Tyler Cowen attempts to answer What is neo-reaction? (Apparently it’s the in thing to do these days.) He fails. Miserably. Of course! But the way he fails is at least somewhat interesting. Spandrell goes all Confucius on it. Nydwracu has some issues with Cowen’s issues with illiberalism.
Let’s see… What else?
Reactionary Future adds his own two-cents on State and Church. Also this is nearly short enough and good enough to be quoted in its entirety.
The next time you come accross an article about racism, white privilege, the wonders of diversity, liquid gender and why tranny toilet etiquette is the key issue of governance, please stop and ask yourself how that author/intellectual got his/her job, who paid for the job, who set up the organisation, where did they learn this stuff, and who set up that organisation. If your answer is “Jews” then please read some history.
I resisted quoting all of it, but that’s only so you’ll click on over to RF’s to RTWT.
Speaking of history, and of powerful institutions running destabilazation programs, Heather MacDonald’s The Billions of Dollars That Made Things Worse (Autumn 1996) is a very comprehensive study of the history of 20th century philanthropic foundations and their cooptation by the left. Required reading! (She’s not as skeptical of the original vector of the foundations as I am. Basically, I’ve never met a philanthropic enterprise that I can’t mistrust. But, hey, ya can’t have everything. Where would ya put it?)
RF adds his own praise to MacDonald’s article here, from which he liberally excerpts. Foundation money is the short answer to: Where did the new left originate from? If someone has real power, which they themselves could not afford, then it is absolutely certain that someone bought it for them.
Nick Land finds Robert Kaplan being pretty darn prescient. Also this twitter cut was a particularly funny inside joke.
E. Antony Gray was quite busy this week. Must be the summer weather. He brings us The Song of the Pipes. And in honor of Hillary’s Herstoric achievement, an ode: The Song of the Idol. Also, a thought: The Sage Discards the Modern Style.
Alrenous sketches a brief hypothesis: Decadence Essentially the Opposite of Independence? Also from Occam’s Razor to Hume’s Freshly Sharpened Guillotine. I’m not terribly convinced by this line of reasoning. Is implies ought when the will of the Creator may be inferred from is.
Also from Alrenous, another brief insightful note on the Philosophy/Magic in Demotism.
Demotism is based on envy. Thing about envy is you can’t have it flopping around untethered. Have to have a target. Hence, market dominant minorities. Kulaks, Jews. Or, in the proggie’s case, market dominant majorities. Not merely handy, but vital. Envy is what makes it go, but there’s no such thing as a sociological muffler.
Sarah Perry is talking suicide again: Patch 7.822: An Experimental Design Puzzle. Not her own (thankfully), but searching for an experiment to figure out why it’s so relatively rare, and which way the causal arrows point in its correlation with mental illness, drug use, and misery.
Count ∅-face and One Irradiated Watson do some anime geekery in Caligula’s Council Episode 5: Dead Puppy Removal Service.
Antidem is joins up with the Caligula duo for a podcast on Angry Birds.
Social Pathologist continues to read Sam Francis reading James Burnham.
It’s interesting here to see that Francis thought that “big business” capitalism worked synergistically with the managerial state to erode both traditional society, morality and the protective mechanisms for individual liberty. Francis also saw that the managerial elite could superficially appear conservative but was ultimately radical at its core and unless the managerial “structure” could be disestablished it would pose a continual threat to any nascent attempts of Conservative resurgence. He regarded the Reagan years as a failure and interesting illustrated how the managerial apparatus managed to deal with upstarts who wanted to change the status quo.
Slumlord gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Sydney Trads Quote of the Week is from: Francis Fukuyama’s After the Neocons—I book which I must confess I didn’t know existed. I thought the End of History was gonna be… ya know… the end of history. Also another @WrathOfGnon classic: Chesterton on Hedonism.
They also have up Black Pidgeon’s latest video with commentary: “Muhammad Ali was a RACIST – and that’s OK”.
