This Week in Reaction (2016/01/17)

I haven’t given much attention to the passing of David Bowie, mostly because I didn’t think it was that important. To the extent that it is, and what we may learn from his history on earth, Joseph Pearce has a nice requiem: Fame, Fashion & Fascism: The Many Masks of David Bowie.

Over at Future Primaeval, Harold Lee brings us The Hippie-Conservative Synthesis—a call to conservatives to be the real counterculture.

As Jim predicted, bitcoin would not scale. Always seemed a little implausible to me. I know my BTC client bogs down my machine. But I figured smart people would “figure it out”.

Over at Dissident Right, August Richter pulls back the curtain on Trump, the Antifragile.

Esoteric Trad considers The Beauty of Rome—experienced first hand it appears.

Social Pathologist’s Picture Du Jour sums up Islam’s (and Europe’s) problems almost perfectly. Slumlord also takes stock of the (current) year that was: 2015: Raisins and Turds. (LOL at that title. Must be an Aussie thing.)

Sydney Trads seem to have found a steady source of meme posters in @WrathOfGnon. Here’s another: Beauty is God’s Handwriting. And then a general hat tip: @WrathofGnon, Thanks for all the Fish!. Also, something we alluded to on the last Descending the Tower podcast: Brazilian Founder of Femen renounces Feminism, Embraces Christianity. Not sure dat haircut bespeaks a “reversion to normalcy” doe.

Speaking of pictures, Nick Land has another: Progress for Richard Dawkins.

Superb line from Nick Land: Chronic lying is hard. Eventually, it results in mistakes.

Alrenous has an Update to Progressivism Diagnostically. I assume he means to lampoon the line of reasoning rather than contend for it. Everyone is not a wizard and spells do often fizzle.

Also this happened. A new blog from an old friend. He’s dropped a huge volume of stuff in just the past couple weeks. Most of it excellent. Some of it unnecessarily hyperbolic.

Free Northerner is has a word or two about Alt-right Ethics:

Is being a low-melanin gene-controlled meat sack pumping out more low-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks and fending off higher-melanin gene-controlled meat sacks so your particular phenotype becomes dominant among meat sacks really the base good upon which all other good is measured and for which all evil is justified?

However, just because God is not a consequentialist that does not make him a deontologist.

Garibaldi

Northerner hints in the above about a forthcoming post on Nationalism, which he drops here. And it is I think a perfect expression of the neoreactionary view on the matter. Or as nearly perfect as I’ve seen at any rate.

Nationalism grew out of Westphalia and the French Revolution, and is a part of the enlightenment and liberalization. When it began, nationalism was the ideology of radicals and 1800’s nationalists were often the liberals, until Cthulu swam past them both. Nationalism resulted the destruction of local culture for a more universalist national culture and the end of traditional authorities.

Nationalism, or at least modern nationalism, is too liberal for me to accept as an ideology.

So I support unified communities, nations, and believe that generally each individual nation, whether based on ethnicity, language, religion, ideology, etc., should have self-determination and should govern itself by its own authorities in accordance with its own local culture.

Free Northerner takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his efforts here.

E. Antony Gray brings us an ode: Aeons

Cambria Will Not Yield has an ode to particularity in If We Forget Europe:

Try as he might, no European can ever return to paganism. Odin and Thor were fine fighting men, and when seen as precursors to the one true God they are inspiring. But it is pure fantasy to think we can invoke those pagan gods in our war with the liberals. It is Christ or oblivion. It would seem that the Europeans have chosen oblivion.

This Week in Social Matter

Media watcher—i.e., watcher watcher—Ryan Landry kicks off the week over at Social Matter with Nightcrawler Is Journalism’s Here And Now. It is about the increasing lengths the Fourth Estate is going to attract eyes (or clicks), whilst obscuring, when not altogether disregarding, the facts.

Last summer, Megyn Kelly attempted to derail the Trump train by smearing him as misogynistic and calling upon white knights to make Trump’s treatment of Kelly proof of misogyny. The media and protest-rioters in Ferguson, Missouri, were in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters for CNN and MSNBC were practically begging for the first Molotov cocktail. The rioters needed the media to portray them as oppressed citizens crying out, and the media needed the rioters for ratings. How much further does the media go before they become Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler: setting up shootouts, or even worse, paying criminals to commit crimes to capture on film? With the media’s actions in Ferguson or Baltimore, is the media not already there?

David Grant’s attorneys are in negotiations with the gods of libertarianism. Unless You’re An Atom, Principled Libertarianism Is Not For You.

