A lot of people have been talking about this. We’ll listen to Alf talk about it: Cialdini vs Trump, with a lift from Heartiste.
Spandrell laments The Will To Not Power, showing that even possession of an actual, honest-to-goodness emperor is not sufficient to reestablish a monarchy. Sad!
Anomalyuk takes a stab at Distinguishing Progressivism and the Left Coalition.
Over at Sydney Trads, Luke Torrisi is… Thinking Right About Pop Culture: “Drive (for Daddy Gene)”. A review of, and praise for, Alan Jackson’s heartwarming hit. Some more @WrathOfGnon classics here and here.
Richard Cocks graces the pages of Sydney Trads once again with Feminism, Children and the Future.
The huge number of movies with apocalyptic themes indicates some kind of awareness and obsession with civilizational destruction, but people are directed towards possible far off consequences while immediate and identifiable realities are ignored. Anthropogenic climate change and its hypothetical consequences is supposed to command our fear and attention, while the fact that many countries, such as Germany, Italy and Spain, all at total fertility rates of 1.4, Japan 1.42, Sweden and the U.K., 1.9 (2.0 is necessary for population maintenance) have below replacement birthrates that threaten economic disaster and cultural annihilation is simply not a topic that the media or liberal elites consider important.
Cocks goes on to consider the topic in much deserved detail. For example,
Traditional imperatives to have children, on the other hand, involve the continued existence of men and women at all, which in the long term necessarily has to take precedence over ideology and politics. The notion that having children might be a duty is now commonly thought of as obsolete and anachronistic in modern Western democracies. Yet failing to have children is as surefire a method for cultural self-destruction as atom bombs, and we know that providing state of the art maternity leave in countries like Sweden has not meant a return to replacement level birthrates.
An excellent essay from top to bottom and winner of the coveted ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Try not to spend that all in one place Dr. Cocks.
Lawrence Glarus pastes the full text of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Diuturnum: On the Origin of Civil Power, which concerned The Bitter War 1881. Glarus notes, “The church was not ignorant of the forces at work around it.” Not then. And filed under And-Now-for-Something-Completely-Different: Notes #5 Sponges are Slow. Really, really slow and you won’t believe what happened next… eventually.
Nick Land has a refreshing Quote Note on the state of Evolutionary Psychology—refreshing insofar as people are beginning to notice that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. And another: “Corporations became sophisticated consumers of ‘sovereign services’…”.
This was important: Qwernomics, tho’ possibly not quite as important to those less dedicated to searching for “intelligent” coincidences (intelligence in coincidences??) than others.
Qwerty persists—arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard solution—due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’ through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and — going forward — simply ‘Qwernomics’).
Shylock Holmes has a rant about why Making the human race better, even by means completely within (arguably justified by) Christian teaching, is seen as such an evil thing, even by denizens of the right. It is the sort of thing one ought not need to rant about.
E. Antony Gray pens a thought: Verses for Economy. And also a hymn:
Social Pathologist has a big paste from Sam Francis on Globalism.
Reactionary Future proposes The Alternative Thesis regarding the link between technological progress (which is real) and so-called moral progress (which isn’t).
I can’t quite tell how important this is: Receptor Sensitivity Homeostasis, but it’s Alrenous, so I’ll link. It could be important in 6 or 8 years or something.
Over at The Neo-Ciceronian Times, Cincinnatus explains Why the Decline of America’s Average IQ is a Cause for Concern.
Finally, CWNY’s regular Saturday Epistle is The Long War. He takes Aquinas to task for sowing rationalistic seeds that would one day sprout up to choke the faith. And he’s not the first to do so. We shall have to get to the bottom of this.
I would concede that the Vatican II theologians are certainly more heretical theologians than St. Thomas, but I would qualify that concession by saying that the Vatican II theologians were merely following St. Thomas’s theology to its logical conclusion, just as the psychoanalysts who came after Freud were acting on his original thesis even though they were dissenters in degree from Freud’s tenets.
What Aquinas, Feuerbach, Darwin, Freud, and Marx had in common was the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fixation. They wanted to simplify and dissect in order to obtain knowledge…
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week over at Social Matter with One Man, One Vote, One Time. It’s not for nothing that his Sunday articles are called Big Think™ Pieces. In this one—☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀—he points out one of the less well-understood benefits of unhindered immigration to the regime: America being a brain drain on the rest of the world actually makes running the neoliberal empire easier.