Also Down Under, Jim completes this sentence: If you are a conservative, _________________. He thinks the Alt-Right, because it does not purge to its right, may become a true political party in the Menciian sense. That could happen, but it will need some leadership first.
Mark Citadel has a great overview of spiritual authority within Christianity: The Voice of the Dead.
The practice of doctrinal preservation then is said to come through both the laity and the priestly caste, but how exactly, if as we have already said, the laity are not of the caliber required to fully understand the Scriptures on their own, and priests (especially today) might fall into grave error? Put simply, we are here speaking of the authority of the dead, or to put it more bluntly, ‘necrocracy’. The people and the priests must never deviate from the faith of the great past heroes of the Church, her saints, her martyrs, her children, on issues of religious importance, doctrinal or not.
“Necrocracy”. I like it. (It’s also the name of a death metal album.) Citadel is nearly automatic these days in getting an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
BTW, Mark was Shoahed on The Twitter for some very mild questions directed at the, irrationally and irredeemably humorless, ADL. He was, however, back up in no time @CitadelMark. And with 125% moar Pepe memes.
Intellectual Detox steps into deeper waters of controversy with What is the real definition of “racism”?
So what are we to make of the word “racism” in 2016? At this point we should acknowledge the actual definition of the word. Not the definition in the dictionary. Not the definition that you might like it to have. The definition that accurately captures how the broad population is actually using the word. The actual usage is this: racism is a hate-word for a person who is more than one or two degrees to your right on issues of race.
And therefore it is not a serious word. Deny it any power whatsoever in serious discourse. An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Intellectual Detox.
Free Northerner takes a Swiftian approach: Colour Doesn’t Exist.
Alf has some reactionary thoughts on Dem womenz.
Finally from Cambria Will Not Yield: The Trumpet Shall Sound and the Europeans Shall Rise.
The European Christians who are resisting the Moslem invasion of the European nations are making the same mistakes the prolifers made. They say they know what liberals are, but if they truly knew what they are, satanically possessed swine, would they try to appeal to their humanity? “Please stop abortion; it kills a young child,” and, “Please stop allowing Moslems into our nation; they are destroying our culture and killing our people.” Would you ask a wolf to spare the sheep in your pasture or would you kill the wolf?
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week at Social Matter with Weaponizing Billionaires. Bankrolling lawsuits against Gawker isn’t the only way for very rich people to legally inflict pain on hitherto unassailable targets. There are many ways. And, as elected officials become increasingly powerless to look after anyone’s interests, Landry picks a fine time to count them in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Carl Icahn’s attempts to steer AIG toward divestiture take center stage. TBTF didn’t just happen. And now that it has, it isn’t just gonna unhappen.
If it takes a billionaire to beat a middling sleaze rag, we're gonna need a lot more billionaires.@SOBL1
— Nick B. Steves ♔ (@Nick_B_Steves) May 26, 2016
For Monday, Mark Yuray updates an old Ara Maxima classic: Rules For Reactionaries. The basic message: Don’t play by your enemies rules, is universally true.
Haeli Wey, 28, Texas HS Math Teacher busted for “inappropriate relationships” with minors
Following close on the heels of Mark, Anthony DeMarco and I devote a two hour “Very Special” episode of Ascending the Tower to Pax Dickinson and his (and Chuck Johnson’s) start-up project: WeSearchr.
In view of the San Jose fisaco, Oscar Reichenbach takes us on an inside look The Trump Rally Riot In Chicago. That was, as you recall, the one that Trump had to cancel. The only one so far…
Wednesday is Weimerica Weekly day. Landry is one of the world’s leading experts in Horny Teachers. He’s all over that subject like thin yoga pants.
Eric Baylor takes his maiden voyage into Social Matter waters with Social Technology To Save Ideology. Social technology for safe, secure, and effective institutional government is a (perhaps the) crucial research area of The Neoreaction, but I’m not sure that equates to “saving ideologies”.
