This Week in Reaction (2016/01/10)

Jim has the startling truth behind the startling truth: Saudi Monarch executes US agent who tried to overthrow him:

“NGO” stands for “non government organization”, but if an organization is actually non governmental, for example McDonalds, no one calls it an NGO. In practice, “NGO” means “US State Department Front Organization”. This is an open secret, as for example when they advertise for employees, they are apt to describe the openings as government employment.

The reason that they call themselves non governmental is that they actively campaign in US politics and foreign politics, which is illegal or embarrassing for the US government to openly do.

Jim also offers a brief reflection on The Good Old Days. Finally, Jim’s Big Piece this week: The Anti American empire. Anti-(a certain demographic)-American Empire that is.

Trump proposes to cut loose all those countries that hate us, despise us, and cost us blood and money. Should he actually carry out this policy, which is completely within presidential power and requires no consent from judiciary or legislature, only the obedience of the military, the horror and outrage will be beyond belief, making the former Bush derangement syndrome, and the current Trump derangement syndrome seem like courteous and rational discussion. The only reason the media’s heads are not already exploding on television is that they really cannot believe the proposal.

While I don’t think the merely temporary government can achieve real and lasting change, it will be good to hear those blood vessels popping like firecrackers on New Years Eve.

Just as the Turkish empire really sucked for Turks, the American Empire really sucks for Americans, hence, the Anti American Empire.

Jim also gives an apt name to a social disorder we’re bound to see more of in the coming years: Rotherham Syndrome.

Harold Lee is his usual awesome self here with some notes from Houellebecq’s Submission: The Best Lack All Conviction—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

In general, every social relationship involves some friction. There is always a temptation to take the easy way out, to exit from demanding obligations to family and friends. But when you spread out a little conflict-aversion throughout a society, this avoidant behavior gets amplified into atomization.

There are probably fewer family feuds now than in any previous point in American history. But this is not because people have learned how to better get along with one another; rather, they figured out how not to have to get along with one another. And in a conflict-averse culture, it’s considered preferable to have no extended family ties than to have occasional family rancor.

Dividual responds to Lee here and heads off in a different but equally insightful direction.

One of the great discoveries of NRx is that large parts of human psychology are reducible to to group dynamics and status-seeking.

Well, not so much discover it as apply it, I think. But the trouble is…

Every aspect of high-T behavior got systematically vilified, to the extent that today e.g. if you start a business and make it big, you cannot really radiate that kind of old-time boss image, standing up like a Teddy Roosevelt and be like “yes, I made this, yes, I own this, yes, I run this show”. Today you would be ridiculed for this i.e. for actual normal high-status behavior, because this is how normally men who really internalize their high status usually behave. Instead you basically have to busy deny you have status and if you run a succesful company and say stuff like “we are a creative community of hard-working individuals” and so on, reducing your own role and pretending it is democratic.

Which led to…

So indeed, why bother? If you would never allowed to feel not hungry, would you eat? Would you bother having sex if orgasms were denied to you? Awkward parallels, but illustrate the point. All the fun was taken out from high status and all the reasons to aspire for it.

And without these status aspirations, we suddenly lack goals. Hence the kind of depression we can see in Houellebecq’s work.

And I think this is why we cannot find a common goal with our family members: in the past the common goal was to acquire status and bring honor to the family name, while competing with other families. This tied families together.

I could go on. Dividual’s is a fantastic article, and in an ordinary week probably our winner. But this week was no ordinary week as you shall see. Dividual settles for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ RTWT.

Alrenous reports on Herds and A Minor Libertarianism Skirmish. Herds tend to be dumber than their average member, and thinking you can just choose to be a libertarian (not that you’d want to) irrespective of the definition of libertarian makes about as much sense as thinking you can just choose to be a woman irrespective… Oh… I see.

Nick Land catches Warg & The Duck dropping truth bombs in 140 characters or less. He also spots Noah Smith being fashionably stupid. Fashionable, but for how long?

Malcolm Pollack suffers from An Onomastic Oversight, over which he makes a brilliant coinage: A.C.I.D.S.

E. Antony Gray brings two visions: The Final Lecture and a Winter’s Afternoon.

Mark Citadel has Some Hard Truths on Santa Claus.

