This week is Aesthetics Week–a philosophical discussion of the role of beauty in civilization. Some pieces narrow in on not-yet-decimated art forms which manage to continue on in opposition to reigning progressive dogma. Ryan Landry’s piece, which airs in an hour, looks at ballet as a form of sublime art–definitively non-democratic. Haven Monahan attempts to drive at a biological basis for why some symmetry, rhythm, scale, and the color red are viewed as beautiful.

Those are the previews. Stay tuned for the rest.

There’s still room in the queue on Saturday and Sunday. If you’d like to get in on the discussion, please send in a submission.

The post Aesthetics Week appeared first on Social Matter.

“Enjoy your stay, but don’t run your mouth off. Wipe your boots off on the mat outside before you come in. If your comment isn’t up to decent standards of conduct and professionalism, then we’ll just remove it.”

Seems maybe a little too informal. This will hopefully be a bit better. We’ll make sure to update the comment policy page with the new requirements.

-One sentence comments in which you either praise or denigrate the piece are strongly discouraged.

-Keep foul language to a minimum.

-Be civil. No ad hominems. If it ain’t directly a fallacy, then it’s pretty much just an insult. And we don’t want those taking up valuable comment space, either.

-Commenting is a privilege, not a right.

-Do not comment with endless quotes. Quote as needed. Do not misquote the author or others.

-No shilling, no trolling.

-No whining.

–You will be banned if you consistently don’t bring anything interesting to the table. Add something to the discussion, whether it’s further development of a point or critique of a point. It takes a lot of time and brain power to write these posts, so if you want to comment on the same page as the article, you’ll have to use some brain power, as well. Make it intelligent. Make it interesting. Mind the tone.

We’re going to be more aggressive in policing the comment section. Again, to emphasize, what we would like to see: commenters who add something to the discussion, namely by expanding on a point made by the author for the edification of our audience. Or an interesting critique. Both are valuable and important.

Thanks for reading.

–The editors

The post Comments Policy Update appeared first on Social Matter.

As leader of the free world (whatever the hell that means today), I suppose he should have attended the march of hugs and kisses, or at the least sent Secretary of State John Kerry or Vice President Joe Biden. When one Western democracy marches, the rest often have to follow suit. But for reasons unknown, President Obama decided not to attend, nor did he send anyone in his stead. Nevertheless, the world took notice.

I have to agree with President Obama for not attending, though I’m sure our reasons differ greatly.

As an outside observer, the solidarity march about as useless as it is pathetic. It’s unclear what it’s supposed to signal to groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda–it’s at least possible that the organizers believed that the sheer PR force and pot-banging from the rally would be enough to ward off the ghosts of Islam.

So, we’re left with one conclusion: the march is little more than an orchestrated and calculated ploy to reinforce the Narrative: “Move along, turn your eyes away from your slain brethren, and remember not. We really can live together. Multiculturalism and third world Islamic immigration will work. Trust us.” As German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the press on Monday, Islam “belongs to Germany.”

We are supposed to show solidarity in this insanity?

What of the free speech part of the rally? Europe routinely (Great Britain, especially so) throws in jail any native who even whispers insensitivity against homosexuality or Islam.

Instead, the rally likely serves as a sort of distraction. After the mayhem, the press snapped back, rebounding in an effort to smother disagreement or a realization that Islam is not of Europe, by Europe, or for Europe. The excuse-makers took the airways along with Western leaders to obfuscate and misdirect, and to dwell on the consequences of the killings. What were those consequences?  The consequences revolved around how Marine Le Pen’s National Front party, as well as other right-wing movements in Europe, would benefit. It’s in the Emphasis. Not outright denial of the events. Emphasis. Rotherham. The press employed the same tactics during the Rotherham scandal: “Keep calm, carry on. Fight the bigots. This isn’t even Islam. It has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with religion. No-go zones are not the problem.”

Never mind the fact that Le Pen was already ahead of her challengers in France before the attacks. In fact, her party’s ideas are increasingly becoming mainstream in France. The media is dragging its heels, and as a result, losing legitimacy on the daily as the press’ narrative sharply diverges from public opinion. Nevertheless, they persist in labeling her and her party “extremist” and “far right.” You can expect the rhetoric to reach fever pitch as panic sets in.

And so, Le Pen was not invited to the solidarity march. After all, she is extreme. In spite of her popularity, in spite of her willingness to speak out against the very thing that had all these silly hearts marching in the first place, namely imported Islamic terrorism, she and her party were given no role to play. Solidarity as Sham.

This scenario is repeatable. The elites act quickly, smearing the blood of the victims on their faces, holding hands, walking shoulder to shoulder, and promising solidarity. Meanwhile, the manufactured outburst and compassion clouds the mind of the people and retards any good judgment as the social/media frenzy floods over them.

The solidarity themes, the constant appeals and blathering about egalitarianism acts as a spell. It turns righteous anger, a rather sane reaction, into misery and confusion. The elite averts disaster by channeling that anger away, while channeling in the misery and confusion and give it a name like solidarity.

As a result, people become reluctant or scared to identify the real source of danger. The Western mind is captured, fooled by misdirection, and wracked by imposed feelings of guilt.

The enforcers of the Narrative are the progressive sociopaths in constant need for attention and gratification. They desire the same sympathy as the victims (best illustrated in the #illridewithyou lie).

