Spandrell has a mouthful to say in response to Ross Douthat’s heavily qualified defense of reactionary thought: Reaction and the Bullshit Industry. Take it away Spandrell:
The insight of neoreaction isn’t that modernity and leftism sucks. Plenty of people have noticed that since before modernism even got running. Neoreaction explains why modernism happened even though it sucks. Why leftism gets progressively worse, and why conservatism, like the one Ross Douthat represents, is a complete joke. Mainstream conservatism are those few ideas which the left can’t outright prohibit at a given moment, because the leftist consensus hasn’t moved far enough. Mainstream conservatism was against gaymarriage because the Left hadn’t reached an agreement within itself. Once the Left decided on gaymarriage, opposition was outlawed, and mainstream conservatism summarily dropped the issue. The moment that a conservative takes even the slightest hint of reactionary ideas the Left will make sure he is not allowed to speak in public. Journalism isn’t about facts. Journalism is the state-run bullshit industry. And the left runs it very tight.
Spandrell is, apparently seriously, thinking about going into Chinese History Biz. It is one of his great gifts. Also, filed under What Formalism Does Not Look Like: Lies. He picks up the story from Sailer: Surprise, surprise De Blasio doesn’t actually run NYC.
Officially there’s a mayor, who’s supposed to run things, but he’s not very smart, at any rate he needed money for his campaign and he wasn’t very good at getting it. So he outsourced that to the free market, and the free market provided. Now there’s a bunch of sleazy middlemen trafficking with influences from here to there.
Not that we’d want De Blasio actually running NYC, of course. But we don’t really want these faggy-looking brokers running it either. The solution: reduce the gap between how NYC is run conceptually and how it is run actually.
Another stellar piece from Jim: Spiritual Security. If “the only morality is civilization”, then it makes perfect sense that strong states have a strong sense of spiritual security. Jim gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Also from Jim: a nice analysis of the Hugo-nominated My Little Pony episode The Cutie Map.
Over at Future Primaeval, Neal Devers relates “The Parable of the Raft” in On Going Against the Consensus. He notes:
[W]e have to distinguish between knowing that we are right to break consensus, and being able to persuade our friends to give us social validation for being persecuted truth-sayers. Real consensus-bucking carries real costs and real uncertainty; if you go against the group, everyone is going to think you’re an asshole, and they might be right.
Fact is: they are usually right.
So I expand on that point to point out yet another pitfall: On the Dissidence of Dissidents. Despite its being considered an unalloyed virtue these days, “going rogue” isn’t often very good for society. Or individuals. It puts would-be cooperative dissidents in a difficult position. My minion liked the quote:
Most rogues are bad people. Most people are not equipped, materially or psychologically, to go it alone. Most people benefit from going along to get along. Because we’re humans.
Reactionary Future offers some brief commentary on The trends within Reaction. Also consideration of the Epistemological underpinnings of political theory.
Neovictorian checks in with a personal update: The Good Psychopath, the Dark Triad Man and Me. He recounts his quest to be all the baddest good guy he can be.
Malcolm Pollack discovers the Black Pill and the reasons not to take it.
Despair is crippling, it is painful, and above all, it is pointless. For those with the capacity to understand it correctly, what seeps out of the Abyss is not despair, but liberty. And with liberty comes responsibility, because what we do is entirely up to us. And with responsibility come meaning, and purpose, and duty, and all the things we thought we had lost.
Nydwracu visits the combox of Douthat’s NYC piece and finds mindless adulation of The professional intelligentsia: the brightest of our society? Adulation which got this particular adulator a gold star for his grammatically coherent act of devotion. All of which gives Nyd a chance to talk about Jonathan Haidt, whose research on (and missionary zeal against) the lack of intellectual diversity in the academy seems to go unnoticed by professional professional intelligentsia intelligentsia. Either that or too damaging to bother considering.
Also from Nydwracu, a paste concerning American slavery. As in the the slavery of Americans. And some 19th Century perspective on The Annual Customs of Dahomey.
