Dividual* continues to impress with: Copying is everything. Picking up the teleofunction them from Darwinian Reactionary’s seminal article on the subject, he applies the principle to replication. Which is really, really important once you think about it.
[*Usage note: I now take the “Divduals” blog name to be a singular possessive. New people must tolerate the indignity of mangled names.]
Also, in an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Dividual has an excellent Group Dynamics based explanation of the decline of the West. Groups can cohere naturally based on a huge variety of traits, provided the in-group has an out-group.
Mark Citadel finds lessons in the profound disillusionment of Adorno and Horkheimer after WW2: The Despairing Marxist .
Sydney Trads have up an outstanding quotation, late in his life, from Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney’s Discussions. Also Carlyle. One can never get too much Carlyle.
Nick Land notices Bryan Caplan entering the bargaining stage. There may be hope for him yet.
Always a treat to get something from Richard A. Brookes. And this week he shares some thoughts on the actual (versus the sophistical) benefits of Diversity and Tolerance. These words have, of course, due to their use in Prog Black Magic, come to mean very nearly the opposite of what they used to mean. Reclaiming them is an option, but it may be a hard and long row to hoe.
Alrenous Fisks the (ostensible) Stoic.
Spandrell asks the age old question: Что Делать—that is to say, what to do when your government is systematically lying to you? The soon to be fudged (or else illegal) French data currently reveals:
37.20% of newborns in France are of African descent. It is increasing at a rate of around 1.5% per year. That means in 10 years half of all French newborns will be of African descent. In 30 years, half of all French 20 year olds will be of African descent. I often talk about Brazilification. But even Brazil is whiter than that.
Now, France may deserve this because of their invention of pseudoprofound bullshit. I do feel a certain amount of schadenfraude
France, of course, is not at all alone. Nor even the furthest down this particular river. He has video there on the “New” South Africa that is a must see.
Also from Spandrell, an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀: Facts are useless (for status discrimination, that is):
Bullshit is the most egalitarian arena, so all status contests are done in the realm of bullshit. Now bullshit requires a topic too. Remember in middle school, when a bunch of friends got together and stared asking: “What would you do if you were invisible?” Or “Batman or Spiderman?” What’s the point of those questions? Nobody’s gonna become invisible. But by asking stupid questions you get people to talk, and through their answers you get to know their character. The question doesn’t matter. The more outlandish the better. You can’t get to know people by asking them a factual question. It has to be bullshit.
And since facts “don’t matter”, Spandrell deluges us with Demographics. Which are, properly speaking, not facts at all (at least the prognosticated ones). He’s buttering his popcorn for the Great International Die Off. This, I think, is rather an empircal question. But I never cease to be amazed at how few hours worked actually go into the Feeding The World Industrial Complex. It remains to be seen whether a doubling—or even a quadrupling—of that tiny fraction might stem this anticipated gigadeath. But I suppose If people cannot be roused to feed themselves and their children, why then of course they deserve what’s coming.
Reactionary Tree has a superb next chapter in his Culture of Critique series, despite its somewhat silly name. Strong on both research and rhetoric, Tree gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Speaking of pseudo-profound bullshit, Antidem has a sponsored review of the documentary(ish) The Unknown Known. No. No. Antidem is not pseudo-profound bullshit. But he comes up with a good name for the phenomenon…
A Derridaism is a statement that seems sensible, erudite, or even brilliant when one first hears it. However, when one subjects it to rigorous logical analysis, one finds that it is, in fact, utter nonsense.
A Yogiism (named, of course, for the famous baseball player Yogi Berra) is the inverse of a Derridaism. It is a statement that seems like utter nonsense when one first hears it. However, when one subjects it to rigorous logical analysis, one will find that, slyly hidden under the surface, there is a nugget of wisdom that is sensible, erudite, or even brilliant.
A Bushism, however, is a statement that seems like utter nonsense when one first hears it; then when one subjects it to rigorous logical analysis, one will find that it really is utter nonsense after all.
