The Republican National Convention was this week. It was less boring than most GOP conventions, but still pretty boring compared to the earlier portions of the campaign where the outcome was less in doubt. Nevertheless all that tacking toward the general election voter got some attention around the sphere. My own favorite speech, not that I watched many mind you, was Ivanka’s. Mother of three, articulate, and beautiful. What’s not to like?
Lawrence Murray finds much to praise in Trump’s Thursday night acceptance speech: Trump the Redeemer, Trump the Destroyer.
Adam Grey over at Faith & Heritage says: It’s Trump or Never, White Man. He focuses on Trump’s well-put, humble, and sincere thanks to Evangelical voters.
Heather Mac Donald says Trump Is Right about Crime. And given the demographics of crime victims:
Trump’s concern about rising crime is therefore not a concern about white victims and the loss of white life. Rather, it is a concern about black lives.
Nick Land finds a particularly germane sentence regarding the Thiel-Trump connection. One hopes it might be true. Time will tell.
Shylock Holmes has some principled Pox-on-Both-Houses Style® curmudgeonry about the conventions: Stop cheering for politicians.
Jim’s predictions about the RNC were vindicated: No riots, no floor fight, Trump in charge. He also raises a glass of moonshine to toast the Alt right at the Republican National Conventional.
In actual fact less than one percent of the Republican National Convention was alt right, and none of them would have given the Nazi salute, though I suppose a few of them quietly murmured “14 words” and “27. Februar 1933” but they were treated as a respectable faction of the Republican party and received the same firm police protection that all the Trump factions received.
By “taken over” progressives mean “not attacked on sight with baseball bats”.
Still, if you are an alt right, not being physically attacked on sight by state sponsored thugs wielding baseball bats with police protection is intoxicating.
Here’s to not getting beaten with baseball bats. In four more years, let us drink in Constantinople! Jim also loves the way Trump explains crony capitalism to the masses during his acceptance speech.
And there was more on Turkey…
Matt Briggs hosts a guest post by the perspicacious (and inimitable) Ianto Watt: Was The Attempted Turkish Coup A False Flag Or Otherwise Allowed To Happen?. Over at City Journal, Claire Berlinski asks Who Planned Turkey’s Coup? (It probably wasn’t President Erdoğan).
Jim has his own thoughts on the significance of the failed Turkish coup: Now four sovereign nations. It’s hard to like Erdoğan, but it’s awfully hard not to cheer for his independence from the “International Community”.
Let’s see… what else?
Current events continue to inspire Neoreactionary Poet Laureate E. Antony Gray. He has an imprecation: A House Divided.
Thomas Bertonneau goes on Sydney Trads with a big essay: René Guénon and Eric Voegelin on the Degeneration of Right Order [Part I]. Another classic from Wrath of Gnon: José Antonio Primo de Rivera on Freedom and Order. And also some (Pygmalion-esque) poetry from Emile N. Joseph: “Poetic Speech”.
Euryale at the Thymos Book Club has a review of Vox Day’s SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police. A big one. More of a comprehensive synopsis and analysis.
Reactionary Future has a brief note linking Fascism and Manchester Liberalism. Also an agenda (I wouldn’t quite call it a “blueprint”) for the Reactionary Restoration Organisation (RRO). It’s a blueprint for the restoration, within which I find little to disagree, but doesn’t really indicate the design and strategy of an organization capable of carrying it out. Of course, having an already Sovereign Organization would help immensely, but also begs the question.
Skyagusta over at Losing the Creek pops his head up to let us know he recently appeared on the TRS Radio “Rebel Yell” podcast.
Alf has a Vaag verhaal.
Mark Citadel brings us: Big Sister & Weaponized Nerds. This is not so much a review of the Feminist™ Ghostbusters movie (which by all accounts is a dud at best), but a review of the hubbub around it, the war on (supposed) nerds, and the broader tyranny of political correctness. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Bear in mind, the actresses in Ghostbusters might be pitching a fit, but they don’t matter. It’s Hollywood and the other entertainment giants that matter because they are the private entities that are funding these adventures, setting up advisory groups chock-full of social justice warriors to ensure all movies, games, and television series’ are as diverse as they should be. Make Moneypenny black? Sure! Let’s make James Bond black next! Oh, and while we’re at it, Hermione is going to be black too. Back in the 90s, when developers wanted to mix things up, they created Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, they didn’t make Indiana Josephine. The point of this revisionism has sinister overtones, it is about erasing even the most minuscule remnant traces of the past, of a bygone era in which women were not viewed as either interchangeable or superior to men, in which whites were entitled to their own heroes.