The state organs supply the feel good ointment of diversity. The repeated tropes of so-called Western ideals convince them to rally in defense of that which is killing them.

Whatever is left of Western Civilization is all that we have. It’s time to Strong Horse the good parts and cull the bad. Islam may be a Strong Horse, but it’s not our horse. In this sort of environment, the only acceptable response to Islam is no quarter.

The post The Paris Solidarity In Insanity March appeared first on Social Matter.

What’s a god? Gods are portrayed in myths as heroes which define societal standards of power, prestige, status, fulfillment, rightness, right action, right being. Society thinks white males are Nietzschean übermenschen. Put down Anton LaVey, White Man. You’ve already made it. What’s good, what’s decent, what counts as success is whiteness, and whiteness is sustained by high IQ, white males.

White males are invincible. Nothing can hurt them. Even if by all appearances a white male looks like he’s oppressed, rest assured, there’s privilege lurking somewhere. We’ll find it. Any time a white man falls from his pedestal, a feminist looks the other way and pretends to have missed seeing the fall. Even if white males lose privilege and status, it’s imperative that they still believe themselves to have Mythical Privilege, so that they never stop shouldering the Sisyphean burdens of civilization plus female rent seeking. It’s a good trick.

But actual lived experience for males is quite different than the cocked up feminist caricature hawked in women’s studies courses, in which white men stroll through the streets of Major American Cities, raping women in open sight of complacent cops and then making a quick getaway (from whom?) to the subway where they luxuriously take up entire rows by spreading their legs as wide as possible to intimidate and project violence. Feminists don’t want to hear about male struggle. The pat feminist answer is to brush it all off as the patriarchy—the very suggestion that feminism or women could be at fault is beyond the pale.

Cue the nancy boy conservatives jumping in and saying: “But unlike feminism, we are the real Supreme Gentlemen, and we certainly don’t hold beliefs of the left which implicitly signal that women have less agency than men. Pat me on the head like a good boy!”

Feminist: “You don’t get any pats for being a Decent Human Being! Now give me and my gender more free stuff!”

Neoreactionary: “That women stickily project lack of agency no matter what ideology they seem to adopt is indicative that women, in fact, do have less agency. But this doesn’t mean we should put up with types of rent seeking which push women away from the feminine and toward the masculine.”

Feminism is instantiation of low agency. At best, feminists have been able to set down the beta male whip long enough to very grudgingly admit that, okay, maybe male X is trying really hard to atone for his sins (which can never, by the way, be expunged) and he’s been the unfortunate victim of external circumstances, but those external circumstances themselves reflect patriarchy. And any women involved are also unwitting vessels of the patriarchy.

Scott Alexander provided a good summary of the tendency of females never to take responsibility for male lived experiences via the Marcotte-Aaronson controversy. Aaronson started out by innocently reflecting on his experiences growing up and became so depressed as a result of constant haranguing from feminists, coupled with the desire to be a Decent Human Being, that he even contemplated castrating himself. Not to make light of the situation, but it’s hard to find a more poignant example of feminism having you by the balls. Alexander’s discussion of the debate was unduly charitable in a way only Alexander can be. Whether Marcotte can escape the ovens remains to be seen.

For Aaronson, male privilege is completely alien to his lived experiences—particularly as a white male nerd. Despite him reaffirming that he was 97% on board with the feminist programme, predictably, the feminists weren’t having it.

This excerpt came from Amanda Marcotte.

“[Aaronson’s post] is the whole “how can men be oppressed when I don’t get to have sex with all the hot women that I want without having to work for it?” whine, one that, amongst other things, starts on the assumption that women do not suffer things like social anxiety or rejection…It was just a yalp of entitlement combined with an aggressive unwillingness to accept that women are human beings just like men. [He is saying that] “having to explain my suffering to women when they should already be there, mopping my brow and offering me beers and blow jobs, is so tiresome…I was too busy JAQ-ing off, throwing tantrums, and making sure the chip on my shoulder was felt by everyone in the room to be bothered to do something like listen.” Women are failing him by not showing up naked in his bed, unbidden. Because bitches, yo.

The eternal struggle of the sexist: Objective reality suggests that women are people, but the heart wants to believe they are a robot army put here for sexual service and housework.”

You’d want to call this autism, but autism is more a virtue than a vice. This is just narcissism, an inability to empathize (or sympathize, for that matter) combined with outright malice. Men often go through terrible suffering and hardship in their designated roles as providers and are supposed to quietly bear it.

Note that the feminist response is to decry ‘quiet bearing of duties’ as an unfortunate consequence of the patriarchy and to instead encourage men to open up with their feelings. And cry. And so on. And then women turn around and summarily show contempt for the feely, bitch men and leave. Leaving men confused. What made you listen to women for advice, anyway?

Women only see status, money, success, other women, glamor, glitz, and unreality. Not staying at home is good. Not having kids is good. #LeanIn. Be high-powered. Be career-oriented. That is success. That is fulfillment. In other words, the ultimate expression of female fulfillment is for the female essence to be emptied out and replaced with the male essence. To be a good feminist is to be a male and to do male-stuff. Forget the vision of a fulfilled female as a woman who actualizes her biologically-oriented potential by playing a complementary role via pair bonding. Don’t play to your strengths, the feminist says. Play to your weaknesses. Appropriate high IQ, white male culture. Put in 14 hour days. Soulless days. Days spent pushing paper back and forth. Accept the benefits of white maleness and foist the costs of responsibility that come alongside white maleness onto other males—c.f. females in fire departments. Look flashy, look societally glamorous, and have male firefighters pick up all the slack or face legal retribution.