E. Antony Gray composes a thought: Ars Poetica.
Alf tells us Waarom is hij niet een wit-nationalist. He gets it:
De kern van wit-nationalistisch gedachtegoed is dat blanken, het superieure ras dat ze zijn, samen horen te staan tegen de duistere wereld die hen omringt. Alle blanken? Ja ALLE blanken. Als alle blanken zo superieur zijn als ze samenwerken, waarom hebben ze dat dan niet allang gedaan? Tsja.
Het probleem van wit-nationalistisch gedachtegoed is dat blanken, net als elk ander ras in Darwin’s boeken, niet uniform zijn. Er is harde intercompetitie tussen blanken. En daarmee komt ook tegelijkertijd het ware doel van fascisme tevoorschijn: Vaisja’s (blanke onderklasse) proberen de Brahmins (intellectuele bovenklasse) voor hun karretje te spannen ten koste van de Dalits (onder-onderklasse). Het is de zoveelste samenzwering van partijen om macht.
Dividuals realizes It really isn’t about individualism vs. collectivism. At least the left vs. right dichotomy is not. Nor big vs. small government. Nor, a fortiori, good government:
“More PIGS than TEATS, or the new Litter of hungry Grunters sucking John Bull’s old Sow to death” (March 5, 1806)
Big Government does not necessarily equal collectivism. It is pretty easy for individualism to create Big Government: all it has to do is to endlessly expand the field of individual rights: claiming that individuals have positive rights, have a right to equal chances, to healthcare, or to not have the their feelings violated, and of course it is the government who protects those rights, the same way how it is the government who protects the limited, negative rights libertarians believe in.
Thus there is a straight and fully individualist line from Minarchism or Classical Liberalism to Socialism. M/CL accepts that the job of the government is to protect individual rights. Simply expand individual rights from life, limb and property to anything from equal chances to housing or unhurt feelings, and you got Socialism. Of course protecting those “rights” means trampling on rights like property, and sometimes life and limb.
Dividuals sees individualism/collectivism arising out of a people’s innate character and largely independent of the political compass. Northwestern Europeans and Brits in particular seem to fall very heavily to the individual side of the spectrum: producing plenty of individualist rightism and individualist leftism.
Indeed, pure collectivism is something Americans and Brits have very little historic experience of. The closest you get is nationalistic war propaganda – such as the famous Uncle Sam wants you poster. Basically true collectivism only happens if there is no obvious individual beneficiary of a given policy. For example taxing rich people to give money to single moms is not collectivistic: you can easily identify for whose sake it is done: it is done for the sake of the single moms. (And in a more abstract way, bureaucrats and intellectuals. But all are individuals.) But joining up to server the Nation, Uncle Sam, Motherland, Fatherland, the Volk or whatever it is called in a given country, is not supposed to benefit any groups of individuals: it is supposed to benefit the Nation etc. as a reified universal, a reified collective, a platonic ideal.
This is a brilliant bit of articulation and analysis. He ends with a “Why this is important” and walks away with the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
Scott Alexander reads Albion’s Seed. Nick Land takes a few notes. And he has moar on The Islamic Vortex.
Also from Land: a big treatise Against Universalism II—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. It is, I think, the universal disposition of hegemons to treat their own metaphysical assumptions as merely common sense. Recognizing this tendency might very well make for a better class of hegemon.
Sydney Trads right a very tight ship. This 2016 Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum is a very impressive amalgamation of traditionalist wisdom. It’s about a day’s worth of reading, but easily a year’s worth of wisdom. Also more @WrathOfGnon memes, including The Ancien Régime was Less Bloody than the Enlightened World. True. Also, filed under LOL: College Kids Say the Darndest Things.
Filed under More Down Under, Slumlord reviews Sam Francis’s Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism.
Mark Citadel delivers a pretty significant batch of analysis in dissecting the Art of the Media Ambush. He outlines all the tricks, and how stragglers in the Overton Window are set up quite consciously to fail. The takeaway from this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:
Piers Morgan
The necropolis of festering yellow journalism which breeds cretins like Piers Morgan is not a swamp one should so readily immerse themselves in. Part of the reason Reactionaries do not engage in party politics, is because our aim is to abolish parties altogether. Is not the abolition of the press also our aim? Then why waltz onto their paddocks? Yes, I know Anderson is just another Conservative, but let’s try to learn from his mistake here. You can’t win in the media arena. Don’t even try. If you dodge the pit, they’ll spring the net, sidestep the net, they’ll release the hounds, beat them off with titanium-clad logic or data, they’ll fill the arena with lava and sharks.
