This Week in Reaction (2016/04/10)

Free Northerner offers A Eulogy for Rob Ford, who died last week from cancer, aged 46. RIP. Noteth FN:

Rob Ford was not a product of donors, he was a reaction to the elite class. He was a vaisya at war with Canadian brahmin class and he deserves our respect. The closest American politician to Rob Ford is Donald Trump.

More on Rob Ford below the fold.

Also at Free Northerner’s: Owned Markets. This is a deep Menciian Formalist tract.

The problem with free markets though, is that they are free. Libertarians and conservatives do not take their thoughts as fully forward as they should. We can privatize all the goods and services on the market, but that leaves one question, what of the market itself?

…

The solution then, is to privatize markets themselves. We need not free markets, which are subject to the plundering all commons are subject to, but owned markets, markets which are privately owned and controlled for the profit of the owner.

Huh?

An owned market would (generally) be free with strong contract law because the free market works and the owner would aim to hit the optimal point of the laffer curve to maximize his own revenues. The owner would also recognize that the well-being of his people was necessary for profit maximization and so would (effeciently) invest some of his profits into infrastructure and public welfare programs to ensure profit-maximization. Pork and rent-seeking would simply cease to exist as a problem, as the king can do with his own money and property as he wishes. Finally, the owner, having human judgement, would be able step in if an corporation or individual within his market was abusing it and address the issue on an individual basis, without having to create an unwieldy set of regulations (with many exploitable loopholes) to cover every eventuality and a huge, impersonal, self-serving bureacracy to enforce it.

B-b-but… what if the king is crazy?

Naturally, none of this is to say that there is no possibility of the owner abusing or misusing a market. Vested self-interest does not necessarily mean wise or correct decisions, he may himself be foolish, sociopathic, or mad, but they do mean that sociopathy and foolishness are temporary states of the current owner rather rather than inherent and permanent structures at the base of the market.

Yup. Free Northerner is no stranger to the podium and he wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Over at Future Primaeval, new guy Raymond Brannen delivers You Can’t Save The World Without Civilization. And it is excellent. Brannen writes to the philanthropic set, who invest in a lot in various schemes to save (or improve) the world. He has one message: There is an essential ingredient to philanthropic programs, and you may not have given it much thought… And you’re sitting right on top of it!

We live in civilization like fish live in water. We may not notice that water now, but we would certainly notice if it was gone. In a world of exponential curves, decline could sneak up on us, and we wouldn’t realize until it was too late.

He does not concerned himself in this one with how to save civilization, nor even so much as defining what civilization even is. Those essays are apparently coming. He is content here to show that most civilizations fall, that ours is unlikely to be an exception, and that when they do things are going to suck… badly. Altruism for distant peoples and lands will be both impossible and the last thing on anyone’s mind. Brannen earns a rookie ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Greg Cochran has the sad, not too surprising news about Henry Harpending. Sailer has a nice RIP.

Sarah Perry summarizes Mill on Why is Freedom of Speech Important? Meh. None of the goods that Mill imagines getting from “freedom of speech” cannot also be gotten in ways that do not destabilize the moral fabric of society. For societies that cannot agree upon a carefully curated vision of the good, a stable social equilibrium will not be possible. Somebody will be eating somebody. Metaphorically or otherwise. Fences are far better than war.

Then Mrs. Perry is over at Ribbonfarm with: Business as Magic, which begins as A Tale of Two Business Functions. She presents a Sociological Theory of Institutionalized Organizations:

[I]nstitutions have two competing interests. On the one hand, they need to be efficient at producing their product or service. On the other hand, they need to be legitimate and to fit into myth-driven regulatory and structural frameworks. In response, institutions decouple their mythical and practical activities. They not only pay lip service to myth, but structure their operations and activities toward signaling conformity with it. Backstage, their members accomplish the necessary tasks using methods often at odds with their institutional myths.

You’ll have to RTWT to see what she means. It’s not too long.

Henry Dampier has a big paste from Edwin Dyga on Abbot’s Defeat. Specifically Abbot’s failure to make any long-term rightward shifts in Aussie politics despite having much promise and several major policy victories.

Nick Land finds an example of ‘Must’ Incontinence. LOL. That phrase needed to exist. Now it does.

