This Week in Reaction (2015/12/06)

Incredible week here in the Reactosphere®. Editorial note: This account of a Belgian couple’s adventure through the DRC is rapidly become an inadvertent #NRx Classic. I knew Moldbug was popular in France… we’ll see how he plays in Belgium.

Mark Citadel has a go at Setting Things Right as to what defines Genuine Reaction®. It’s not about policies as it is a way of thinking (and feeling) about culture and civilization in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

By contrast to [conservatism], the Reactionary opposes radical change based upon history as a whole. His politics is not local, it is cosmic, in the sense that he reacts to a change in epoch rather than a change in individual governmental structure or leadership. A la Guénon and Evola, the world in the eyes of he who is gifted with sight represents a cleaved reality, broken in two by the ravages of the ‘Enlightenment’. If the Fall is symbolic of man’s disconnection from the innocence of God, then the Enlightenment is symbolic of man’s disconnection from the wisdom of God, and the reverence He is owed. The system that has come to be known as the World of Tradition, representing the largely unchanged underlying assumptions of human life prior to the end of the last epoch, has moved beyond view over the horizon line in the rear view mirror.

The modern battle is not so much religion getting in on the act of politics as it is politics usurping the rightful role of religion in society. This is why, according the Neoreactionary Theory, our enemies are identified by the markers of the priestly caste (Brahmins), far more so than those of the merchant class (vaisyas). Vaisyas with too much political power certainly can pose a problem. But when self-appointed priests get out of hand, that’s when the Big Problems begin. The reactionary alone is truly a-political:

The Reactionary who sits to the right of the monarch is a witness not only to an emergent political conflict, but in truth what that emergence entails: an epoch coming to an end and giving way to something new, something with earth-shattering ramifications. All those party to this neoteric development in the foundations of human civilization, not religious politics, but politics as religion, are defined as the dogmatic left.

Giovanni Dannato considers An Aesthetic Declaration of Independence. It is dynamite—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

There never was a very rebellious soul who had Jif or Skippy peanut butter and Campbell’s soup in their pantry. Brand-name comfort foods connect people to childhood memories of nurture and care, allowing people to feel like warm fuzzy parts of a meaningful tribe even as mass society parasitizes them. By the same token it is extremely powerful to dismantle these visceral attachments and replace them. To do this is to truly rebel and turn one’s back on a corrupt culture that feeds on its own. To follow a culture’s aesthetic is an act of powerful ritual significance that ties one to it on a subconscious level. No matter how people might hate their lives within a society, they are trapped so long as peform the rituals of obeisance.

If we believe politics is downstream from culture, loving one’s country while hating its government is not enough. Real repair begins when you hate the culture that gave rise to this dysfunctional government in the first place.

Mrs. Sarah Perry returns to Ribbonfarm with An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink. Much of the the article is spent outlining the types of ecosystems that affect biological species. But this in no ways dulls the brilliance when they are turned into analogues for socio-ideological species. As always, Mrs. Perry is fantastic, and as always hard to summarize. So here’s a taste:

Alcohol prohibition in the United States constituted both a ritual destruction and a pesticide-style management policy. Relatively healthy ritual environments for alcohol consumption, resulting in substantial social capital, were destroyed, including fine restaurants. American cuisine was set back decades as the legitimate fine restaurants could not survive economically without selling a bottle of wine with dinner. In their place, short-life-history ritual environments, such as the speakeasy, sprung up; they contributed little to social capital, and had no ritual standards for decorum.

[…]

Early 20th century and modern prohibitions clearly don’t eradicate short-life-history drug rituals; rather, they concentrate them in their most harmful forms, and at the same time create a permanent economic niche for distributors.

No stranger to the highest stage, Perry wins another☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Now go and RTWT!

Alrenous has some additional thoughts on Nick Land’s disappointing underperforming Chinese genius: “a smart sheep is still a sheep”.

Land’s disgust with the incentive structures is true, but it was far too late to do anything about it by the time Ung-Yong was born. China’s geniuses are suppressed at the genetic level – they don’t need social suppression like they do in America.