To spurn motherhood and the feminine is a great temptation, and one which women easily fall into. Why? Because women are hypergamous, status-driven creatures, and so when feminists are allowed to poison pro-social, healthy, feminine roles in culture, females automatically seek out high-status alternatives, namely male routes. Not what’s feminine, but what’s masculine, since masculine remains high-status.

Feminists love white males and desire more than anything else to be like them. And they also hate them at the same time. It’s a woman thing. What else is new?

Like women, blacks have had a difficult time with agency, which helps to explain Sub-Saharan black fertility rates, Malthusian traps, and the inability of black males to invest in progeny. While progressives may try and glorify authentic black culture, when it comes down to it, they just don’t, protestations to the contrary. Like the feminists who can’t escape low agency, SWPLs have a difficult time escaping k-selected behavior. That, incidentally, is why polyamory is bad social technology.

“That’s racist” is the default discourse response to states of affairs in which blacks do not enjoy all the benefits of k-selected whiteness while engaging in r-selected behavior.

Where do we go from here? What’s to be done? For blacks, k-selection is to be aspired to. Blacks should be pushed and prodded into societally valuable traits like paternal investment, hard work, low time-preference, etc. This doesn’t mean we should fall into the delusion that blacks should be forced into specific white occupations. SWPL affirmative action is toxic. Blacks don’t generally belong in offices, and they certainly don’t want to be there.

For what it’s worth, the British were very good at cultural imperialism, and even now in former colonies, high-society British cultural norms are still high-status. It’s possible to civilize the uncivilized, although the arrangement is unstable if left alone to fester and unravel, or to be unraveled by unscrupulous parties looking to profit off the innate baseness of blacks at the expense of the common good. Markets be damned if gangster rap is profitable. Black thug culture should be crushed and shunned, both at the cultural root of music and aesthetics and through heavy-handed enforcement for those who still decide to act out thuggishly.

Feminist culture should be poisoned and made low-status through aggressive propaganda campaigns. That’s when females will revert back to feminine norms.

At the end of the day, it might be too generous to view the White Male as a Herculean figure. A more apt metaphor might by that of a brilliant, well-endowed, but flawed creature, which used to be a god but now tolerates an ever-growing parasite load. Divinity wanes.

Whether the creature lives or dies is a live question. To call it a god might be reaching for the stars, and its godly status at this point may just be more discourse to justify the continued exploitation of an increasingly depleted resource. Feminists and blacks could care less, mostly because they just don’t know any better. They want more rent seeking. More equal representation. More ousting of white males from high-status positions, but female and POC replacements can’t sustain the burdens of civilization.

The real question is: How long can the Employees of Civilization Corp. bear being worked to death before they throw in the towel? By the way, before you answer, let me just add that there’s no escape, no running away and hoping that civilization will rebuild itself ex nihilo out of the ruins. It won’t. And if it does, you don’t deserve any of it.

There is only one course of action. The only morality is civilization.

The post White Males Are Gods appeared first on Social Matter.

It’s been an extraordinary year with a total of 171 pieces. We’ve decided to provide a brief summary of some of the best posts to hit the site so far.

On November 7, Bjørn Vosskriger entered the scene with what can only be called–as cliche as it may sound–an instant classic on gentrification. The piece, called “Gentrification as Total War or “Triumph of the Williamsburg”“, was a superb chronicling of gentrification from a more strategic frame, which Vosskriger placed squarely in the context of 20th century Great American City life, in order to answer the question: how have blacks been weaponized against whites as a form of terror? What are the countermeasures to be deployed? Truly a tour de force work, and one which will be cited for, I’m confident, years to come.

Back in October, John Glanton seized on the #GamerGate controversy and marked Social Matter as one of the ‘right’ publications which ‘got it,’ which understood the dynamics of the burgeoning movement without patronizing but also without kowtowing–the appropriate mixture of praise and fatherly advice. Many will reference this article as their red pill moment, namely for how it acted as an quick-course antidote to the media’s never-ending thede-poisoning of the right and outer right.

Henry Dampier came out and said it: America is a nation of bastards. The problem? As he writes, “Contemporary divorce law has placed legal authority in the hands of wives, and taken it out of the hands of their husbands. All married households are legally female-headed households, especially when considered in the context of how family courts typically operate.” Middle class culture has been decimated, and family life is on the rocks, creating anti-social effects which erode state and societal stability. The solution is rule by fathers. The solution is patriarchy.

Why do non-liberals seem to be stupid and crazy? Hadley Bennett offered an answer. Once liberalism captures high-status mechanisms, progressivism memetically dominates because of mimicry. Rather than being some sort of innate function of ideology dictating intelligence, up-and-coming elites adopt elite values, and resistance is met with swift exclusion and punishment. Progressivism eats alive the best for their talent and spits out the rest, leaving outside movements in the cold to work with fragmented, fringe, unstable psychologies and a tendency toward lower intelligence. This only serves to reinforce the Cathedral. This is also rapidly changing.

