This Week in Reaction (2015/12/27)

Rest on the Flight into Egypt, Luc-Olivier Merson (1879)[click to massively enlarge]

Season’s Greetings this This Last Week in Reaction take many forms: “I’d say something nice but that would trash the brand”. God Jul! Merry Christmas! Is that Freddy Mercury? From the Other Down Under, From Dalrock, a Very English Christmas, ‘Twas the Night for Leathernecks, “To Friends Unmet”, and Merry Federally Recognized Holiday Of December 25th That Shall Remain Nameless So As Not To Offend.

Arthur, the Esoteric Trad, wonders Are Cities Culture Killers?—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ in its own right. Cities certainly seem to be that way today. Why? I doubt that this rôle stems from anything in the inherent nature of cities. In fact, cities should, in principle, be more orderly than their hinterlands. But good principles have a taken a back seat these last couple centuries. His next essay comes almost (but not explicitly) as a counterpoint to the first: “It’s The Degeneracy, Stupid”. Cities are one kind of concentrator. The “Alt-Right” is another. The problem is not so much in the concentrating, as it is in the what that’s being concentrated.

The other area where people might run into the obvious lies of the left establishment is of course demographics and race. A great many people ‘wake up’ to the reality of race but never ‘wake up’ to anything else. They are essentially what should be known as the ‘Alt-Left’ – where everything is acceptable as long as it is a whites only society. Homosexuals of course have greatly appreciated this, because it means they do not have to face up to their sins. Here is a group of people willing to accept them because they shout about Niggers and Kikes just like them, but won’t actually suggest they change their behaviour.

For this astute and timely kick in the pants, Arthur wins the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Arthur has also the obligatory 2015 in Review.

Two articles from Warg over at Future Primaeval. The first a short and sweet Defence of Witch Doctors and Alternative Medicine. And then: Gödel vs The Human Brain in which Gödel comes out on top.

Jim bring some back of the envelope math on the Externalities of IQ. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

[W]e may conclude that the only a quarter of the benefit [ed., or harm,] of IQ is internalized, that three quarters of the benefit [ed., or harm] goes to everyone else.

Graaaaaagh returned to my attention in this Millennial Woes Show. (I wish his blog could be “followed by email”, but alas :-[) Well… Graaaaaagh has a podcast. Episode 2 is here. Also on the blog, just in time for Christmas: Who is Santa Claus?

Scott Alexander wonders How Bad Are Things? Pretty bad by his estimates.

Alrenous proves the Journalism and the Accuracy Impossibility Theorem.

On net, journalism is pollution. Freedom of the press is impossible; even if there was a eucivic function for the press, it cannot carry it out. As “Shams may cease” etc, attempting the impossible guarantees a dyscivic sham that will be captured by sociopaths, as sociopaths are the best at lying.

Spandrell offers some exquisitely crafted bullshit cleaned from @SoMuchGuardian.

What the Talking heads at Vox meant to be worrying (and we gotta do somethin’) news is a source of Great Yuletide Cheer for Nick Land.

Mark Citadel has a great review, with commentary, of Capitalism, Tradition and Traditionalism.

Nice piece down under over at Sydney Trads: Human Nature News – Feminist Bigotry:

Even Rosemary Neill considers it “pleasing” that 61 per cent of biology students in [New South Wales] are girls. Why not equal pleasure at boys’ overrepresentation in maths, physics and IT?

Well, at least she has the good sense not to be principled about it. Also at Sydney Trads a beautiful reproduction of a @WrathOfGnon Original.

Carlos Esteban suggests Christians start enforcing their copyright on the holy day: Aparta tus sucias zarpas de mi Navidad. He also offers Los polvos del 68, which focuses on moral and social shipwreck of that generation’s children.

Over at Forward Base ‘B’, Dannato runs with the observation that What Money Rewards, We Get More Of.

Reactionary Ferret promises a hedgehog-sized volume of future output.

Richard A. Brookes ponders Collapse or Correction. He’s leaning toward the latter. And that isn’t actually an entirely good thing. Is 1980 USA (correction) or 1988 USSR (collapse) the better analogy to the West today?

It is possible that in some areas—for instance on the immigration issue—there could be a change in policy and attitude that lasts for decades. But that would simply be a shift from the current unsustainable leftist spiral to a more sustainable leftist spiral.

What is more interesting is what the result will be if there is no correction.