Revisionism is the tax that mediocrities of the present pay to their dead betters.
Jim was an incredibly busy beaver this week. In addition to his articles above, he has a quick note: Tor compromised.
Next a magnificent essay on Western Civilization, giving honor where it went right, and noting where it went wrong—all offered in classic Jimian deadpan, with only the barest hyperbole for effect—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Hard to summarize, but here is a taste:
The Enlightenment was western civilization taking a very bad turn, which may well be the end of us all. The scientific revolution gets identified as part of the enlightenment, but this is like Marxists telling us that Marxism is scientific socialism. Science predates the enlightenment in that science got started around 1247, and the enlightenment around 1750. The high period of science, 1660 to 1945, occurred during the enlightenment, but was caused by the reaction, not the enlightenment, in that King Charles gave the Royal Society status, and the Royal Society gave science and the scientific method status. If Western civilization is to survive, the Enlightenment must be thoroughly purged and erased. Eradicating the enlightenment make make restoring Christianity necessary and possible, but the urgent necessity is the thorough and complete erasure of the enlightenment. Western civilization cannot survive the enlightenment.
This too was absolutely magisterial: Patriarchy and fertility. Patriarchy always and everywhere motivates fertility as well as increased economic output. The only problem is: Patriarchy is formally illegal. Jim relates his own experiences:
“Sweater Girl” Lana Turner age ~16
I was the boss of my family and I found being a patriarch and having children hugely rewarding. But then I am a grade A asshole, and I am not afraid to commit illegal acts, though I tend to consult lawyers on ways to weasel out or buy my way out if caught, before I commit them. It is hard to be a patriarch if you are a nice guy, or if you have respect for law and social pressure, because marriages on the Pauline model are illegal, being marital rape and psychological abuse. Marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years is illegal and criminal, so of course the population is collapsing. Workable families are similarly illegal. Indeed, these days any sexual interaction with women is illegal with the notable exception of hiring whores and escorts – whores, escorts, and porn stars being the only women who are likely to give you explicit verbal consent moment to moment.
He concludes with a candidate for Neoreactionary Sentence of the Year: “Marriage and family is outlawed, thus only outlaws have wives and families.” Yet another ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for Jim.
Finally, in CWNY’s Saturday missive: Out of the Belly of the Leviathan.
This Week in Social Matter
A lighter than average week at Social Matter this week, since two of the three editors were off in Cleveland for the RNC. We’ll hear more about that next week.
Ryan Landry was on vaction last week, as well. Filling his shoes as Official Week Kicker-Offer was P. T. Carlo with the Twilight Of The Secularist Deep State In Turkey. A feat made more amazing by the fact that the coup had been dead for only about 36 hours at Sunday’s post time. Carlo, avoiding the US entanglement angle and the false flag angle, sees instead in the coup a dying gasp of Ataturk’s staunchly secularist and modernist vision.
Journey very far from the kitschy tourist traps of Sultanahmet or the hipster bars and nightclubs of Beyoğlu, and you’ll quickly feel more like you’re in Cairo than Berlin. Istanbul’s face may be worldly and lit by neon lights, but its soul is found in the song of the city’s thousands of minarets as they exude the call to prayer.
And now Erdoğan has only increased his power to return Turkey to it’s roots.
Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara.
There is now no going back for the Turkish deep state, which will never recover from its humiliation. A vengeful Erdoğan will purge every Kemalist in the military and civil service, as he fully exploits his newly found blank check to eliminate his political enemies. The Constitution will be rewritten, with the military forced to surrender all its previously enjoyed sovereignty to civilian command. Ataturk and his aspirations will be relegated to history books written by Islamists and will live on only in the fading memories of old men.
Mark Yuray takes a provocative tack on honor killing of Qandeel Baloch: Feminism Killed The Pakistani Lena Dunham.