He also offers a few mild correctives of Jim in Some Applied Prudence/Property Morality.

Speaking of Jim, he’s back to one of his many hobby horses: Technological decay—Air Superiority/Shmair Shmuperiority Edition. Classic Jim:

When Dubai wants to build a tall building, it hires western experts. But those western experts are expatriates, semi permanent exiles from the west. They have foreign wives, girlfriends, and concubines. They don’t build tall buildings in the West because a horde of bureaucrats would shake them down for bribes (politely laundered through “consultants”, aka bagmen) and because they could not get any decent pussy in the west.

Nick Land finds a glimmer of hope in the US Space Act of 2015. Also this: The reason why Sane non-Muslims hate Islam.

Malcolm Pollack is not giddy about the Coming Collapse: This Ain’t No Disco.

Whether we will be able to build something worthwhile upon this rubble is doubtful at best, and even if we manage it, it may take a very long time. High civilizations, and in particular high-trust societies, do not grow upon trees, and they are by no means the default human condition. Whatever follows a general collapse, or a civil war, in the West will not be a swashbuckling plot from a Robert Heinlein novel; it is far more likely to be a time of brutality, poverty, suffering, uncertainty, and fear.

Others may snap their fingers at the noble experiment now coming apart in America, and may imagine, on no practical experience, that they will know how to do it better. Not I.

E. Antony Gray has a vision: Rest.

Reactionary Ferret wonders “Are these people even trying to do science?” Well… Science is hard. Scienciness is easier AND gives you the answers you’re looking for. Greg Cochran chimes in on that subject. Ferret’s New Project sounds interesting. Interesting in the ha ha sense. Also how’s that ISIS in America working out for us.

Hooeey, that Ferret was a busy beaver this week… Also: The Big Gay, wherein we learn any artwork praised as “brave” almost surely sucks. As in, the creator was really brave to make art that sucked that bad!

Spandrell has thoughts on Morality—specifically as practiced in the DRC. Well… not so much practiced as observed actually.

He also takes a look at Conspiracies. The insanity is not so much in the conspiring as in the results. Spandrell shows why.

In spired by Spandrell’s Morality article, Free Northerner has a fine meditation on Culture Loss. It is quite gradual until it is sudden.

This is the harm immigration causes, it wears away at built-up cultural practices. The insidious danger of it is that this regression is barely noticeable until one day you get stuck, look around, and wonder, ‘why is nobody helping me?’

And also why the melting model of assimilation was historically so important. That is, before it became a symbol of hate. He goes on to quote and comment at length on a white couple’s documentary journey through the former Belgian Congo. Free Northerner wins ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.

Also from Northerner, more on the word Racist.

Racist is a racial disparagement aimed at whites, and only whites.

This is not me saying it. This is not a reactionary view, this is the vanguard of social justice saying this.

Right Scholar segues from Mystical Bodies to a new series on Culture and sophistry. Always something to look forward to with this guy!

Migration Period has an idea to make money off all those icky stereotypes.

Dividuals have this response to Harold Lee's award winning TFP piece. It was pretty good too:

In other words, the correct way to preserve the most important aspects of Libertarianism, limited government, low taxes etc. would have been to stop all this Libertarian bullshit about the free and mutually beneficial contracting of equal individuals and admit that yes, we are masters, and we have a personal responsibility to look after our servants. You can only preserve Capitalism through keeping it halfway Feudal. It has a more human face that way.

That response seems to have inspired this in-its-own-right post: Traders, Masters, Servants, Predators, Victims, which is a simply magnificent bit of Formalist Theory. It was a tough decision this week with so many high quality articles, but… for this pair, Dividuals wins this week’s ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Congratulations!!

Like a good formalist, Neovictorian makes his Hiatus formal. With an apposite warning. Evolution has prepared us poorly for Teh Interwebz.

CWNY considers the heroism of Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear in his timely epistle this week: Christmas Land is Our Nation.