And…

And Michael is back at A House with No Child with reportage on Turkish Military Assaults Turkish Kurdistan. Hopefully this is a sign of much more to come. About Michael, not about the Turkish Military… Tho’ I’m not a huge fan of the Kurds. Curds, ja. Kurds, nein.

This Week in Social Matter

Over at Social Matter, Ryan Landry kicks off the week with Desperately Seeking Susan Jobs—the rise and fall minor hiccup in stride of Once Tech Cover Girl Elizabeth Holmes. You know how when the media finds a black youth gunned down by a white cop, the probability that the youth was a criminal who had it coming approaches one? You know how when the media find a campus rape where the perps are all privileged white boys, the probability that the story is almost entirely a fiction approaches one? You know how you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting a man shamelessly biting dogs? Well now anytime there’s a Nanobot Company promising to radically change medical care with Tech™ and that company is headed by a woman, odds are gonna be pretty good that that company is much better at PR than actual tech.

She is the exception that proves the rule, but in the progressive mind, she was the exception that proved their meme. Women and men have the same abilities in math and science.

These are the same people who drive through six miles of ghetto dwellers to find the one black kid reading at night to show you that human neurological uniformity is real. Anecdotal exceptions are the bedrock of progressive messaging.

“Levels” of humanity “helped” regardless of yada yada: Billions
Medical Nanobots Delivered: 0

Holmes can deny it but she did put on a performance in the role created by Jobs: the proselytizing techie. Steve Jobs was not selling people on his products as much as he was selling them on being cool, being cutting edge, being a tech savant. You might just be a schlub, but searching through your expensive iPod that looked sleek and futuristic gave you status. Jobs talked of changing the world and how you, the consumer, could be a part of it. Decades into his second run at Apple, all consumers have become are sex-obsessed iPhone addicts, who don’t talk to anyone else anymore. Holmes wore the black turtlenecks. She had created the mythical story of not liking needles, explaining why she came up with pinprick sampling. She had a quirky diet, and said she had a humanitarian mission (no billionaire works for money, silly peasant). Holmes also had a catch phrase, “One tiny drop changes everything.”

The dust is still settling from the Theranos Debacle, but my bet is she’ll come away personally unscathed and command media and speaker fee attention for decades to come as the voice of Girls Can Do It Too, Inc. Ryan gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his great (as usual) work here.

David Grant opines on The Least Wonderful Time Of The Year.

Ryan is back on Wotan’s Day with his next installment of Weimerica Weekly—Fake Red-Stater Outrage About Insufficient Christmas Jesusiness Edition.

And Jim Wyecroft makes a debut at Social Matter with a fantastic nail in the coffin to pathological altruism: Mosquito Nets And The Rising Tide Of Malawians. He documents how cheap, easy, and popular it’s gotten to spread “kindness that can kill”. Wyecroft wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ on his first outing. And I’ve heard there’s more in the pipe from him.

This Week in 28 Sherman

Over on his home blog, Ryan Landry offers a Sunday review of the long awaited, but never quite named that way, blockbuster: Star Wars Episode CopyPasta.

He has his if-I-must-say-so-myself My Best of 2015. We bloggers let navel gazing slide every late December. Jesting aside, it’s actually a fantastic list. Ryan combines talent with consistency—an all too uncommon combination in the neoreactionary world.

Tuesday, Grerp returns to her Permanent Guest Chair at 28 Sherman to give her tak on The War On Christmas. She cuts swiftly and skilfully to the heart of the matter…

[I]t’s still Christmas time. What this means for you and yours, practically, is anyone’s guess because we no longer have commonly held cultural traditions when it comes to Christmas or any other holiday or much of anything, really. This is what the outrage over “the War on Christmas” is about. It’s a sort of angry nostalgia over our inability to maintain or celebrate our communities or our communal experiences.

And that’s really a whole lot more culturally damaging than a noisy, hostile minority declaring War on Christmas. You can’t oven the culprits, when we’re doing it mostly to ourselves.

And in This Week in WW1 pics: The European Family Fight

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter suggests a formalization of the position our Cultural Masters hold:

Editorials are, naturally, a riot of preening and virtue signals. But even ostensibly hard news stories cede a significant portion of their real estate to the same obligatory posturing. I almost wish each reporter would simply caption their pieces with: I am a good liberal person who thinks good liberal thoughts! Once suitably qualified, they could dispense with the social gesturing and simply issue their report. This would reduce most articles by half, thus providing additional space for the homosex lifestyle section. There are no losers.