[Pakistan’s Cathedralite] newspaper eagerly encouraged and fueled Qandeel Baloch’s narcissistic endeavours in order to further a political goal: the advancement of feminism and other progressive norms in Pakistan. Baloch made a reckless but predictable deal with the Devil. She would be the cudgel with which the Cathedral would beat traditional Muslim Pakistanis. In exchange, she got attention, fame, notoriety, and money. In theory.
In reality, the deal got messy very fast, and her own traditional Muslim Pakistani brother strangled her before she became a Kim Kardashian. He saw her become the Pakistani Lena Dunham, and he had enough.
I’m not saying that people walking through a Western Virginia forest dressed up as a deer in November deserve to get killed, but people should not walk through Western Virginia forests dressed up as deer in November.
Qandeel Baloch was not empowered, she was a political pawn for organizations that did not care whether she lived or died.
Sunshine Thiry agrees a lot.
Yuray also shows How Russia Takes Over The World In One Sweeping Arc. Are we Russophiles? Nonsense… Russia is just awesome!
For Saturday Prose & Poetry, Lawrence Glarus brings his next installment: The Project, Chapter III.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Business picks up again this week over at Landry’s home blog with Cop Killer Similarities. He draws the parallels between the Dallas and Baton Rouge attacks that the media has been unwilling to draw. Parallels that make a complete lack of coordination between the two rather hard to believe.
Next he articulates The Frustration of Immigration. The real enemy isn’t actually the immigrants. They’re just the cudgel.
If you are taught to be ashamed of where you came from and the ancestors that toiled to build your community, you will feel as much if not more allegiance and solidarity to and with the man who arrived on a plane or long march than the person whose parents were raised alongside yours. The true conflict between the two tribes of the home nation feeds the building anger between those who have hopscotch loyalties with as alien a people as possible versus those who value kith and kin.
Landry nabs an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.
On the night of Trump’s nomination, Son of Brock Landers takes a step back and marvels at what Alt-Right shitpoasting hath wrought.
This doesn’t end. This is the beginning. The Left is firmly in power and has such totalitarian control that every big business does what the Left politically wants. They control the megaphone, the schools, and are the regime. Reality is getting in the way though. Their minority pets aren’t behaving. The Narratives are crumbling faster. The white Left are humorless Puritans. They are unhappy people who seek status and joy through having a slice of political power and feeling they are righteous… right before they pop SSRIs and enjoy a scheduled cuddle class before going home to their cats and Internet porn. The Left, this regime, finally has an opponent that is willing to fight back and have fun doing it.
Wishcasting? Familiarity bias?? Or sober assessment??? Time will tell. (But Ryan Landry is not known for public drunkenness.)
Lulz memes & Twitter do NOT build a new system but do the next best thing. They delegitimize & lay bare the folly of the current regime
— SOBL1 (@SOBL1) July 20, 2016
This Week in WW1 Pics: When Germans Prayed.
Finally, some quick notes on Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC (and a bit on Thiel’s setup).
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter attended a party in a boring, non-diverse zip-code and lived to tell about it.
There children play unattended throughout the neighborhood well past dark. Practically every face smiles in greeting. Impromptu games spring up in green common areas, where not-for-long strangers share picnics. Evening porch parties dot every few houses, as wanderers-by are warmly welcomed to join. Kids’ bikes litter the sidewalks and itinerant family dogs seek patting from strangers they have no fear to approach. Not a door is locked. And on the last night of my visit a band played in an open area as people from 8 to 80 danced together like they were in their own living room.
It is, as our media would describe, a place of pure Hate.
The demographics of this enclave hardly require describing….
Next up, Porter discusses Ideological Statistics.
[T]hroughout the West judiciaries stand as sturdy bulwarks against the rise of stab-resistant whites. In America, we have a constitution that protects the sacred rights of what three jews, one latina, and a dementia-American say it protects. In Europe, these safeguards must be assembled ad hoc.
Which he follows up with a German example of judicial lawmaking moral browbeating.
The German judge, his malevolent mistress, and the earth-burrowing slugs Hollande and Valls are all loyal creatures. Loyal to an ideology. That this fidelity conflicts utterly with the interests–and increasingly the lives–of their people is cause only to redouble efforts in the face of mounting obstacles.
Incidents in Europe seem only to have increased in frequency since Porter wrote this last week. Something’s gonna break. I’m not quite sure what.