From a strategic point of view, there is a defensive weapon that exists to protect the empire by being open borders. Leftists will not admit we are an empire that dominates the globe, but any empire must fend off challengers. By leaving our borders open, defense against rising threats is easier. By using the system of higher education and post-education material security, America can pull in the best and brightest out of other nations and prevent their home nations from applying the human capital to their social and economic systems. An anecdote one may hear often starts with a Nigerian or Pakistani pre-med undergrad student saying he or she wants to become a doctor and go home to help their people. The anecdote ends with the storyteller finding the Nigerian or Pakistani on LinkedIn living in Long Island, or the suburbs of Atlanta.
Of course, importing new, more easily manipulable voters can’t hurt.
The goal of third world immigration is to create the one man, one vote, one time situation that so much of decolonized sub-Saharan Africa witnessed. It is possible LBJ realized it would be easier to bribe the black underclass and import impoverished “Future-Americans” than to persuade whites. Looking at the insurgent, anti-status quo campaigns of Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders, it is evident that the American regime has a much harder time controlling its white population than it does minorities. Clinton won due to rigging primaries with the DNC’s help and the Democrats being just beige enough to carry her in several states.
Titus Cincinnatus returns Monday with When We Talk About Tradition, What Do We Really Mean? He spends much of the article discussing what it doesn’t mean—tradition is not a congenital preference for less technology, mistaking the accidents of modernism for the essence. A conflation that the left rejoices in, and, sadly, one which too many on the right are too ready to accept.
Even outside of the outer right, there is an increasing sense of dissatisfaction among many Westerners with the direction in which our societies are going – a dissatisfaction that is arising from a rightward direction. For many, this sense may be inchoate and inarticulable, but it’s there. Others may be able to give voice to their complaints, but only inadequately, or in the wrong directions, mistaking symptoms for causes. It’s fine to discuss the symptoms, but let us not mistake them for the root origins of the many sicknesses that afflict the West which result from turning away from our traditions.
There is a strong strain among those who long for a return to the “good ol’ days” to equate modernity (for that is really what we’re condemning) with technology and/or science. In many ways, it is similar to the “noble savage” mythology that has persisted for centuries in Western thought, namely that technology as such is bad and dehumanizing; primitivism is good and natural and in line with the human spirit. In many ways, then, the Amish and other pietistic sects who reject modern technologies are the most authentically Western among us.
Cincinnatus zeroes in on what we should mean by (the Western) tradition:
When we talk about tradition versus modernity, we need to understand that we’re talking about a dichotomy that lies essentially in the realm of worldview. Tradition holds to one set of general preconceptions, while modernity holds to a different set. Modernity arose as a result of philosophical rejections of many basic truths – Christianity, the innate sinfulness of man, the essentially communitarian nature of man’s sociability, and a recurring view of temporality – and their replacement with a new set of ideological preconceptions – rationalism, the innate goodness of man, radical individualism, and a “progressive” view of temporality. This sea change in worldview was largely the result of the Enlightenment, though the argument can be (and has been) made that the seeds for this were sown earlier in the Reformation.Gratuitous pic of Maria Kostikova
Cincinnatus earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his efforts here.
Mark Yuray pens a rather Moldbugesque Letter To Ukraine.
Landry’s Weimerica Weekly is Episode 37 – Hollywood’s Scrubbing Of Gays. This is in the scrubbing them up to make them presentable sense, just like normal people. Nothing to see here, folks… except that gays are totally normal, except witty and charming and insightful. Pay no attention to those number of anonymous sexual partners, those STD rates, those rates of depression and suicide behind the curtain.
On Thursday, newcomer Fritz Pendleton arrives with a simply fantastic debut: Gini And The Economic Altar. There is much to like here. He starts with a Menciian analysis of modern intellectual life, as backdrop. For example,
We can see the new church at work most prominently on university campuses. Here the modern-day cardinals have shed their robes for khaki pants and a belt; the new dogmatists look through their black-rimmed glasses at a congregation of naïve students, scratch the scruffy beard on their chins, and preach their gospel of the great goddess.
The college cardinals have been trying for decades to infiltrate the last holy order available to free-thinking men: the hard sciences. Most men assume that mathematical subjects are pure logic and therefore timeless and unchangeable. Western traditionalists assumed that they would be safe in these studies. The feminists, the socialists, the race-baiters, and the radical queers broke down the doors of the humanities long ago and so their new theology was born.
