like that. Or at least enough like that for exceptions to prove the rule.

Neocolonial pulls up notes on Taxation as Relationship.

The question at the heart of this is whether taxation based upon a notion of slavery, upon coercion, upon serfdom, upon scheduled pillaging, can ever be moral.

His point being that each of those sounds evil under a purely institutional relationship, but more or less acceptable under a personal one. And the personal relationship is precisely the sort of thing that the West has spend the last 400 years or so trying to banish. Another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Mark Citadel pens his own Open Letter to France. He takes quick aim at France’s devotion to the god of reason.

What sympathy can be found for a man who feeds his arm to a lion? None. A once proud nation, one of the finest in Christendom, reduced to rubble in just a few hundred years. Don’t complain about the fanaticism of the Islamic State for they only conduct themselves in accordance with their god. And remember what your adopted god of reason has commanded, France. You must be tolerant, and root out racism wherever you find it. Your sons must be taught about their hidden gender identity rather than how to defend themselves. You must have fewer and fewer babies to ensure France’s ethnic diversity continues to flourish. Slaves are bound to obey their masters, and the master you have chosen for yourself commands you take a straight razor across your throat. OBEY!

This too was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Reactionary Tree has National Association for the Advancement of Kosher People—a well-balanced expose on Jewish involvement in (arguably domination of) the NAACP.

Esoteric Trad has a run-down with many thoughts here: The Quick and the Dead. Observations on Paris. Also another Mists of Albion podcast: Paris and the Urban Jihadist.

Nick Land notices Niall Ferguson noticing “this is exactly how civilisations fall“. Moldbug beat Ferguson to the punch. Also from Scott Alexander’s toxoplasma to Land’s Vauung.

Spandrell catches New York Times in a Wile E. Coyote Moment with It’s your fault for resisting. Sweden it seems is more advanced than others in illustrating the rule that if polite people are not allowed to be realistic about race, then the only people being realistic about race are impolite people.

But everything is an abstraction. The FDA don’t suffer personally the consequences of their decisions. Well they do eventually, if somebody gets cancer. But that’s far removed from the decision, and it’s all in the realm of possibility. But that’s not the way politics work. Human groups don’t make decisions like that. It’s not what, or how; politics is about who and whom, who is your friend and who is your foe, who is a useful associate and who isn’t. The left is a social club. A social club which allots status points according to allegiance to some abstract ideological principle, which changes all the time.

And?

If Sweden, or France, can’t make good policy because that would undermine their own legitimacy; then under a democratic system of open debate, all governments all the time will find themselves in the same situation. If having an opposition prevents you from doing good policy then we should not have oppositions. Democracy doesn’t work. I didn’t say this; the New York Times did. Not that I disagree.

What happens next is left as an exercise to the reader. Or you can click on over there and RTWT. Also from Spandrell: Thoughts, contra Moldbug to some extent, on North Korea. And lo… Open Borders: the Novel. LOL.

E. Antony Gray pens an ode To a Persian Rug.

In an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Atavisionary discusses increasingly delusional maoist stupidity afflicting Mizzou, within the context of what amounts to a review (a big one) of the remarkably prescient movie comedy PCU.

Over at Forward Base B, Giovanni Dannato thinks that Overrated Rationality is the Enlightenment Mistake. Not a mistake; but the mistake. I think basically he’s right about that. But humans don’t need to be baboons for him to be right about that.

Moar from Giovanni: Abstract Reasoning is What Makes Us Human. This one was very good. (If not entirely pleasingly formatted.)

Where instinct is not enough, the greater human formulates strategies.

This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. RTWT!

Our man on the ground en España, Carlos Esteban brings us El Islam y Occidente. Providence, it seems, favors the winners. Or at least that’s how historians tend to see it.

Occidente, todavía hegemónico, es una civilización eminentemente moral, lo que significa que siempre ha tenido necesidad de buscar una justificación ética a su dominio, basada en una concepción cristiana de la vida. Perdida esta, descristianizadas nuestras élites y en bastante medida la base misma de la sociedad, la consecuencia no ha sido el fin de toda traba moral, sino un enloquecimiento intelectual, un extraño deseo de muerte, un inexplicable masoquismo civilizacional abanderado por nuestros intelectuales pero que ya ha calado en todas nuestras estructuras.