Kiss the Ashtoreth and do what thou wilt shall be whole of the law.

The Sickbed Of Cuchalainn is a picture rich chronicle of the Emerald Isle’s giant leap into 21st century morality enforcement. With Ireland safely on board, it’s probably time to short political correctness.

Porter has so many well put thoughts on Trump and his GOP detractors that I find him almost impossible to excerpt. Well… I’ll try…

With the permissible platform already established by their nominal opposition, Republicans are tasked primarily with articulating how they would implement liberalism better. This being a far more comfortable field of inquiry than pursuing national questions or constituent advocacy that may trigger ism alerts by the left’s cultural border guards. And men simply weren’t made to sustain being called mean names.

…but do RTWT.

Finally, he performs an exploratory lobotomy on a NYT Dear White People Editorial in Gift of the Blackguy. If blacks don’t want a race war, they really should tell their mulatto masters about it; because for every one whitey this sort of bullshit convinces, it just makes 10 more less disposed to dialogue.

This Week… Elsewhere

Evolutionist X tries Formalism on for size. Doesn’t look too shabby.

She also takes on the Race Doesn’t Real Fallacy. This is a full frontal assault on Google and NYT top-shelf propaganda. And effective. She notes:

Reality does not disappear just because people sometimes disagree on exactly how to use words to define it.

What people mean by any word is socially constructed. Language is social by its very nature. That alone doesn’t tell us whether particular referents of language are real or not.

And here Evolutionist X offers Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in time for Christmas.

Briggs says Theories Don’t Have Probabilities. Again. Also, This Week in Doom—Reality Now Illegal Edition.

Brett Stevens find in ISIS the distant mirror. Sophistical moral equivalency you say? I don’t think so. ISIS can post-birth abort disabled children for the same reasons Westerners can pre-birth abort them: wonderfully plastic low-church religion. Also, conservatives try to be good little liberals when they oppose segregated spaces, which is to fail at both liberalism and conservatism. Brett says thanks to Trump for the victories thus far.

Stevens characterizes the Faustian nature of the West, for both good and ill. Also a letter from a rather dystopian and not too distant future. Pseudonymity is cheap, easy, and robust. Use it.

Hail to You has some fairly good (or at least not horrible) news surrounding Total Fertility Rates by Race in the USA, 1980-2013.

Roman Dmowski offers some straight talk on The War on Drugs and the War on Guns, as well as a picture that paints well over a thousand words.

Hadn’t heard from Kristor in a while. He’s back at The Orthosphere with a brief note on The Quale of Mystical Experience. Also a slow clap for this one: The Imago Dei & His Lord.

To defect is effectually to banish oneself, and to invite the ostracism of commensals. The right to defect is the right of exit. It is a risky move. Sovereigns may not justly prevent it; defection must always be a legal option, if laws are true, for it is always an ontological option.

Bonald is a jack of many trades. And a master of at least one: Disney Princessology. His essay The weakness of God is a little bit about that.

Donal Graeme offers an eloquent (and brief) meditation on The Incarnation: One Of Us.

Kill To Party brings us an Introduction to Intellectual Alchemy. This is not the good kind of alchemy, that became chemistry; but the bad kind, that became sophistry.

Thrasymachus notices even Moar Western Tropes in ISIS Propaganda. This ought not be surprising. Kind of a narcissism of small diffferences thing. Fundamentalism is a creature of the West. Islamic Fundamentalism is a creature of the West. ISIS is a creature of the West. The West really did take over the world. And now it’s having trouble keeping up with those mortgage payments.

Xavier Marquez posts his list of besties.

Idaho Royalist pops in, but only to say, “I’ll be back!” Let us hope that is true…

Giovanni Alighieri has a bit of Inside Hogwarts commentary on Black Hermione. In other news, we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce offers extended analysis of Dickens’ great classic Holy Ghosts & the Spirit of Christmas: “A Christmas Carol”.

Cheshire Ocelot has a review of Dante that is not part of the Divine Comedy.

Al Fin teaches Teaching Money to Kids.

Two days late again… I keep slipping up. Too much good stuff out in the sphere and too few hours in a week to keep up with it. Ah well. I’ll keep slogging away anyway. Thanks for reading. In the meantime, keep on reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!