Sydney Trads borrow another one from @WrathOfGnon with a beautiful quote from Solzhenitsyn. Also a brilliant quotation from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Reactionary Perroflauta, Carlos Esteban brings us Ángel y Marta. Spain may be hurting, its government coffers all but dry, but you’ve got to hand it to ’em, they’ve got pluck. Enough pluck to create snazzy propaganda to warn the good people of Murcia about the dangers of “sexist” toys.

Nederlander Alf writes (in English) of A neoreactionary Vatican. An anti-fragile system does not become too dependent upon single institutions, I think, even the Vatican. Still, it would be great to have a church hierarchy that was better inoculated against the the lies and empty show of modernity.

Reactionary Ferret goes meta in Reactions to Reactions. The solution is not demotic actions but in better propaganda. A specific kind of better:

The correct response to propaganda… is to counter with our own propaganda. The right, in general, has failed at this; not because we are intrinsically bad at art—we are not. We have failed because we’ve put the counter-propaganda value ABOVE the entertainment value. You want propaganda that works? You make it fun and entertaining and let the propaganda happen naturally as a reflection of your personal views, as art always does. You want to win this war, then you must realize that art is the front lines. Create better art.

Also from The Based Ferret: Moral Differences Transcending Ideological Ones. In which he makes an eloquent defense of diversity… the right kind: Intellectual diversity.

And—Ferret’s been a busy beaver ferret this week: Some well put together thoughts on Change, Conformity, Stability, Individualism, Totalitarianism.

Collectivism beyond one’s own nuclear family, though, is often pathological and leads to moralizing rationalizations of bad or harmful behavior. The desire to make your family proud often results in responsible behavior, but the desire to make your State proud results in conforming and non-critical… behavior.

In the conflict between individualism and collectivism, a sort of middle ground must be reached, but that middle ground should probably lean more toward the individualist range.

I don’t think collectivism is a synonym for egalitarianism. And while I don’t believe in any -ism, I do think that a society needs to act principally as a highly structured—i.e., hierarchical, but nevertheless collective—organism. The right (or duty) to criticize and dissent should exist (because anti-fragility), but ought not be equitably distributed.

Free Northerner is fantastic here: Superior and Inferior:

[T]he consent of the governed doesn’t exist. You are born into a society and indoctrinated in its ways from before you can even speak consent, let alone meaningfully understand the concept. The ideas of your fathers control your mind before you are even capable of realizing it. The liberal may respond, ‘but I rebel against the ways of my fathers’, not knowing rebellion is the way of his fathers. The consent of the governed is the consent of a woman not protesting because she has inadvertently consumed rohypnol.

See also: Commenter “Max” saw fit to dump some extended Moldbuggery into the conversation. Also from Northerner: thoughts, with a bit of personal history, on Christian Culture.

Ribbonfarm “Contributing Editor” (wooo… swanky) Sarah Perry expounds On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke. She clarifies that she’s not looking for the type of joke that is played on us so much as the type of thing we make of our own lives. Which as metaphors go, isn’t a bad one. So long as it’s a metaphor, I suppose I can accept it; and so long as there’s someone to have a laugh with when we finally get to that punchline.

Filed under Missed Because No Follow-By-Email Widget: Anomalyuk discusses Elite Cosmopolitanism—the tolerable kind and the much less tolerable sort:

[N]ormal elite cosmopolitanism may be good or bad—that’s an interesting discussion for another day—but either way the elites in the past did not impose their exotica on the common people. George IV built the Royal Pavilion, but he did not import thousands of Indians from Madras to live in Brighton. Christian VII of Denmark commissioned translations of Persian histories, but did not expect his subjects to go to mosques.

Today’s elites, unlike those of any previous era, do not even see themselves as elite. They think that everyone is equal, that everybody else should be like them, and assume without hesitation that everyone else could be like them. That produces a disconnection with reality that could become the stuff of legend. The peasants have no bread? Let them eat cake! Flyover people don’t want Syrian refugees? Let them dance salsa with them! The apocryphal French princess was probably less out-of-touch.

Also from this past week: Outrage and what it’s good for and mostly what it’s not.

If I draw conclusions from outrage porn, I am looking for conclusions that are independent of the validity of the reporting.