The review wouldn’t be complete without a return to origins. Social Matter’s first post started off with a bang. Bryce Laliberte interviewed former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade regarding his recent work A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. While it was hard to tease out political answers from a reluctant Wade, the book itself will mark a Kuhnian shift, which will strongly influence Science and public opinion. Laliberte provided a more exhaustive review of the work here.

Laliberte further identified the Social Justice Industrial Complex, which kicked off a week of exploratory work on how the SJIC menace has crept into the superstructure, not as a result of a  cabal of schemers in a backroom, but owing to impersonal, social forces tied together by evolutionary logic. A small series of conspiracies in isolation resulting in an noxious, aggregate effect.

Other notable posts:

The Future is Rotherham – Bryce Laliberte

Why Pat Robertson Was Right About Feminists And Why Housewives Are Still The Best – Hadley Bennett

Moving Beyond Hit-And-Run Warfare: How #GamerGate Can Actually Win – Hadley Bennett

Become Worthy: The Path of the Right – Ash Milton 

Why the Left Despises Skilled Labor – Henry Dampier

On Pandering – John Glanton

—————————————————–

Cheers to a stellar 2015. We hope all our dear readers keep on reading and invite others to join. We’re looking to expand the magazine this year and bring in some incredible new additions. Tides are shifting rapidly. Scalise is just the beginning. Stay tuned. Can we count on y’all?

–Bryce Laliberte, Hadley Bennett

The post 2014: A Year In Review appeared first on Social Matter.

The post Merry Christmas From Social Matter! appeared first on Social Matter.

Once upon a time there was a village named Pompeii which for all intents and purposes was a libertarian structural utopia. Not a single voluntary transaction was de jure or de facto prohibited. The little village people were culturally in agreement with this legal arrangement. And since the culture was in the bag, the scenario was sustainable in the long-term. They simply had no interest in restricting voluntary exchange. Restriction of mutually beneficial, voluntary trade, after all, necessarily reduces value and makes everyone worse-off. Nobody wants that. Besides, the only reason the exchange existed in the first place is because both parties ex-ante expected it to be mutually beneficial.

Yet, the village did understand the concept of externalities. A local factory was sued to the ground for generating externalities and hence violating property rights. Causation wasn’t too difficult to establish, and the harm was very distinct and assignable and material. No escape. The sludge and pollution presented themselves for judgment. Everyone agreed that infringement occurred because rights are stuffs that individuals possess over other stuffs, whether themselves or other objects. But there exists an entire category of non-physical, ethereal, abstract, ephemeral, amorphous stuffs over which nothing is actionable or should be actionable, since something is actionable if and only if rights have been violated. No one was able to make a plausible case as to why rights should apply to stuffs like ‘good manners and decency’ or ‘pre-requisite conditions for societal trust and long-term stability,’ among other things. So, because the non-physical, non-grabbable circle stuffs couldn’t fit in the square box, they were emptied. Out of sight, out of mind.

Besides, they were probably too busy enjoying victimless crimes to notice.

On one particular happy summer’s eve, a major employer in town was caught frolicking with a lady of the night. His wife subsequently divorced him and gained title to his planes, trains, and automobiles—to his whole business. She bankrupted the company through dozens of lavish trips back and forth to India—studying yoga and meditation. Half of the quaint little town lost their jobs. A few wealthy merchants, who had a particular distaste for the local population, bought several local factories and kicked out all the employees, leaving the factories empty. But this was most obviously the highest-valued use of the resource because the transaction was voluntary. And from the perspective of the merchants, the psychic income of seeing another ethnic group suffer was preferable to pecuniary gains. They were so ludicrously wealthy from previous business endeavors that failed factories didn’t even come close to the annual interest generated by their assets.

It was difficult to find new work. Some people found themselves with lots of idle time, but that time was quickly filled up with not-writing-that-book-they-always-wanted-to. Others looked for more gainful employment, trying to make a go of it in booming segments like the murder arenas, where people would buy tickets to see fighters voluntarily duke it out to the death. The people were especially enthralled with the owner of the murder arena. His business brought in the most amount of money from ticket sales, so every year at the annual parade he received first honors from the mayor for Value Creation.

The butcher came in second place. He always came in second place. One year he managed to take first because for a while, instead of getting tattoos, people preferred to get their ears lopped off. They saw it in a tribal style catalogue. It was a fad.

No theater showed ‘good’ cinematography. That was held to be a meaningless proposition. What was good was what people deemed valuable. And what was valuable was whatever happened to convince people to transfer money from one person’s hand to another. Pornography. Prostitutes. Pimps. Drug pushers. Blackmailers. These were all held to be very popular and honorable professions—and especially recommended by parents and teachers—since they commanded high wages, and thus were indicators of how much value they were creating and how much better off society was being made as a result of their efforts.

Every manner of gambling. No limits. The townsfolk knew that if you decided to spend all day and all night at the casino, it must be what you really wanted—otherwise, you wouldn’t be there. They all knew this because psychology follows from economics, and economics says that by definition if you act, if you do somethin’, you must’ve valued that above all other alternatives.