Also, this is important: The NRx Moment. Significant areas of disagreement within NRx continue to exist, and Nick Land has a foot in most of them. But with this:

A reactionary exploitation of demotism is not a neoreactionary episode. The Alt-Right is properly credited with capturing the spirit of this development. It is not us.

NRx is situated absolutely outside mass politics. Its moment dawns only when the Age of the Masses is done.

So say we all! Now about that “asabiyyah ceasing to matter” thing…

Also at Xenosystems, explaining Tyndale and his impact on the evolution of the English language in just a few tweets. And: Modernity in a Nutshell.

RF has doesn’t like the phrase: Political science because of its empirical implications. He suggests “Political Logic” in its stead. Clearly the phrase “Political Science” as a self-aware field of inquiry has never not meant “shilling for revolutions everywhere”. Also, in Platform building:

The direction of serious thought would logically need to not begin with what should happen, or its imperative offshoot “must happen,” but with an analysis of what does happen. But this line of thought is unpleasant and leads to conclusions which people do not like.

I blame Kant.

Spandrell tries to be nuanced on Abortion. I think he tries too hard not to be a hypocrite. Also he has an Informed Position on Tibet, which is actually a great read, once you skip his utterly malinformed position on NRx. More here on Tibet and Tradition.

Poet Laureate of the Neoreaction, E. Antony Gray has a song for Lent: By The Waters of Babylon , wherein in contrast with ancient Israel, the faithful of today are strangers in their own homeland.

Neocolonial returns with an analysis of Movers and Stayers. A healthy state needs both, and should prefer to not privilege one class of them over another.

A state must necessarily view movers as temporary help. Their focus on people and place is first and foremost on their own stayers, those committed to the success of the place rather than the success of some ephemeral corporate enterprise within that happens to be taking place within the borders of the state. Any concession made to movers is based solely upon the advantage to their stayers.

The nation on the other hand values its movers most highly, for they are the true source of value that a nation provides within a federation. Moreover, they compete with other nations for these movers, who are always making offers for their services. Any concession made to stayers within the states of the Federation compromises their ability to compete for movers.

In answer to Scott Alexander, Dividuals considers Tribal competition, status-wireheading and its uses. It is a first class bit of psycho-social analysis in its own right.

[Team competition] is not merely about the benefits of tribal membership. It is that sweet, sweet power trip when we defeat them. But it seems in order to feel that, to crave that, you need to have fairly high testosterone levels and Scott does not seem to be very good at that. So he may easily miss that point.

But about those tribes?

Intertribal competition can take many forms. Sometimes it is literally about massacring each other, sometimes it is about fighting for real prizes like wealth, sometimes it is just like in sports, a short-term glory and a heady power-trip feeling, and sometimes it is just that funny kind of not-even-competition when you sit safe and comfortable with your in-group and crack jokes at that idiot outgroup. Either that, or you praise yours, like, erecting statues to national heroes. Yes, people do it all the time, like how Reddit likes to make fun of religious conservatives. It is all about feeling better than the other group without having to even do a thing like actually winning a match. This the least realistic but easiest kind of status-wireheading and probably deserves a name on its own, I will now use Direstraiting after the Money for Nothing song.

“Direstraiting”. LOL. Dividuals offers common sense prescriptions for what to do about the tribalism inherent in people groups. A definite ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Mark Citadel delivers his promised article: Reflections on Caesaropapism. He defends the relationship, but not the cartoon version everyone thinks that it is, which he takes pain to nuke.

Emperor Justinian depicted in 6th C mosaic with halo & crown

Liberals present a false dichotomy to the non-secularist. Either they wish for an ecclesiocracy where the sovereign power rests with the brahmins, or else an ecclesiastic body that is an arm of the sovereign. The former has of course existed, for example the earliest days of the post-Schism Catholic Church where the Pope wielded tremendous political power over sovereigns, something that would wane in time. The latter has also of course existed, great examples being Russia after 1721, and perhaps the Anglican Church under King Henry VIII. However, a true understanding of the Byzantine view of authority and how it was exercised proves this dichotomy to be a false one.

So, if that’s what caesaropapism ain’t, what is it exactly?

Emperor Justinian I declared that the ideal relationship between imperium and sacerdotium was one of ‘symphony’. The Church and the sovereign, each with their vested organic spheres of authority were to attend to their roles to the best of their abilities, and when a ‘wrong note’ was played in this symphony, the response from the ‘audience’ was decisive. When the great and venerated St. John Chrysostom was deposed unjustly from his role as Archbishop of Constantinople by Emperor Arcadius, the city erupted in furious riots.