[W]hen people come into conflict, someone’s pursuit of happiness must be thwarted. When hundreds of young men in the street start eying dozens of women, should we prioritize the good of many or of the few? There is no set of principles that will not require you to sacrifice someone’s good for another’s sake. The question is “Whom are you willing to sacrifice?”

Mark Citadel returns to Social Matter with Battling The ‘Aesthetics’ Of Modernity, but beware the R-rated image, which I find difficult to look at even for a moment. It’s presence is, however, very much relevant to Mark’s point in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀

Abortion is ugly; motherhood is beautiful

Just as there is an organic moral base for mankind, there is also an organic aesthetic base which at the very least extends to the broad spiritual race. On average, people from Belarus have similar concepts of beauty to the French. It is very possible for an Italian to marvel at St. Basil’s Cathedral, and a Russian to admire the Coliseum, even though both are culturally distinct architectural styles.

I think this is exactly right. There are logical, principled, and moral reasons to oppose abortion. And they are completely correct. But none of them smacks you quite as hard as Abortion is Ugly. Now one might counter that brain surgery is ugly. This is true, yet brain surgery is an attempt to restore natural healthy function. What natural healthy function does abortion restore? Consequence free sluttery? No. Abortion is ugly all the way down.

Landry returns Wednesday with Episode 8 of his preternaturally regular podcast.

Friday brings another newcomer, Margot Ford, up to the Social Matter Amplification System. She peels back several layers of subterfuge on Anarcho-Tyranny In Germany.

This Week in 28 Sherman

If you needed help with his Nightcrawler Is Journalism article, Ryan Landry provides a review of the film to kick off the week over at his home blog. Sounds like he watched on a lark, thanks to zero overhead Netflix. Overall he loved the movie, “a great film that I heartily recommend.” Still, there are a few things that Nightcrawler gets (rather predictably) wrong:

The journalism angle is well represented for gore but there is a miss. The sell is that crime creeping into white burbs plays well for cameras. We know this is a lie. Hollywood wants you to think the media is not on the side of criminals and trying to frame crime as a bad thing. This is a lie since the dindu crimes of break-ins are suppressed while the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings get national coverage. Where was the national outrage for Amanda Blackburn? Unfamiliar with that name? She was the pastor’s wife raped and murdered in front of her toddler. They couldve just robbed her but they did not. they raped and killed her. That did not get trayvon or michael brown treatment, but if we are in the start of a national crime wave and incarceration policies are being debated, what better symbol to push to be tough on crime? She is not used since she does not fit the prog narrative.

He has moar on David Bowie’s Footsie With Fascism. Whether Bowie was, as he later averred, in a drug-crazed attention-whoring episode or not is, to me, beside the point. (Turns out a whole lotta 70s era artists when through that phase too.) What’s interesting is what drug-crazed attention whore celebs used to be able to get away with? It’s not that they can get away with less these days. Certainly, they can get away with more, generally speaking (e.g., Miley Cyrus). But it is a very special kind of more (e.g., not Mel Gibson).

Landry ventures out to TRS this week with Bloomberg’s Loathsome Jew Trilogy. Now before we accuse ol’ Ryan of going all Natsoc on us…

I like capitalism and the free market, but I am also smart enough to know that usury laws were put in for a non-theological reason.

Usury laws were put in because one cannot price for all risks. There are two schools of thought: “A price for every risk” and “some risks cannot be priced”. The second approach is not just pricing something so that the market can sustain it, but pricing the actual, underlying risk. Your loan and return requirement for a particular risk will be too high for some projects to operate and pay you for your risk. Those projects should not be funded until they can be engineered, designed or altered to fit a lower return, signifying a safer risk.

Usury laws are not anti-capitalist. They are pro-capitalist: merely a signal that the sovereign is unwilling to take the risk of unbounded risk pricing.

This Week in WW1 Pics: Dead Macedonian In The Snow.

Finally, Neoreaction’s most productive worker, Landry posts his own personal week in review. He does them every week, but I thought I’d go ahead and link it since he’s putting more and more meat in there.

This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter begins with the intriguing assertion: Maps Don’t Show Borders. Well, not the real borders. Between peoples. They used to mostly. He reports on the interesting developments among the Visegrad Four (V4) nations of central Europe: “The Visegrad states are coalescing around a common rejection of Soros-style, petri-dish globalism. And these are just the liberals.”