…and little else. I definitely agree with this sentiment. Being drawn in, for no reason other than sample bias, to conflicts that have no effect on you brings with it a strong tendency to universalize… ideas, problems, and solutions. In other words, to engage in precisely that which we criticize in our ideological enemies. Do I always follow this advice? Of course not; that would be Puritanical!

Neovictorian checks in from what sounds like a very productive sabbatical with Dreams, consciousness and sanity. He’s busting open the doors on “Become Worthy”.

CWNY’s Saturday Missive: By Whose Law Shall We Live.

This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry kicks off the week over at Social Matter with the suggestion: Amerikanskiy Zones—an answer to the following:

At what point does Russia take advantage of its vast expanse and of the current political climate in America by offering political asylum to whites in autonomous zones?

I might add Russia also suffers still abysmal (even if slightly improved) fertility rates and is expecting massive population decline over the next 50 years. I think Landry’s tongue is ever so slightly in his cheek in this one, but the beauty of it is that the idea actually makes a lot of sense from the Russian perspective. The hypothetical propaganda angle for Cold War 2.0 (which does in fact appear unfortunately to be real) is priceless.

Mark Christensen discusses the twin phenomena of white student unions and the moral outrage the very thought of them generates in Identity And Civilization: Why Humanity Depends On Ethnoculture. He boils it down the current orthodoxy on identity brilliantly in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

[W]hite identity politics is Hitler, and non-white identity politics is Mandela. Mugabe and Idi Amin don’t enter the respectable mind as archetypes of non-white identity politics. The practiced ideology of the white, western Brahmin is this: universalism for white people, identity politics for the rest. On a more fundamental level: agency for white people, socioeconomic conditions for the rest.

But aside from the incoherent ravings of our Cultural Masters, what about nationalism proper?

[N]ationalism becomes an enemy of civilization when it believes that Shakespeare is great because he was English, rather than that England is great because it produced Shakespeare. Thus it falls on all those who stand for the continued betterment and evolution of mankind to oppose this strain of nationalism, problematic exactly insofar as it resembles the leveling “humanism” of our universalist friends.

Anthony DeMarco and I are joined by a whole lotta folks over on Descending the Tower—a review of the “Top Stories” of 2015. What we lacked in planning, we made up for in length.

Ryan Landry, who alas was unable to make the DtT episode, nevertheless did deliver his seventh (7th) installment of Weimerica Weekly—Barak “ISIS is contained” Obama Edition.

C. A. Bond returns with a deusy: Empiricism And Its Role In The Cathedral.

[W]hy is it the case that [extreme British] Empiricism has been so popular? Taylor seems to ascribe this to moral sentiment, Richard Dawkins like most people seems to ascribe it to a “zeitgeist” of progress (almost everyone seems to assume that the tail wags the dog), but as De Jouvenel implies, the truth seems to be that Empiricism has been promoted despite its lack of success and its incoherence, which means it has another value and usage to power. The answer seems to be that Empiricism has value as a societal acid, which is quickly followed up with an assertion of the primacy of the central power’s null hypothesis.

It’s easy to forget that ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences. And not all bad consequences are unintended. Bond wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. But for the first time ever, and in a judging fiasco that will hopefully be never be repeated, that award will have to be shared with…

Image from the terrifying(ly named) Thammasat University “Massacre” in which 46 out of many thousands of people lost their lives

Rounding out the week, newcomer Lawrence Glarus pens Schadenfreude In Bangkok.

Under the license of democracy, Thailand was belatedly thrown into the cultural revolution of the 60’s. It was only 1973; the night was young. Now the students, intellectuals, artists, and left-wing journalists could catch up with their American counterparts. Giddy iconoclasm birthed wild subversion as the intelligentsia swam unfettered. Many of the elite took note and quickly concluded that liberal democracy was a threat to their institutions and power.

Fortunately, the elite and especially Thailand’s King were prepared and mounted what is among the longest-lived anti-revolutionary retrenchments in the world:

Spurred by fears of an alien incursion and emboldened by religious, military, and royal backing a formal and informal campaign of terror spread through the country. Organizations built in the late 60’s as counterinsurgency units were given new targets: students, politicians, unions and activists. Radio stations set up throughout the country spread propaganda and coordinated militias.