Citadel highlights the organic nature of the relationship between secular power, religious authority, and the people of a nation. And gets a well deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this important work.

And Mark also has some business to deal with: Amoral Counter-Signaling is Retarded. It’s an authoritative smack-down of the Radix pro-abortion article. More than it deserved. But sometimes it’s worth smacking shit down, just for the hell of it. It builds conviviality.

Intellectual Detox drops another of his rare but always perspicacious essays: Day Dreaming of a Living Wage Grand Compromise. A very interesting proposal. Even more interesting why it will never happen. Detox walks away with an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Jim hates to say it, but he’s got some points Against Urbit. Say it ain’t so, Jim! He’s got his reasons. He also has an ode to differences: Ain’t Inequality Great. (That’s my name for the essay, not his.)

Alrenous finds and fills an explanation gap with Lewontin’s Fallacy: Short Version. Also: Stupidity is a Crime.

Notably I think since public choice theory is true, eugenics is impossible. However, serfdom could be a requirement for welfare – when the truly stupid risk starvation due to their stupidity, they will willingly trade their freedom for their life. This would formalize the command relationship between the intelligent and the stupid, meaning society can easily trace the true responsibility and hold the responsible accountable. Alternatively, the idiots starve and stop being a problem.

And Alrenous gets all up in Nassim Taleb’s grill on the subject of Persowning. This is a good old-fashioned (like 2005 Style) fisking. So Taleb thinks that “owning persons” is a bad thing? How gauche.

Sydney Trads have up another beautiful @WrathOfGnon meme We Once Built Beautiful Cities. They also have discovered Black Pigeon and imbed his video: The Transgender: Normalizing Mental Illness. If you haven’t discovered Black Pigeon, you should.

Michael Laurel checks in after a long absence to update on the status of his Prediction for Armenia & Azerbaijan.

Alf expands on Christensen’s take on PC to consider the power of memes (or simply well-couched facts) On the Value of Shock.

Civilization is an ecology of souls. CWNY takes up the cause with The Fiends of Liberaldom Have Marred God’s Creation.

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This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry, hopefully recovered from his illness, is back in the Sunday Chair at Social Matter with An Empire Of Bad Assumptions. The Blue Empire (State) has been making wars more difficult to win for the Red Empire (DoD) for quite some time through politicization, but the academicization of war, by sending “academics to foxholes” represents a doubling down on strategic stupidity.

These academics were going to help American soldiers better understand the communities they engaged with and better execute on the mission. This was an absolute failure. Academics couldn’t be put into place effectively since war is war and not an anthro project. The petty status games of the university even followed these professors there. Academics let their egos hurt each other and their feelings towards the military affect them. The chaplain on MASH had a better feel for interpreting the situation in the war zone than these academics who became holed up in secure bases far from the natives.

Landry’s choice of Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H is a particularly apt point of comparison. Because that’s exactly what these academics are trying to be: Priests bridging the cultural gaps between Us (American Military) and Them (aka., The Enemy). And it’s all working about as well as one might expect, which is to say, not at all.

E. Antony Gray has some prose for Monday: Evola, Humility, And Mythos. Gray has a bone to pick with Evola’s essay “The Decay of Words, Part 1” helpfully republished by Counter-Currents, in particular with what he sees as a disingenuous tack taken by Evola with the word “humility”, which the latter takes to be a synonym for “base”, and therefore the opposite of virtue. Needless to say, this portrays Christianity in a negative, and in view of Western history, a rather inexplicable light.

The Christian notion of humility has everything to do with this abasement before a greater power and the joke about Jews both demonstrates this and gives us a little picture of how silly holiness spirals are in reality…. Christian humility starts with abasement before God, who, if panto-kratos (all-powerful) would be to anyone other than a soft, unitarian kind of religious person, a source of dread. (The latter person is incapable of comprehending the actual sort of Power that God is.) Humility has lost its flavor not from some slavish morality … but from the loss of a comprehension of servitude—from democratization.

