This Week In Reaction (2016/06/05)

Well… it happened. They finally figured out what the parentheses meant. Actually they took them to mean a lot more than they meant, which was never more than a cheap gag for lulz, but hey… Talmudism. August J. Rush was first to the story about the story… along with insightful commentary… and about a million angry trackbacks.

[W]hat’s even more ironic about the situation is that while many of these media figures maintain blacklists for their shows, and while these organizations maintain hit lists on people who disagree with them to attempt to hurt their employment (which I categorize as economic/social violence), when others begin to keep lists those same people suddenly think of this practice as barbaric and evil.

Mike Enoch here trolls the bejeezus out of a woefully outmatched journo named Lucy. Swallow all beverages carefully before reading!

Butch Leghorn really smacks it out of the park here: Meme Magic: Echoes and Coincidence.

Why do we put echoes on Jewish names? Because of this game that Simon Kelner is playing. Pretending to be white while being a fifth column to push policies which are adverse to the interest of whites. You see, this tactic is a deception. It’s not an honest attempt to argue for the policies which Kelner desires as a Jew. It’s an attempt to whisper in the ears of whites as a concerned friend, offering avuncular advice. Jews and only Jews play this game. This method of working against our interest through deception is absolutely a source of ire from the AltRight. Here’s an idea: Why don’t the Jews simply present their positions fairly and not attempt to deceive?

What a great Current Year to be alive… Let’s see, what else?

Nydwracu has some high-test #NRx theory in Breaking the Feedback Loop:

The Beat Scene, North Beach California c.1959

The internet has made it much easier to form scenes, but it necessarily exerts systemic selection pressure upon them: those who have more time and inclination to use the internet can more easily form or influence a scene. Since time spent online funges against time spent in other pursuits, some of which are important for mental stability, internet scenes tend toward depressive mental sources; that is, the internet tends to generate scenes of depressed people who sublimate their depression into cultural artifacts that push their viewers toward depression. A radical political scene, for example, attracts depressives and produces arguments that the world is in such a state that hopeless, lethargic, fuming despair is the only rational response….

Given this, it seems like it ought to be possible to subvert an idiom, to create artifacts within an idiom that draws on and promulgates a certain source such that the artifacts promulgate a different source while remaining recognizably within that idiom, socially if not stylistically, and thereby break the feedback loop that spreads/intensifies that source and allow its audience/the members of the scene an escape from it.

Nyd thinks that this has indeed happened, at least twice, but I don’t wanna steal his thunder. This was a very highly rated ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. RTWT.

He also finds Herbert Marcuse being totally moderate on the supposed depredations of colonialism. And here’s Marcuse admitting the sixties liberation movements weren’t really related to the proletarian revolutions Marx intended. Also: Some issues aren’t national… and you can easily guess the ones the are.

Nydwracu pens an elegant proof Against Utilitarianism. And another interesting thought experiment: Harvard cannot have it’s egalitarian cake and eat it too.

Alrenous has a very elegant proof here with apposite examples: Some Irrationality is Disguised Rationality. The more fashionable, the more irrational. This also was quite good: Grey Goo Already Happened:

Evolution is smarter than you. If it were possible to convert Earth to self-replicator mass due solely to self-replication, it would have already been converted to biomass.

Also from Alrenous: a Truth Machine Blueprint. And sexual dimorphism makes another appearance in Unmistakeable Evidence as a barrier between plausible lies and implausible ones. And also that proggies are the real misogynists.

Sarah Perry returns after a brief hiatus. She has a low-cost, and I think serious, proposal for public art around Virginia Lake entitled “Null Hypothesis”. She also has Something (a sketch of a graph), which appears to be related to The Theory of Narrative Selection. The “academic study of narrative selection” is not (apparently) new (unless Sarah is being modest about having invented the damn thing), but it sure as heck was new to me.

Here I will look at stories as if they were biological organisms. Stories can’t reproduce themselves; they rely on humans for their survival and reproduction. In that sense, stories are symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) in their relationship with humans. New stories are constantly being invented, using existing and novel devices and elements. They take as their subject matter factual happenings, imaginings, or both. They are transmitted and retold at different rates; most stories peter out and die, while a few sweep across the world in hours. They exhibit all the hallmarks for natural selection to act: variation, differential survival and reproduction, and heritability. Reproduction is complicated. Stories may transmit copies of themselves (reprintings, oral retellings), or they may transmit their traits to new generations of stories.