Here he has an open letter to Dear Solipsists. I’m personally ambivalent about trans-racial adoption. But not when you use it to score moral points against your huwyte, non-violent, and anti-racist neighbors. Here’s some classic Porter on that:

It’s gratifying to see she’s impartial to her own biological offspring–neither of whom I imagine will ever be called a strong white man by their mirror-gazing mother. Though to the preening white–ummm–parents of African accessories, I’ve been wrestling with talking to you about some things I think you need to know. God or Gaia did not fashion this world as a stage for your exquisite morality. This being a play best produced away from those who must be harangued to heed it. There is a reason you did not choose to raise your Liberian–ummm–son in his native habitat far from the predations of suburban white professionals. It is the same reason your hollow ethics didn’t compel you to decamp to at least an American black ghetto, where the non-racist neighbors would have been regarded with calm composure.

This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X goes all Do-it Yerselfer on a Tentative map of Neanderthal (and Denisovan) DNA in humans.

Next she wonders Why is India so dark?

This was a little more navel gazy than usual, but Mrs. X definitely has some interesting stuff on actual autism spectrum disorders: The Big Bang Theory is not “My People”: aspies, tribalism, and the development of nerd politics. Like I’ve said, the development of the unpopular smart nerds vs. popular dumb jocks dynamic is a very recent cultural trope. It has little basis in human biology and I in fact have speculated that it may very well be a ((((Jedi)))) mind trick. The Professor was the smartest and most desirable man on Gilligan’s Island. More on the subject here.

Evolutionist X rounds out the week with another edition of Kabloona Friday. This time we meet a homosexual Eskimo. And since DePoncins’ book was published in 1941—before the stereotype that stereotypes are always wrong took hold—stereotype validation is refreshingly abundant herewith.

This Week… Elsewhere

Matt Briggs has a few Predictions Relating To Racist German Women Taunting Innocent Migrant Men. In which, he links to Ed Feser’s long comprehensive take on Liberalism & Islam.

Speaking of Feser’s article, Bonald takes his own excursion on that here: Liberalism and Islam, Christianity and paganism.

So, in a sense, liberalism and Islam are opposites. In another, they are cousins. Christianity posits two orders, each largely defined by the opposition of the other. Liberalism takes one, Islam the other, but if you’re just left with one order which covers everything, does it matter so much what you call it? It’s just like we know whenever somebody starts going around teaching that everything is sacred, one knows with certainty that anyone who believes it will promptly lose his sense of the sacred entirely, since the sacred only exists for us in opposition to the profane.

Back to Briggs… He examines an honest-to-God peer-reviewed paper in an honest-to-God academic (well, “academic”) journal and wonders What Could Feminist Physics Possibly Mean? About what you’d think, apparently… not that it would be physics. He also has one up at The Stream: Obama Warns: Global Warming Deniers Now Face the Disapproval of … Business Leaders!

But back to Bonald… He questions the thesis that Assimilation of French Muslims impeded by zombies (aka., nominal Catholics). Meh. Correlations are too easy to find.

But back to Briggs… This was crucial: When Philosophy Lost Its Way Discussion

The effect of the retreat of philosophers into incomprehensible and practically useless sub-sub-specialties is to elevate science to the place theology once stood, where it doesn’t belong. It is to let scientists adapt faddish philosophies, since they never are forced to confront their philosophical views and prejudices. Introspection isn’t necessary by definition if philosophy is of no use. About all scientists can recall is some vague ideas of falsifiability, which are of little practice value.

Briggs gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for that one.

The simply breathtaking Rita Hayworth Gene Tierney [Don’t believe everything you read on teh interwebz]. [Click for embiggening.]

Filed under Worth it For the Featured Image Alone, Briggs also says: When They Come For Your Cash, It Will Be For Your Own Good. But also worth it for updates on the Global War on Cash.

Whenever Voegelin comes up, I always expect heavy. Over at Imaginative Conservative, Eric Voegelin’s Redemption of Modernity appears to be an attempt to get Voegelin and Kant to play nice. Evaluating whether that works is above my paygrade. Must’ve been Voegelin Mashup Week over there because here’s another: The Burkean Tradition of Strauss and Voegelin.

Also there, more on McLuhan’s Thomist realism: Technological Servitude & Marshall McLuhan’s Proposal for Liberation. I’m not convinced of the terms of the debate. “Technological servitude” for example means what exactly? “We” humans have “needed” the plow to survive for going on ten-thousand years. Does that mean we are The Plow’s servants? There’s also an implied collectivism in some of this that doesn’t ring true. For example:

By spotting the patterns of our servitude, we can arrive at not simply a realistic appraisal of the challenges of our new environment; we can also arrive at the sort of meditative thinking, traditionally encouraged by the liberal arts, which will enable us to liberate ourselves from our technological slavery.