For once, leftist agitation, built on the anglophone model, got precisely nowhere:

Activism and its distant cousin terrorism only work when there is an interested third party with power. The students had no such third party, and as we’ll see the Village Scouts did.

And there’s much more from Glarus. An encouraging, deeply researched, and well-told story. Can it work in the West? Without a King to act as an equilibrium point, it will be much harder. With Bond, Lawrence Glarus shares in the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

This Week at 28 Sherman

A recovery pace over at Ryan Landry’s home blog this week. But even at a recovery pace, he outpaces most of us. On Monday, he talks about The Slattery Report and Our Lying Media. He dials up the countersemitism to a mild and cloudless 6. This is not to be mistaken for anti-((((Ezra Klein)))-ism, which is peaking the meter at a red hot 10. With the pathologies of #Rapefugees getting harder and harder to hide, public support for their “plight” was waning. Leave it Vox to lay on another thick layer of sophistry. Landry counters.

Why must 315 million Americans be forced to do things because less than 2% of its population wants it and needs to feel it’s a part of living their identity? Note: Israel is never asked to take in a single refugee despite being a Jewish nation. This is insanity.

A New Orleans police officer applaudes as WWII vets from the 4Th Infantry Division pass in the Military Parade, celebrating the dedication and grand opening of the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, 6 June 2000 (Photo/Bill Cook/DOD)

This too was particularly poignant:

The most disgusting thing is to consider how many Americans liberated Nazi camps and freed Jews behind barb wire. In return, those white men are demonized as the horrible patriarchy, the bad old order and nothing to be thankful for. Americans who share the values of those liberators are today called Nazis. One of my grandfathers was in the 3rd Armored Division that liberated a camp. He told me many things from the war. One that he shared, once I was old enough, was that he never understood how thousands of prisoners would not charge the dozens of guards armed with guns. How come the Jews would not fight back? It sickened him. Die on your feet. Had he lived to see the Holocaust used as an excuse for the obliteration of any concept of national borders and protecting one’s people, he would spit blood.

And this week in WW1 pics: Aussies Underground

This Week in Kakistocracy

In Bonding with Ethnocentrism, Porter untangles the great ethical issues of oxytocin: a drug that appears to increase feelings of closeness, while simultaneously increasing “defensiveness toward out-group members”. Maybe there is some Conservation of Defensiveness principle in there… somewhere in the human soul. Hmmm… Nevertheless, he finds a stunning admission in the (presumably) Peer-Reviewed™ NIH article:

Oxytocin is known as the “bonding hormone”.

But for the purpose of establishing this settled doctrine as a premise for all further debates, let us reiterate: the National Center for Biotechnology Information states that ethnocentrism occurs naturally in the normal population: under normal circumstances people tend to favor their own group over out-group members. I don’t think it can be stated any more plainly. Ethnocentrism is perfectly natural and normal. That is to say: Welcome to ethnocentrism! And pass the oxytocin.

Ethnocentrism is perfectly natural and normal… unless you’re white that is.

Also, he finds some use in reading WaPo: Yo Ye Pharaohs, Let Us Walk. Occasionally they accidentally tell truths, whilst attempting to hide it.

Porter covered Brussel’s cancellation of New Years’ festivities last week. This week he takes up Köln’s failure to cancel them:

Day turning into night isn’t speculation if one contemplates yesterday. So it is with this. Man’s pieties are in constant flux; his nature is unchanging. European men will cast out the Saints of Cologne, or their wives and daughters will be plundered as chattel. That’s all the scapegoat there is.

Finally, in the aftermath of the New Year’s sex attacks, Porter finds the iron fist part—the tyranny part—of anarcho-tyranny: Bathing in Cologne. When a thousand muzzies roam free in rape gangs, the police always minutes away. Protest that injustice, however, and they’ll be waiting there for you. With water canons.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X begins the week with Newton’s Third Law of Politics. This is a huge data rich takedown of the myths surrounding refugees… I mean err… asylees, immigration, national character, and the kitchen sink. Clearly she had a lot on her mind. Excellent article and ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. A taste:

Bad Koreans, Bad!

