Brexit happened. The Reactosphere® is pleased, of course. By all means share a pint or two in celebration. But we at Social Matter would be remiss not to point out the monumental difficulty that yet remains of restoring sane, secure, and effective government. In the gently abused words of Mencius Moldbug:
If you’re trying to save the old Britannia, you’ve arrived on the scene a little late. Electing Leave is like showing up at an autopsy with a live human liver. Yes, it’s true—the patient did die of liver failure. But that was a week ago. I suppose it can’t hurt to try and put the thing in, but I really doubt it will do any good.
Hestia Society also had to open up its own official subreddit. So far it’s doing pretty well.
Let’s see what else…?
Reactionary Future has more oodles and oodles on foundations, on the subject of which he is rapidly becoming the sphere’s foremost expert. Here is: Logistics of ideas. A big paste here on the rôle of Ford Foundation in Whigs and the creation of black racial liberalism.
And this too: Human Rights (and proxy civil wars). The setting is Chile, the real genesis point for “human rights” pontification.
It seems that Pinochet and the Argentinians were removing subversive intellectuals (always referred to as social scientists) from academia, the majority of who seem to have been Ford Foundation grantees. Once removed from academia, these social scientists found employment in private social science foundations (a total of 49 were made in Chile alone) funded by the Ford Foundation.
Meanwhile on the helpful side of Pinochet’s regime…
Chile’s economy was then passed to the Chicago boys whose training program was funded by the Ford Foundation….
The implication is that this conflict was a civil war between US centers of power, all funded from the same place, all pretty much pushing the same thing.
Who needs a tinfoil hat? You just can’t make this stuff up. But of course there’s no real hiding it, because liberals love to brag about their “good deeds”. For this trio of posts on nefarious foundations, The Committee awards Reactionary Future an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This quote note prompts Nick Land to add:
If Islam destroys the West, it will only be in the role of a suicide weapon, deployed by the West against itself.
Also “Brexit is not the disaster. The disaster is what they’re rowing from.”.
Nydwracu quotes The New York Times and then quotes The New York Times (again). A bit of linquistics geekery Person-marking in Tangut. And an honest question about “Do what you love!” Self-actualization is overrated, I think, but obviously it’s nice if you can get it.
Pal on the Twitter @JoeWChristman sent a link to this The Atlantic article: How American Politics Went Insane. He described it as “accidentally the most #NRx article ever”. Coming from such a high Cathedral source, the admissions it contains are surprising to say the least. Not an exact quote, but as Maine somewhere notes: the only way democracy can actually work is by thwarting democracy.
Alrenous has a useful and welcome discourse on Definitions Considered Meaningful. Welcome by me, at any rate. I was able to understand it. (I think.) He also has Answers to the Five Most Intractable Problems. Note to self: Always call a problem “intractable” if you want Alrenous’ help in solving it.
Alf offers a substantial insight in Ernest Becker, Denial of Death and Magic.
You might assume that Ernest Becker has all the best of intentions. Similarly you might assume that Ernest Becker is subversive. On the individual level both assumptions can be held since individuals believe all kinds of stupid stuff. None the less truth is truth, which means that factually only one of these assumptions can be correct. We cannot prove everything. Many things in life are unfalsifiable. The Jews seem to be very proficient at constructing unfalsifiable realities. Ernest Becker’s book is brilliant. It is also unfalsifiable.
“Liberalism is moral syphilis and I’m stepping over it” –Jonathan Bowden.
Social Pathologist continues to read Sam Francis’ Beautiful Losers. After several posts outlining Francis’ view of James Burnham and his contributions, we take up this week the enigmatic Whittaker Chambers—enigmatic in particular to Sam Francis. Says Slumlord:
Whittaker Chambers
Whilst I think Francis gives Chambers an accurate appraisal, I feel that his own lukewarm religiousness rendered him partially deaf to Chambers’ message. Francis was looking for a method or program, within the existing materialistic world view to right it and it was Cambers’s contention that there was no solution within it. The only way out was by re-embracing religion. Burnham, on the other hand, seemed to take Chambers’s witness more seriously, and by the time he had written Suicide of the West, Burnham had conceded that ideas, i.e. culture, were just as significant as material and historical determinism. Burnham’s identification of liberalism as the solvent of the West owes a large part to Chambers influence, yet he would not fully embrace religion, whilst recognising its utility, till shortly before his death.