But Pendleton’s primary focus is on the Dismal Science, and the way it is has been turned into a PR firm for communist snake oil. The Gini Coefficient, a supposed measure of “inequality”; 0 is perfectly equal (yay!), 1 is perfectly unequal (boo!!!)—gets special scrutiny:
Do we dare imagine a nation where an open-heart surgeon takes home the same pay as a janitor? One job requires nearly a decade of dedicated study, an unwavering hand, a stout set of nerves, and the ability to think quickly lest a patient die; the other job requires a broom. What may be termed equality of outcome would certainly not be equality to the surgeon who spent his youth learning the scalpel when he could have just taken up a broom and gotten paid the same wage. Now multiply the scale of this nightmare by several orders of magnitude: a pharmaceutical chemist taking home the wages of a street sweeper; an electrical engineer receiving the same pay as a prostitute. Nothing could be more unequal. Nothing could be more unfair.
The Committee were impressed with Mr. Pendleton, giving him a nod for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
On Friday, “Bad Bad” Billy Pratt delivers a magisterial essay on sex realism: Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing. It features some classic movies, Dracula (1931), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but doesn’t constitute a movie review… because that would never make it past the censors here. Pratt has more than one kewl trick, but this is his best one—incisive contemporary social commentary mashed up with lessons long buried in old movies (preferably black-n-white)—and we’re happy he brought his A-game to the pages of Social Matter. Just a taste:
The lie we’re told as men is that beta male behavior, this kind of relinquishment of alpha male masculinity, is what garners respect — both from our women, to our women’s families, to the world in general; if we are “man enough” to make an overt showing of standing down and rolling over, and showing our soft, sensitive, underside, our willingness to be disposable for the sake of others, that this is what garners respect in the modern landscape of equality. This is a lie.Casey Anthony
Chivalry is the intentional, situational, and voluntary abrogation of privileges normally associated with high status. If a man doesn’t have high status in the first place, he cannot deign to lay it aside for the good of others—a noble obligation. Asking him to do so is to create a cargo cult in sexual relations; or, more darkly, an acute case of Who-Whom. Pratt gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.
Finally, in a surprising development, Flint Hill comes back with a fantastic bit of satire: Mr. Searle Is A Bit Concerned. Which is an entertaining shiv delivered to liver of this abysmal bit of sophistic, moralistic verbosity.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over on the home blog, Landry thinks that the Elite Can Use + Convert To Islam . He appears to be completely serious in this. It’s a hypothetical, but it’s very hard to see how a sect of Islam could come to be seen as high status. If there were a there, it’s possible to get there.
On Tuesday, SoBL opens up the blog for a guest-post from the irrepressible Grerp: Gentrification or Revitalization. Her immediate case in point—west Grand Rapids, MI—is not a particularly egregious case of either; but nevertheless sufficient to cause some advanced moral signallers to… well… signal morally. Grerp has her own moral calculus, wherein the living conditions and physical risks of real people count for way more than the internal dispositions of would-be “gentrifiers”…
Whatever you want to call it, gentrification is a takeover. People—mostly white people—from the suburbs come in, buy and renovate properties and then sell or rent them to people with their values and lifestyles. These people are intolerant of crime. They don’t like trash in the streets or glass on the sidewalks. They want to be able to walk their dogs at night, and they like to stroll farmer’s markets on Saturday mornings. They’ll willingly pay more not to have to live in neighborhoods where people noses are bitten off at house parties.
This Week in WW1 Pics, it’s The Orthodox Easter Friendly.
Finally at SoBL’s: Of Course Hillary Is Ill.
The real scandal and horror is that the system is selecting for a woman clearly off (stroke or no stroke). We know she naps. We know she is often confused. The #HillaryStools hashtag has drawn attention to her need for stools and short backed chairs at all appearances. Colostomy bag? I can believe it all because this is a near 70 year old woman that I strongly believe had a stroke. Think of your mom or aunt at 70. Now if they didn’t have a stroke, would you want them in charge at the most intense situations? No. Now add in a stroke in their mid-60s. This is a broken system to get to this spot. This is the system rubbing it in everyone’s noses.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter asks: Where Did They Go? The “they” being white—actually British—Londoners. Up for vivisection, a BBC article that, helpfully, notices this fact, but then attempts to put lipstick on it: “Implausibly, Muh Economy”. And besides: Don’t you know that banning foreign ownership be rayciss? It’s as rayciss as having a border to keep people out. I do hear Karachi is lovely this time of year.
