This Week in Reaction (2016/01/03)

For all those in sufficiently advanced time zones, it is The Current Year™ 2016.

Jim writes In favor of a repressive state religion:

The religion of Massachusetts wound up conquering the US, and eventually the world, in large part because Virginia took religious freedom seriously, while Harvard and Massachusetts was unyieldingly and fanatically determined to extirpate it with fire and steel and still are unyieldingly and fanatically determined to extirpate it with fire and steel. When crazies and fanatics go up against moderate, compromising, and cynical cosmopolitans, the moderate and cynical cosmopolitans tend to get trampled.

If ever there was freedom from the state religion in a white state, that state was Virginia before the War between the States, and it did not end well.

We today have two problems: A single monolithic state religion, that since World War II has dominated the entire world, and a state religion with no archbishop and inquisition to keep the crazies in line. Kings put Bishops on the payroll to shut up the crazies. If you have a state religion controlled by the holiest, you get holiness spirals of ever more holy people.

We do have Bishops on the payroll, of course. We just called them tenured Faculty. But because of the low-church, voice of the people, nature of the Progressive religion, they have no interest in, and in fact would find it quite heretical, suppressing the progressive holiness spirals of the people. Jim wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Atavisionary beats the dead-line and slides in an essay with the delightfully offensive title: Lesbians are Sub-standard, Imitation Men. It gets even more provocative than that. Fainting couches are not provided. An important contribution to the Neoreactionary sex realist view and ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Rhys Caerwyn returns from a semester of silence with a history-packed Epiloque to his Civilization From Chaos: Russia series.

Mark Citadel has some very good reasons not to see Hateful Eight, but advocates that more might somehow be done to harm the finances of Hollywood.

Sydney Trads have up an insightful quote from Kenneth Minoque’s The Servile Mind highlighting the truly orwellian nature of “political correctness”. Also a very useful The Year in Review: 2015, Year of the Quickening. Every bad year is a good year for the Deep (née Dissident) Right. This was a beautiful (and true) meme poster: Dear Young Women.

Nick Land’s Populism II was interesting. Especially in the comments. He also says an Auld Lang Syne for the This is the Current Year that was:

2015 has been intense, and deserves some considered retrospection here — but no way is it getting that now.

Spandrell brings us Men doing their own thing—more lessons from the classic Chinese novel Water Margin. Also New Years greetings and an oriental story.

And also this from Spandrell: What to do about Censorship. Weibo’s network, Weibo’s rules. Nobody’s making you use Weibo.

E. Antony Gray offers, for our edification, The Young.

Anti-Arab march held in Corsica despite ban on protests.

Michael continues to be back—all the way back???—at A House with No Child with news of the Always Audacious Corsicans and their drive for separation from France. He has also commentary on the whys (and the why nows) China’s Anti-Terrorism Bill.

In Reality Check—Turkey Edition, Michael reminds us Erdogan’s Daughter Literally Heals ISIS Jihadis. Wahhabism is basically SJW for tan people.

Alrenous turns his attentions upon Bad (one might say sophistical) Physics.

Carlos Esteban has one in the impressive Spanish language smart people’s journal La Gaceta: ¡Adiós, izquierda! ¡Hasta luego, derecha! It was unfortunately brutally mangled by my Chromebot translator. But Esteban (no relation to me) seems to be highlighting the new political fault lines in the West: globalist versus sovereignist (yes, as a matter of fact that is a word (and a pretty good one I think)) has replaced left versus right, neither of which maps very well to liberal versus conservative anymore. Reed Perry called it Global Civil War. Also, on his home blog, a brief note: Todo es postureo. Neither Chrome nor Goog-Translate wanted, for some reason, to touch “postureo”, but I’m pretty sure that by it he means “signaling”.

Finally the weekly Jeremiad from Cambria Will Not Yield: The Man of Sorrows is the Counter-Revolution. Among many well-put and astute observations:

[N]ow dirty jokes are told from the church pulpits while ‘racist’ comments have become the parking lot dirty jokes.

This Week in Social Matter

A big week over at Social Matter. Ryan Landry kicks off the week by closing off the year with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀: Social Matter Christmas: Chestnuts, mistletoe, the whole shebang a reactionary’s take on the cultural milieu that shaped that Current Year known as 2015. He challenges the reader to embrace the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic faith in light of the Mystery of the Incarnation and the marks that faith left upon European peoples. Pretty dang inspirational here:

This is about the Europeans forefathers who fought off the Arabs and Turks to maintain a safe realm for European civilization to not only survive but blossom. This is about a faith that warred with barbarians, cannibals, and heathens to spread civilization and raise the wretched living in squalor. Will you be worthy? Will you honor not just Christ’s life but the life of all those believers before you? The cathedrals that beautifully mark the history of Christianity are not just built with stone and glass. They are built by the faith to participate in a celebration of the community, the people, and the faith. They are built with the knowledge that the monument to God may not be finished in one’s time but will stand for all time for one’s people.