On Tuesday, Mark Yuray trots out a masterful work: Right-Wing Activism Always Fails. He begins with the recent events in Cologne, where the police proved utterly incapable of even seeing, much less stopping, an organized band of about 1000 mudslimes committing about 1000 sexual assaults last New Years’ Eve, but proved perfectly capable of marshalling overwhelming force against 1700 peaceful activists who wished to protest mudslime violence. This is the way of anarcho tyranny. This is the way it must be. And if you protest anarcho-tyranny, you’re gonna get tyrannied. RTWT… and the comments. For its importance to the sphere and the amount of quality discussion it generated, Yuray’s article wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.

Wednesday wouldn’t be Wednesday without Weimerica Weekly—Blacks in Hollywood (talking about Jesus and God) Edition. And also café au laits in Hollywood.

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This Week in 28 Sherman

Over at the home blog, Landry a great In Memoriam for Rob Ford who succumbed last week to cancer at 46.

Mayor Rob Ford, Hulk Hogan arm wrestling

Even his sex scandal got more immediate attention than the Anthony Weiner scandal. The media defended Weiner for a while and even tried to rehabilitate him. Ford was being accused of anything and it was quickly picked up and believed. The man uttered the funniest denial of cheating in the history of political sex scandals.

“I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.”

Stopforamoment, stop stop stop and listen to his words. He was answering to charges he performed cunnilingus on another woman. Hookers were even involved. You couldn’t write that in unless it was the lowest of cheap comedy films.

Be sure to check out Landry’s most memorable pic of him.

Landry is all over Evenwel v. Abbott like a cheap suit with Where’s Your Constitution Now. That’s your Muh Constitution. Wait but what about equal representation for extraterrestrials??

This week in WW1 pics: When French Cyclists Were Cavalry.

And Ryan has some commentary on Breitbart’s attention to the Alt-Right. Like many observers, he smells some spinning going on in the way that Milo and Bokhari downplayed the misogyny, racism and antisemitism (“They’re only joking because you sensitive souls are so laughably triggerable”). Much of it is quite real. But hey that’s a minor distortion in our favor. Not that respectability is within reach in either case. This was important:

Altright is more a movement while NRx is now more like a small strategic organization. Be careful of entryists and people wanting to rush to the head of the parade. Both Altright/NRx see similar problems (issues and groups) but maintain very different organizations, goals, structure as well as strategy. We all want to see the existing progressive regime replaced. We can work on that together, and then split up the spoils. Decentralization is a strength of the AltRight. Better to keep it that way than to let interlopers dilute the ideas within it just for attention.

Also: Landry is a man about the podcastosphere. Here he is on Rebel Yell.

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This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter contemplates the hold that worldwide opinion seems to have on our American politics: Men Can’t Serve Two Masters—And They Don’t Even Try. At least when it suits our masters hear at home. Whether to lead from the front or from behind is, of course, for the leaders to decide.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks with House Speaker John Boehner in May 2011

Almost definitionally, the interests of foreign actors will run counter to those of any domestic citizenry. What is best for you is rarely aligned with what is best for them. As a result, foreign lobbying of their politicians will occur to the near universal detriment of the people who actually elected them to office. Thus it would be a fundamental safeguard of any polity to ensure such external leverage never materializes. This is not an exotic concept.

And so if I were to explain the simple notion to a man on the street and ask him what would be the likely legal response to massive and routine foreign lobbying, he would probably imagine a very active slate of bribery and treason trials. As in practically every aspect of politics, he would be very wrong.

Foreign interests are rightly alarmed that the United States may begin to act more in its own interests—i.e., more like every other nation in the world—and less like your rich senile old uncle. And you’re supposed to feel bad about that.

Next Porter asks: What’s for Lunch Tomorrow? For the True Conservatives™ of the GOPe, it’s blinis with caviar and crème fraiche as far as the eye can see. If 40% of GOP voters are morally bankrupt for having the audacity for vote for their identity, what does that say about other identity-group voters, eh?

Would you have to walk on water to get accepted at all eight Ivies? Just about. Porter has the story in Slipping the Surly Bonds. It’s good to be Harvard, with your pick of the litter of African-Americans. It’s good to be an African-American who isn’t a stereotypical African-American. Especially one who can actually swim.

Finally, Porter laments The Decline of Boxing’s Intellectuals. Apparently getting bashed in the head a jillion times, and being non-white, has caused some boxers to have out-of-date opinions on matters of fashion. The article really isn’t about boxing. Neither Porter’s, nor Bleach Report’s. (And so boxing remains an under-explored topic of The Reactosphere®.)