And all that follows is very interesting. Like do false stories “survive” better than true ones? Etc. Sarah wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ in very tight balloting this week.

Here are more WeSearchr Links from Pax. Butch is quite impressed with the speed with which Nick Denton’s bounty was met.

Sydney Trads have a nice review of The Free Mind, a collection of essays and poems in honor of the underappreciated Professor Barry Spurr. Also another obligatory meme from @WrathOfGnon: I Read Old Books Because…. And this deserves to be framed:

“Mansplaining” becomes necessary when communicating with someone crippled by “womanthink”.

Also there: Luke Torrisi has A Reflection on Joseph Pearce’s “A Christian Response to Europe’s Crisis” that is quite good.

Slumlord is making the exposition of Sam Francis a major calling. This is entirely welcome service to the Dissident Right. Here is Francis on (James) Burnham. He quotes Francis at length; I’ll quote some Slumlord:

What needs to be understood here is that Burnham recognised the rise of this [managerial (brahmin)] class was not the product of some “conspiracy” or malignant design, rather he recognised that the rise came about through the complex interchange between commercial forces, technology and population. Changes which frequently, were enthusiastically embraced and forwarded by Conservatives as well.

It’s not as though ideas don’t have consequences. They do. And one of the most consequential ones was baked implicitly into the cake of republican governance: Feelings trump ideas. Every time.

Nick Land discovers Iron Maiden has a Tour 747! Who knew?!! Also a very significant awakening, among at least a not entirely idiotic few, on the left on the Twitter about the monster they created. Yet another twitter cut inspires this observation:

The Outer Right provides the formal critique of democracy. It will be the Left, though, that graphically closes the curtain on it.

Lawrence Glarus has a deep, thoughtful piece on Performance Art.

When Yukio Mishima tried to wake his country from its slumber it rolled over gave his bloody corpse a pat on the back went back to sleep and forgot to reacquaint itself with its wife. Japan right now is very much the opposite of the Sea of Fertility. It is the island of afertility. It hasn’t even gone through the motions enough to demonstrate real infertility. I suspect this is the result of a spiritual death of an eccentric nation occupied by a strange insidious foreign religion.

And now in an age of Universal Grievance Mongering, we could use more authentic performance art:

The ability to carry symbolic meaning through action is at the heart of performance art. It is one of the key functions of exosemantic signaling. Part of the day to day maintenance of any cultural commons is not just the productive actions people take but their symbolic ones. Performance art, among its many functions, serves as a way to remind each other that we are in a cultural environment. Repetitive and predictable symbolic gestures reinforce the greater cultural context in which people exist.

Glarus takes home an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

Mark Citadel takes up a hammer and sickle in Deconstructing ‘Maoist Jesus’. He takes on 6 myths that Maoists, other leftists and their, alas, Christian progenitors would love to have you believe about Jesus; myths that, unfortunately congenitally non-religious or pagan reactionaries, are all too willing to accept.

E. Antony Gray pens an ode: The Orator Announces the Age. “Men above all desire to be ruled / If not by themselves, by whom?”

Alf is funny here… start out in Dutch. Then switch to English (because ya just gotta cuss I guess…): NOS / the Dutch have grown too decadent. NOS is Nederland Operating System or something:

From an endarkened perspective it is obvious that the NOS is cathedralizing, e.g. here, where white knights agree that we need more women in top positions. But it is difficult to communicate the obvious to the oblivious. I am trying to build bridges between enlightenment and reactionary values but it comes off as weak. I think it is because I am trying to argue on behalf of both groups. But there is an undeniable schism between the groups and when I pretend otherwise I am being fake.

If not a bridge, perhaps a life raft.

Jim says: “Trump for King… and here’s how to do it”. First, formalize due process:

The purpose of due process was supposedly to ensure that the innocent do not go to jail, and the guilty do go to jail. But anarcho tyranny means that with so many laws, the innocent are bound to be guilty of something or other, while actual criminals are deemed the oppressed, and are coddled and protected by the state. Due process lets real criminals loose, mostly dark skinned real criminals who prey on white people, while imposing enormous and impossible legal costs on innocent middle class honest respectable people….