E. Antony Gray has a thought: The Sage Offers the Dire Solution.
Free Northerner re-explains: No Enemies to the Right. As usual, he re-explains things perfectly:
When first formulated, NEttR had a slightly different formulation though than simply not attacking fellow rightists. When originally used a few years back (can’t find the links), it meant no attacking people from the left. You could not criticize people for being more right then you, i.e., you never criticize from the left, always from the right. For example, you don’t criticize a anarcho-capitalist for insufficient economic justice, that would be criticizing from the left. It instead you criticize him for the problems created by a lack of legitimate authority, ie. from the right. Criticizing a 14/88er for being racist is from the left and is verboten; criticizing a 14/88er for being a nationalist rather than a thedist is fine as it is from the right.
Free Northerner earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his excellent work here.
Spandrell has a video—and a plea—for Rhetoric, the lost art.
Sydney Trads have nice quote of the week up from Julius Evola on the “Heathen Imperium”.
Finally, Cambria Will Not Yield sends his weekly missive: Our Fight for the Land of ‘Evening Lingerings’. He takes Thomas Mair’s side in the conflict with British Labor MP Jo Cox. He makes a case that it was the moral thing to do. That may be, but was it the strategic thing to do? If it were in the Right’s power to deliver a constant barrage of assassinations against Lefty pols, well then… the Right would have some power. That would be something to work with. But doing so is not in our power, therefore the mode is currently strategically useless.
This Week in Jim Donald
Jim was very busy this week. First, a really insightful article in the aftermath of the Orlando Shooting: The feminized police force and army—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
In response to the Orlando terrorist massacre there were women in uniform among those police responding. This was absurd, outrageous, despicable, shocking, and immoral. We should not expose women to danger—and because you cannot treat women differently to men, no police were exposed to danger.
Therefore, it took about 3 hours to stop Omar Matteen for good. The lesson?
A situation where unowned fertile age women are mingling with masculine men is socially intolerable. The woman have to be owned, or the men emasculated, and since keeping women under control is today deemed intolerable, the men are emasculated, and we are now seeing that it is costly to emasculate police, and the Brits have repeatedly demonstrated that it is very costly indeed to emasculate soldiers.
Fertile age women should not be allowed to mingle with men except that they are firmly controlled by some male who is present, in authority over them, and responsible for their good behavior, and the number of women he is responsible for is small enough that he actually can control them. In practice, the alternative is always emasculating the men.
Jim finds some hope that Nationalism rises from the dead. Or at least twitches. Brexit may have been just such a twitch. We shall see.
Next he notes the truism: All slopes are slippery. Even twitchy nationalist ones:
Brexit does nothing in itself to prevent Britain from being overrun by Muslims who are fundamentally and intrinsically hostile to Britain and the British. But it makes possible the will and intent to prevent Britain from being overrun with Muslims.
Furthermore:
I am not saying that we are winning (indeed as long as we have one person one vote we are inexorably doomed to lose horribly, to vanish utterly from history, and to be unremembered as those capable of remembering the past perish also) but Brexit is going to set free dangerous thoughts.
The Altright is the Dark Enlightenment manifesting as a mob, and Trump is the altright manifesting as electoral politics. Brexit is also the altright manifesting as electoral politics.
A key point of the Dark Enlightenment is that mobs are not the solution to the problem and electoral politics are not the solution to the problem – but they are a manifestation that people are thinking about the problem and thinking of solving it. Even if Trump becomes president, his greatest accomplishment will remain that Trump set free dangerous thoughts. Ideas are far more powerful than guns, for someone has to aim the guns. The mob, and the electoral politics, are not power, but are echoes of power, they are the thunder that tells us the lightning has already struck.
This one earned very high marks from The Committee, but had to settle for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ spot. It was a very tough week.
Finally, Jim fisks George Soros on Brexit, which in passings delves into Italy’s Five Star Movement (which we mentioned in the Descending the Tower recorded last Saturday and due out soon), for which Jim finds some (humorous) sympathy:
The five star movement is a non cathedral leftist movement. Much like Bernie Sanders. Their economic program is, like that of Bernie Sanders, pure self destructive evil madness, akin to the flagellant movement that flogged each other to show how holy they were, but, like Bernie Sanders, they are outflanking the Cathedral on the left and, like Bernie Sanders, trying to produce a leftism that is not held together by hating white heterosexual males, the destruction of the white race, and the physical destruction of white civilization. Instead, they hate the economic system that produces stuff, and propose to replace it by a program of not producing stuff, since actually producing stuff is low status and insufficiently holy. I suppose everyone will earn their living by doing socially conscious puppetry and artisanal basket weaving.