Porter finds the neoliberal establishment has a plan for pseudo-groveling at the feet of populist outrage: Treasonous Elites Concede to Continuing the Program of Treasonous Elites.
Maybe you can imagine workers displaced by Indian visa holders or poor/elderly whites trapped in violent diversifying neighborhoods as their home equity dissolves to nothing. Perhaps these people look grimly upon their situation and think: Goddamn it. The percentage of employment in manufacturing has remained static for six. fucking. quarters!
Surely these people have no greater ally than the Financial Times and its earnest five point plan.
Earnest!
European murder and mayhem continue to prey upon our attention spans: Truth Thunders from the Balcony—a heart-warming story about a grumpy dude who told the truth to the shooter, and lived (AFAICT) to tell of it. The real issue, of course, is Germany’s lax gun-control standards.
At this point I’m extremely skeptical of whether [Munich shooter] Ali Sonboly maintained proper safe-storage procedures for his firearm. And once the Munich court docket is cleared of all the right-wing Internet comment criminals, I do hope heads will roll for not having checked to see if his pistol had a trigger lock.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X kicks off her abbreviated summer week with a celebration of Strawberry Season with a bit of bio-history: Fragaria x Ananassa and Hybrid Vigor. It also serves as a welcome reprieve from the insanity of modern culture and politics.
Next she starts a promising series with part 1 of Some quick notes on the big six civilizations. (Six, not five. ISWYDT.) The “Part 1” part is Sumer Civilization, and arrives laden with great pics and graphics.
This Week in West Coast Reactionaries
Platalea Ajaja has a memoir: Ghost Hunting. Whether fictional or autobiographical or something in-between I cannot tell. But it is relatively brief and pretty good.
Auld Wat has some lessons from St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s Five Books on Consideration: Because My Heart is Pure.
This Week around The Orthosphere
Bonald considers The subtleties of maximizing papal authority. And how that shoe fits on the other foot to minimize it.
If the meaning of papal statements are so opaque that the faithful are not qualified to recognize a contradiction, then communication is not really taking place at all, and again, no one need feel bound by statements he is told he can’t understand well enough to reason from independently.
LOL. I think being Catholic is more an ontological thing than a doctrinal thing, and really that doesn’t seem like too bad a thing. Certainly the hierarchy cares little for doctrine. Otherwise, they’d do a whole hella lot better job clarifying it. The Pope said a lot of Catholic marriages are invalid. That could be true. If he really cared about it, he’d order the bishops of the world to start a massive effort at convalidations. But he doesn’t really care about it.
Bonald picks the discussion right back up again with Development of doctrine: new categories more convenient for my use, in which he identifies distinct methods for hermeneuticists to avoid teaching what the Church teaches, or teaching what She does not.
All of which, sets the stage for considerations of the indestructibility of the Church. Bonald shows, convincingly, that even if the promise of the indestructibility and indefectability of the Church pan out, that doesn’t mean that the Church doesn’t face a practically existential threat, nor that she doesn’t have real flesh-n-blood enemies that threaten her existence.
All of which (I think) leads Bonald to a diagnosis of The social fragility of Catholicism. I disagree with him on a few of the particulars, but the his general tenor—social fragility—is a strong one. He lays out a smorgasbord of food for thought. For example:
First Vatican Council 1869-70
The period between the French Revolution and Vatican II was exceptional. One might call it the “Pius X” era of Catholic Action, frequent communion, integralism, and, in general, the mobilization of the laity. What was it, an orthodox echo of the Lamennaian idea that the Church could beat her enemies at the contest for popularity? Had the papacy discovered the trick of high/low vs. middle, as Pius IX mobilized conservative Catholics against Gallicanism and Pius X mobilized them against modernist theologians? If so, it was an unstable arrangement, as John XXIII and Francis I discovered they could mobilize liberal Catholics against tradition, and the papacy now rules unchecked over a wasteland.
Also from Bonald: What have white people ever contributed, anyway? In short, the entirety of Western Civilization, which, he points out, is a sufficient justification for European rule over societies they built, irrespective of whether Western achievement is measurably higher than that of any other people group or not.
Psychiatrist says demonic possession is real by way of Knight of Númenor.
As a psychoanalyst, a blanket rejection of the possibility of demonic attacks seems less logical, and often wishful in nature, than a careful appraisal of the facts. As I see it, the evidence for possession is like the evidence for George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. In both cases, written historical accounts with numerous sound witnesses testify to their accuracy.