Don’t fight battles you know you can’t win. It oftentimes only strengthens your adversary. By all means, if somebody wants to interview you, go for it, but in a format where you dictate the questions that you want to answer.
I wouldn’t say reactionaries favor the abolition of the press per se so much as the abolition of a free and independent press. Because someone’s got to be running the show, and it really shouldn’t be the press.
Free Northerner says: “Virtue signalling is not virtue, it is the pretense of virtue.” Exactly! FN distinguishes between two types of virtue signaling: hollow signaling and baldfaced lies. The former really isn’t too bad, traditionally speaking, so long as it doesn’t crowd out the much more difficult task of actual virtue. But modern technologies like social media have made hollow signaling so easy and the potential status rewards so great, that it’s become a problem itself:
[H]ollow signalling is being weaponized. Rather than being a social lubricant for your social circles, it is becoming politicized. There have always been holiness spirals, but those spirals usually required some action or effort and happened over periods constrained by time and distance. Now spirals are immediate and require no effort. Activists are using this to weaponize signalling, forcing people signal properly, often through the threat of job loss….
I think this is why there is so much anti-virtue signaling among reactionaries. We simply don’t trust people who signal virtue. Usually for good reason. Better to actually be virtuous, even slightly and offer no proof of it, than signal a thousand times more. FN wins another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Finally, CWNY’s Saturday missive: That Which Endures. A lamentation, but not without hope.
This Week in Social Matter
It’s not really in the Editors’ Style to go abraggin’, but socialmatter.net passed one million page views some time in the very early hours (EDT) of Monday, May 2, 2016. April 2016 was its most visited month with about 84k visits, narrowly edging out the previous record set in March 2016. That is, of course, all small potatoes in teh interwebz taken as a whole, and even by comparison to the broader alt-right. But it is nevertheless gratifying, considering the relatively high bar of the discourse here and sort of reader Social Matter intends to attract.
Ryan Landry kicks off this week with This Is What Decline Will Look Like On Virtual Reality. Wireheading ourselves to oblivion is about to get a whole lot more wireheaded. As per usual in our Internet Age, the first drivers of new media are the pornographers. But just as with VHS and DSL, the possibility for plausibly non-degenerate use are endless:
We have simply discussed fun, but it will not stop there. This is world-building. Not just for groups, but for the individual. Who will want to be a small fish in a big pond of reality when they can become King Fish? The entire American marketing and advertising industry is going to pitch everyone on the joys and freedom of VR. Advertising creates imaginary needs all of the time.
One cannot help but thinking technology like VR will push the gap between the truly competent and the blissfully entertained even wider. Income gap, shmincome gap; what about the agency gap?!
Six Flags plans to add VR to 9 roller-coasters.
All technologies need a user. The sword is only as good as the man who wields it. Think of not just the narcissists, but think of the low attention span, infantilized adults society has molded. People will run to VR. Look at iPhone and tablet use already. Neal Stephenson’s “gargoyles” idea in Snow Crash is already real and we are not even VR-capable like in his fictional Metaverse. Gargoyles, per the book’s slang, were so often in the Metaverse (realm that came after the Internet) that they never moved, like a statue. It was a negative term; a human had given up on existing in meat-space reality to exist in the Metaverse. Snow Crash, Inception… you can piece together a probable outcome for this all.
Social technology must keep up with material technology or it kills us. At least kills the virtue in us. Sancte Augustinus, ora pro nobis. The “Hardest Working Man in Neoreaction” earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ here.
Newcomer Dave Hoffman has a nice analogy: The Left, The Collapsing Star. His starting point is the increasing incoherence of the left and devolution into constituent mutually repulsive parts. Like a G-type star entering a red giant phase.