Finally Neville A. Graham delivers his much anticipated next installment Inversion – II, in which we meet the man called up to play the first extraterrestrial pipe organ.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over at the home blog, Son of Brock Landers’ Monday article: Countrywide Skates Again. “Too Big to Fail” now means “Too Big to Fine”. But more importantly, the Whole Truth about the Mortgage Crisis remains indigestible, in spite of serious Hollywood attention…
What no one can talk about is how the banks and mortgage firms made a killing as middle men and fee collectors handing out easy money mortgages to people who had no hopes of paying them back and were fresh into the country. The movie The Big Short’s famous angry line from Steve Carell is absolutely wrong, and Hollywood knows it. In any bubble, the late receivers are the Ponzi borrowers. Who were the late receivers? The worst quality borrowers and immigrants that middlemen could swindle. Those late receivers helped raise the real estate wealth of the earliest receivers, which only made economic inequality worse in America.
Another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Landry this week.
Next, he suggests “Have You Seen Angry Birds?” as the Code Phrase for the new generation of samizdat dissidents. He also suggests you should see the movie.
Landry went on the Fatherland Podcast. Have a listen.
This week in WW1 Pics: Motor Machine Guns. The speed of technical innovation during WW1 never ceases to amaze me.
Finally, it looks like Landry got a fine response out of his Troll of Julia Ioffe last week.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter remembers: The Greatest rather mixedly. Needless to say, Muhammad Ali was a complex and controversial figure. Needless to say, he blows the current crop of ball-scratching bitchy black “icons” completely out of the water. Whether that ball-scratching bitchiness was because of him or in spite of him, seems to me to be an unresolved question.
Next some good (and rather surprising) news: Danes are increasingly figuring out how babies get made. Ostensible blue-eyed baby boomlet is on the horizon there.
Though operating from the presumption these are primarily native births, it speaks positively to what more convincing incentives might accomplish. And the necessary push may be less than many believe. There is enormous spiritual gratification in seeing the world through your children’s eyes. In passing the baton to those who will cherish its memory. In loving something more than yourself, and even more than conservative values. I know many men who confided their longing to have had more children. I know none who wished to have had fewer.
Porter looks at the European national soccer teams and ranks them according to their lack of Diversity on the Pitch. I actually saw that game between France (FRA) and Romania (ROU). And it seemed obvious that the French team was the white team wearing yellow, and I was wondering what African team would be abbreviated ROU. Then I realized it was the European Cup. Then I remembered the French team was always in blue. Yay diversity.
Finally he pens, for the benefit of any mainstream conservative politician who might have the wisdom to make us of it, The Speech Not Given, but which could have been without the sky caving in. Of course, neither I nor Porter agrees with all of its carefully crafted “race-blind” content, but putting the “I’m not a racist” burden of proof squarely onto the shoulders of a member of La Raza is long overdue.
This Week in Evolutionist X
It’s easy enough to forget that Evolutionist X, the other exception that proves the rule, is a mom. Potato Madness reminds us of this fact. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
And here, she characterizes the intellectual strategy of conservatives as “I don’t hate minorities, I just hate liberals”. Just because you don’t hate minorities doesn’t mean you’re not a racist. Conservatives have been, I think perhaps quite literally, hypnotized by their enemies. Breaking that spell is not easy. As for me, not only do I not hate minorities, I don’t even hate liberals. But that doesn’t mean I think they should be making decisions that affect me, or even themselves.
Speaking of the Shitlord Summer Blockbuster of the Century, Evolutionist X has Some quick thoughts about Angry Birds and a caution about LSD stories. They are, apparently, otherwise unrelated topics.
Filed under Anthropology—for all practical purposes—Friday, she cracks open Homicide by Daly and Wilson. The focus here is on childhood deaths, specifically likelihoods by age of homicide by parents and non-relatives. Chock full of data.