“It’s unlikely that internal valuation systems match perfectly with external behavior, and it’s strange to automatically equate the two, as if that were the only possible model of explaining behavior,” one man once said about Dave. “Why can’t we let the two diverge? Besides, even if it were the case, it certainly couldn’t be established by semantics alone.”

The rest scratched their heads, repeated the ‘by definition’ argument a few more times, before finally shooting back a silver bullet: “But why else would they do it, except that they valued X more than the alternative?”

All of the folk living in Pompeii knew they had singular, undivided, monistic wills. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” was old, outdated, outmoded psychology.

As a result, Pompeiians held that only individuals, like Dave the bum, know what’s best for themselves, what they gain the most value from. Parents can’t know what is best for children. Governments can’t know what is best for citizens. This trend of thinking is why the citizens of Pompeii always gave cash gifts at Christmas. It is impossible to know what an individual most wants, so it’s best to let them decide. Ironically, the principle actually did bear out some of the time, as many of the children were sorely disappointed to receive cash, as they had requested fathers for Christmas, and the rent-a-father service just wasn’t the same.

Leaves swirled, snowflakes fell, years dragged on. Eventually, there were no grain stores left. Many had lost the will to live. After being seduced by a wandering cult leader who promised easy respite, they all decided to take cyanide together. They wanted to die and were willing to pay for it. So before they downed a lethal dose, they raised their champagne glasses and gave a toast to the scientist for most excellent Value Creation, since they gave what was left of their life savings in a final, last, voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange.

And then they all died. But it was okay. Because there was so much value.

Value Horrorism.

After it all ended, the last one left to survey Pompeii began to understand that Maybe Something Had Gone Wrong. He came to several important conclusions. First, societal well-being is not strictly identical with a conception of value defined and lauded by society as whatever a person perceives to be in his interest, and whatever internal or external force motivates him to transfer geld. Economic forces govern society, just as governing forces govern society. Value Horrorism is to economics as demotism is to politics.

He realized that a major stumbling block to Pompeii’s continued existence was the idea of rights as only applying to individuals and physical stuffs, making it immoral for force to be applied, in order to steward the commons. He burnt alive the idea of victimless crimes, but without jumping to a polar extreme, without jumping to Ultimate Fascism.

Full stop. I’ve decided to ruin the story. Since stories are imperfect by nature, I want to clear up possible misinterpretations. All I’m saying is that it is logically possible that an uncritical understanding of value without understanding the underlying selection environments, i.e. what it is to generally ‘be valuable’ (not that all people value degenerate bundles of goods in this scenario, but that a non-trivial number do, such that other societally productive products are crowded out), could lead one to endorse a scenario which looks like Value Horrorism.

I’m also not saying that this scenario ‘would happen’ in a libertarian society. The story illustrates a logically possible scenario which I use to better understand what could go wrong if you don’t have low time-preferenced, upstanding individuals covering for a sloppy definition of value which counts on a population that generally has a good idea of what’s best for themselves beyond hedonism. The story shows how some understandings of value break down as good models for societal well-being when stressed.

If Pompeii were filled with quality specimens, you would hardly need to dissect, poke around, and pull out value’s guts to see what’s really inside, because things will function pretty well on their own without much tinkering. But when you substitute craven savages and are still tempted to call bleeding, blisters, puss, and death ‘value’ (a concept almost always connected to well-being, either individually or societally, or both), then we have what’s called a semiotic hijack.

So, two elements are necessary to understanding Value Horrorism: (1) selection pressure is good, (2) but a selection environment which encourages the extraction of human potential directed in the right way is a pre-requisite, since otherwise what it means to be fit, or what it means to create value is just herding oneself into the oven, along with the rest. A degenerate populous, as was the case in Pompeii, actively pwns value, which results in a semiotic hijack because ‘value’ sounds like a really good thing but can in some circumstances entail the most profane and destructive offenses against God and man and society.

The real question is whether the degens were always degens, or whether they were also helped along, their vices encouraged by wily merchants trying to take advantage of personal weakness.

The post The Christmas Trigger: Value Horrorism appeared first on Social Matter.

The semantics is a dream for the labyrinth operator. Smoke and mirrors allow celebrity columnists-of-the-day to obfuscate in 600-800 word bits by (1) appealing to Islam in the abstract, and (2) citing a few leaders who expertly hand-wave and disavow violence.

Islam is a religion of peace, and so on.

For the second point, the columnist usually throws in a link to a news piece by a run-of-the-mill progressive who interviewed a leader of a non-profit organization dedicated to sanitizing Islam. Prog media outlets have good relationships with Muslim orgs, and so the Islamic sanitizers will establish contact with prog journalists to feed them statements in advance, while refusing to return calls from other outlets. The piece takes the same form every time, and every time, readers walk away in a dazed-like state, not really convinced, but not fully capable of fighting the progwash, either.

Throughout all the editorials, the running theme is that religion is a capital-R phenomenon, that is, Religion is nothing more than a set of doctrines filed away in book form or held by a particular subset of scholars who argue that X behavior isn’t part of a religion because that’s not what our prog-baptized-exegetical-method derives from the book. To repeat, the underlying assumption here is that religion-stuff is made by building words on top of each other to form a doctrine, and then when you have a doctrine-thing, you have a religion.

Wrong, wrong. Religion is history, religion is culture, myths, rites, practices, and structure.