In other words, we really are the good guys. But trying to be holier than Jesus doesn’t seem to be working out too well. One of the unintended pathological consequences of getting rid of the sacrament of penance, I think.

Free Northerner hopes that the European backlash will be better controlled than Le Petite Mort. But he’s not optimistic.

Reactionary Ferret finds a case of moral signaling in a surprising place.

CWNY dreams of A Homeland for Whites and advises us what must come before it.

This Week in Social Matter

Goldman Sachs Tower, Jersey City, NJ

Over at the Flagship Publication of Neoreaction, Ryan Landry kicks off the week with his Sunday Big Think™ Piece The System, SCALE, and Scams. SCALE: Size, Complexity, Automation, Liberalization, Elitism. Also making a cameo NINJAs: No Income, No Job, or Assets.

For our current political-economic system, [banks cashing out on bad mortgages] cannot be allowed to happen. The five biggest U.S. banks control half of the industry’s total assets. These banks fund our political elites and need government sanction and blessing to continue their control over the allocation of capital not just in America, but within the American empire. These same banks have the majority of total derivatives, as the government’s lack of regulation of derivatives acts as an economic moat for those same banks. If the banks go down, the danegeld holding together the Left is threatened and large corporations suddenly have to adjust long-term planning.

David Grant returns Monday with Not With Gold. A timely meditation on the West’s current troubles through the lens of a 9th Century seige of Paris.

When a strongman attains power, he does so by violence, or at least more violence than alternative archetypes use. This is a result of the circumstances which occasion the strongman’s rise. There are stories of non-violent leaders putting an end to chaos—Herodotus has one—but these are rare. Chaos involves violence, and so does ending it.

Hubert Collins sidles up to the wordpress editor on Wednesday to show how Hispanic Immigration Will Make Secession In The US More Difficult. Needless to say, we do not see this as a selling point for Hispanic immigration. There are many reasons to oppose the vast bulk of Hispanic immigration, but Collins makes the case that Hispanics, by their history, seem to be uniquely averse to it. Not averse to any other kind of political turmoil, mind you. Only the sort that we, as Europeans, would think the least bloody: peaceful separation. An interesting theory, well worth more study.

This Week in 28 Sherman

Over on his home blog, Ryan Landry continues his Social Matter article with a history lesson: China, Forex and Robert Rubin.

Now America is on the verge of importing Buicks made in China. America was suppose to be sending Buicks to sell to the Chinese market. Did not happen. Their consumer goods market is 40% counterfeit, and it’s not like anyone in America’s power structure is going to push to force American made goods onto Chinese shelves. This is because of Clinton’s [Most Favored Nation Status for China] decision. In reality, it is because Clinton sided with Robert Rubin’s decision to benefit the FIRE economy’s interests rather than the manufacturing economy’s interests.

Turning attention to culture on Tuesday, he asks But How Right Will Houllebecq Be? Landry finds reading Houellebecq “like reading one of us but with tremendous writing skills.” But how accurate will his jeremiads prove to be?

In multiple books, he has portrayed the Last Frenchman as one with nothing to pass on, disconnected from France’s past, sex obsessed, empty, passionless, seeking a rush (vitalism) in relations with non-French women because the taboo of the other and the other’s taboos against sex. French women are portrayed just as poorly, yet both genders find meaning and joy when they connect love, passion and emotion into their sexual encounters. That is when they finally try, and stop rejecting ancient gender duties and roles.

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

Landry also has some thoughts (and video) surround Upbeat Downer Songs. Serotonin receptors were getting overloaded at least as early as 1966 it would seem. I have to second his pick of 3EB’s Semi-Charmed Life. That entire eponymous album appears to have been approximately about… serotonin overload.