Imaginative Conservative has a “Timeless Essay” from Roger Scruton (2012): Conservatism Means Conservation. Tons of good stuff there. For example:
But you cannot live in the centre of the cities any more, the suits complain: They’re not safe. Downtown is for blacks and Hispanics; for bums and drop-outs; the schools are appalling, the crime rate soaring and the place rife with drugs, alcohol and prostitution. Well yes, that’s exactly what happens, when the state subsidizes the suburbs, imposes zoning laws that prevent proper mixed use in the towns, and engages in its own gargantuan housing projects which drive the middle classes out of the city centers. All this occurs in defiance of the market solution and, as Jane Jacobs pointed out in The Death and Life of American Cities, it deprives the city of its eyes and its ears, of its close communities and natural fellowship. Do the Italian cities have crime ridden centers like the American? Why is it that everyone wants to live in the middle of Paris and not on the edge?
Also there: a rather provocative quotation on Industrialism & the Fate of the Arts. I think it is wrong—excluded middle fallacy—but it’s worth grappling with.
Briggs posts the foreword to his new book from the pen of Steven Goldberg. His The Stream article this week is: University of Cincinnati to Require Diversity Oath of Professors, Staff. The silver lining, according to Briggs:
This theory provides a testable prediction: Look for, in the next year or two, a faculty or staff member of UC to be fired or disciplined for not being sufficiently committed to Diversity.
I’ll add a note in passing that it always seems to be the middle tier sorts of schools that go the extra mile in holiness. They have to try harder to impress their Masters in Cambridge, MA. It’s a Stream two-fer this week, as Briggs has also: The Murder Rate has Plunged Since 1990 … But Big Gov Knows How to Turn That Around.
Briggs has a fantastic bit of analysis here: Publishing & Equality Are Killing Science. He gets a lift from Sarewitz’s Nature article: The pressure to publish pushes down quality. Call it “Elitism”, call it “Reality”, just don’t call it “Late for Dinner”. Actually… it is reality. This earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Another gratuitous pic of Lana Turner b4 she went blonde.
Equality caused the increase in colleges, which caused the increase in students and the professors teaching those students. The requirement that academics publish, married with Equality, caused the massive increase in publishing. Since Equality, though yearned for and believed, is false in fact, the average quality of those publications necessarily decreased.
And this might have been fine, because although the average necessarily decreased, the quality at the top might have stayed constant. If you have one man who can jump 8 feet, then the average of jumping ability for this sample of one man is 8 feet. But if you add yourself to the sample, and you can only jump 2 feet, then the average necessarily decreases to 5 feet, though the top man can still jump 8 feet.
But Equality and the mania for publishing is worse than that. Their combined effect burdens our high jumper by (metaphorically) forcing him to wear heavy weights, much as with Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.
Democracy ruins everything. More on the late decline of science, Chris Gale digs up some old gems from Bruce Charlton and adds comments: Converged science is no science.
Also from Chris: Nations are what? More than political boundaries in which to be born: That much is for sure. And he has more on the severe limitations of fMRI: Bruce, you could have Schadenfreude. That’s Bruce Carlton, again, BTW; whose 20 year old predictions on the technology are thus far holding pretty well.
More from Briggs: Expectations Of The Majority—i.e., that everyone they meet is probably a member of the majority. Dissidents may have a small structural advantage here.
Over at The Orthosphere proper, J. M. Smith makes a welcome return with the first installment of Knucklehead News. Turns out he’s been keeping an eye out for “subscendant” behaviors for quite a while.
Kristor takes a freshly honed scythe to the idea that experiments “prove free will” doesn’t exist: Libet & Liberty. Kristor also takes Alrenous to school: Determinism is Empirically and Analytically False. Richard Cocks also chimes in on the subject. I am glad to see them all talking.
Bertonneau tries his hand (I think) at a bit of satire: Tenured Astronomy Professor Fired after Discovering Trans-Neptunian Object: Women’s and Minorities’ Grievance Committee Says Object Insufficiently Diverse. Satire only because “Upstate Consolation University” does not appear to be a real place, but it is possible that the names were changed to protect the guilty. At any rate ripped from a future headline near you.
