Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at Social Matter! Today is a day off. There will be no column today or tomorrow. I’m terribly busy, and John Glanton’s wife will be stuffing his face with stuffing on Thursday while he’s doing bench presses. There may be a column on Friday, but no guarantees. Hopefully, you’re busy with family and are only tuning in today because it’s habit. It’s still a good habit, but for now, close out, shut it down. Keep away from electronics. Use this time to detox. Count your blessings. Be thankful. Enjoy family. If you’re going to propagandize, do so […]

Face to Face with Race is a compendium of personal accounts which together forms a lucid set of social and racial observations detailing Close Encounters of the Minority Kind. From the start, I found it to be a unique addition, in that it squares the circle by presenting first-person narratives without courting the usual sort of I Shot Myself In The Foot Because I Sound Crazy rhetoric only voiced on obscure blogs or newspaper comment sections with broken grammar and spelling–at the wrong place, at the wrong time. The book is around 200 pages long and has 14 short stories, each with […]

Deontology is out, teleology is in. The non-aggression principle (NAP) has been a staple of libertarian theory since its moderation iteration with Murray Rothbard, and while it has considerable use in user-user interactions within the system, it’s a fragile bit of political technology when employed in system-user interactions. I’ve talked a little bit about rights, teleology, and non-aggression before, but I don’t know that I’ve delved deep enough into this particular libertarian hang-up. And it is a hang-up. It’s sometimes bizarre what sort of governance strategies and prohibitions on state action libertarians or anarcho-capitalists will justify to themselves through this device—browsing […]

Feminism as an ideology is perfectly capable of entailing consent to the patriarchy, protestations of radfems to the contrary. Liberal feminism, whether the radfems like it or not, is cladistically part of the tradition. That’s what this piece is about: because of the genetic heritage of feminism and its world-historical development, no matter what feminism as an ideology logically entails, the cladistic approach better explains why feminists, rather than Feminism as such, hate with a visceral hate all manifestations of patriarchy-by-consent, but encourage high-octane BDSM. Too often conservatives fall into the trap of accepting Feminism and falling in with feminists, and […]

This is going to be a bit of a hard and sober piece for most supporters of GamerGate to swallow. Bitter medicine is how I would describe it. GamerGate in its current form will likely not exist a year from now. Chan movements don’t have the energy to sustain themselves for longer than a year without a significant drop in firepower, especially if the other side begins to take steps to starve them of oxygen: apathetic responses, instead of white hot rage, from the SJWers, as well as lack of concrete success. Project Chanology didn’t win. Occupy Wall Street did […]

What would progressives do if they won? Go back to their homes, raise families, work hard—all the normal activities of active duty soldiers returning from war? It’s an instructive question to ask the progressive. Were you born to reshape society, in order to gorge yourself at the Sunday buffet without your brother-in-law (in reality, your sister-in-law) giving you disapproving looks? And suppose that that magically happens. Suppose weight isn’t an issue at all, or rather that fatness is lauded. What then? When the ring is cast into the fires of Mount Doom, do you go back to the Shire to live […]

In the interest of keeping us all on our toes, Social Matter has conducted an interview with Michael McGregor, managing editor of the always interesting Radix Journal, and Gregory Hood, a frequent contributor to Radix, along with Counter Currents and American Renaissance. Note: In the style of Vdare, some links come from the authors and some from the editors. Hubert Collins: Everyday there seems to be more and more commentary on “neoreactionaries” (NRx), sometimes loosely called the “Dark Enlightenment.” However, I don’t think they’ve received much strong analysis from the perspective of someone more to the right and less mainstream […]

Alternative title: How To Be Patriarchal In An Unpatriarchal Society This week is the Social Justice Industrial Complex week at Social Matter. My fellow writers will delve deep into the belly of the beast. What I’m after today is a little something different. Supposing you’re already satisfied with the existence of the SJIC, what’s to be done? The workshop here is a quick and get-your-hands-dirty introduction to socio-sexual group dynamics, but the main point is to provide concrete steps to understand and defend against the poison drip of group subversion by women. Moving forward, I’ll just take Social Justice to mean […]

Deontology vs. utilitarianism is for schoolmarms. The teleological approach to rights and natural law is far more instructive and useful. Not even Hume can escape teleology. Justice, according to Hume, is an artificial virtue, which springs from the difficulties that scarcity presents. Justice here is related to property rights. He notes that where there is no scarcity of goods (e.g., water and air) there are consequently no disputes, since they are easily accessible by all in abundance. And, as he further points out, land in some country is also viewed this way—it being so plentiful that no rules are really […]

Last week, I argued that ideologies are proxies for thedes. There are about five posts more queued up in my head, which all unpack the concept in different ways, but I’ll only explore one here. It’ll help keep the blood from leaking out of your ears, owing to all the autism. Ideologies are proxies for thedes, and so are policy instruments. Employ a little bit of Bayesian reasoning for a moment. If you encounter someone who refuses to label themselves while simultaneously advocating for extensive health and safety regulations in the workplace, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, a progressive […]