And This Week in Pics From WW1: Morbid Humor.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter kicks off the week by turning to Napoleon Counsels. His commentary, as usual, is pithy with some bones tossed to men of a certain age:

So why do Americans pay $852 billion for quote-unquote national defense? Is it to annihilate the camel spider caliphate? If so, it’s an extraordinarily inefficient means of self-protection. The capacity of islamic militants to harm us is directly proportional to their presence in our countries, not to how many bugs we obliterate in the Syrian desert. I am intrigued to learn what effect French bombs in Syria will have on the festering Parisian banlieues where so much hostile alien sentiment is safely incubated. Every sortie in Hollande’s impotent operation should be accompanied by Bob Uecker’s baseball commentary: Juuust a bit outside.

As for France, Napoleon it seems would not approve.

Next up in This Week in (Refined) Outrage: A Sweet Gesture. Outrage because it is not an isolated occurrence.

Porter takes us back to the almost unrecognizably sane classical liberal admonitions of Washington’s Farewell Address.

He has Lessons in the Library. Coming soon to a library near you…

Fear not only of black savagery, but of the state’s nearly explicit sanctioning and defense of it. Would you like to know the response of Dartmouth’s administration to an act that if carried out by whites would have resulted in activation of the national guard? They apologized… to the blacks.

This Week… Elsewhere

Evolutionist X has a two part series on Prohibition: Did European Filthiness lead to Prohibition? and Beer, Cholera, and Public Health. Lots of fun stuff in there. From the former:

In the 1860s, the Irish comprised over half of all arrests in NYC; amusingly, they were also almost half of the police. To this day, the Irish continue to serve their communities as police officers and fire fighters, and also criminals. According to the Wikipedia, “the Irish topped the charts demographically in terms of arrests and imprisonment. They also had more people confined to insane asylums and poorhouses than any other group. The racial supremacy belief that many Americans had at the time contributed significantly to Irish discrimination.

[…]

Of course, since this was still the era of Segregation, “Coloreds” didn’t live among Puritans, but the Irish did.

Or as I like to call ’em: the Coloreds of Europe. As always, it comes generously-linked and well-researched.

This was quite good a seminal contribution to neoreactionary theory. The Homeostasis theory of disease, personality, and life. And part 2. From part 2:

If modern people are coming down with mental illnesses at astonishing rates, then maybe there is something about modern life that is making people ill. If so, treating the symptoms may make life more bearable for people while they are subject to the disease, but still does not fundamentally address whatever it is that is making them sick in the first place.

From women taking prescribed antidepressants… all the way to Tumblristas. All symptoms I think. For her great efforts in this series, and pushing the frontiers of NRx Theory, Evolutionist X wins her second (IIRC) ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Speaking of lessons in the library, Evolutionist X also takes a look at The Most Important People in History. Not too many surprises. Yet, she still considers it

a fucking tragedy that the guys who saved the lives of millions of people are less famous than some woman who crashed a plane into the Pacific Ocean.

So say we all.

More on the Paris Attacks from Man-Sized Target:

What makes no sense through the lens of national interest, or even mere ideology, makes perfect sense when viewed through the prism of “Is it good for Israel?”

Cane Caldo takes The Full and Fair Measuring of Adultery-by-Porn.

B. W. Rabbit has launched AltLeft.com. Or in other words national socialism.

Clark (Hat) Bianco has some notes from The Future™ on The Current Refugee Crisis.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Bruce Frohnen pulls out a can of whupass on Daimon Linker with College Professorships: Conservatives Need Not Apply? Also, Joseph Pearce asks: Where Have All the Grown-Ups Gone? Good question. Pat Buchanan asks the obvious: Time for a Moratorium on Immigration? And answers the obvious too.

Over at The Stream, Matt Briggs marvels about “Global warming! Is there nothing it cannot do?” He ascends his well-worn soap box: Stop Teaching Frequentism; More On That “Altruism” Study. Also real fiat currency is on the line with Keenan’s $100-Grand Climate Challenge. And of course… This Week in Doom—Mainstreaming Degeneracy Edition.

Refuting actual heresy is fun, but refuting vague gestures is boring. Bonald calls Burnout:

But with Kasperism, there’s no “there” there. It’s just a bunch of soundbites about “mercy” and whatnot that nobody even attempts to apply consistently (e.g. no mercy for “racists”). They’re not even ideas; they’re just slogans meant to signal piety and throw skeptics momentarily off guard. And this is where the Church has chosen to direct her collective mind. Not only is it stupid and boring, even its refutation is an uninteresting intellectual chore, patiently pointing out the equivocations and inconsistencies while the world ignores and Francis moves on to his next harangue.