…

So in our current environment due process and judicial review is discredited, and lacks political support. In Tony Abbot’s Australia as much as in Duterte’s Philippines, it was suddenly and startlingly revealed that judges are simply all out of moral authority. No one cares about due process, because, under anarcho tyranny, there is no reason why they should care. It is not just a tiny handful of reactionary intellectuals thinking like this. It is pretty much everyone.

Even the progs, except, of course, they won’t say it in so many words…

Larry [Summers] is pissed because his commute to Harvard is obstructed, blissfully unaware that Americans further from the seat of power suffer from the anarchy of government far more severely than he does.

You’ll have to RTWT, to get the final plans on creating the Trump Dynasty in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. It’s a long shot, but worth dreaming about. At least for a while.

Finally CWNY’s missive this week: Among Us But Not of Us.

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This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry kicks off the Official Social Matter week, and raises a few humorous and largely misplaced cackles in The Ticking Nigerian Time Bomb. Not quite a forgotten nation this week, from all-no-evil-seeing perpective of Western Media, but one whose image gets a remarkable amount of photoshopping. Landry looks at the unretouched hi-res photos:

Nigerian Oil Rig

Nigeria might produce plenty of oil but not develop the human capital (or does not simply have the human capital) to have a functioning domestic refinery sector. Without such high skilled manufacturing and technical sectors, Nigeria is simply another Third World country subject to the booms and busts of commodity cycles.

This is not too different from Venezuela. The factors that make Nigeria worse are the Christian-Muslim split and history of civil war and conflict, pure population numbers, and government corruption and incompetence. Venezuela did have a corrupt regime, but what compares to post-colonialism sub-Sahara Africa? Nigeria cannot even protect its cash cow oil sector. Pirates cost them $15 billion per month. Bandits that post to Twitter attack oil facilities. Lost oil revenues crush currency reserves, which [Jim] Chanos says are rapidly dwindling.

Who knows but whether those Afrikaner mercenaries who did such a bang-up job on Boko Haram might not know how refine oil… or at least keep the lights turned on for those who do?

Mark Yuray is first to file with (to date) the most comprehensive review of WeSearchr And The Coming Information Wars.

There are a lot of start-ups with snappy slogans and big, pie-in-the-sky dreams, but WeSearchr is one that is, at best, understating its significance. The home page proclaims: “WeSearchr crowdfunds the truth.” That sounds innocuous enough to an honest man. Liars might take notice, however. There are a lot of them out there, and in a late-stage democracy such as ours, lying is something between a national pastime and the structural basis of society. Such a society ought to watch the truth warily.

To such a society, the truth might be positively explosive.

Doing news the old-fashioned way—i.e., for profit—may seem a bit shady, but it’s a breath of fresh compared to the current mainstream reasons: to aggrandize the power of the media by manufacturing consent. WeSearchr has been up a little over a week, gotten literally zero press coverage (Mark’s article is was on the first page of search results). Yet they’ve raised over $75k in bounties. WeSearchr is a game-changer. Mark wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

David Grant, fresh off last week’s victory in the balloting, also shows upon Monday with a Hoppe, Skip, And Jump: From Libertarianism To Neoreaction. Showing that it is not wise to base a political theory upon an applause line (“life, liberty, property”), Grant gets to the bottom of the libertarian quandary in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

Does the right to life mean that abortion should be outlawed or does the right to liberty mean that a woman may choose whether or not to carry and give birth to a child? Are people of different localities to decide this and other questions according to their own particular judgments? But if there is a single, correct answer, then those localities which decide wrongly are oppressing their people. So who is to decide what the correct application of libertarianism is and impose it upon the unenlightened statists of the world?

Someone wise and learned, mighty to overcome opposition, and possessing authority over all matters everyone’s life, a vast power which chooses which of Locke’s or Mill’s or Hayek’s libertarianism shall reign supreme and potentially intervenes to prevent everything from murder to spanking.

Hoppe comes to offer a solution, but only by plowing under the intellectual foundations (such as they are) of libertarianism. As I always say, “Libertarians are quite right about a lot of things, but almost always for the wrong reason.”

Yuray returns on Tuesday with another installment: The USA Cannot Balkanize Part II. His thesis is that the US lacks sufficiently homogenous large regions that might be carved out as viable nation-states. When you have this level of heterogeneity, you don’t get Serbia or Croatia but Bosnia:

Of the successor states to Yugoslavia’s socialist republics, Bosnia was the most diverse, the most heterogeneous, the most geographically mixed, and the most similar to the United States’ demographic composition of today. At the outbreak of war in 1991, the Yugoslav census of the that year showed that Slovenia was 90% Slovenian. Croatia was 80% Croatian. Serbia was 80% Serbian. Bosnia was 40% Muslim, 30% Serbian and 20% Croatian.