Shakin’ muh head over that Socially Conscious Puppetry…
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week with Driving Through Dying Blue Towns. Landry wears a lot of writing hats: investigator, culture critic, interviewer, script-writer, finance wonk, sportz wonk, babez wonk, eroticist, and Nixon impersonator to name just a few. In this one, he wears the “What the Hell Happened to My Home?” hat. And it’s a masterpiece. A taste:
Stephanie Predel is off heroin. But the Bennington, VT area where she lives, is in the throes of an epidemic.
The siren song of secularization helped us leave the world of religion behind, especially the shame of sin, but at what social cost? No fault divorce and rampant illegitimacy destroyed our families. Those institutions created social bonds that no government program can replicate even if you “expect more”. Europe and Japan throw government money at increasing birth rates and fail to boost them. When the people fall in love with the hedonism and narcissism of modernity, they stop thinking of the future. Kids get in the way of vacations, cat gifs, and hobbies. What responsibility does one have to unborn generations when you barely know your past? There are no children.
But that taste won’t do it justice. Everything that’s gone wrong in America has gone wrong in Landry’s hometown. You see it from 30,000 feet, but you feel it on the ground. This was an instant classic and ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. (Indeed, The Committee will no doubt have to revisit the article in December for Best of the Year contention.) RTWT!
Mark Yuray received another message from the future: Another Letter From Royal America. A future king finds a better use for our large, well-trained, and expensive armed forces.
Mark Christensen makes a smashing return Tuesday with the first of a planned 3-part review of George Grant’s 1965 essay: Lament for a Nation. Grant is not too kind to capital interests, which tend to be dangerously internationalist to a small nation such as Canada. Christensen characterizes Grant’s view of large corporations as positively Moldbuggian. So too the relation between the corporations, state power, and the civil service. Many of Grant’s prophesies have come, or are coming true, and this review stands as a valuable history lesson on America’s great neighbor to the North.
Wednesday it’s Weimerica Weekly—Girly Pop Sluttery Industrial Complex Edition. By converting the musician, instead of the music, into a product, the music industry, is not so much creating edgy music as the edge itself.
On Thursday, Christensen is back with part two of his review True North: The Canadian Tradition. George Grant’s powerful work of prophecy concentrates on Canada’s more authentic basis for conservatism in society and government, and how easily it could be (and in fact was ultimately) frittered away.
Precisely at 8pm EDT on Thursday evening, June 23, Hadley Bishop announces “We’ve Just Launched An Official Subreddit”. That’s at: Official subreddit of NRx.
Sam Statham returns to declare war on the abuses of the English languages used to explain, without explaining, the “senseless” Orlando Shootings. He avers: Mass Shootings Make Sense In A Democracy. Omar Mateen’s actions were evil, but not senseless. They made perfect sense… to an enemy of Western degeneracy. Why should he, and thousands of perfectly sane radicals like him, suffer the soft bigotry of low expectation? There’s something fundamentally modern about ISIS’s strategy, much of which they learned from Europeans:
Democracy, as the engineering of permanent conflict in a society, demands that every individual with a vote becomes an unofficial soldier and therefore a legitimate unofficial target. International treaties trying to establish the opposite did nothing to prevent that logic from developing into the messes of the First and Second World Wars, when total war acquired its true meaning—total mobilization of the economy, the militarization of the civilian population, and mass murder as a legitimate method of warfare. The Allies, Germans, and Soviets were all complicit. The logic didn’t disappear after 1945.
Filed under Prose & Poetry, Lawrence Glarus delivers the highly anticipated Chapter 2 of The Project—it seems to be some sort of AI dystopian thing and I’m just sure something bad is about to happen…
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over on the home blog, Landry has some points to add to Jim’s excellent article on The Thorny Issue of Rape. For example:
Sorry ladies, you wanted liberation but don’t want to deal with the consequences nor can handle the freedom. The rest of us now have to reconfigure society around this because the people at the levers of control want this to continue. A patriarchal system will return, and the only question is if it is under European/American white stewardship or Islam.
“Regret rape” is very real, but it is very not rape.
Just in before the election, Landry has some final thoughts on Brexit.
Leave, even if successful at the ballot box, will not happen. The British government will not implement it. Circumstances would stop the execution of any leave. This vote was to confirm that Brits loved the EU, and were agreeing to their liquidation by the globalists. Orwell had considered the idea that even if England went commie, it would still be England.
We know now, of course, that the first premise has been satisfied. Will the rest of the prediction play out? I tend to think so. Time will tell.
This week in WW1 Pics: German Stormtroopers—decked out for chemical warfare edition.