Also from Bonald, problem #4,126 with America’s tertiary education system. And… More on pseudonymity. tl;dr? “Hell, yeah!”

And here is Bonald, in an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, with Naziism as the triumph of love over morality. If you follow liberal logic, that’s where it leads.

The authority of the universal moral law is acknowledged, but its content is disputed. This is the way of the traditionalists.

Suppose liberal morality is all one knows, so the traditionalist way is not available. A man, a white gentile let’s say, instinctively loves his people, his ancestors and their ways. Then he hears predominantly Jewish moralists condemning them as wicked, unjust, and oppressive. His instinct is to be angry, but as he listens to the condemnation, he is forced to admit its validity. The only standard of justice he knows stands with the Jews and against his kind. What can he do? Justice itself demands that he renounce his own father, but how can he do such a monstrous thing?

One can, in other words, reject the authority of the universal moral law.

Kristor brings a valuable perspective with The Verdict of Paris. This part was supremely well put:

Among the galaxy of confusions evident in our leaders, the confusion between crime and attack is among the most important and often manifest. We hear always about “bringing terrorists to justice,” when justice ain’t in it. Such talk is confused, and confusing. One cannot but think that, the confusion being so very obtuse, it must be intentional, and tendentious.

But his primary point seems to be:

No doubt ISIS thinks of itself as fighting Christianity, and the West that crushed Islam from the Siege of Vienna onward. But it is not! It is fighting the vicious disease of the West that took root at World War I, and blossomed after World War II. Granted, to be sure, ISIS has damaged us. But only collaterally. Its main attack is aimed at the Establishment of the West, and that Establishment hates the West.

So, to the extent that Muslim terror sabotages the West, it is sabotaging that salient within the West that is interested to sabotage the West. One enemy of the West is at war with another.

Dr. Peter Blood checks back in with a book review: Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. A very thorough review I might add. Almost saves people from reading the book. Almost.

Malcolm Pollack discusses whether values are universal.

Real Gary does the Religion of Peace math in Islam By The Numbers. Also This Week in Getting More Fed Up: Polish Firearms Enthusiasts Oppose Brussels.

West Coast Reactionaries have completed the transcription of Julius Evola’s unpublished 1971 interview in parts four, five and six.

Thrasymachus does a well-balanced analysis on Trump. Which sounds just about right to me.

Cheshire Ocelot takes a look at Richard Weaver’s great, and apparently quite timeless, classic Ideas Have Consequences in his LXXV Books series. Inter alia.

Chris Gale is superb here in his analysis of the Lukewarm War: Malthus, total war, the West. One of many bon mots:

So the Wahabites decided, in their Salafist (I am using the terms interchangeably, and as insults) stupidity, that the best thing to do was kill random people because that would ensure that the host nations would accept the millions of unemployable young men that the host nations could no longer feed. Because the Islamic must be the most blessed people: and they must rule. Because Mohammed.

Brett Stevens is pretty good here on The importance of civilization.

An oncologist would recognize liberalism for what it is, a parasitic organism comprised of the lower echelons of society attempting to destroy the higher. It has no more complex ideation; it is simple resentment, based on the universal tendency of every group to clobber whichever other groups it can dominate. Because its members are less brave than socially crafty, it works entirely through passive aggression, at least until it has the numbers to go on the usual murderous rampage.

What Stevens calls “liberalism” we tend to call “leftism”, but other than that quibble, it’s a remarkably accurate description of the phenomenon. Also Safe spaces must be destroyed.

This Week in Croatian Reaction brings Cuckservatives Dio Drugi. He covers a lot of Moldbuggian ground.

Filed under Of Courshe I Missed It: Those Who Can See, magisterial as always (second draft of history, really), brings us Crashing the Gates: A Crash Course.

Sorry this is so late… Sunday’s date on it… and it’s THANKSGIVING. So Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! See you next week. Keep on reactin’! TRP… Over an out!!