The delusion of Religion as Doctrine leads to constant bafflement in the public sphere, particularly in response to the idea that if Christianity has some public policy privilege, it’s ipso facto illegitimate unless equally applied to the long line of religious grifters waiting for their slice: Jedis, and other cocked up ‘religions.’

Back to the main point: Islam vs. islam. Doctrine has its place, but if we take seriously the idea of religion as an empirical phenomenon for study, trying to map the religion of Islam onto islam is reminiscent of a child trying to stick disjointed shapes into the wrong box space. It just won’t go. It won’t fit. Islam and islam have a similar veneer. They’re certainly cladistically related.

But when Western Islamic authorities speak about Islam, they must be referring to something else. It’s an Islam foreign to the experience of those in the UK, of those in Scandinavian countries, and especially foreign to anyone outside the western world, where islam doesn’t need to hold to any surface-level pretensions to a sanitized Islam. Official proclamations are so manifestly distinct from islam that it makes sense to conceptually separate the two. Islam and islam, or thedelam, thede-islam, what have you. It’s ugly and a sin against style, but I needed something, and I’m all out of sexy neologisms. At Social Matter, thede-based analysis is just as important as purely conceptual analysis to understanding phenomena.

Western Islam only exists in small pockets of the western world, in universities and front organizations. Of the world’s total Muslim population, how many belong to Islam, and how many belong to islam? An empirical survey of western-islamic relations obliterates the claptrap paraded about in op-eds. The empirical record is clear. Thedelam is the complete rejection of the West, and the fact that there’s cross-pollination of a few select values is irrelevant. Thedelam is primarily for Arabs, which is why it’s made strong inroads into Northern half of the African continent, where it takes advantage of Arabic admixture. Memeplexes don’t port nicely to other hardware, and when the thedelam memeplex arrives in the West, it provides a Strong Horse conduit for the actions of disaffected, radical whites, who look for validation of their disorders.

Endless arguments about ‘what Islam is’ are entirely beside the point—islam is what it does and it does what muslims believe, and it doesn’t matter a damn bit what Official Islam has to say about it. Yet, the nation’s best and brightest columnists still manage to think that the coup de grâce is as simple as: ‘that’s not Islam.’

First rule: always be suspicious if a single argument does that much work. It’s really not that easy. But let’s grant Islam as Properly Conceived (which looks suspiciously like a prog wet dream) for the sake of argument. What follows? What changes, exactly? Nothing. The world’s ‘Muslims’ are still muslims, not Muslims.

Religion as Doctrine is why the Australian Prime Minister feels comfortable saying that ISIS has nothing to do with any religion. He’s wrong, but thedelam isn’t exactly monolithic, either; it represents one offshoot of islam, an offshoot which is very closely related and attracts sympathy from many of the other parts of islam too scared to dive into the deep end. Not every muslim on the street is scheming to behead you, but they might favorite ISIS tweets and provide cover. They might push for Sharia law.

And they almost certainly will encroach culturally.

The post How To Make Sense Of ‘Islam Is A Religion Of Peace’ appeared first on Social Matter.

“A lot of people thought this was just someone pulling the fire alarm,” 27-year-old Thomas Zell said. Zell further remarked that pulling the fire alarm is a regular occurrence at furry conventions. “But it was serious this time,” he added.

Furry fandom grew out of the 1980s as a subculture of folks who anthropomorphize animals and dress up in mascot-like suits while role-playing. But the development of a more expansive aesthetic is relatively recent, a consequence of the advent of the Internet, which allows weird segments of the population to connect with one another and organize physical get-togethers like conferences. Blame Usenet’s alt.lifestyle.furry. Somewhat related is the Tumblr –kin phenomenon, in which the psychologically troubled shed whatever semi-healthy identity they could’ve maintained with external help and adopt identities more concomitant with their particular pathologies—pathologies which should’ve been discouraged by the wider culture. But since reinforcement through online communities is possible, pathologies can flourish.

Sometimes –kin/furry pathologies translate into body modifications, instead of expensive mascot suits.

Before you start becoming a little too sympathetic at the chlorine debacle, previous events hosting furries (not at this particular hotel)—notably one in Vancouver—had to post a sign prohibiting mutual masturbation in the public areas of hotel.

Surprise!

It’s hard to understand this behavior without adopting an anthropological frame. Furries, like homosexuals, are skilled at public relations, and like Puss in Boots, switch from wide-eyed innocents at one moment to the sort who are ready to jerk each other off in full view of children while directing lewd comments their way.

For cladistically left thedes, the press usually offers friendly bemusement, and others like Gawker offer near unqualified support and hammer any dissenters as furryphobes. But even on Gawker the occasional commenter who has up-close-and-personal experience rears his head for a brief moment before being submerged by the obfuscating rabble.

If a viable culture does not discourage delving deep into pathologies, deviant subcultures will spring up and fill the vacuum. A study conducted by Kathleen C. Gerbasi in 2008 found that 43.1 percent of 209 attendees at a furry convention identified with the following statement: “You were born with this connection to your non-human species.”