After the election, Landry takes note of the Night of Brexit. He remains skeptical, of course.
This vote will be something the EU will throw every single trick in the book to delegitimize, force a revote (note age splits) and refuse to implement. I did not think Leave would win and that even if it does, the forces of control will not execute on the plans. Then the EU Road War would change everything. There have been other European nations that voted against centralization but those did not count. The voting continues until the USG empire gets the result it wants.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter pours a can of derision over Con Law Advanced, wherein we are instructed: Statewide bans on guns that look s-s-scary are not unconstitutional, whereas statewide bans on abortion totally are.
Next, he reveals his own hitherto disguised political inclinations: Mexit or Brexit, Vote Leave!
[T]he vast majority of modern politics is an exercise in the buying, selling, and often-enough giving away of your children’s inheritance.
It would be positive if more votes were cast with that thought in mind. Because unlike those who win elections by dangling values and those who lose their societies by taking the hook, I’m more interested in interests. Specifically, what course best serves my family and my nation.
Upon the news that UK voters has voted to leave, Porter identifies the Cracks in Babel. Speaking of interests…
People fundamentally want to be governed by their own kind. By those who share a common history and aspirations for the future. They want leaders who will support and advance their way of life, not that of others. They want an advocate and a champion for their interests. No man hires an attorney who pledges to make the best possible case for his opposition.
Whether any change is possible in Britain without radical reassertion of the royal authority remains, I think, to be seen. But it’s certainly gratifying to see common sense self-interest prevail every once in a while.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with some speculation on Southpaw Genetics.
Next a big dump of pics from Evolutionist X’s Memes File.
She steps into the political theory and demographics realm here: Donald Trump and the Death of White Identitarian Politics. This much is certain:
Liberals are high-class, in-party; their ideas make it into university curricula and influence the nation’s movers and shakers. By the time conservatives (who do not usually run in liberal circles, nor read much from university presses,) notice a liberal idea, it has already become quite widespread. And nothing makes an idea seem old and passé quite like having it suddenly associated with the out-party, the politically low-class and uncool folks who vote Republican.
On top of this, America has a white problem—the problem of too few of them. And it’s unlikely even the Trumpenfürer will be able to do much about it.
And it’s never Friday without Anthopology Friday™. Evolutionist X brings us excerpts with analysis from Still a Pygmy (part 2).
This Week around The Orthosphere
Imaginative Conservative has up a brief quotation from Lord Acton: The Ideal Friend of the Honest Historian. Another quote here from Richard Weaver on “The Tragic Education”
Also up there, an interview with Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán on The European Union & the Fate of the West. And this was interesting, considering all the talk of Foundations: How Equality Destroyed the Carnegie Family.
When the second wealthiest man in human history worships at the altar of equality, we ought to take notice…. Carnegie’s book reflected neither a need to justify his wealth in a democratic society nor was it a form of hypocrisy. Rather, Carnegie gave voice to a creed that celebrated and explained seismic changes in society, culture, and economy. He declared, in the rush of modern history, a new dispensation of progress. This new egalitarian age sunders the past, radically empowers the individuals of the present, and makes of the future a blank slate of unknown but undeniably progressive change.
Chris Gale has some breaking stats on Physician divorce. To those who’ve been around the Manosphere for a while, some of the results will not be at all surprising. But it’s good to have a “peer reviewed” study to back up what everyone already knows. Also notes on Translating Poetry (and also how not to do it). More news from the psychiatric medicine sphere, wherein Stimulant use is stimulated.
Matt Briggs is back from vacation. He makes a passionate and compelling case for epistemological realism with Infinity & Probability: A Return To The Finite. Here he notes an advancing proposal for Wayne State University to drops math requirements—for obvious reasons. Note the pattern: It is almost always the mid tier schools that signal the hardest.
Briggs book is due out on July 22, but it is already The #1 New Release in Epistemology and Logic. Small pond, no doubt, but a rather deep one.
The irony of Brexit: A Decision By A Democracy is not at all lost on Briggs.
Pleb – the main problem of the EU is muhh democracy
Aristocrat – the main problem of the EU is Liberalism#NRx pic.twitter.com/4QBVaTaa4R— Д. Markov Citadelska (@CitadelMark) June 27, 2016
Over at West Coast Reactionaries, contributor Alexander1813 has a bit of short fiction in two parts: Self-Overbecoming Via Circuits (part 1) and part 2—dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Bowden.
On Donal Graeme’s Masculine Monday, he takes on an issue with the PUA crowd. I like to think of it as, “Wherever your treasure is, there will your dick be also.”