In one sense, the left is very powerful, but change your perspective and it is actually quite weak. If that delicate balance is maintained, then it is bad news for all of us, but how fragile is that balance? I certainly don’t know. The future of the left hinges upon it. The good news is that, if well understood, we can tip that balance.
Right now, the focus is on white-cis-hetero-males, but those men are either small in number in leftist circles or completely submissive. When feminists talk about the patriarchy, or BLM talks about white supremacy, they’re referring to a powerful and nebulous far-away force akin to the Illuminati. If it’s not an unknown cabal, then it is “the system”. Both are conceptualized abstractions, and neither are things one can directly point to. This makes the enemy elusive, and it’s hard to keep a constant hate for an enemy that comes and goes from your attention.
Hoffman thinks continued weakening of the gravity which hold the left’s star together might leads to its demise. That depends, of course, on how much mass remains at the center of it, and what other “material” it might attract into it’s weak orbit.
Mark Yuay is always controversial. I don’t know why, because he’s typically only relaying what is widely and firmly held with The Neoreaction. This week he articulates yet another jimmy rustling #OffNRxPos: Alcohol Is The Truth Serum.
Alcohol makes complex thinking more difficult, and the result tends to be that deception is more difficult as pent-up emotions and views come bubbling out – positive or negative. In a group setting where everyone is intoxicated, this provides deep emotional and social catharsis for everyone involved. It’s just as much fun to hear someone else vent the truth as it is to vent it yourself, whether the truth is “I really love you man” or “I really hate you man.” Alcohol accelerates the social selection and calculation process; the truth comes out inevitably, alcohol ensures it comes out earlier. This saves time and psychic energy for everyone who is dissembling or trying to keep track of others’ dissembling.
But you say that like it’s a good thing. It is. If I can’t trust you drunk, then I can’t trust you. Nor you me. Trigger a puritan: Have two drinks too many today!
More on VR when Landry returns with the podcast: Weimerica Weekly – Episode 22.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over on the home blog, Landry spotlights Brazil’s Perfectly Corrupt Olympics Showcase. Things are bad. Landry tells us how bad. I suppose Brazil will forever be one of the BRIC nations, but you don’t see that acronym used much anymore:
The sarcastic remark by DeGaulle that Brazil is always the country of the future hide a feature of its past. It was a functioning and competent monarchy until it replaced that with a republic. It might be better to study Brazil not as a what may come or what will be but an historical what if. The monarchy died, the republic was born, and both writers left and right can agree, corruption has been an issue ever since. Maybe the blood on the streets this summer will not be the favela violence, as the police have been cleaning out in the run up to the games, but of political battles.
This week in WW1 Pics: Satirical Maps.
And Landry finishes off the week with some astute remarks on Prince. RIP.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter considers The Rankling, i.e., of America’s CEOs by this latest resurgence of populist fervor. He notes:
[R]iches consistently act as a moral laxative, with the resulting discharge always flowing down on the heads of those in more modest social strata. It is not pernicious that the wealthy enjoy their wealth, but that they deploy it antagonistically against those less so. I doubt the SPLC can boast of a staff more hostile to western peoples than any random sampling of billionaires. The lesson being, a nation-state with aspirations of longevity is well-advised to defang its plutocrats before they grow beyond handling.
Highlight reel worthy stuff there. Of course, the only reliable way to keep those plutocrats defanged is to have a very well-fanged monocrat. Along the way, Porter adds:
I’m always hopeful that Disney will introduce a Chamber of Commerce pseudo-animatronic ride at Magic Kingdom. Here park attendees can enjoy an air conditioned trolley-ride through past and present America hosted by a living Jeb Bush, so life-like that patrons will never suspect he’s actually the real thing.
Sometimes you give Porter a nod not so much for what he says (although that is always fine enough), but just for the way he says it. And this is one of those times: An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Porter finds a lot to like in Trump’s much ballyhooed, but thus far relatively undigested foreign policy speech: City on a High Hill.