This Week at Social Matter

Ryan Landry talks about who is Enabling The Left’s Economic Lies. And how. He kicks it off with this canonical observation:

What is unwritten in a New York Times article is always the real story.

The backdrop of this instance of NYT fabulism is a decline in competition between air carriers, who are now maliciously “tricking” people with “hidden” fees for flying. Left unsaid is the actual mechanism for this: Captured markets. Because airline mergers. Because the D-government and TBTF banks like mergers.

For the Times to report the marriage of big business and progressivism would eradicate the illusion that the Left is the party of the little guy. This facade must be maintained no matter how much the opposite is true. The Left’s foot soldiers froth at the mouth over the Koch brothers, while George Soros and many other billionaires fund the Left’s pet causes and candidates.

On Monday, Mark Citadel returns with Codreanu On The Ruling Class. This was an interesting guy to learn about. He was not a fan of hereditary succession but reserved a specially eloquent scorn for democracy.

It was Codreanu’s belief that rather than play by democracy’s rules, the natural elite had fled to any bastions of virtue they could find, and he saw the qualities of Romania’s past great heroes in his Legionaries, those who came out of the priesthood, industry, agriculture, the military, and notably dissidents from the nations Liberal universities (yes, they had those then too). From this stock, he felt that Romania could cultivate a new political class. […] [T]he elite when designated, would designate their successors for the future, based upon the loyalty of the elite itself to the nation. The nation constituted all those Romanians presently alive, all of those who lay dead in its soil, and all those as yet unborn.

David Grant wonders: Whither Leftism? Now that it’s everywhere, where can it go?

On Wednesday, Landry is back with Episode 2 of Weimerica Weekly. Which appears to be a weekly podcast. Imagine that.

This Week in 28 Sherman

A slightly abbreviated week on Ryan’s home blog and I think I know why… Hint: rhymes with shmodcast.

A snapshot of the “horrors” of Operation Wetback

The week kicks with a Whole Lotta Irony: GOPe Denies Trump But Accepted Romney. Not sure what “GOPe” stands for, but appears to be the professional Republican caste. They’re stumbling all over each other to pooh-pooh Trump’s anti-(illegal)-immigrant rhetoric, but strangely enough urged us to support Romney a mere 3 years ago. Hmm… That’s weird. Ryan chalks it up to a strange kind of tribalism…

Trump is not their guy. Trump is not jumping through the hoops they have set up. Trump is not speaking to them, but he is speaking to the little guys. The GOPe has deamed of a populist candidate. They have dreamed of a guy that blacks may slide over to by even an additional 5-10%. They have prayed for one who fights the media for being unfair and goes out to every stump speech with this message; “DC-NYC is corrupt and needs a spring cleaning” for decades. Trump just isn’t their guy, and they hate him for that.

Trump isn’t their guy, and… ergo… they’re not gonna be able to control him. So maybe not so strange.

Filed under Culture, When Boomers Did Christmas Movies: Scrooged. Landry is at his best when talking about dated cultural artifacts that no one’s given a second thought about in years. Digging up Scrooged is no exception.

The replacement of the personal with the stage managed by Boomers hits elsewhere as Frank Cross can never quite mimic his predecessor generation. Frank Cross receives a humanitarian award, which is a nice play on the original Dickens’ work’s solicitation for alms for the poor. The Boomers took the formerly valued and cherished idea of civic duty and community building and mocked it. It’s the band aid giving symbolized by “check-box” United Way donations and throwing cash at a problem. It might be a check that is delivered to a non-profit, but the bond that formerly was present with the traditions of charity and Church going is gone. Scrooged fits the Carol tradition well by also maintaining the secular idea of the Christmas spirit that never has to mention Christ. This fits perfectly with Boomers and the ’80s. Recall that the Care Bears were just a cute, secular way that adults could teach children about morality without using Christian angels. By 1988, the secularization of what we call the blue states was just about complete.

This quirky, but amazingly perspective, social commentary wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

And finally this week in WW1 Pics: Gallipoli Snow. Snow! In Gallipoli!