This Week… Elsewhere
The Anti-Puritan has a simple 18-step plan to conquer Progressivism: No Genocide Required: a Nonviolent Alternative to Rightist Singularity and a Suggestion to the Alt-Right. The only trouble is: if you had the power to do all that, you wouldn’t need to do all that. But I appreciate the sentiment: RaHoWa and RWNGTK are neither necessary nor sufficient.
Greg Cochran muses about human genetic admixture and historical barriers to it in Building momentum. In other genetic news, he’s got a correction to offer for La Wik: Romans are (and were) Still Italian
Cochran also tries to read Between the lines of NY Times writer Farhad Manjoo on Peter Thiel. Some applause lines are too obvious to be taken seriously by serious people.
Heather Mac Donald, who just wrote a book on The War on Cops, comments on the recent skirmishes of that war: The Fire Spreads.
President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist.
Obama had his chance to “go to China” and failed, and I think we all know why.
Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus over at The NeoCiceronian Times, makes the case that highly centralized monarchies were a modernist innovation and that an aristocratic oligarchic republic is the better form of government: Resistance Is Feudal. Also some apposite thoughts on Church, Männerbund, and Militia.
Roman Dmowski has a superb bit of commentary on recent events here: Whither the Democratic Capitalist System? The “End of History” is itself coming to an end, and the results are not looking favorable for the neoliberal establishment in this ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
[Western] regimes have stumbled and found themselves under attack in a very dramatic fashion, finding enemies and critics from every cohort. Their ability to deliver the practical goods of government–basic items like order, peace, and prosperity–is more and more in disrepute. The modern democratic capitalist regime is now subject to corrosion within and assault from without by different species of tribalism. These attacks are not isolated events so much as a multipronged assault on the very legitimacy of the democratic capitalist order.
RTWT! Also at Man-Sized Target: Politics in the Age of the Mass Man—increasingly identity politics, if only for survival.
Ivanka Trump with baby #3 in tow
Unorthodoxy has an analysis of Trump’s recently expressed NATO policy… and why the establishment isn’t talking about it.
This was particularly well put, and only few may be relied upon to so put it: The Fundamental Psychosexual Difference Between Men And Women In One Photo.
August J. Rush has a magisterial documentary on Anatomy of an Insurgency: A look at #BlackLivesMatter. The shoe indeed fits. And we should endeavor to make them wear it. For all the excellent research and argumentation that went into this, Rush wins the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
Over at City Journal, the latest outrage to lay at the feet of the Mediocrity in Chief: The Anti-Cop President. Also there: Theodore Dalrymple offers his thoughts on Freedom and Terror.
Trichotomous thinking makes a big comeback this week with Butch Leghorn and Curt Doolittle’s musings on Rock-Paper-Scissors and Fascism.
Fascism smashes Liberty
Law obviates Fascism
Liberty undermines Law
Therefore, for the common good, a balanced equilibrium must be carefully guarded by the sovereign. Also from Butch: some speculative theory on Property and Norms.
Lawrence Murray has an excellent (and increasingly sympathetic) overview of Trump’s America First Policy.
Dr. Peter Blood has a very thorough review of Ian Fletcher’s Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why. “Free trade” is a linguistic con-game seems chief among the reasons.
Welp, that’s all I had time for. Next week more war stories from the RNC, plus hopefully news that the DNC nuked itself. Enjoy your summer. Keep on reactin’! Til next week… NBS, over and out!!
Thanks for the links, and the reading. This week should be a good one, because the news is fairly horrific.
The violence is becoming so regular I’m getting a bit inured to it. I’d feel bad about that… if I felt the goings on in Western Europe were any of my business. Which I don’t. Western Europe has more than enough power at its disposal to solve its own problems. If it lacks the will, then what can I do?
Islam has declared war on the West and we are part of the West. That makes it our business.
This is just an amazing number of links. Thanks. I like that Sydney Trads site. It had popped up here and there and now I have added it to my feed. But damn … that piece on Guenon and Vogelin … I mean … not to go all Evola-esque leveling on you … but the references were so obscure that I couldn’t penetrate it. Maybe there is hidden wisdom there but perhaps they could take it down from 160-IQ to 140?
Bertonneau is a top-rate political philosopher. He writes mainly at the Orthosphere. I admit I have a hard time getting him myself.