In many ways the speech was revolutionary in its shifting philosophical moorings. I can certainly understand why his detractors have chosen to alight on its poorly articulated and inchoate tactics, rather than the generally clear strategic vision behind them. They want readers focused on the widgets rather than the company. And what Trump expressed repeatedly is that the American company exists for the benefit of Americans. Not The Economy, or democracy, or immigrants, african esteem, climate change, world hunger, or to redress their ancestors’ accused moral infirmities.
Porter digests it the rest of the way for us.
Europeans appear to be mobilizing, in fits and starts, for the latest, years-old invasion of their lands. Mostly fits. Enter the New-Right Reception Center. They’ll be built with Euro money, but at least not in Europe. Actually good(ish) news, despite hot steaming bowlfuls of snark…
Italians are proposing to build reception centers in Africa for Africans who just shoved-off 10 minutes earlier. Hello Igbu, welcome back to Africa! Though I suppose we do what we must for evolutionarily terminal Euro-cucks to feel that moral frisson.
Despite the derision, this is actually positive news on multiple fronts. European militaries are (allegedly) going to involve themselves in resisting invasion rather than facilitating it.
Filed under Third World Travel Ain’t What it Used to Be: Travel’s Truest Pleasure.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X kicks off the week outlining her Election Priorities. Those sound okay. But she missed the most crucial one: Outlaw Elections.
She is having her one year blog-a-versary (I believe the customary gift is paper) and she continues her invaluable Cathedral Roundup Series. It’s election time for the Harvard Board of Overseers, which pits the diversilicious (and sanctimonious) Harvard Alumni Association slate against the petition slate. You’d think they’d’ve learned their lesson from the 2016 GOP presidential nomination process, but Muh Democracy is a powerful drug I guess.
And this week in Anthropology Friday: The Land of Perfection. She has broad excerpts from William Smith’s (1996) Aborigine Myths and Legends.
This Week in West Coast Reactionaries
Adam Wallace drops a deusy in stalwart refutation of anti-natalism, Life: Yea or Nay? He’s obviously taking the “Yea” on that one, BTW. Along the way meet the tragic figure of Otto Weininger and the brilliant work Anthony Mario Ludovici. Among others. Wallace takes the logic of anti-natalism out to the woodshed. It had it coming. For his efforts here, Wallace earns another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
WCR House Pagan Hotherus returns with Islam and the Moon. As usual, he is controversial. 9/11 Trutherism and skepticism of the Apollo moon landings are among the least controversial opinions voiced. But on this we are agreed: Islam does not belong in the West. (We don’t really agree on why, but…)
And, sliding just under the week-closing bar, Testis Gratus offers some Thoughts on Theology (also here). I think he makes the case the theology never ceased being the queen of the sciences. Merely the content of the theology changed.
This Week around The Orthosphere
Bonald warns Against “Shakespeare was Catholic” conspiracy theorizing. Yup.
Imaginative Conservative has a timeless essay about the even more timeless ideas of Eliot and Burke: Oak and Stone and the Permanent Things. And from 1960, a nice piece from Russell Kirk: The Best Form of Government.
Here are Ten Things You Don’t Know about the Lincoln Assassination. Well, I knew a couple of them. But still pretty interesting. Why New England Democracy Disappeared… said like that’s a bad thing… by an actual gypsie. Mostly meditations on de Tocqueville and pretty good. Also there: What Shaped Eric Voegelin’s Thought?
Chris Gale responds to Clerical hacking charity. It is literally impossible to love all people of the world equally. If someone’s “pitch” to you depends on that, you can be sure A)they’re hacking your own concern module, for B)either status or money (or both); and C)that’s bound to make them feel good. It is, quite simply, a con, and should be called out in the harshest terms. If people were reliably to lose status with this practice, perhaps they could go back to heeding the advice of Christ give their alms in secret. Also from Gale: Statistical modeling psychiatry on three factors?
Also Chris quotes from me in an installment of mutterings. But it isn’t clear he took my meaning quite right. It’s true politeness will not save the West. It never could. Politeness is for in-group. And it’s pretty important there.
Briggs kicks off the week by taking Bad Epistemology to the woodshed in Ritual Sacrifice Promoted Evolution Of Stratified Societies: A Statistical Fallacy. He has an opening salvo on CRISPR: Here Comes The Gene-Editing Research In Human Embryos. On Da Podcast: Let’s Polka! Or How Polka Can Save The World. Really! It’s Science!!
