The Very Best of Last Week in Reaction (2016/04/24)

Last week’s This Week in Reaction is now up over at Social Matter. A world record 12 awards were given out. These were:

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Honorable Mentions:

Mark Yuray: How To Passivism. After showing why Right Wing Activism was the thing not to do, Yuray follows up with what to do. The answer: work and build your own self, families, institutions, communities, connections, and capabilities. It’s hard, not very sexy, and crucially fails to trigger much dopamine in the brain. But it’s the only thing that can work. It’s the only that has ever worked. And besides, Aristotle would approve.

Free Northerner: (two related articles) Activism and Accept Power. In the prelude, Northerner carefully defines activism and clarifies how all the ingredients to “becoming worthy” do not involve it. He then goes on to explain how one “accepts power” after working hard to establish and aggrandize legitimacy in his own domain.

Jim Donald: Fixing housing, health, and education. A concise and entertaining thought experiment on how to fix these obviously broken aspects of modern life, if only an executive whose rights matched his duties were permitted to exist.

Nydwracu: Against white nationalism. A brilliant short essay cutting down to the bones of why white (qua white) nationalism is, even if laudable to some extent, nonethless ultimately incoherent and useless.

Spandrell: (4-part series) The distribution of power, The Song Golden Age, Its Decline and Fall. Classic Spandrellian storytelling from Chinese history in his own skeptical realist 21st century voice.

Ryan Landry: A Deep State Announces Its Existence. Landry doing his best investigative journalist and analysis, relates the otherwise rather inexplicable story of why the shadowy powers behind what little law & order Libya has left would choose to go public.

Mark Citadel: Evola’s Case For The Tripartite Race.. A much anticipated article, on a topic clearly close to Citadel’s heart, he lays out Evola’s hierarchical view of race, why it’s important and what it means for our situation today.

Adam Wallce: The Demon of Mechanisation. A profound examination of how the velvet oppression of compulsory freedom for deracinated individuals destroys our natural connections to each other, to the transcendant, and to our own nature.

J. M. Smith: A Lamp That Shall Be Put Out. A superb essay linking the dishonoring of anscestors to iconoclasm and many disorders it has wrought through the ages.

Bad Billy Pratt: “E.T.” (1982) and Muslims. Yet another of Pratt’s patented mashups of Classic Movies and Current Pathologies. Spielberg flips the classic alien visitor script: E. T. is safe, oh so safe, he would not hurt a fly. Look at him. He’s cute. Those federal agents sure are meanies. This prepares Anglophone hearts to treat slightly less extraterrestrial, but massively more real future aliens.

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… And the Winners Were:

(The panel were deadlocked on the overall winners. Co-champions is not an unprecedented resolution. Nor an ungentlemanly one. Nor ungentlewomanly, as the case may be.)

Ryan Landry: Immigration and the Innsmouth deal. A brilliant interpretation of Lovecraft’s Shadow over Innsmouth in light of the West’s apparent addiction to forms of immigration that are metamorphosing the very nature of the West.

Evolutionist X: What Ails Appalachia? Pt 3 (possibilities). This is a conclusion to a series (parts one and two), but stands up quite well on its own. Mrs. X seeks to answer the question of why Appalachia performs worse than it’s natural and human resources would predict. She runs through the entire gamut of factors, but the pathological consequences conscious government policy are called out for special and withering scrutiny.