[P]lanting reprehensible in the fertile soil of eagerly resodded minds isn’t the only area where liberalism excels. It also cultivates a lush tribalism within its menagerie of constituents, while simultaneously stamping at the thinnest shoots on the right. This being a cartoonish hypocrisy that conservative media outlets counter by aiding the left in their efforts.

Though what I find even more grating than the bought-and-paid-for cuckservatism of a National Review are the individuals who defend it by disavowing plainly successful tactics of the left. I have heard innumerable sniffs from those ostensibly on the right who claim that tribal appeals are the tools of liberalism, and thus beneath them to deploy. Well you’re certainly an honorable loser. I hope Chinese historians will footnote that.

Sometimes Porter puts things so well, you just have to give him an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Like this time.

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This Week in Evolutionist X

Filed under it needed saying, Evolutionist X notices Elections chose for ability to win Elections:

[S]ystems have unexpected consequences: you get what you select for, not what you intend to select for. The founders wanted voters to simply come to a rational agreement about who would be the country’s best leader. Since then, we have accrued dozens of layers of complications–political parties and primary votes; super pacs and campaign ads. I have no doubt the founders would have despised it all.

If the founders could have seen down to today, I’ve no doubt they would not have walked but run back into the arms of George III.

Next up: Is Capitalism the only reason to care about Intelligence? Well, I certainly hope not. Tho’ some might consider them effectively synonyms. Along the way she explodes a few myths—well… half-truths—about intelligence. E.g., multiple intelligences. Part Two of the series zooms in more on human social status and social class. A taste from part two:

Why do Americans generally proclaim their opposition to judging others based on background status, and then act classist, anyway? There are two main reasons.

As already discussed, different classes have real disagreements with each other. Even if I think I shouldn’t judge others, I can’t put aside my moral disgust at certain behaviors just because they happen to correlate with different classes.

It sounds good to say nice, magnanimous things that make you sound more socially sensitive and aware than others, like, “I wouldn’t hesitate to go out of my way to help someone in trouble.” So people like to say these things whether they really mean them or not.

In reality, people are far less magnanimous than they like to claim they are in front of their friends. People like to say that we should help the homeless and save the whales and feed all of the starving children in Africa, but few people actually go out of their way to do such things.

But hopefully they’ll help their actual nearby friends, who cannot help but see them do it, right? Less so, I think today, than in the past. This is a conundrum of modernity. She brings it all to a point in Part Three in answering normie objections. Like “b-but we’re all intelligent just differently intelligenced…” Nope:

If you transported me tomorrow to a hunter-gatherer community, and they gave me a test of the skills necessary for survival there, I’d flunk (and die.) They’d conclude that I was an idiot who couldn’t gather her way out of a paper bag.

Very well, then.

But neither of us lives in a hunter-gatherer society, nor do we particularly care about the skills necessary to survive in one. If I want to know the kinds of intelligence that are necessary for success in industrial societies–the kind of success that may have led to the existence of industrial societies–then you’re looking at normal old “intelligence” as people conventionally use the term, measured by IQ scores, the SAT, vague impressions, or report card

A whole lotta research here as we’ve come to expect from Mrs. X, and another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ in her cap. (Or wherever she keeps them.)

And Anthropology Friday… did not die… after Evolutionist X finished up with Tylor’s Primitive Culture. It lives on in newer old books. This week Mrs. X looks at Aboriginal Folklore excerpting from William Ramsay Smith’s Aborigine Myths and Legends (1932).

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This Week in West Coast Reactionaries

Just in time for their own certified official (h5) brand spanking new sub-heading at TWiR, activity at WCR plummeted. Adam Wallace did have up The Plebeian Podcast S3 E1: Islam in Europe. Featuring Mark Citadel and a bunch of other smart guys with a variety of British Isles accents, whom I don’t know as well.

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This Week around The Orthosphere

Donal Graeme is brilliant here: The Misery Of Too Much Comfort. He picks up from Ace’s “That’s why I cut you just to heal you” which is a secular apologetic for female pain. Graeme ties it back to the Book of Genesis and the curses of the Garden.

One consequence (among many) of Original Sin is that women will experience greater pain/suffering as a result of bearing and rearing children. I would argue that an expectation of this is “baked into” their genetics.