This Week in Nydwracu
Nydwracu was quite the busy beaver this week. He has a solid over view of Epistemic and instrumental rationality. A “sect” of “Rationalists” seems to think the two are identical. Wes shows why that doesn’t quite hold. He concludes with a Big Fat™ Smirk:
There’s surely a culture somewhere in the world that could be experimented on—a culture where people are socially required to believe something that’s demonstrably untrue…
British actress Klariza Clayton smoking
Yeah, Rationalists, get on that, will y’all?
Nydwracu also reads SSC so you don’t have to, collecting answers to The central conservative insight? Surprisingly good answers I think. Unknown how many bad answers he had to skip over. Also: rounding out the democratic primaries with The mystery model’s predictions. And: How many books do you think Donald Trump reads? This is really bad news for folks hoping for a highly literary president.
Nyd also wonders: Does formalism matter? Because Strange Loop is not a government organization. And the answer is yes it does, because under formalism Strange Loop has a perfect right to invite or disinvite whomever they want for any reason… but the reason they feel compelled to make proggy decisions is that they don’t actually currently have that right, or at least a lot of the people who give them money don’t think so. Also Two definitions of culture and how they figure into multicultural calculations. And The plan… for a “Living Constitution”.
This Week in West Coast Reactionaries
Over at West Coast Reactionaries, Lucius Varo has some thoughts On the meaning of the Iranian Revolution. He makes the case:
Unlike all other modern revolutions which saw the overthrow of monarchy and the establishment of either a democratic order, dictatorial order, or communist order, all of which represent a degeneration from the monarchical order, the Iranian Revolution saw the establishment of the rule of the Clerics, of the Brahmin caste.
He’s absolutely right about it establishing the Brahmin caste over Iranian society. He’s absolutely wrong about it being the only time. In fact, I don’t think successful revolutions can fail to install the priestly caste over society. “Priestly” rightly understood at any rate. Legitimacy must come from somewhere. I tend to doubt Iran any is closer to a genuinely traditional society than it was under the Shah.
And Adam Wallace makes a, somewhat introspective and depressive, return with Primer, Pt. 10: What?! Hey, introspective and depressive is how reactionaries cheer themselves up!
Christopher Grant, prompted by recent interest in the Fukuyama Thesis, delves into some serious political theory in Postscript on Liberal Democracy and the End of History. (It’s on his home blog here.)
CygnusX111 offers Commentary on The Corpus Hermeticum.
Argent Templar pens An Open Letter to the Conservative Party of Canada. It appears the Tories, like all rump end progressive parties, are scrambling for the beer and popcorn from liberalism’s table.
P. T. Carlo keeps an eye on the pop culture, purely for research purposes of course, and has a review of Deadpool: Nu-Male in the Promised Land. Deadpool appears to be noteworthy only because…
…beneath the recycled plotline, wooden characters and juvenile dialogue lies the genesis of the next step in the liberal ideological agenda.
I bet yer sayin’, “Yum. Yum.”
This glorification of Nu-Male degeneracy is where the film sets itself apart from the rest of the pack. Deadpool just doesn’t present us with a foul-mouthed, devil-may-care, anti-hero; a kind of Han Solo in spandex. […] It undermines not the noblesse oblige motivations displayed by the golden age superheroes of yore, which were made archaic long before, most notably in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight; rather its main target is the very intrinsically masculine nature of the virtues long displayed by the fictional heroes of the Marvel universe.
Gay? Heaven’s no… That’s soooo early 00s. Deadpool is pansexual. Rated ‘R’ for run away from this movie as fast as you can.
This Week around The Orthosphere
Over at Imaginative Conservative, they have a quotation, to me somewhat ominous, from Adam Smith on the Art of War from Wealth of Nations. And here is a review of some of the ideas of Wilmoore Kendall: The Lie of the Open Society, who appears to have made some mincemeat of at least a couple Enlightenment writers.