More woodshed, this time for National Geographic (which I gave up on some time in the mid 90s): On The Rise Of The “Nones”.
Over at Gornahoor, Cologero has a bit of Guénon (plus analysis) on Tradition and Being.
At The Orthosphere (proper), Kristor shows how Doubt is Incomprehension.
This Week… Elsewhere
Cato the Younger has a nice essay on Alt-Right Muh Puritah™ spirals, Modernity: The Manifestation of Lucifer. If you can’t “love the sinner, hate the sin”, then how is that any different from what SJWs do?
Dissident Right finds a bit of ancient Germanic poetry leading to an elegant essay on Man, Uprooted.
Anti-Puritan takes note of the Cultural oversaturation of normative logic—or an examination of fallacies that begin with the letter M.
Dr. Swaggins finds substantial confirmation in previous weeks’ predictions and admits: It’s Nice to be Right.
Al Fin looks at Return on Investment for US Colleges and Universities. Tho’ it is not entirely clear how they are calculating ROI, it is quite clear that cheap colleges that graduate lots of STEM win. Related: On Choosing to Send One’s Child to Prison, Instead of College. He’s only mostly serious about that. Also: Kick ass summer camps for kids.
William Scott says Happy Easter (Again). This time with an original musical composition. This guy’s got some skillz.
Narm No has an adaptation of Cicero’s 3rd Paradox.
Bad Billy Pratt over at Kill to Party has some apposite thoughts on Sexual Selection and “Teen Mom”. The TV show that is. (Apparently it’s a TV show.) Interesting bit of analysis. Mostly of the memes with which the producers are trying to connect with the audience.
As well, “The deepest test of Faith a Progressive may endure”, Pratt says, “is becoming the victim of a crime.” Which he had the bad taste to accidentally pass with flying colors in The Trial of Victimhood and Progressive Faith. Hey man, it was an accident. We know you really think the perp was black.
Giovanni Dannato goes on the Stark Truth radio show. Good to finally hear his voice.
Roman Dmowski has more on the Trump’s big prepared speech, specifically his Foreign Policy and Russia.
Over at Anonymous Conservative, he updates us on the ongoing leftist bathroom singularity. Disgust reflexes, or rather the weakness thereof, come to the fore in Migrants Are r-strategists – Playing With Feces. Asylum-seekers have left behind centers with blood, vomit, and feces smeared on the walls. AC sees this as:
yet one more example of how migrants tend to be r-strategists seeking amygdala assuaging through the dopamine from free resource availability. It may also point out a possible reason pandemics seem to arise as K-shifts begin. Peak r is not conducive to containing disease outbreaks.”
Also from AC: Trump Blows Fuses In Rabbit Brains.
Reactionary Tree engages in a bit of slow history with a letter from an American Farmer in 1782 on: What is an American? Amazingly articulate. And amazingly particularist.
Welp, that’s all I had time fer… Support your local anything (that isn’t degenerate that is). Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… NBS, over and out!!
I chuckled at the Dutch blockquote. Somehow it’s intelligible; sounds like someone speaking English with a mouth full — and a concussion.
If it wasn’t for chrome translator, I’d be a whole lot more monolingual.
Most people find dutch to be unintelligible because of the deepthroat G. Then again a fair share of my blog is translating nrx into Dutch.
It’s enjoyable reading NRx translated into Dutch translated back into English(ish).
Another collapsing-star metaphor here, if I may be so shameless.
It’s a linkfest Malcolm. Always room for a few more of yours. Trouble getting to your site at just this moment, but I think I recall that one, and it being quite good.
Thanks Nick,
Yes, the site was down for a little while. (Lots of this lately with my hosting service; time for a change I think.)
Back up now.
Yeah, politeness is for the in group, but most people want to be within that, if for no other reason that power seems to be there and power brings money and women who stick by you and children.
You have to be diogenes to avoid the ingroup in a functional society. The fact we can implies this society is dysfunctional