It’s not that there aren’t large racially homogenous tracts in the US. It’s just that they don’t contain major population centers. The places where most of the people live are, unfortunately, rather diverse.

If the federal government of the United States were to dissolve or collapse for some reason, there would not be an easy vacuum for aspiring state-builders to fill. The immediate consequences would probably be as described above: violent warfare and separation on the order of villages, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Following that, sporadic violence and dysfunction for a long time to come. Bosnia is still a mess. Lebanon is still a mess. Syria is still a mess, and will probably remain a mess for decades despite Russian support for Assad.

An orderly Divestiture of the Empire may prove to be more difficult than advocates (like me) think.

Landry considers the Tiny House™ Phenomenon on this Wednesday’s Weimerica Weekly. He thinks it’s a weird hipstery response to the screwed up housing market—one that conveniently fails to address what’s actually wrong in the housing market. That proves more controversial than one might think.

New-comer Sam Statham takes a look at developments in white pathology: Baby Boomers Fail Two Generations. As those who’ve been paying attention to this blog (or Ryan Landry’s) already know, America—especially White America—is facing a renewed and virulent heroin epidemic. Statham looks for reasons. A common denominator is permissive and narcissistic boomer parents who, all too often, after their desperate adult OD, will end up raising their grandchildren with the same failed techniques they used with their children. And even less energy.

The Baby Boomers who bought into the nihilistic, materialistic left-wing values of 1969 raised a nihilistic, materialistic generation without the moral and social supports of an explicitly Christian society and of residual traditionalist inertia. That generation was failed by its elders, and it, in turn, failed its own children.

Those same elders now litter the pages of The New York Times with displays of obscene self-absorption. Why did their kids turn to heroin? How did this happen? Who caused it? Well, it was the heroin, of course! Heroin showed up at 3am with a baseball bat and dragged their kids out of the house. Heroin flew a Chinook over the high school and abducted their kids in some kind of special forces raid.

P. T. Carlo has a dynamite foreign policy post: The End Of The House Of Saud. Wealth can only pay for so much malinvestment. In this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Carlo lists the checks coming in that the KSA may not have sufficient funds to cash. Low oil prices facilitated by the Saudis have not driven the competition out of business. It is failing spectacularly to win winnable wars in Yemen and along its own border. And underneath it all, a growing Wahhabist—bat shit loony “low church” Islamic fundamentalist—movement, and a generation of young men with nothing better to do than be attracted to it. An ISIS Caliphate wouldn’t be complete without capture of the Kingdom, and Carlo guides the reader in imagining just how that might play out.

Of course, it’s easy to play Nostradamus and sling about vague premonitions of doom. But just ask yourself this simple question: when you look at the House of Saud’s current situation which vision of the future seems more realistic? The magically Enlightened and Modernized Islamic-Utopia put forward by the architects of Saudi Vision 2030? Or the alternative vision, which we can already see across so much of the Arab world today, namely one with black flags, severed heads, and columns of Toyota Land Cruisers full of heavily armed men?

Just because Wahhabism isn’t Anglophone, doesn’t make it not progressive. On the contrary, it’s the most progressively progressive of all.

Carlo’s article made the international circuit as well. It was discussed, apparently well-received, in this Swedish language (no subtitles) podcast. Related: Greg Cochran has some brief thoughts on Saudi Modernization. “”Modernization””.

And rounding out the incredibly busy week at Social Matter, Lawrence Glarus dons his short fiction hat with Chapter I of The Project, wherein we are given a glimpse of some future transfer of sovereignty. But to whom? Or what?

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This Week in 28 Sherman

In what deserves to be a heavily repeat meme, Landry discusses: Power Hungry Hillary, America’s Mother-in-law. (With apologies to those decent mother-in-laws of the world, of course.)

Those mother-in-laws butt into any conversation, always tell you how to raise your kids, and constantly nag you about things you should do. You somehow fail the role they envision some hypothetical perfect son or daughter-in-law would eprform perfectly. This relatonship is especially rough on wives and when grandchildren arrive. Hillary has spent decades doing this to America with her signature fake book and tagline “It takes a village to raise a child”. She explicitly states that she does not trust you to raise your own kid. It’s the ultimate mother-in-law statement.