Violent, low-trust societies that people find unpleasant to live in and want to leave are violent and low-trust because they are full of people who are violent and low-trust. High-trust societies like Sweden function because everyone involved is a default-cooperator who wouldn’t even think of cheating others. Hell, when they translate articles about government corruption and nepotism into Swedish, they have to explain the concepts because the Swedish language doesn’t have words for such practices. In other countries, helping out your family over the interests of strangers is seen as moral; nepotism and “corruption” are the default, and this strange, immoral practice of treating strangers like family members has to be explained.

Here she considers the relationship between Absolute Monarchy, Revolution, and the Bourgeoisie. Also an extended meditation on Consanguinity and Socialism.

Ms. X puts her HBD Hat on again as she asks Does the Bronze Age Herald a Major Transformation in Human Dispersal Patterns?

And finally a trip to the (diet and dentine of the) Far North in Kabloona Friday.

This Week… Elsewhere

Relevant perhaps to our new series on right wing esoterics and symbology, Imaginative Conservative reprints William Provost’s 1990 essay: The Language and Myth of Tolkien.

It is both easy and tempting to separate the power of God from the love of God. To appropriate power without appropriating love is the ambition of every magician, of nearly every technician and all but a few politicians…..

When the mythical deals with the power of the Gods as separate and distinct from love, that power always has a demonic dimension. Satan is power and the quest for power is always Satanic in character.

Also there, Christopher Morrissey talks about The Christian Humanism of Marshall McLuhan, who it turns out found fellow Thomists of his own day a bit more prickly than one might expect. Funny that. Not funny ha ha.

The coveted Briggsy

Matt Briggs has the latest in “Official Science” in The Real Anti-Science Crowd. He goes full sithlord over at The Stream with Pro-Gun Is Pro-Life. Filed under “And The Winner Is…” Second Annual WMBriggs.com Bad Science Award!. Or the “Briggsy” as we like to call it.

Briggs also takes a fresher look at Dropping Homicide Rates.

Nice essay here from Chris Gale on how the current US Administration has lost The mantle of heaven. Aka., Mandate of Heaven. I think that’s quite right. Unfortunately for us (and New Zealand) the vast majority of Westerners still find legitimacy in the system that gave us the current Administration.

Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson links this rather remarkable HBR article.

Thrasymachus’ takes a rather differently nuanced view of “The Hateful Eight” and the Racial Ideology of Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino’s insight is that a great deal of what blacks say is lies intended to manipulate white people in one way or another. He can say this of course because he approves of it.

Nice essay here from JM Smith: January is the Curmudgeonly Month, in which explores the origins of that term: curmudgeon… not January.

[A] curmudgeon is, at bottom, a bitter loser. This is why the word is so often applied to sour old men who resent the fact that the world has passed into the hands of a new generation of overlords. This is also why it is so often applied to conservatives, who have been losing, and bitter, since 1649.

Time for a rebrand I guess. Also a discussion of the actual meaning of tolerance, which is obfuscated When Tolerance is a Painted Strumpet.

Brett Stevens in quite on point with The enemy is within:

Democracy misleads us. In the name of a kind of pacifism — the idea that we can control others by considering them “equal” — we have made our society into hell. Under the surface, it is a miserable place. People act with a “committee mindset,” taking no unpopular risks to affirm what is right, and we enable millions of parasites to take from the good. Until we fix this outlook, everything else is just a scapegoat, which is why we have failed to reverse our decline so far.

Stevens continues on that theme here:

With an egalitarian society, only the victims become King. Society owes them something and those who do not hand it over are bad and evil.

Al Fin wonders What Would Hit Girl Do?

Speaking of hit girls, Roman Dmowski asks Do They Deserve It?

Greg Cochran has some preliminary but better than expected news to those worried about the effects of genetic load on human achievement: It could be human cognition is Idiot-Proof. More ideas about that here.

Iron Legion sees the two social pathologies coming to loggerheads in Sympathy for the Devil in Cologne.

Carlos Esteban has praise for wonder and a corresponding warning against cynicism in Stupor Mundi.

Well, that’s all I had time for. Only two days late. Only, you were probably expecting that. So. Not late at all!! Until next week… Keep on Reactin’! TRP… Over and out!!