Th. Jefferson’s Poplar Forest home
Bopping visitors to Southern historical sites with slavery is apparently all the rage now: Remembering Our Founding… Slaveowners? After all, the typical Southern historical site tour-goer—being historically illiterate (Is this the water slide?)—has probably never even heard of slavery. And besides, what else could possible have been important about Thomas Jefferson other than the fact that he owned slaves?
Also at Imaginative Conservative a pretty strong tract against Determinism: Science Commits Suicide. A longer, more articulate version of “If determinism is true, why should anyone believe it?”
Matt Briggs dips a toe in The Stream with California Tried to Move to Make Global Warming Skepticism Illegal. One takeaway here is, among other things: if something sounds Orwellian (e.g., “California Climate Science Truth and Accountability Act of 2016“), it probably is.
In the Official W. M. Briggs Podcast this week: Trust Me, I’m a Scientist. And this was a useful primer: A Brief Explanation Of Occam’s Razor.
This also bears repeating: The Fermi Paradox isn’t a paradox unless you accept certain premises, which thus far remain highly speculative. Finally some musings on whether Melody May Be A Learned Response?
Over at The Orthosphere, Kristor is brief, clear, and on point with The Subscendence of Politics.
Politics is being replaced by the procedure that will as mature furnish the basis of its eventual future renascence: the formation of a tribe, of a common cult and homogeneous nation. What was once politics in America is devolving into something more basic, and – most likely – much less civil, much bloodier. It is the subscendence of politics. It is, i.e., the verge of war.
Thomas Bertonneau here offers a bit More on Subscendence—Monkeys sitting at MS Word Edition.
And Kristor is back to discuss The Optimal Tariff & Laissez Faire. And a magisterial treatment of the topic it is… and winner of the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
Gratuitous pic of green-eyed girl
Government is of course nothing at all if it is not command and control of some sort: the basic act of the state (or any sponsor of a market) is to set rules of social and economic interaction, and keep them, and penalize their infractions. This is how markets – or any of the various organs of society, for that matter – are instituted to begin with, and maintained. No rules, no game: if you want a market that can iterate, remember (score, account, bank), so learn, and thus integrate intelligence supraindividually, you need constraints on behavior. So some command and control is inevitable: whether or not it is formally instituted, there is always a government. This is to say no more than that men always and everywhere try to coordinate their acts.
But if you want government control of certain sorts of acts – murder for hire, say, or fraud – as you most certainly do, then taxes are a lousy way to get it. State levies should be aimed solely at raising revenues, not at controlling behavior. Government of behavior is the function of law, of the judiciary, and of punishment.
And this was pretty good too: Anarcho-Tyranny → Monarcho-Liberty. A profound and profoundly accurate logical implication in its own right. He goes on to discuss legitimacy and the Mandate of Heaven:
[I]t is not the consent of the people that determines the legitimacy of the government, but vice versa. The people feel as they do about the government on account of the facts on the ground, and it is those facts that tell whether government is legitimate. The feelings of the people about those facts are, not a cause of the government’s legitimacy, but one of its effects, and thus no more than an index of legitimacy. […]
Government is legitimate that is in fact succeeding at governing, that is governing well and toward the good.
The Committee awards Kristor an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.
Cheshire Ocelot reviews Memoirs of a Service Afloat During the War Between the States. Shows you can tell a lot about a book by its trigger warnings.
A winning stroke for future time orientation: Sunshine Thiry is home-raising some future Thanksgiving dinner.
Chris Gale wonders Is Grief being medicalized? And if so, why? Also Youth suicide in the UK—neither up nor down.
Bonald has Cartesian meditations on racial identity.
Previous sexual partners versus divorce risk is making the rounds again Think Of The Children by way of Vox. Our earliest canonical piece on this came from Social Pathologist in 2010. But the trend, and its strength, continue to be confirmed empirically.