Here are a couple of the other statements from participants:

“A feeling that in a previous life you were your non-human species and you have been reincarnated as a human.” – 27.8 percent

“A persistent feeling of discomfort or inappropriateness concerning your human body.” – 23.9 percent

It’s been noted that furry sexuality is quite fluid, which makes sense if furrydom as a whole is classified as species dysphoria. This dysphoria, like most other activities deemed deviant and degenerate by the socon crowd, displays an inexplicable and consistent co-morbidity with a litany of other disorders–inexplicable, that is, if you hypothesize that furrydom is an innocuous identity. It surely can’t be because of the persecution. Innumerable groups throughout history  have experienced far worse than someone pulling the fire alarm at a convention. You don’t need an exact control group in an experiment.

You need a fortiori–expertly used by St. Paul in the New Testament: “How much more, then?” These groups haven’t been persecuted equivalently. They’ve been persecuted with far worse and displayed resiliency. They don’t magnify and glorify  ‘microaggressions,’ since that’d be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Which groups am I referring to? Pick your poison. A lot of people like to reference Asians and Jews in America. Even the Irish and Italians. Or maybe Falun Gong or Christianity in China, though I’m not saying they’ve escaped unscathed. That’s hardly the point.

The point is the absence of co-morbidity and the presence of resiliency.

Furrydom doesn’t magically disappear with the right rituals and incantations for casting out demons. But it would help.  The cultural context in which a furry feels comfortable identifying and indulging in a harmful personal and social identity should be crushed by the overarching culture, not tolerated. Furries should be marginalized.

Pathologize the bad, extol the good. In comes the press to the anti-rescue.

The press, as usual, gets to determine what counts as a Meaning Culture for youth. Christianity is near-universally ridiculed and frame-controlled into an obsequious, decaying community center to liberalism. This means that other Meaning Cultures take precedence. Even the most deviant subcultures, so long as they don’t thwart liberalism, are viewed as avant-garde, which transitions to acceptance in fairly short order. Meaning Cultures usually have a variety of inward roads—take the Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene. Some lost kid stumbles into a dance club and meets a friendly group of people in a place designed to disorient.

That’s precisely what makes clubs successful. Disorientation. He keeps in contact. He pops E and after a few weeks goes on a road trip with the EDMers. They start babbling about chakras and energy bracelets, and the few times where he lets out any signs of unacceptable frames—e.g. comments about gays or not using proper pronouns or considering new age spirituality to be vain, narcissistic, and self-serving—he’s harshly reprimanded. The more traumatic the reprimanding is, the better.

When he falls into the frame and signals accordingly, he’s given excessive praise. It happens very quickly. Belief-network pwnage occurs. This describes the acceptance of certain fundamental premises of the ingroup, and from this premises it appears that all sorts of supposedly coherent and interrelated implications follow, though in reality they are far removed from one another. In other words, the new kid Joe now believes that consciousness-mangling drugs implies that electronic dance music is the only language of the gods, organic, non-GMO food grown within a 20 mile radius is the only acceptable form of victuals, and finally that the government is conspiring with Walmart to ensure you and the rest of the world don’t have access to these drugs, since wide use would mean an end to all Christianity hatred and sectarianism and violence and poverty. Wear this energy bracelet: science and spirituality are one in the same, and they imply all of the above.

The actual implications are usually nonsense. You adopt the main premises and then feel secure and comfortable adopting ingroup semiotic patterns. Memes want to duplicate themselves, and they’re constantly on the prowl for more lifeblood.

A healthy culture is important, since most don’t have the agency to buck a sick culture and end up unconsciously falling into societally prescribed patterns. Even if you have the ability to recognize disordered trends, the ability to will yourself in the opposite direction doesn’t necessarily follow. This phenomenon is made worse when opposing communities fracture neatly across the country, since isolation crushes opposition to the dominant narrative.

You need a strong culture to oppose a culture, and if you sink a man’s boat, you’re obliged to toss him a life raft.

The post Someone Gassed The Furries appeared first on Social Matter.

This is well within the realm of possibility. “Will this be the bullet that puts my life and my family at risk?” Forget departmental disciplinary measures. The message is clear: cops can no longer carry out their roles without being subject to media spotlight and dozens of citizen journalists second-guessing expert autopsy reports and larping as Sherlock-fucking-Holmes’.

A demotist media falls prey to market logic. It’s incredible that a decent level of media quality has even managed to drift along for so long, given the game structure. All it takes is for one hawk to push the dominoes down, and then other hawks have their claws forced. Down go the dominoes. The advent of the Internet and smartphone connectivity is what finally did it. Media cycles iterate by the hour, instead of the week or the day, which accelerates games. It’s better if all the newsrooms decide to cooperate and ban clickbait journalism. But agreements are unstable. The ad revenue is there, and newsrooms are already struggling. When your next-door cubicler is laid off, it’s hard to leave that revenue on the table, especially when other newsrooms creep toward the end of the rainbow.

Readers backbite and complain, but pay them no mind. Data are data. Revealed preferences win out. Clickbait hysteria works, race-war journalism works because it satisfies the public’s desire for bloodlust and violence, all the while flattering pretensions to self-holiness. And because readers have computers, Internet access, and literacy, they will continue to patronize the comment boxes of YouTube and news organizations, ready to be boinked around from one side to the other. Even New York Times readers can’t track patterns over a year-long news cycle. Yet, readers often say that advertising ‘won’t work on them.’ Millennials are especially bad about this. If you say X doesn’t work on you, you have to realize that if X were to work on you, you probably wouldn’t know that X was working on you. Tread lightly.