Thank you, Nick. As I wrote in response to Kgaard, I had a hard time with it too. For Traditionalists, however, there can be no dumbing-down. The obligation falls on us strenuously to understand as deeply and accurately as possible. Guenon and Voegelin, in detailing the catastrophe of usurpation and empire-building in Central Asia in antiquity have discovered the cause-effect paradigm that explains the disaster of our world.
Dear Kgaard (I dig the moniker). Guenon and Voegelin are, themselves, difficult propositions. Over decades of reading and re-reading them, I have come to the point where I am beginning to grasp the depth and clarity of their analyses. Reading them, like reading Evola, resembles something like an initiation into mysteries that it took them half a lifetime to discern. What I have endeavored in the Sydney Trads essay is to take Guenon and Voegelin down from 220 IQ, to whatever my pathetic IQ is. It is a genuine essay, an attempt to figure something out that is shrouded in interpretative difficulties. In so doing, I also try to adhere to a Traditionalist principle, which is that the present should be understood, first of all, in the broadest and deepest perspective possible, and then, by stages, in narrower perspectives. Guenon and Voegelin had the flash of insight that the key to the disrupting and distorted character of modernity was to be found in the immensely destructive imperial movements of Antiquity. Guenon and Voegelin found, independently, a pattern there that turned out to be applicable to our parlous situation.
I thank you for struggling with my prose.
From your best of the week: “Lastly, the movement has had significant success in attaining government recognition and legitimacy. Beyond mere governmental recognition, BLM often meets and works with government leaders at the highest levels, regularly meeting with President Obama, Department of Justice Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and with various federal Senators and Representatives. Whether these political figures privately consider themselves to be members or allies of BlackLivesMatter is unknown, but they appear to be, at a minimum, highly sympathetic.”
So you reject the De Jouvenalian model of Moldbug, which tells you that BLM is made by the elite? Is this formal acknowledgement of NRx being alt-right, and not reactionary?
The Best of the Week post is selected for excellence on a substantial number of axes, only one of which is slavish devotion to “the De Jouvenalian model of Moldbug”.
Upon further consideration, Chris B., I completely fail to see how that bit of reportage you quote in any way denies the De Jouvenalian model. Mr. Rush is certainly not praising the High-Low alliance against the middle. Indeed the operation of BLM is a textbook case illustrating the Iron Law of Rebellious Tools which you yourself articulated. Your complaint makes zero sense.
Nick, is there any resource that parses out the differences between “Tradition,” “Neo-Reaction,” “Alt-Right,” and other terms? I’m still fairly new to this realm, and have taken to using them…not interchangeably…but as cousins drawn from the same set of siblings.
BTW, thanks again for the links, much appreciated!
You’re doing impressive work over there at NCT. I’d still like to figure out how I discovered it, but… at any rate, you’re in the queue now.
You’ll have as many answers to those definitions as people you ask I suspect. I try to keep definitions as simple as possible, but no simpler.
“Alt-Right” simply refers to the Dissident Right–rightists that are out of power with no hope of getting it through ordinary means. (Tho’ the way many of them talk, they would not agree with that assessment.) Since it is simply an umbrella term, the Alt-Right doesn’t really have a particular essence (other than the fact it consists of people more or less vaguely right wing who have no political power).
Neoreaction (pace Nick Land, we try to avoid the hyphen) is a particular dissident group within the Alt-Right. It is defined principally by both the critique of modern socio-political structure and a programme for restoration of formalist government articulated by the movement’s founder Mencius Moldbug.
Neoreaction is not particular reaction, but an engine for diverse particularist reactions. As such, it is sympathetic to, and attempts to remain on good terms with, many on the Alt-Right such as NPI/Radix, Amren, Paleocons, Legitimist Catholics, the Orthosphere, various nationalists, etc.
Tradition is an even broader term. I think it usually refers to the inherited authoritative norms of a group. Tradition, it seems, is inherently particular, and therefore I find discussion of generic (unspecified) tradition often quite unsatisfying, if not downright confusing.
“You’re doing impressive work over there at NCT. I’d still like to figure out how I discovered it, but… at any rate, you’re in the queue now.”