This Week in WW1 Pics: Open Cockpit Complexity.

Finally a brief reminder on Friday to Stay off Facebook, Bring Back Bullying, and read Social Matter.

Bullying not only enforced social and cultural norms, it popped people’s heads before they go to Kardashian level arrogance with no accomplishments. My sister has even fallen under the spell as she is now Julia Child crossed with Martha Stewart, but in all honesty, my mom and wife are both better cooks. Bring back bullying or else America turns into the 40 year old still thinking she fits into her Miss Teen USA swimsuit or the 60 second assassin who thinks he is a porn star.

Also don’t stay in school. And do drugs, preferably legal ones.

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This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter’s reputation as seer (or inside trader) is forever cast in marble with A Bloody Mess. Front and center: the breathless disruptivitiness of Theranos, and its foundress, not terribly hard on the eyes, TED Talk competent, and putative nano-tech innovatrix: Elizabeth Holmes. Stage left Peter Dinklage in an Artoo-Detoo get up. Holmes, if you recall, was introduced to us (well, me) as a Steve Jobs impersonating, high tech wunder-babe by SoBL back in December. Porter asks the questions experienced VC investors were apparently afraid to ask, like: “That ‘nanotainer’ sure looks a lot like a Christmas tree light, dunnit?” and “Blood tests are already pretty damn cheap-n-easy, ain’t they?”

Elizabeth Holmes personally inspects nanotainer for high-tech-iness.

There is a difference between what a thing costs and what a business charges. Revolutionizing the industry required Theranos to materially lower the former. But because it appears they had no viable technology to do so, they instead lowered only the latter. Which means investor seed money was likely spent on subsidizing the illusion of lower costs. This in the hopes their technology would mature without scrutiny to meet its present marketing promise. Basically it was Holmes grandiloquently assuring my company can do X, before turning to her engineers and hissing: now go make X happen.

Along the way in this Sunday, May 29 article, an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Porter questions whether Ms. Holmes Fortune-worthy $4 billion stake in the company might be worth quite a few fewer digits. His suspicions were vindicated on Wed, June 1. when Forbes reduced the estimated number of those digits to one. And a nice round one at that. Dalrock has a bit more on that same subject.

Porter finds a testimonial of woman betrayed by ideology: Negging with Aristophanes. He quotes her; I’ll quote him:

Like so many women across the West, she assumed her civilization would always stand, no matter how many bricks were removed. Certainty lead to hubris. And hubris leads careless young women to a cruel middle-age.

She imagined rational teutonic efficiency was simply a state of the environment she so cherished. A given. German institutions would capably manage the country’s welfare no matter who peopled their labyrinths. This conviction left her at liberty to vote blithely “out of love for nature.”

The errors caused by emancipation bias greatly exceed the errors of repression bias.

Next: news that the ANC-dominated South African parliament has found Faster and More Effective means of land justice: the Expropriation Bill, “alarmingly” so-named according The Economist. Alarmingly, perhaps because so straightforwardly truthful? “Willing seller, willing buyer” was too slow Joe. Well, if they’re not both willing, then at least one of them must be… unwilling.

Sometimes blacks do alarming things. And that’s precisely what page 27 of the local paper was designed to cover. Though I do wish the reporter would look up from the sidewalk long enough to discuss exactly what he finds alarming about a non-white majority confiscating the property (and lives) of a white minority. Maybe he is alarmed by the incipient awareness that nothing whatsoever prevents the same thing from occurring in Europe.

Porter tries the shoe on the other foot to see how it fits. Of course, imagining “expropriation” of colonist lands in Europe back to the European natives is to tilt at windmills, at least for now. But this change of gears for South African policy affords Porter an opportunity for clairvoyant predictions on the productivity of seized lands. Or is that deja vu?

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This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Micro solar panels for Detroit? If you’re sick of hearing about Detroit, do not despair. The article is not really very much about Detroit, but gentrification and it’s opposite, and the ways government regulations tend to favor the “opposite”. She sees social complexity as a key metric:

Everyone has a maximum level of complexity they can personally handle; collectively, so do groups of people. Hunter-gatherer groups have very low levels of complexity; Tokyo has a very high level of complexity. When complexity falls in a neighborhood (say, because the local industries move out and rents fall and businesses close,) the residents with the most resources (internal and external) tend to move out, leaving the area to the least competent–greatly increasing the percentage of criminals, druggies, prostitutes, homeless, and other transients among folks just trying to survive.