This Week in Kakistocracy

What’s up with George Soros? Porter has full coverage in Practically Humanoid. Soros is basically an NGO—a really rich one—one who hates you.

Next he takes note of Sweden’s late unwelcome advances from reality:

Everyone wants to save the whales, but no one wants to live with one. Swedes were too pompously naive to understand the difference. And as with most cosmically imbecilic blunders, the crash site is going to be spectacular.

Porter is just fantastic with We Stand with You. The differences between White Wing Terrorism and Islamic terrorism is the difference between crime and war:

[T]here is no moral equivalence between criminals of a society and foreign attacks against it. When own murders own, men go to the gallows. When aliens murder own they go to war. This used to be understood implicitly. And for those who still observe the behavior of approximately 6.5 billion minorities, it still is. Whites founded, built, and sustain this country. It is their inheritance and home. ‘White terrorists’ thus foul no one’s nest but their own. The Syed Farooks, in contrast, come to foul mine. The difference is everything.

Not that Loretta (My People) Lynch would have any chance of understanding that. Real Gary has comments on that horror here.

Here he contemplates the Rise of the Shitlords. And approves.

This Week… Elsewhere

Evolutionist X begins this week asking (and answering) Why do Rh- People Exist? And a Part Two to that.

Here she has a nice smackdown of Feminism as (mostly) status game.

Filed under Beards, Ginger hair, and recessive traits of all shapes and sizes, Evolutionist X presents the Ainu:

who…

are among the most famous Siberian peoples primarily because, once upon a time, Europeans mistook them for Caucasians, probably because the Ainu had beards and other East Asians tend not to.

Evolutionist X also has some ideas on negotiating that lossy, nevertheless essential, medium in Meditations upon Language.

Dutch neoreactionary Alf writes (in English!!) In defense of Sinterklaas and his sooty (ergo racisty) Black Pieters. Puritans… finding ways to ruin Christmas these 400 years.

Matt Briggs goes up on The Stream with Most Idiotic Aspects of the Paris Global Warming Conference. And another (he’s really popular there): The Real Reason for the Paris Global Warming Talks #COP21. Did I mention they REALLY like him there? Women In All Combat Roles Necessarily Means a Weaker Military.

Briggs also tackles What Is A Game Of Chance? Hint: Chance refers to states of knowledge, not causes.

Bonald tackles Is Islam a religion of peace? Peace occurs when the outcome of a conflict is easy to predict. So sure. Every religion is a religion of peace… if it wins.

Also, in view of the Holy Father’s latest bout of anti-Catholicism, Bonald wonders So is it okay to be obsessed with sex or not? Or is it only OK if you’re on the left side of the Culture War?

Over at The Orthosphere, JM Smith considers the degenerated state of academic freedom in Can There be Theoria in Xanadu? It’s a pretty strong article. And not too long…

Along with most of the classical and biblical tradition, Aristotle maintained that the road to theoria runs through the moral life. Orthopraxy was said necessarily to precede orthodoxy, because no man mired in sin could hope to see things in their true aspect. This is one discipline that has been dropped from the university catalogue.

Aristotle names three impediments to orthopraxy: brutality, vice and incontinence. A brutal man lacks moral sense, owing to congenital defect or subsequent accident. A vicious man has corrupted his moral sense through voluntary indulgence and the formation of bad habits. An incontinent man retains his moral sense, but is weak, lacks restraint, and so violates his own good principles.

Richard Cocks is very good here: Patriarchal Culture.

In the nineteen sixties, Betty Friedan said that if women wanted to enter the workplace, they must emphasize their ability to be strong, capable and independent; not weak victims in need of protecting. Friedan was not listened to and women did indeed claim victim status and appealed for help from men. Men came to the rescue, following their traditional role as savior and protector. When the women claimed that it was from the oppression of men that they needed protecting, many men turned their attack on maleness and masculinity. In some areas of life, particularly in education, the male presence was largely withdrawn. In the nineteen nineties, men were frequently depicted as pedophiles and rapists, or potential pedophiles and rapists.