Me and Anthony are joined by Arthur the Esoteric Trad, and Poet Laureate and polymath E. Antony Gray for an installment of Ascending The Tower – Episode XII – “The Horrors of Real Magic”.

David Grant has a warning Against Antigone.

Antigone belongs on the index, not of forbidden texts, but of dangerous ones. In the wrong interpretive hands, it gives license to flout authority in the name of one’s own interpretation of “higher law.”

Ryan comes back on Wendesday with Weimerica Weekly—If You Have To Pay Single Girls For an Orgy it Isn’t Art Edition.

Jim Wyecroft appears for the second time in as many weeks with a solid exposé: Vlogging: Making Narcissism Pay Since 2005! Very, very solid.

Tanya Burr, for example, began her vlogging “career” as a trained make-up artist, recording hundreds of make-up tutorials. This content attracted a large and diverse audience, ranging from teenage girls to professional adult women. After reaching a modicum of success, the psychological effects of being watched and liked by many people takes over. Vloggers tend to believe that their actions really matter to their followers. Finally, the economics of vlogging, i.e. more content, more ads, more shares, more engagement, more revenue, kick in, and the Vlogger is filming himself taking a shit.

Wyecroft reports that vloggers can earn “between $20k and $30k a month just from ads”. Not far from the minimum NFL player’s salary. And absolutely astonishing if you consider how incredibly unentertaining a lot of this stuff actually is.

Rounding out the week (and the year), Hadley Bishop takes the wordpress editor on Friday Reviewing How Social Matter Did In 2015. Surprisingly good news on the stats given the respective disappearance and retirement of Bryce Laliberte and John Glanton earlier in the year, and Henry Dampiers’s recent unplanned work-stoppage.

This Week at 28 Sherman

Ryan kicks off an abbreviated week over at his home blog with a look back at his 2015 Social Matter Posts. His arrival right around the time Laliberte’s and Glanton’s departure, kept the content at SM at a high quality and from going to zero sometimes. Neoreaction doesn’t award an MVP (yet), but if they did my vote would be for Ryan Landry.

Next up: A Racist Macroagression Unnoticed In New York. OK, so I maybe I was a little too soft on Orthodox Jews in our last Descending the Tower (which is from the point of view of this TWiR in “next week”). Recalculating.

Finally, this week in WW1 Pics: French Train Guns.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter notices the Western Immune System Becoming Troublingly Unsuppressed—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

Home is whatever men are willing to defend. By that fundamental metric, one enraged Corsican mob is more potent than nine American carrier strike groups. But when conflict goes physical between Arab and native, which do you imagine the French state will mobilize to defend?

Anxiety could be good for you, scientists have found

Next he digs up a Telegraph story which outlines the up-side of Living with Anxiety. Anxiety would have had obvious benefits in the red in tooth-n-claw human adaptive environment—a state of existence to which our Cultural Masters seem all too eager to return us.

Porter provides expert commentary on New Years in Brussels, or rather the lack thereof. One of the many lesser advertised benefits of diversity is that it gives way to quite the opposite:

It should be no surprise if the holiday is never resumed. For this is how diversity settles–one concession at a time. In a competitive environment, what is not defended is discarded. Because the Belgian government has prioritized other populations over its own, the settling will continue in a manner that accommodates the invasive elements. New Years today, Christmas tomorrow. And soon enough Belgium’s disputes will not be between native and Muslim, but Shia and Sunni.

This is how civilization ends: Not with the delivery of one valiant blow, but by the inexorable addition of a million niggling papercuts.

Finally, Porter has a suggestion for his tombstone: It Was a Good Life, He Never Saw Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico makes remarkably little news relative to its size. When they do it’s usually bad. I tend to think there are some people who can pay their bills if you cut up their credit cards. And others who can’t pay their bills under any circumstances. With Puerto Ricans it’s hard to tell.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X provides another installment of Cathedral Roundup—Harvard Totally Not Ironic Social Justice Dining Placemats Edition.

She has strong article on the Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma and its implications here: When Defector-Punishers meet Cooperator-Punishers in the Streets of Paris—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. It’s easy to forget there are two (2) stable equilibria in that game…

Societies with smart people should converge on mutual cooperation; societies with dumb people converge on mutual defection.