Her suggestion of micro solar panels as a help for de-gentrified Detroiters is offered completely without irony, but also with a warning:

Such projects need not be run as charities–in fact, they probably shouldn’t be; if a project increases peoples’ economic well-being, then they should be able to pay for it. If they can’t, then the project probably isn’t working.

Next question: Why do people watch so much TV? Every people needs it’s communal entertainments I think. It’s far from clear that TV has been a net positive development for that. But it seems to me social media is far worse.

On Thursday, Evolutionist X has yet another question: Is there a correlation between intelligence and taste? Taste as in taste-buds that is. The science literature is suprising silent on the question. But more plenteous on other interesting questions about the intersection of taste and society. Of which she gives an ample review.

And Friday wouldn’t be Friday without Evolutionist X’s under-appreciated Anthropology Friday series. This week’s installment: Sacrifice Among the Semites pt. 2.

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This Week in West Coast Reactionaries

Christopher Grant comes on WCR with a history lesson and a provocative title: Can Liberal Democracy Survive Liberal Democracy? Critiques from Toqueville, Nesbitt, and Moldbug all make a showing. What’s at stake is the fabric of civilization itself: democracy overthrows hierarchy… by definition:

[T]he non-democratic structure of civil institutions further acts as a bulwark against “the vice of democracy” which according to Tocqueville and Mencius Moldbug, is its tendency to prey upon itself. The progressive temptation to extend the principles of democracy to the intermediate associations of family and church only hasten their ongoing decay. And why shouldn’t they? After all, as Moldbug points out, the word democracy carries with it a double valence as it is synonymous with “good” ”and produces “deep in your medulla, warmth glows from everything democratic” and therefore anything anti-democratic is deemed “bad.” It’s rather silly but we must ask ourselves: would the democratization of the nuclear family or the classroom result in more stable homes or learning environments? Is the hierarchical and authoritarian structure of these institutions deleterious towards these ends?

Newcomer Platalea Ajaja relates the pain of losing a girlfriend by Some Unnatural Experience.

Octavian Revolution has some nice background on pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus in Paradoxes of the Obscure.

From Argent Templar: Plebs are Going to Pleb—or “How I Learned to Stop Being Triggered and Realized that People Have No Agency”. Well, not no agency… If they had no agency, there’d be nothing worthy of Heaven… or Hell. But certainly about half of the people are below average in agency. And average ain’t great shakes. It falls to the elite to create and enforce incentive structures which encourage personal moral growth in plebian castes.

And Argent is back with a What if Islamic State Loses? Other than jump for joy, that is. His concern is: “if IS loses, who is left to provide an alternative system to liberal democracy? What great world movement is strong enough?” I have to admit, I don’t share this concern at all. Which is not to say I’m not concerned about liberal democracy. That is, indeed, a problem. Only it’s a problem that no combination of Islamic Caliphates could, working on their own, possibly address. Liberal democracy is a European problem. And it can only be solved Europeans.

And capping off a very busy week at WCR, Testis Gratus offers his own two bits on the very productive on-going discussion of reactionary church-state relations (which even Jim noticed) in Ecclesia et Imperium. He contends, along with Bonald, for the supremacy of the Church over State.

A king is only divinely appointed to be monarch through the Church, not by God directly. This is why the Pope coronated the emperors and kings; it was an investment of their Divine right, not some formal recognition. Furthermore, to say that the religious and political spheres are entirely separate is not true. A ruler is not a good ruler unless he acts according to Divine Law, which is given to man through God’s Church. The First Lateran Council affirmed Innocent [III]’s view of the matter, which was later put into Canon Law. It is the Catholic view.

There is no doubt this represents an ideal. But the pattern clearly doesn’t apply to St. Paul’s emperor (likely Nero) mentioned in Romans 13. Sometimes the Bishop crowns the King; sometimes the Bishop accepts whatever King he happens to get. Gratis goes on to consider Pope Leo XIII’s soul (church) and body (state) analogy, which is in my mind a very satisfying one. The human person cannot fail to be both ensouled body and enfleshed soul. There is a necessary organic relation between church and state. For the well-being of both.