The makers of the “documentary” were so certain they’d caught Rumsfeld in a Bushism that they named the movie after it. But, as Antidem notes: “If smarm were smarts, the left would have colonies on Jupiter, but the truth is that they simply aren’t as clever as they believe themselves to be.”
Antidem also has some interesting, even if rather Inside Chaucer™ remarks on The Canterbury Tales And The Virtues Of Pauvreté. The distinction between poverty and misery is, I think, an underappreciated one these days.
Social Pathologist Slumlord is really digging Michel Houellebecq and offers some commentary on an interview he did for his latest novel.
Giovanni Dannato sets up a delightfully formalist relationship: Money Only Belongs To Its Masters. “Only surplus is income,” he notes. As for the rest,
We are like a whole world full of Gollums obsessed with the power of the One Ring even as its master dominates and consumes us.
Dutch correspondent Alf writes (well) in English of The disco that is Nrx. Writes well… not delusionally about red-pills. Red pills are lot like steroids. You still have to put in all the work to get those gains.
And from Spain, Carlos Esteban has coverage of elections there with El misterio de Vox—Vox the Spanish right populist party, not Vox the left-liberal opinion site (nor Vox Day).
Right Scholar wonders whether there might some commonality among Millennial Mutineers.
And Cambria Will Not Yield is as unyielding as ever, this time with a Remembrance in Five Acts: By the Cross We Conquer.
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry’s Sunday article The Elites Anticipated Nationalism vs. Globalism. This reads as a 20-years-on review of Christopher Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites and Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld—what they got right, but importantly what they missed. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
In anticipation of this week’s latest Star Wars installment, David Grant brings us The Force Abnegates. The Force has sufferred under its own explication. And the storytelling of the franchise has suffered for it…
The Force-based morality of the Star Wars universe demands total self-abnegation. Darth Bane refers to the Jedi as “slaves to a greater good”, and while Darth Bane is unambiguously villainous, his description is accurate. To value family, friends, nation, traditions, anything over and above this nebulous “greater good” invites the Dark Side and transforms you into an agent of evil.
A failure to pair natural desire with its object is a fatal flaw of certain religions. And certain science fiction series. On his home blog, David Grant has some good thoughts In Praise of Passion.
Returns comes back on Wednesday with Weimerica Weekly Episode Foar. This time with a… Sponsor!!
CA Bond returns after a long hiatus with a gem: Conservatives Are Wrong: It’s Not About Culture, It’s About Power. He’d been absent over a year, but he’s been reading De Jouvenel. Time well spent by the looks of it. Politics may be downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from power. The key is a reiteration of the Menciist dictum: “Sovereignty is conserved”. Dividing power is not merely an invitation to chaos, but chaos itself. Bond earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over at his home blog, Ryan Landry puts in his two cents Best Thing I Read In 2015. I won’t spoil it for you, but I can’t say I disagree with him.
‘Tis the season to reminisce about “When Boomers Did Christmas Movies”. This week: The Santa Clause. In which…
Tim Allen plays a divorced dad who is required to take on the duties of Santa. The entire friction to the story and plot movements in the set up of him being Santa and his son knowing relies on divorced couple problems.
It’s downhill from there. And Landry regales us on what could have been in this movie. Had it not be of boomers, by boomers, for boomers.
Finally, in This Week in WW1 Pics Makeshift Graves.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter kicks off the week with a foot-stomping, rip-roaring defense of particularity: More Value in Interests. This is an instant classic—☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀—on the strength of analogies alone:
Bill Kristol at Weekly Standard professed to concern over the robe-soiling conservatism has suffered by its new bull elephant marking his territory. This lament being a bit rich coming from a jewish neocon, whose invade/invite DNA is so caked on the “robe of conservatism” that it crackles when pulled-up for entry. But of course that presumes conservatism means something beyond two white parents raising eight adopted Africans to fight for Israel in a borderless global marketplace. And we are assured it does not.