He contemplates the nature of Trumps recent decline in the polls: A Little Too Bright. To the extent that it represents a genuine deterioration of support among traditional GOP voters—which, given our unabashedly biased media is impossible to know (at least til election day)—Porter thinks this could be due their well-inculcated fear of seeing their own people winning.
Lesbos—Greece, not the genre—is in the news again: In the Wake of Virtue. Porter notes this eternal truth:
Wealth is the airbag when virtue strikes reality. Those without this buffer are certain to suffer. And remorseless nature couldn’t be more indifferent about cries to the contrary.
Lesbians (the people, not the actresses) are learning the hard way that no good deed goes without an endless appetite for more, and stern browbeatings from your cultural masters should you hesitate. Hey, maybe tours of refugee camps is the Next Big Thing for Lesbos.
Porter finds some heartwarming video here in The Left-Hand of God. Pray the Rosary, defend your homeland: two great acts of devotion that go great together.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X continues her series on The Big Six® Civilizations with Parte 4: Norte Chico, Peru—one of the few certain to have arisen independent of the others. As usual, her account is filled with fascinating tidbits, like the Norte Chicoans managing to have a civilization with agriculture without a written language. How they managed to do that is, of course, a matter for speculation.
Next up a review and recap Pete’s Dragon (the junior novelization). She didn’t care too much for it, for reasons.
Number Five in The Big Six Civilizations: China. A veritable smorgasbord of Chinese history, including Chinas brief foray into world discovery and potential domination. And boy, if you thought FGM was bad…
[S]o there were apparently enough men whose parents had thought it a good idea to lop of their genitals in order to get them a job that they constituted an opinion-making polity within the Chinese government, and got into conflicts with the Confucian scholars, who I assume hadn’t been horrifically mutilated by their parents.
For Anthropology Friday (who are we kidding?! With Evolutionist X, it’s Anthropology Almost Everyday!), she continues excerpts from and commentary on Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man, part 2: War. War, that is to say, among the humans, in the last gasps of colonial rule in throughout Africa in the 1960s. And war among chimpanzees as well, in spite of Goodall’s best efforts not to predict it. Mrs. X wins a well-deserved ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one, especially for pairing the warring proclivities of two primate species.
This Week in West Coast Reactionaries
Some pretty heavy political theory over at WCR this week. First, Argent discusses Appearance and Eudaimonia: Humanity’s Twin Realities. He sees the two as the crucial dividing line between left and right.
Auld Wat takes an Evolian intellectual tour with The Thunderbolt and the Grail, Pt. I.
And Adam Wallace continues his Primer, Pt. 14: Three Questions. “Do you accept life? Do you accept yourself? Do you accept God?”
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Matt Briggs has lately been on a kick about scientific models and the hierarchy thereof. Here he clarifies The Difference Between Essential And Empirical Models. In considering the case of Ramona the Three-Legged Dog…
I know, and you know, that something is wrong with the mutt, where “wrong” is used in the essential and not empirical sense. Nothing can ever be “wrong” in the empirical sense. Things are the way they are, and aren’t the way they aren’t, a tautology and a truth. But things can be askew essentially. Take a side away from a triangle and you’re left, empirically, with two lines, and there’s nothing wrong with two lines, unless you mean it to be a triangle, and then something essentially has gone wrong. The word “wrong” is not “judgmental”, but a plain statement of fact.
More explanation is required: Falsifiability Is Not That Useful, in which:
If Pr(Y | X) = 0, and Y is observed—and all as in all as in all as in all conditions in X having been met—then X has been proved false, i.e. it has been falsified. It is as simple as that.
Proved. But so long as Pr(Y | X) > 0, X is not falsified for observation Y. Yet more on that topic: Essence Is Of The Essence.
Next up: Is Most Published Research Wrong? Yep. Here’s Why… and here’s at least something that might be done about it.
Briggs also turns over the microphone to the irrepressible Ianto Watt, who looks in Behind The Russian Madness.