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This Week around The Orthosphere

Very interesting article here from Cologero: Polymaths and Self-Creation. Interesting, even if somewhat disjointed.

Matt Briggs takes note: Church of Scotland Goes For Gmarriage (Government-Defined Marriage). Well… at least the Presbyterians have an excuse: They were predestinated for it. And over in The Stream Briggs has the following advice: Pretend to Believe In Free Will Or Else You Will Make Bad Choices. According to a sciencetastic™ article, bad things happen when you don’t believe in free will. Therefore, people should freely choose to act as though they have free will, even though they decided that they don’t. It’s hard to argue with his conclusions, but something seems amiss in the premises.

Over on the Official WM Briggs Podcast this week: Multiverses, Infinities, Probability & The Deadly Sin of Reification. And the veteran Week in Doom™ is sat down this week in favor of This Week in Atheist Codes of Conduct, just up from the minors. There’s no breed of men quite so sensitive as professional iconoclasts.

Briggs also offers a mild corrective to Raymond Brannen’s Bayesian Vampire, namely, The Bayesian Metaphor Can Do More Harm Than Good.

By way of Imaginative Conservative: Who knew George S. Patton was such a competent poet? Also Can a Southerner Ever Escape the South?

Kristor writes in praise of The Gothic Cathedral: Fossil of the Human Acme. Hopefully, also a sign for greater things that may yet be achievable.

Cheshire Ocelot reads and reviews Rev. Robert Lewis Dabney’s A Defense of Virginia and the South, which he likens to a Molotov cocktail thrown through the Overton Window. Very comprehensive and a worthy contribution, and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Chris Gale wonders Which weed is worse? All I gotta say is: Tobacco put man on the moon. Cannabis definitely did not. Also from Chris and the words of Christ: Do not signal virtue. It’s too easy. Be virtuous… and let another man notice, despite your best intentions to not let it be known.

Mark Richardson finds New Labour not even needing to hide its contempt for the (white, older) working man. They shouldn’t call it “Labour” anymore; they should call it “Crazy Cat Ladies”.

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This Week… Elsewhere

AMK is itching to write and invites input on what about. He finds something: Responding to Chaos Patch #116. (116th Chaos Patch! Who knew?!)

Dalrock deftly characterizes feminist outrage as Fragile femininity and finds the so-dubbed “masculinity crisis” rather overblown. The now ubiquitious, putatively feminine “heroes” all happen to be excelling at fundamentally masculine things. Only the chromosomes have been changed for the purposes of the camera. In a way, it’s a lot like bowdlerizing Onward Christian Soldiers. You can dick around with the words and (likely) ruin the hymn in the process; but you can’t fundamentally change the meaning of it. At least, and still call it “Onward Christian Soldiers”… (“Onward Vibrant Humans” perhaps???)

Antidem went the San Jose Trump Rally, and recorded live podcast.

Heartiste takes not of the nature and speed of the Civilizational Death Dance. Also an anecdote from Boy Scouts indicates American Women Are Becoming Less Feminine, And Beta Dads Are Partly To Blame.

Gabe Duquette sees more stagnation—this time in pizza technology. He doesn’t seem to consider whether pizza may have approached it’s platonic ideal already.

I don’t agree with all of this, but The Top 10 Reasons the Secular Alt-Right Is Not the Answer is worth a read. There’s enough there there to be coherent.

Carlos Esteban checks in with a brief note: Beware La sonrisa, especially when there’s nothing to be smiling about.

Speaking of Burnham and a “nation of managers”, Roman Dmowski has a very fine essay: Can Burkeanism Save the American Right? He thinks not.

Conservatives in America today thus find themselves in a position more like that of Frenchmen of a rightward bent in the late 19th Century. The French right was disunified and consisted of groups leaning towards several competing sources of authority: Orleanists, Bonapartists, Bourbonist Restorationists, and moderate Republicans. Each group had different practical policies under the circumstances of France. More important, each appealed to a different mode of legitimacy; in late 19th Century France, the very idea of what France was, who was and was not a part of it, and the purpose of the French regime were highly contested questions.

Dmowski earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.

Henry Gloucester (nee Giovanni Alighieri, who discovered he was more English than he thought) has a big defense of Patriarchal Christian Marriage.

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Welp… That’s all I had time fer. Lemme know if I missed something. Meanwhile: Donate! And keep on reactin’!! Til next week, NBS… Over and out!!!