Next he makes a hearty stew out of The Pledge of Professionals—the watchers that watch the watchers.
Porter ponders the national politics because, when all politics is local, what other kind is there?
And finally, just to prove that he pays closer to attention to Vatican News than I do, Porter takes some not undeserved swings His Loopiness and His Army of Impressive Sounding Theologicians in Never Unchosen.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Petz Week over at Casa Evolutionist X this week… First she wonders Why are people so keen on pets? In Part 2, she tackles the dog question. And the un-numbered Part 3 takes on the Cats: Incomplete Domesticates.
A nice essay here on Did Electricity kill Religion? In my view: Not really. But by turning its focus away from an ordering and formative sense of awe, it may have made it unbearably mundane and self-righteous.
Continuing on the the theme of religion and its substitutes, Evolutionist X also wonders Why is Star Wars more popular than God? (Among white people that is.)
This Week… Elsewhere
Matt Briggs wades into The Stream with December 12, 2015: The Day Science Died. And also this: Trump’s—No, Wait—The Republican Debate.
This was more than just a Comment On “Origin of probabilities and their application to the multiverse”. Pedantry in defense of clear logic is no vice. Also from Briggs: There Are Only Two Errors: Idealism & Materialism. Only two philosophical errors that is. And a million ways to make either of them. And, of course… This Week In Doom.
Aphorist Malcolm Pollack: How strange it is to be a line, in a circular world.
Reactionary Ferret reviews the Childhood’s End TV miniseries in parts one and two before giving up on it. Also a tepid, but non-nuclear, review of the latest installment of Jedi propaganda.
HBD Chick is first (that I’ve seen) with her best of 2015 list.
A Timeless Essay™ at Imaginative Conservative from Gleaves Whitney: The Swords of the Imagination: Russell Kirk’s Battle With Modernity. Also Pat Buchanan wonders of these are The Last Days of the GOP Establishment.
Since it is the Year of Mercy™, Bonald offers the Pastoral Response to Ubiquitous Sexual Sin that he wishes (and I wish) Catholic pastors would provide. For no extra charge, he evaluates Motivation: the most useless criterion for moral deliberation. I wholeheartedly agree with this.
The problem here is obvious. A scrupulous man will never feel confident doing anything pleasant or in his interest, while an unscrupulous man will write himself permission slips to do anything because it’s all for love, compassion, or social justice. If you’re trying to decide what’s the right thing to do, don’t worry about what your deepest intention is, just ask what is the right thing to do for somebody in your situation given the nature of the act, the duties of the actor, and the consequences for everyone.
Also from Bonald: Servile monarchists—in which he takes John C. Wright rather severely to task for his whiggish republicanism. On the way this amounts to one of the stoutest arguments against democracy I’ve seen in a while. He manages to show that giving each man a tiny share in sovereign government, republican virtues necessarily detract from each man’s particular concerns. An absolutely brilliant argument which shows that democracy, by its very nature, wars against particularity and subsidiarity. Bonald wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for this outstanding essay.
Cheshire Ocelot re-reads GK Chesterton’s Heretics. It’s enjoyable, but he trips, like many of us do, over Chesterton’s rather slavish devotion to democracy.
Donal Graeme’s Thoughts On Married Clergy are similar to my own. But he was astute enough to write them down.
This was rich… Blinded by the Light. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the DHS is outsourcing it’s racial profiling&mash;i.e., ordinary common sense—to ordinary citizens with its “See something, say something” campaign.
Greg Cochran wonders what made the Ionians so smart. Nobody really knows, but knowing would be pretty important.
Chris Gale describes How Paglia gets it wrong. Universally hated by feminists, she still tries to hold onto the juiciest (and failed) bits of it.