Imaginative Conservative wonders How Should We Treat the Evil of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfits? Author Marion Montgomery’s sets the modernist stage:
[W]e have established a secular Manicheanism, one differing radically from the ancient heresy. In the old heresy, creation was seen as evil—a heresy fed in part by Platonism. Spirit was separated from nature in the interest of spirit’s rescue from its enemy nature (Plato’s shadow). The world became antagonist to the Heaven-bound soul, a distortion which has descended to us most conspicuously, it seems to me, in the Puritan mind. The Puritan mind actively contended with nature, expecting that by gaining control of being it could establish a City on the Hill, the City of God brought down to earth by man’s labor. Light contended with dark, whether the “dark” was stubborn soil or wild savage. To the ancient heretic, heaven or light or spirit found its place in the transcendent. In our new version of the old heresy, the center of reference—the place of light, from which light emanates—is no longer beyond temporal and spatial illusions; it is, once more, the mind of man.
Also there, Pat Buchanan’s How Will America Commit Suicide? And James O. Tate sings the praise of The Glory of Chamber Music. A two-fer from Mr. Buchanan: Let Trump Be Trump?
An address given to students at (based) Wyoming Catholic College: The Heart of Liberal Education. That’s liberal in the good sense.
Local hero Jim Kalb graces the pages of Imaginative Conservative with Tradition: Worthy of Being Ignored? I didn’t immediately read the byline, but determined it was him, just by his snappy style—a style that is, alas, something of a rarity in the somewhat prolix Reactosphere®. Here’s a bit…
[T]radition is not about itself but about goods toward which it’s oriented, so it’s relative to something higher, and it can improve or go downhill. And there are other ways in which we come to know the world—reason, revelation, personal observation—so other authorities are necessary as well, and may say something contradictory.
Even so, breaking with tradition is breaking with authority. People today romanticize “breaking the rules,” but it needs a special justification. There are similarities to declaring a state of emergency in which constituted authorities authorize themselves to ignore normal standards of legality, or to engaging in conscientious objection or civil disobedience in which individuals do the same thing. Such things are sometimes called for, but if they become habitual authority stops being orderly and respected, and power becomes crude, brutal, and devious. The progression is common in revolutionary movements.
RTWT!
Finally there: Marshall McLuhan and Roger Scruton provide support as Christopher Morrissey delves into The Social Message of Social Media. A thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, concluding:
If our new technologies, by their very structure and configuration, offer us an instant sensory awareness, then the challenge for the artist in post-modernity is to offer a spiritual vision that is no less comprehensive. It is surely a daunting task. But spiritually how can we expect anything less? The contemplative viewpoint of the artist is required in order to interpret the social message of the media of our times, and to situate this social message in a historical context profoundly aware of the spiritual traditions of humanity. Nothing less than such a global aesthetic vision can hope to make sense of the instant sensory awareness — the technological cocoon — in which today’s mass society slumbers.
This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ and definitely worth your attention.
Chris Gale has some very choice (and hilarious) Memes of the day. Also some shop-talking on Depression, genes, trauma.
Gale adds a few well-put thoughts to Pendleton’s in The unequal Gini incoherent index. The problem with meta-analysis:
I lose the measurement: all measurements have strengths and weaknesses. Many predate modern syndromes. Most measurements are proxy, and a series of measurements for the same syndrome ask different questions, have different predictive power, and different factor structures and internal consistency.
If the Gini coefficient measures anything, it is the one thing that Gini proponents refuse to consider in their model: Humans actually are unequal. (I doubt it measures even that, but it comes closest to that.)
Mark Richardson has met some South African refugees to Australia, which lead him to ponder You don’t know what you’ve got until….
George Inness, “Twilight”, oil (1875)
Bonald takes a stab at Categorizing Islam: Doctrinally, morally, and politically. Bonald’s on-going work at establishing the friend-enemy distinction as a legitimate basis for discrimination among observant and obedient Catholics has thus far been worth its weight in gold. Next a hopeful report that Democratic consensus not so strong as we had been led to believe.
At The Orthosphere proper, Bertonneau has thoughts and praise for Hudson River School painter George Inness’ “The Rainbow”. This is a visual genre that has attracted our attention privately at Social Matter for quite some time.
Right Scholarship considers Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia in The Mystery of Mortal Sin. His take is rather surprising.
And the indomitable Moose Norseman has conversation with two not entirely hypothetical interrogators.
This Week… Elsewhere
Roman Dmowski is spot on in A Community Organizing Success Story.