Conservatives and traditionalists continued to try to preserve a more masculine perspective. But in high schools and colleges, the smothering feminine has arguably become dominant; an aggressive tendency to feel pity for the underperforming and weak. The unprepared student must be nurtured. Standards must be lowered so that almost no one need feel inadequate. Grade inflation, medals just for showing up and Valentine’s Day cards for all followed. Cries of “good job” on the soccer field when patently a good job was not being done.

Speaking of Greek philosophers, Brett Stevens recommends conservatives turn away from Kant and back to Plato.

The holidays may provide an opportunity to come out to your family (i.e., as a non-voter). Sunshine Thiry has the right formula.

At Imaginative Conservative, Pat Buchanan wonders Is NATO Necessary Now? And if necessary, is it necessary that Turkey be in it? Also from Joseph Pearce: Oliver Cromwell: Hero or Villain? A villain mostly… of revolutionary proportions.

Man-sized Target helpfully contrasts Right Wing Terrorism vs. Muslim Terrorism. Only one seems to be of relatively unlimited supply. He also notices some Overton Acceleration in he Fads of Liberalism.

Real Gary concludes, based on What They Do, “US domestic policy is also pro-Islamic and anti-Christian/European”. Yup. Also a fond remembrance of an excellent teacher of his in Lessons of History and Philosophy.

Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Andrew takes a bittersweet view of South Park in Consequence Time.

Cheshire Ocelot reviews Jacques Maritain’s Education at the Crossroads.

[E]ducation exists to hand down a culture, provide moral training, and essentially set him up to acquire wisdom. It is not primarily technical or vocational training, though it may aid in training for one’s eventual career and can, and probably should, provide some “practical” knowledge to that end. Unfortunately, by 1943 schools had begun losing sight of this goal, and the problem has only grown worse since then.

Indeed. And they don’t even provide much “practical” knowledge anymore.

This week in Croatian Reaction brings us some speculative fiction from the date 22.06.2051.

And in the Spanish, Carlos Esteban writes in defense of the coming feast: Feliz Navidad (con perdón). Even the most lamentable commercial excesses do not spring from nothing.

Pero las fiestas populares no se ‘inventan’. Al pueblo se le pueden imponer -se le imponen- un régimen político, ideologías, impuestos (que por algo se llaman así), preferencias de consumo, o canciones de verano. Pero intentar imponer por decreto -o por campaña de marketing- un motivo de celebración es como tratar de decidir por otro de quién tiene que enamorarse. Si no fuera así, ¿por qué no trasladar la Navidad a primavera, cuando hace mejor tiempo y se puede callejear de compras?

There are some things even the Jews cannot do, apparently.

Xavier Marquez has a superb Abandoned Footnote: The King’s Two Bodies in Bolshevik Political Thought. This was inspired by his reading of Nina Tumarkin’s Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. His is an analysis of the rise of extreme pseudo-religious fervor that rose up in spite of that sort of thing being officially suppressed. Perhaps… rose up because being officially suppressed.

[S]oon after the October revolution it became clear that “charismatic” appeals were exceedingly useful in the struggle for the loyalty of the masses. Already in early 1918 the old Bolshevik M. S. Olminsky argued that though “[t]he cult of personality contradicts the whole spirit of Marxism, the spirit of scientific socialism,” Bolsheviks should not ignore their leaders, who personified the party and the working class (Tumarkin, p. 87). Individual Bolsheviks – primarily, but not exclusively, top leaders like Lenin – were both exemplars of the values that a good Communist should have (and thus to be emulated) and personifications of the proletariat (and thus to be honored). Lenin himself, for all his dislike of flattery, was quite conscious of the power of his image, and grudgingly accepted some of the manifestations of the cult growing around him.

For this outstanding contribution to neoreactionary theory, Marquez wins another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

This week in… Kill to Party, a review (of sorts) of Primer (2004) and Masculine Identity.

This just in… A new blog with a very promising name The Froude Society. This week brings: Peace Sells, Don’t Buy It. A good synthesis with many good ideas there.

Only two days late this week. Is that an improvement?? Keep on reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!