This leads us to the modern day, and the theory behind this post. The problem is that in the present age women are more coddled than they have ever been. They are, especially in the West and in families not at the bottom of the SES ladder, further removed from suffering than ever before. The level of comfort in the civilized world has never been higher. True suffering, true sacrifice, is alien to most women growing up. Most parents take care to keep their children from having to suffer, often by ensuring as much comfort as possible.

While I certainly understand this behavior on the part of parents, it is at the same time utter folly. Suffering can never really be escaped. It will always be present, and I will use a future post to go into that in further detail. What matters for this post is that this coddling approach is a disaster.

Suffering is a type of hormesis. (Or maybe it’s the other way around.) Not a long read, but very worthwhile. Graeme wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Statistician to the Stars, Matt Briggs kicks off the week with Attorneys General Embrace Lysenkosim With Gusto: Why Now? Because the election, of course. Bayesian reasoning: if it’s “Official Science” it’s practically guaranteed to be wrong, because if it were correct, it wouldn’t need to be “Official”. And… Briggs takes a dip in The Stream with Should Women Be Allowed In Combat? Equality Debates Reality. An actual debate… hosted by the NY Bar Association. Briggs reports and adds a few cents.

Did you know Briggs had a podcast? Well now ya do. Really classy and not too terribly long. And funny. (Some bonus material for that one.) He also (seems to have) attended a recent talk by Steve Forbes and George Gilder in Manhattan and reports back on The Future Of Freely Using Your Own Money, a.k.a. Capitalism.

Sunshine Thiry begins to count the ways Liberalism and Social Justice Warriors have ruined children’s literature. It’s not simply the message anymore, but the craft.

Bonald clears the air of cant regarding the pro-life/pro-woman train wreck with a repost of Victims, and Other Categories:

But isn’t the woman a victim in a spiritual sense? Doesn’t having an abortion wound her soul, and shouldn’t we pity her for that? Sure, but that’s true of any sin. One might as well say that rapists are the real victims of rape, because of the harm they do to their souls. You might even be able to prove that rapists often get depressed after their crimes, the poor dears. In some ultimate sense it is true that the sinner is the worst victim of his sin. But in our normal way of speaking, no, a rapist is not a victim. The woman he attacks is. And it’s the murdered baby who is the victim of abortion.

Kristor has more on that same subject.

Next, Bonald takes a look at the Sins of our times: Why do we find it so difficult to be chaste and to be honest? A taste:

With regard to truth, we have the ideology of political correctness, which promotes dishonesty. It differs from merely false belief systems like Islam which promote untruth sincerely held. PC is both suicide to deny and suicide to live by. For example, a person can get into big career trouble very quickly either by saying that women don’t handle criticism as well as men or by acting on the assumption that they do handle it as well.

Speaking of Kristor, he’s over at the Orthosphere (proper) with musings upon The Optimal Tariff. And this was ROFL-worthy: Western Culture I. Related: Western Culture II, Western Culture III, Western Culture IV, and Western Culture V. (That last one’s not viewable in .ro domains.) It’s been a good millennium to be Western.

Cato the Younger gets it in A Fools Hope. The “it” being passivism:

I’m not saying not to vote. I don’t expect everyone to be a Monarchist, or anti-populist NRx. I’m just putting it out there that you shouldn’t expect a revival of high culture, Christendom and Occidental glory under a system that was ushered in by those who sought to destroy it. I don’t have all the answers and I could be wrong. But I doubt it greatly.

Want to truly help? Build. Families, communities if possible. Cultivate a noble life, and develop a devotion to Christ. Be a strong masculine Christian male. Defend the true and beautiful. Teach others, your children. Start the revival now. Build the foundation for the the revival. You cannot usher in a good leader like Trump, or even a King on a weak foundation. No Leader or King can solve the ground level issues of degenerate and individualist lifestyles. Cultivate, create and build. This is going to take awhile.

[ADDED:] Cato’s article is short and a perfect follow-up to Mark Yuray’s suprisingly controversial artile. It wasn’t properly a follow-up, however, since Cato published one day earlier than Yuray. Cato the Younger earns a late but entirely deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Cato also triangulates upon Mild Christian Hermeticism.

Knowledge of the divine realm, or that beyond the veil may not be exclusive to Christianity alone. It is important to note that we believe that Catholicism (or in Mark [Citadel]’s case Orthodoxy) is in deed absolute truth, therefore all it teaches is true, however it does not teach everything that is truth.