Rioting is not a bug but a feature of leftist community organizing. Riots, like letter writing campaigns and other methods of community organizing, are designed to produce certain results. They demand attention. Race riots in particular fit into a broader narrative, and that narrative is one of black despair of white racism and the need for more programs to placate the rioters. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton routinely threaten a “long hot summer” if their preferred job programs and giveaways do not materialize. After the 1992 LA Riots we heard ad nauseum about how it was the product of “12 years of neglect.”
Why aren’t Milwaukee’s late riots the result of 7 1/2 years of neglect? He has the stomach-churning video to boot. He also has some thoughts On “Lookism” in Politics. It’s obviously not optimal, but it’s way better than the alternative.
Al Fin offers up a list of Skills to Learn Before a Child Turns 12, specially targeted to highlight my failures as a parent. To add insult to injury: Some Non-Lethal Skills Dangerous Children Must Master by the Age of 10.
Over at City Journal, Steven Malanga has an interesting report on The New Landscape of Labor. Private sector unions are not doing very well—no surprise there; but where they’re doing the least bad is. Also there: Heather Mac Donald tells us Why Milwaukee Burns.
Filed under My-Aren’t-You-Surprised-I-Sure-Am-Surprised, Larry Sand looks at California’s Temporarily Temporary Tax. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #1:
Once you have their money, you never give it back.
Also at City Journal, Aaron Renn discusses Trump’s Pitch to Blacks. It’s one that should, by all rights, work…
Indeed, if there’s one group with a prima facie, legitimate gripe about immigration, it’s urban blacks. The white working class largely lives in areas with relatively few immigrants, but many blacks live in cities with substantial immigrant populations. Less-educated black urban dwellers are more directly exposed to competition from immigrant labor. In Chicago, for example, Latinos dominate many residential construction crews. Black men could be doing many of these jobs. Some employers clearly prefer immigrants over blacks. Going back more than a century, fear of this race-tinged displacement led African-American leaders like Frederick Douglas and WEB DuBois to view immigration ambivalently.
But electoral politics is far more tribal than rational. And we have to consider the tribe.
Andrea Mármol (2012)
My favorite living Spaniard, Carlos Esteban, has a brief meditation on Las edades del hombre. This seems to be a correction offered to one Andrea Mármol, tho’ I cannot quite make out which Andrea Mármol, so I hope it is the one I have pictured.
Lawrence Murray asks Could White Advocacy Exist in a Multi-Ethnic Society? He thinks not; and it won’t be allowed anytime soon anyway. Also from Lawrence, Scoring Trump on Immigration. He does… not great. But with the bar set so low among virtually all other mainstream politicians, it’s hard not to pull for Trump.
Greg Cochran finds everything old is new again Me and my Shadow. Well, not everything, but some surprising things.
Rorschach Romanov is back: Blogging at In-Between. (He always comes back. We just never know where’s he gotten to.) TBH, I like the Less Left moniker even more. This week, his philosophical rantings are entitled Trichotomy Down. I think his interpretation of the trichotomy is wrong, but it’s an enjoyable read just the same.
Over at Manticore Press, Lennart Svensson offers a plug for his intriguing book: Science Fiction Seen from the Right.
Unorthodoxy, uncovering the undeniable futility of the GOP, has a nice bit of analysis here: Oh Those Wacky NRx and Their Cathedral—in spite of the title, not because of it.
William Scott offers a rather gripping bit of short fiction: Offering. And this too: London Plane—also good, with these irresistible lines:
It all seemed silly. People don’t talk about falling in love in college anymore, not like for forever. It was all just about getting laid; falling in love is too costly and dull, doesn’t last. Or so the brave new convention has it. He wanted to protect her and be loved and cared for in return. John felt a tinge of shame for wanting her in this way. (He is certain this is an illegal social arrangement in some European countries.)
Someone’s been reading Jim.
Dr. Peter Blood reviews Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961). It doesn’t sound like he liked it, but it may not have been the point.
Welp… that’s all I had time for. Keep on reactin’! Till next week… NBS, over and out!!
Thanks for the kind words!
I second that, thank you once again!
“Now multiply the scale of this nightmare by several orders of magnitude: a pharmaceutical chemist taking home the wages of a street sweeper”
BTW, couldn’t agree more…
Thanks again, and Cincinnatus needs to consider what happens when defence microbiologists are getting the same wages as that pharmaceutical chemist. It will be worse than a nightmare.