Mark Richardson names Traditionalist of the month: Alexander Gauland and has video. Also feminists have a big megaphone and need some shouting down: Laurie Penny sets out the true goal of feminism: the state must replace the husband. Women’s self-reported happiness has been dropping steadily for over 40 years, and our Cultural Masters can only prescribe more of the same lies and snake oil that got them into this mess to begin with. And some selected works from John Atkinson Grimshaw .
This Week… Elsewhere
Roman Dmowski considers Biased Judges in the Age of Diversity. Front and center: an incoherent narrative where differences (“wise Latina”) are all good all the time, except when it’s completely racist to suggest differences might exist:
Let’s face it, it is not exactly a crazy idea someone in the National Council for La Raza might, you know, not like someone running for President in large part against the ethnic chauvinist claims of la raza. But the liberal media–and the liberal official conservative opposition–wants us to forget all the ethnic determinist claims used to promote non-whites against white males in the name of diversity.
Dalrock has a bit more on Elizabeth Holmes, Amelia Earhart, and the PR Machine that produces them: A coat and a hairstyle. Speaking of Amelia Earhart, he’s got some more herbicide of truth for that particular memetic weed. And a well-deserved smackdown on the supposed harmlessness of female achievement inflation. And he’s not done with that yet.
This was good (if you can tolerate the template): Universities Have Deep Pockets:
You earn 15 credits, and what do you get?
Another semester older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter won’t you help me dig outta this hole,
The Cathedral’s got my money, now they want my soul.
This was pretty interesting Delta Kylos takes a look at the origins of the French Revolution through the lens of Nerd Rage. I suspect that a social environment wherein real social status (power) can be bought merely for verbal IQ universal marker of instability and revolution.
Renaud Camus
Also there: video plus commentary of Renaud Camus on The Great Replacement. I certainly hope, merely for the sake of consistency, it is available in French.
Over at Le Mitrailleuse, Mark Lutter announces his new blog Free Cities Initiative: Let A Thousand Cities Bloom.
“Bad” Billy Pratt produces yet another of his masterful mashups: Authenticity and “The Cable Guy” (1996). A taste:
There is a decadence to this obsession with authenticity. Our culture fosters a kind of Holden Caulfield-like suspended adolescence where wearing the Metallica shirt isn’t enough, nor is it immediately permissible, but only after an undefined quantity of experience is your ownership of the shirt acceptable. Are you sophisticated enough to understand why you should enjoy chocolate liver pate, regardless of personal taste? Are you watching Mrs. Doubtfire the right way, ironically and detached, or following the film’s narrative as intended?
Pratt goes on to show how Jim Carrey’s nameless cable guy’s cringe-worthy lack of guile shines a light on the deeper inauthenticity of the show’s more socially graceful characters. Pratt takes home an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Speaking of megaphones… Heartiste picks on Sharon Stone: The Sad Squeaks Of An Aging Starlet’s Rationalization Hamster Spinning Its Final Wheel. But for a reason:
Sharon Stone is 57
The problem is that, unlike most aging women who must nurse their fantasies and shill their platitudes in private or to a small audience of immediate family and close friends who know better, Stone has a public platform to spread her lies to impressionable younger women who can’t see through the bravado to the sexual market rejection hurt underneath. At the margins, some younger women could be convinced, to their detriment, by Stone’s false pride that playing the field until late middle age is a viable route to life happiness, instead of what it really will be: a big mistake.
The Pulse Gay Nightclub shooting took place in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Roman Dmowski was the first to file: Orlando Muslim Terrorism. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this in next week’s roundup.
Peppermint may think that I won’t link him if he’s offensive enough. That’s where you’re wrong, Kiddo. Actually not a bad a post, once you get used to his idiosyncratic naming conventions.
Welp… that’s all I had time for. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… NBS, over and out!!
From Kristor: “Government of behavior is the function of law, of the judiciary, and of punishment.” Curious isn’t it? Especially from a Christian blog.
Thanks for the links! I hope you found the potato post as amusing as I meant it to be.