Brett Stevens has a review of popular “far” (i.e., center) right party politics in Outbreak of honesty. Truth seeping into mainstream media is no doubt refreshing, but the only thing lacking in Popular Will™ is a single entity to will it. And in Wealth transfer is conquest, Stevens looks at one of less obvious pathologies of class warfare: Dysgenics. It’s a less obvious pathology in the same way that gravity is the weakest of all fundamental forces. It may be weakest, but in the end, it dominates the large scale structure.
Brett also has this wonderful bit of shibboleth mispronunciation:
We have a President who is unwilling, and ideologically unable to effectively stop a terrorist group that is now killing Americans inside our country. He cannot stop them from coming in without offending his donor class. He cannot profile them and ban specific profiles based upon likelihood of evil intentions without offending the multi-culturalism dogma that is at the bedrock of his political coalition.
Donal Graeme takes the attack dogs and water canon to the phrase “Single Mothers”. Long overdue. The phrase, rather definitionally, lumps widows (of whom we are admonished in The Bible to take care) together with women who either likely destroyed their marriages or never bothered to get married in the first place (about which The Bible takes a rather different tone).
Trump brings a “wry smile” to the face of this reactionary.
Good thoughts from Ace in “… and I place a nameless stone”:
Conquests may be laudable.
But who wants to be the Lord of Ashes?
How sumptuous the meal eaten in solitude?
What value has gold that cannot be spent?
Few are the pleasures as great as the act of sharing them.
Thrasymachus has some really excellent advice in dealing with Moslems and Terrorism; Blacks and Crime. Basically give them the full court soft bigotry of low expectations and don’t even think about apologizing for it.
So that’s all I got… Sorry this is so late… So much for my one week on-time streak. See you after Christmas. ‘Til then, keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!
What is your opinion on churches with large multi-media centers built into the nave/worship center? I won’t set foot in them, personally, but I wonder about other peoples’ experiences.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Heh. Well, first of all any church that has a large “multi-media center” built into it’s “worship center” will not use the term “nave” nor ever have even heard that word. (A fine point of Protestant theology is to remove the distinctions: sanctuary/nave/narthex. As a genuine Christian, I stoutly uphold these distinctions.) Since I’m no longer Protestant, I don’t have much reason to set foot inside them. I’m not allergic to the experience, but I don’t consider it setting a foot inside of an actual church. It’s more an entertainment venue. And for that, they’re fine. I don’t think electricity so much killed religion as denatured it. Inspirational entertainment is one way in which electricity has certainly damaged faith.
[Ed. I realize how much holier than thou that all sounds. I’d be remiss to fail to mention that many many Catholic churches built in the last 50 years share some of these modern(ist) peculiarities. They share in this abomination, tho’ I would not go so far as to question the validity of the sacraments confected within them. I look upon them and their congregations with pity, not hatred.]
LikeLike
Government is lying to you because 90% of voters can’t tell the difference between truth and lie. Solution is to abolish democracy, as always.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Speaking as an occasional “peeker in” on the NRx world, I find a great deal of good sense in the Group Dynamics thread. Though to bring this concept to a functioning reality, I foresee a great deal of mass movement of people within nations and even continents.
Additionally, it seems the Frankfurt School has proved to be Germany’s lasting revenge on America and the Allied Powers of old.
Nice blog here by the way.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for visiting Whitewall, and your kind words. Game theory group dynamics, and evolutionary psychology in general, are scientific building blocks with which the new reaction builds upon the old. Old school reaction was correct and here are some new ways to see why.
LikeLike
Nick, I fear the link did not activate.
LikeLike
Thanks for the response. (FWIW, I do know the difference between a nave and a worship hall; I just didn’t want to limit the question only to people who worship in one or the other.)
LikeLike
@Whitewall, I didn’t intend a link in my comment. I was just referring vaguely to the sphere. Scientific ways of looking at Chesterton Fences are too numerous to count around here. For example: Evolutionist X .
@Evolutionist X: I figured you did. My point was more that the names that ecclesial organizations give to their “worship halls” tend to prescribe (or at least correlate with) the type of activities that goes on in them.
LikeLiked by 1 person