I think this an undeniable aspect of the faith, because if it weren’t true, neither the Church Fathers nor Aquinas could have, for their own exposition of Christian dogma, relied so heavily on ancient pagan philosophers. Also from Cato a Quote of the Day from under-hyped Conreliu Codreanu, from whom I think we’ve heard before.

Chris Gale has a superb anti-gnostic meditation: Let us grow up [I Peter 1]. Also from the science papers: This is your brain on meditation.

Eva Brann returns to Imaginative Conservative with more on Socrates: Democracy and the Just City. And a defense of virtuous Paganism from Joseph Pearce in Of Gods and Men: The Pagan Path to Christ. Christianity perfected Paganism at least as much as it perfected Judaism. Also from Pearce: What is Modernism? A brief essay and worth a read.

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This Week… Elsewhere

Peter Blood returns with another of his all too rare and extremely valuable reviews. He takes a look at Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. Blood’s contrast of the moderate and careful reasoning of Botton with the shrieking bombast of Kuntsler is alone with the price of admission.

Empathologism finds Scholarly recognition of the empathogasm. Quick fix, “warm glow altruists” are a major problem no doubt. So too however, I fear, are so-called “effective altruists”. They’re just looking for that perfect empathogasm in a putatively superior way (which leads to empathogasms itself) and have the low time preference to plan and wait for it. If we applied an inverse square law to empathy, just imagine how much better the world could be.

William Scott, of Teleolojic Folkways, continues his series on the etiology of leftism with The moral conceit of the Left Pt. 2. In this one, Scott deals with “Totalitarian Diversity”—the practice of imposing upon the entire world, by force if necessary, the tolerance and openness of super-Hajnal Europeans. Here is the movie version.

Froude Society, aka. HRx Central, is concerned about Sowing Seeds on Desecrated Ground. He is right to note that focussing solely on Muh Huwhite Birthrates is insufficient to stem the tide of the suicide of Western Civilization. But to fix society, one must fix oneself first. Having a baby or five is no guarantee to do that. But it is, at least, a start.

A hearty “Amen!” for Giovanni Dannato who suggests Abolishing Compulsory Schooling. Yes, I think this “experiment” with Prussian schooling has gone on long enough. Also from Dannato: The Need For Sexenomics.

The pressures of mass society have squeezed civilized men to compete by adopting elaborate bower-building behaviors like we see in birds. This formula works in a society with strict rules that mandate high reproductive investment, but in a sexual free market, a lower investment strategy is far more successful. A man can forgo the bower and secure 5 or 10 mates in the time it takes a career schlub to lock down just one who’s at the end of her reproductive years.

Our current sad state is a textbook example of where social technology failed to keep up with material technology. If you have more wealth and freedom, you need more social constraints, not fewer. Also from Dannato, a nice bit of psycho-social analysis here: White Collar Criminals Are Worse Than Street Criminals. With greater agency comes greater responsibility.

Real Gary has promising news: The Dutch Vote No.

Dissident Right highlights the emerging fission between Liberals (i.e., actually liberal liberals, like “right libertarians”) and the Regressive (identity-politics lovin’ SJW) Left in Liberal Apologetics. Dissident Right sees it as an opportunity to school open-minded liberals on the weaknesses of their viewpoint to resist regressive left entry. So we might hope.

Brett Stevens thinks The United States Wants Its Balls Back. I hope he’s right. I’m not as sanguine about Trump’s prospects as I was a couple months ago. Also humorous (and mostly true) thoughts on National Beer Day Celebrates Another Inverse Triumph Of Government:

Past history suggests that government would be less destructive if its workers drank so much beer that they were incapacitated, at which point the few functional humans would resume directing the others toward productive activity instead of fighting eternal human weaknesses with even weaker laws.

Also at Amerika, analysis of The Continued Manshaming of The “Respectable Right”. Brett outlines “four pillars of any sensible conservatism”. His political vocabulary is somewhat different than that of standard reactionaries, especially his use of the term “conservatism”. But I think I agree wholeheartedly with two of those pillars, and only somewhat with the remaining two. And he left out a couple things.

Welp. That’s all folks. Looks like this is a long one (~6000 words if the WP Editor Thing may be believed). At least I have an excuse for being 1 1/2 days late. Keep on Reactin’! No enemies on the Right!! Til next week… NBS, over and out!!!