Societies with smart people in charge that is. Then she has some really insightful graphics about favorability of muslims pre and post Charlie Hebdo Massacre and pre and post 9/11. Must be something in the water. RTWT.

With a lift from Scott Alexander’s LW digit experiment, Evolutionist X next takes a look at Digit Ratios and Mutational Load.

After dealing with race last week she answers the question: Are “Whites” Real?

Finally, Evolutionist X says hello to the New Year with Quotes from Kabloona (Also, Moby Dick).

This Week… Elsewhere

Briggs introduces us (or me at any rate) to Epistemological Gettier (Non-)Problems. And more and more epistemology in Under-determination, Quus, And Why It’s Cause That Counts. He also grades Last News Years’ Predictions.

Briggs also drops some extensive quotes from Ron Srigley’s LA Review of Books Essay: Dear Parents: Everything You Need to Know About Your Son and Daughter’s University But Don’t. Very worthwhile read. Finally, he’s back on The Stream with a picture-rich Will 2016 Be the Year We Approach The Great and Terrible Singularity? Picture rich and alarm free. Well, not alarm free, There’s more than enough to be alarmed about, but he thinks (as do I) that rational machines are not one of them.

Brett Stevens stakes out a strong Postition: Anti-Censorship. I think too strong. Also some good (Dampier-esque) observations here in Anti-work conservatives.

Carpenters building the Peyton Randolph House smokehouse, one of home’s outbuildings (Colonial Williamsburg 1997)

Brett has a real tour de force here in The Potemkin Economy. The economy construed broadly.

Yes: I said Hell. You are living in a thinly-disguised, well-compensated hell. It is crafted so that only the sane can detect it, and since the sane have always been a minority, that means that it is never noticed. The point is simple: to eradicate the sane using the mechanism of Darwinism. Reward the insane, and this occurs, regular like clockwork.

It’s long, but organized and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. RTWT. Very much on that same subject—i.e., our socially constructed hell—Technology won’t save us.

A timeless essay over at Imaginative Conservative from the late George Panichas on Restoring the Meaning of Conservatism.

Grerp shows up in Chris Gale’s reflections: Safety requires hard words.

For my Croation language readers (and goog translate tolerators), Reakcionar was pretty good here: Ruštveni status i što dalje. Basically it’s a huge brain dump of Menciian proportions on the role of status in social relations. Which is a pretty big one.

Cheshire Ocelot reviews his Best Year Evah!

Kill to Party is deeper thinker than his name might otherwise indicate. Here he considers Under The Rainbow: The Inevitability of the Modern World. It’s a little stream of conscious-y, but heads in a very definite direction:

In a post 1960’s landscape, the concept of hierarchy was seen as dangerous heresy- universal equality became an unquestionable premise and suddenly a wall was erected which separated this brave new world from the ancient ignorance of yesteryear.

The idea became that the modern world was inevitable.

Despite increasingly atheist sensibilities, the Progressive comes across like a fatalist. That amongst the stars there is a plan written for the historical progression of the world, and we would be sitting here with cell phones and lattes no matter what course of action was taken to get there. This makes the modern progressive look more religious than any of their reviled Christians.

Kill to Party wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ with this one and, truth be told, was only narrowly edged out from the title at the last moment.

Ace welcomes the new year with a lift from Ozzy: “Times have changed and times are strange…”.

Bonald has fondest wishes for the Orthosphere for the new year. And a good report of it’s not death. Also this was funny, and mostly true: All sex all the time.

After all, I could have written a post about drinking water access in the third world, but I didn’t, because that would be boring. This is a post about sex. But I’ve got this on His Humbleness: at least I don’t pretend that I’m not obsessed with sex.

OK. That’s the punchline. You might have to RTWT to get the joke.

Quaker Mary Dyer led to execution on Boston Common, June 1, 1660 [unknown 19th century artist]

Late breaking from Froude Society: Ein Volk, Eine Vereinigung, Ein Trumpenführer. He finds Trump interesting, but the reaction to him much more.

The anti-Trump coalition is some of our best evidence of our enemies’ true nature as a decentralized religious movement, it coalesced in a short few months and has yet to near its final act. Whenever our enemy makes any sudden movements we must know why and to where. Let’s explore some of the ways the Left’s response to Trump may pan out.

And he does far more than that. A Must Read in Fine Menciian Analysis and winnder of this week’s ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Roman Dmowski considers Saudi Arabia a Counter-Productive “Ally”.

Welp. That’s all I didn’t have time for. Happy New Year. Here’s to better schedule keeping in 2016. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week, TRP… Over and out!!