Kristor picks up from this Free Northerner classic to discuss Owned Government. He gets more Formalist with his commentary each passing day I think. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:
The sovereign does not then simply reign. He owns. If he did not own, then his reign would be unjust, and men would adjudge it illegitimate; for, his reign in that event would not commensurate with the ontological facts, and as ill fit to reality would therefore be immoral, unjust.
Is there an orderly market? Then is it constrained by rules. And then is there some sovereign who constrains it —who exerts upon it the control of an owner, to enforce those rules. Orderly markets are always owned and ruled, whether ostensibly or not. And rule of a market is ipso facto rule over the spatial and temporal domain or Receptacle of its motions, be it a transnational empire or a coffee shop. To reign over a market is to reign over some bit of material reality as property, and to control it authoritatively.
Also there, Thomas Bertonneau has Some Thoughts Concerning Brexit.
Chris Gale has takes a few whacks at Brexit reactions, like Charlie Stross’.
Mark Richardson finds an Interesting (Victoria, Queensland, Australia) Herald Sun readers’ survey , showing the typical reader to be far more conservative on a number of issues than his Cultural Master. One hopes it may yet do them some bit of good. Also: What Western man was doing in the 1240s—it was magnificent.
Bonald answers The nostalgia charge.
Gratuitous pic of girl at sunset
It seems that its pieces contradict each other. If we have idealized the past, then we’re not just mindlessly trying to ape some past state of affairs. By definition, we are guided by ideals of some sort. One might still try to fault us for historical ignorance, except that we never claimed to be trying to build a historically accurate theme park–that’s the accusation the progressive is making against us.
If the ideals are wrong, then proof of that does not depend on how difficult it might be to “get back” to that.
As Alexander Dugin emphasizes, when one drops the dogma of Progress, everything is back on table. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from the Middle Ages, the fifties, or the current year; it’s progressives, not conservatives, who care about that. What matters is what is right, what is good, what works best.
This Week… Elsewhere
Henry Gloucester has Father’s Day Meditations on his second Fathers’ Day.
Reactionary Tree considers Conservative Canon Wars as well as ostensible Anti-Canons (LOL at that list from Wiker). He also links us to Jim Kalb’s candidate works and makes a starting volley of his own.
The Black Pill
Unorthodoxy has some interesting poll data about who trusts whom among Remain and Leave supporters. After the vote: Throw Away Your Black Pills, The Fire Has Started. Also: What’s Next After Brexit?
AMK has a very entertaining (and absolutely accurate) take on Why women can’t be trusted with voting, free speech, national budgets, or power.
He also wonders whether the concepts behind Thiel’s support of suits against Gawker and WeSearchr might not be combined in Fundr: a Social Technology for Bankrupting Cathedral Media.
Robert Mariani has a few more predictions in Future Things II, which sounds just a bit too plausible to be very funny.
Knight of Númenor catches Left Clients battling for victim supremacy in the wake of the Orlando shooting. I’d bet against white guy victims… even if they are gay.
Antidem brings us the next installment about his buddy: Psycho Dish and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week. This is some plucked-from-real-life commentary on the state of our nation and black culture.
We are told—those who style themselves our moral betters make sure we hear—that “Black Lives Matter”. To whom, I wonder? Judging by the rate of black-on-black murder, and by the rate of abortion among black women, not to blacks themselves. And if not to them, why to me? If they can’t be bothered to raise their children (Why was the dead black youth living with his grandmother? Where were his parents? Dare I ask?), protect their young people, and care for their old and infirm, by what right do they burden me and mine with those tasks? Do we not have enough to do in caring for our own?
Over at Propertarian Forum, Butch Leghorn conveys some thoughts from Curt Doolittle On Natural Law. And on the home blog, Butch does some Fact Checking Trump.
Roman Dmowski has some additional thoughts on the Orlando Shooting.
William Scott has a video up (~27:00) with his thoughts on Liberal Diversity.
Greg Cochran has some notes on First Farmers.
Thrasymachus has some notes on Modern Child-Raising and Fertility Rates. I wish there was an easy answer, but there isn’t. I also wish people would stop thinking I have magic powers, which I don’t.
That’s all I got, folks! Come visit us on The Official NRx Subreddit. Drop some links there that I might have missed. Keep on reactin’! Til next week… NBS, over and out!!
Great week, and thanks for the reading and links.
What is your handle on the reddit? I trust you as a leading light in this circle and would love to be able to use your name as an anchor for valuable discussions.
I would be interested to know this too. I am /u/nickbentham