“That sappy marketing won’t work on me!” said the hipster, as he bought his favorite overpriced, organic cereal named Wow Just Wow to celebrate the nonconformism his parents always fall into.

The public wants destabilizing media.

No state should let them have it.

The problem is compounded when destabilizing media is also thoroughly leftist. A patriot uprising would be possible in 2014 if the media generated cover and ran interference. Imagine if for every newsroom that replaced blacks with ‘youths, teens, and juveniles,’ you had two newsrooms which lauded citizen militias maintaining order, securing the border, and putting down crime? Sacrifices from the right are so rare because the right fears demonization. The left covers for their own, both inside media and out. When you know that you’ll be memorialized and named saint-of-a-few-news-cycles, you’re more likely to put yourself on the line by joining a revolutionary communist group and bombing public buildings. Rest assured, all good leftist bombers end up at the right hand of the Cathedral, as evidenced by tenure at prestigious universities.

Rightists have no such support. If they pray around a flag pole, the left is ready to publish screeching rhetoric on Christofascists plotting-around-the-flag-pole to return to a despotic, theocratic church which ovens homosexuals on first sight.

With this dilemma in mind, is it possible to provide similar cover fire for the police in the absence of a takeover of the press? And will body cams help? In the U.S., there’s actually a chance every cop could be required to wear a body cam. Certainly Obama is signalling in favor. If the media narrative is controlled by the Cathedral and is systematically misleading the public, body cams worn by police would be nothing less than hell on earth for progressivism. Progressives burn. Civil libertarians sleep soundly. And the right is vindicated. Optimistic, maybe, but there’s potential.

I hate dystopians, but I had a dream once that Elon Musk awoke to robots crashing through his rooftop glass pane at night and strangling him to death. Which reminds me that we might be able to do better than body cams.

What about robocops? In fact, this question is dangerously close to the one posed by Salon in the year 2114: Are robocops racist?

In fact, robocops armed with pure unfiltered inference to the best explanation combined with machine learning will be much closer to reality than cops who drag their feet at having to deal with belligerent and hostile blacks yet again.

Robocops are fearless and tireless machines that refuse to put up with the idea of no-go zones.

All the conservatives in 2114 will call them color blind robots. All the conservatives in 2114 will say that conservatives are the real egalitarians, since they never programmed the machine to favor one race over another; that’s just overt racism. And if you’ve already forgotten, the nancy boys will be happy to remind you: conservatives are the real anti-racists. And the real feminists. And the real progressives. Still. In 2114. Some things never change.

Vox will lead the charge by arguing that we need to have a conversation, a public dialogue about the asshole behavior of the executives and programmers at Robocop Inc. For starters, there still isn’t even racial or gender diversity, and there’s almost a complete dearth of the xyZ gender and nuclear-queers (both terms to be invented sometime circa 2050). Secondly, Robocops are asshole racists, and although conservatives now fully support equality for sonar-queers, they’re having an existential crisis about opposition to nuclear-queers. Gawker and the Washington Post will throw themselves on the dog pile.

The Catholic Church will still cling to its bigoted, old ways of same-sex marriage.

“That is NOT okay.”

Robocops are morally unacceptable. Machine learning was invented by white males, and so we need to have another conversation. Undoubtedly, mental states are transmitted subtly to code. If code can be have an aesthetic, it can have a personality. The programming has internalized white supremacist norms. We need a new programming language. It must be invented by the Bantu. Robocops must be invented and engineered by the Bantu, as well. We all know that the Bantu are out of luck. Robocops will have to be shuttered. Maybe not. There were also some questions about robocops aesthetics. They all look like white males and females.

“Problematic.”

After a revolutionary discovery by some professors at Harvard in 2113, it turns out that robocops actually learn stereotypes by observing white males. It must be the white males. The white males have to be removed, so that robocops don’t accidentally internalize racism by continually updating and forming patterns. We’ll have to compensate. The program will stipulate that robocops must arrest an equal proportion of the races based on the demographic makeup of a region.

Some clever bastard will have a futures or predictions market for crime rates in strictly defined geographical areas, and since the information will be updated on the fly, he’s set to rake in a lot of dough. Crime surges upward, but we only become aware by phone surveys of victimization, rather than official counts. There will, of course, be a large disparity between police counts and reported victimization data. Let’s crank these amps up to 11.

To compensate for all the years of robocop racism, The Atlantic will argue that whites should be penalized. Robocops should be biased against whites, and in favor of blacks. Conservative Inc. will still be full of nancy boys who wait until it’s safe before they come out from behind mama’s skirt and squirt the left with a water pistol.

“I said the term ‘social justice warrior’ and mocked it. I’m so brave,” said the conservative writer 10 years after everyone else started thinking it acceptable to make fun of the Tumblristas. Social justice warriors are addicted to triggering themselves and finding offense, like the rat who overdoses from pumping on the drug dispenser. A celebration of weakness. The highest form of slave morality.

Body cams will be an improvement, but will never be enough. And robocops will never be good enough until we send them after the disorderers, the journalists.

The post Robocops Won’t Save You From The Progressive Media appeared first on Social Matter.