Well, agreed on principle but confused as to extent. Is it “our” (whose) duty to “liberate” (how much) everyone by meditative thinking. Or is this liberation only for the few? And if only for the few, then who’s to say that a few aren’t already liberated? And of course given the current state of the liberal arts, it seems even to begin this project that the entire edifice would have to be torn down and rebuilt to provide any support to genuinely free thought. Finally a view from married Roman Catholic priest (because formerly Anglican priest) Dwight Longenecker on The Reformation: The Mother of All Revolutions? (The question mark I think is purely rhetorical.) We’re approaching the 500th anniversary of that event next year.

Over at West Coast Reactionaries, new (to me) author Cato Disapproves has very fine essay on The Decline of Community. And another: The Happening and Leviathan. That which cannot be sustained usually ends. But knowing when is always the hardpart.

With all due respect to Thrasymachus, whom I respect and usually like, this is almost 100% wrong, that is to say, in the places it makes any substantive claims at all. Our current problems—the decay of the west—are chiefly structural. Argue with that, or don’t argue at all. Here too we have what would amount to an argument with Christensen’s Civilization post if only the two were logically or thematically related in some way.

An encouraging sign, Chris Gale thinks We need a second reformation. Involving the Prots and Romans. Since the first one didn’t actually reform anything, but rather split the Western Church in two (and then in 35,000) and carve out space for the so-called Enlightenment, perhaps we can call this a “first one”.

Mark Richardson asks Who do the German Greens blame for the Cologne attacks?

David Grant engages in a bit of speculative analogical fiction at his home blog: The Gate of Gnon.

Coontown University is an excellent and enjoyable (thus far by both metrics) discovery. This week, Dr. Swaggins brings us Eyferth the Cat. The good doctor’s first post in December, predating my knowledge of the place, was a tour de force (and music to my ears): Fecundity is Immortality.

Also at Coontown U., here’s one On the Neural Basis of Political Belief. There is some. But it’s not quite the way the media want to spin it.

The fact that we have both conservatives and liberals means that both phenotypes (or underlying genotypes; a four repeat allele of the DRD4 gene has been shown to correlate with conservatism and identical twins raised apart generally share political beliefs) have helped our survival at some point. If one of these two phenotypes were less fit than the other, this would mean one of two things:

1. We’re living in a potential multicultural paradise wherein different groups pose no significant threat to one another’s safety or prosperity, and to be concerned with an incalculably massive horde of illegals effortlessly crossing our southern border, rapists migrating to Europe and so on is tantamount to basing one’s worldview off of paranoid delusions, or

2. There are people out there who outright lack the mental hardware necessary to understand these threats even after hearing about the Rape of Cologne, the Paris shootings, the San Bernardino shooting, the Boston bombings, the Rotherham rape ring, the attempted bombing at Hanover, and the Chattanooga shooting.

I’m not given to hand out an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ to just any ol’ Johnny-come-lately onto the seen, but this is that good.

JM Smith is fantastic here: Duffers and Fanatics—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

[I]magine a hiking club that is comprised of true hikers and duffers. The true hikers love hiking, the duffers are happy to hike, but only because it is an agreeable way to exercise, socialize, pass the time, build an appetite, or what have you. And to the extent that the duffers take over the club, the club will cease to be a hiking club and degenerate into a social club that happens to hike. Socializing, not hiking, will become what the club is “all about.” Book clubs are often destroyed by duffers.

To find out why that’s important you’ll just hafta RTWT.

Check out this freaky robot dog

While hooliganism will play no role in a proper restoration, it’s sometimes difficult not to admire their strategy.

Brett Stevens notes Why diversity trumps feminism every time. Feminists are really between a rock and a hard place. The perpetrators of actual rape are overwhelmingly “diverse”. Fixes for that will involve disparate impact. And that’s rayciss. He also says, “Blame democracy, not the rapefugees”. Not that we can’t blame both, of course. And, of course, it isn’t as though people voted for Muzzie rape gangs, nor in fact that a majority of Europeans (on any given day) are all that gung-ho to accept migrugees. Europe is quite famously undemocratic, eevul EU-n-all that. And that’s the entire point about the occult power of democracy: it allows the powerful to manipulate the opinions of people to act, in general, against the interests of those same people. The answer is not Moar Power to the People, but rather far less.

Guest author, Daisy Belden, explains at The Mitrailleuse: No, I’m not a feminist.

Well looky that… It’s still Monday. On the west coast of America. We’re declaring this: On (Freaking) Time!! See you next week. Til then, keep on reactin’! TRP… Over and out.