Thanks Nick, that means a lot. I’m not sure how you found me either, but I’m glad you did. It’s been a journey for me over to the Alt-Right. For years, I’d been a “conservative,” though not really a cuckservative, per se, since I’d never been for illegal immigration or accommodating Islamism, had been at least unenthusiastic about legal immigration, and hated feminism, etc. But, I’d have called myself a “strict by-gum constertooshunalist conservative!” all the same, been pro-free trade, pro-wars for oil and big banks, etc. A regular FReeper, if you know what I mean.
Started getting red pilled a few years ago by reading Vox Day and Steve Sailor, and then found Traditional Right a little later. I found Social Matter more recently, and was amazed by it. Truly amazed. I think I may have gone through a couple of months worth of SM posts the first evening I found it. The Alt-Right says the things that I sort of knew all along, and was even starting to question and articulate on my own, but these sites accelerated the process tremendously.
I started writing the NCT because I just have a burning urge to write. Really. I don’t get to nearly as much as I’d like. Only get to do one or two posts a week. Would like to do more. We have some time-consuming life’s circumstances going on recently involving moving my Dad out to live with us, selling out house, packing, finding another house, etc. which keeps me from putting finger to keyboard on a lot of things in a timely fashion. I’ve got a number of draft posts in the hopper that are basically just titles at the moment, designed to jog my memory about what I wanted to write.
I really do appreciate what you said, because I very strongly want to try to maintain a high quality control on the blog, and not allow it to turn into just another “here’s a news story and three sentences why I’m mad about it” type of site.
““Alt-Right” simply refers to the Dissident Right–rightists that are out of power with no hope of getting it through ordinary means. (Tho’ the way many of them talk, they would not agree with that assessment.) Since it is simply an umbrella term, the Alt-Right doesn’t really have a particular essence (other than the fact it consists of people more or less vaguely right wing who have no political power).”
OK, that’s pretty much the impression I was getting, that it’s more of an umbrella than anything else.
“Neoreaction (pace Nick Land, we try to avoid the hyphen) is a particular dissident group within the Alt-Right. It is defined principally by both the critique of modern socio-political structure and a programme for restoration of formalist government articulated by the movement’s founder Mencius Moldbug.”
Aha, I read his Formalist Manifesto. Seems to be a fairly stringent subset of the overall umbrella.
“Neoreaction is not particular reaction, but an engine for diverse particularist reactions. As such, it is sympathetic to, and attempts to remain on good terms with, many on the Alt-Right such as NPI/Radix, Amren, Paleocons, Legitimist Catholics, the Orthosphere, various nationalists, etc.”
I see. I guess I’d qualify under the nationalist and paleo-con headings most of all. I’ve always had a politically contrary streak that centers around the rejection of, say, the last 150 years or so of American politics (support localism, secession, nullification, universal militia; oppose democracy, federal centralisation, the “civil rights movement” in its many continuing forms). Was for Perot in ’92 (but wasn’t old enough to vote) and for Buchanan in the ’96 GOP primaries.
“Tradition is an even broader term. I think it usually refers to the inherited authoritative norms of a group. Tradition, it seems, is inherently particular, and therefore I find discussion of generic (unspecified) tradition often quite unsatisfying, if not downright confusing.”
Yes, I got that sense too. When they say “let’s preserve tradition” – what is really being said? Whose tradition? Do we need to go full-on Amish to be “traditionalists”? Tradition is a term that pretty much always need an adjective with it.
The Iron Law makes it clear the rebellious tools are directly assisted with the connivance of power. That quote, and the whole post, insinuates that it is a grass roots movement first and foremost. It clearly isn’t. It clearly comes from funding from elite within the current system. This is a direct contradiction – liberal theory of culture bubbling up spontaneously versus elite led culture. This section is even more clear:
“Insurgencies live and die by the support of the civilian population. Insurgencies rely on local supporters for resources & intelligence, and without this support, the ability of the insurgents to carry on their activities is extinguished. Additionally, the government leadership’s willingness to acknowledge the budding insurgency is critical in granting legitimacy to lukewarm supporters and the general public.”
BLM’s support is from Foundations such as Soro’s.
I see. So you fault August Rush for not seeing behind the curtain; for telling a story that is (rightly) shocking to normies in a way that normies can understand.
Thanks for the link! Great stuff. Keep up the good work.
Seconded.
Thanks, gentlemen. I’m just the messenger.