For a little while now, my responsibilities in real life have been piling up in such a manner that my lavishly compensated position as a Social Matter columnist has had to take a back seat, which is regrettable, I know, to my four or five avid fans here. You know who you are. My plan was to try to coast through June or so, but, in the light of the recent crystallization of neoreaction, I’ve decided that now would be the best time to vacate that position. My neoreactionary colleagues here have been very kind to allow my somewhat vanilla conservative […]

One of the perennial weaknesses in leftist thought is its utopianism. Good old vanilla Marxism is the model here, especially considering how many contemporary ideas about social justice are intellectually derivative of it. The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles, you see. All the miseries, the frustrations, the wars, the peregrinations, the tragedies of this great ongoing pageant can be attributed to those struggles. Even its triumphs, too, are tainted by the fact that they were erected on the bent backs of the laboring classes. Injustices and exploitation all the way down. In the Marxist […]

  Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion. People’s thoughts are as thin and fragile as lace, and they themselves as pitiable as lace-making girls. The thoughts of their hearts are too wretched to be sinful. It is perhaps possible to regard it as sin for a worm to nourish such thoughts, but not for a human being, who is created in the image of God… That is why my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There one still feels that those who speak […]

Liberals have some sort of weird fascination with Banksy, the pseudonymous English graffiti “artist.” I suppose the fact that he’s such a shadowy figure is part of it. He’s got a certain mystique. And I suppose the fact that he’s at least nominally socially transgressive warms the cockles of their hearts as well. There’s nothing contemporary liberals love more than pretending that it’s still the sixties (whether they were alive in the sixties or not) and that they’re still blowing minds and shocking the bourgeoisie establishment and standing up to The Man. (This is another facet of that self-deluding psychodrama […]

In a move that’s sure to disappoint my legions of adoring fans, I’m switching gears in this Thursday’s post. Shaking things up. Instead of producing my customary, erudite commentary on something I know a little bit about, such as education or weightlifting or the deep antipathy that our social superiors feel towards red-staters, I’m going to produce erudite commentary on something I know even less about: law enforcement in America. The goal of this switch isn’t just to take myself out of my conceptual comfort zone. It’s also to raise some questions that I think are pertinent, especially in light […]

Like I mentioned in last week’s post, just because two people are using the same words doesn’t mean they’re talking about the same thing. That particular discussion revolved around competing notions of what it means to be an underdog, but you can see this phenomenon all over the place. You could turn on the TV this very evening and see it. The average talking head on MSNBC and the average FOX personality, for instance, would both pay lip service to the notion of “patriotism” (the former with a little less enthusiasm than the latter, granted), but in reality they couldn’t […]

The latest thing the hipster Millennial commentariat wants you, their adoring public, to stop doing is “punching down.” They want you to know it ranks just below violating a safe space but above microaggressions on the graduated scale of Not OK. Totally problematic. And what exactly is “punching down”? Well, punching down is where a big guy picks on a little guy (or girl). It’s where someone from a position of power or privilege makes and argument or a statement or even a joke that comes at the expense of someone from a lower social stratum, where the well-situated mocks […]

Imagine a red army and a blue army fighting for control of a city. (You might populate this hypothetical city with gray civilians, or you might not. I don’t think it tortures the thought experiment much one way or another.) The fighting in this city is mixed up. There are no battle lines to speak of, just sporadic flare ups of combat as both sides attempt to stake out various territories within the metropolis. Now imagine that the two armies operate with vastly different rules of engagement. The blue rules of engagement are pretty streamlined: “Shoot reds on sight. Shoot […]

I suppose I’m a pretty typical Millennial when it comes to my TV habits. I don’t watch too much network television, but I do love my Netflix, which I trawl regularly for good war movies and 80s action flicks. (If you’ve got any, post suggestions below.) I don’t, however, have the typical Millennial predilection for watching bad movies ironically. So the other day when I queued up King Arthur, I only made it about twenty minutes in before I had to switch it off and just watch Black Hawk Down again. The premise of the movie wasn’t the dealbreaker. It […]

Occasionally, the “manosphere” and some of the other parties on the alt-Right have a dust-up. (Sometimes hilarity ensues.) The critiques that the reactionary and the traditionalist rightists register against the manosphere during these dust-ups are generally valid ones. There is, for instance, no real defense of “pick-up artistry” from the standpoint of someone who takes the idea of community, much less the idea of morality, seriously. Trawling bars and nightclubs, plying young women with “cold openers” and drinks, securing one night stands and upping your “notch count”—these are empty and hedonistic pursuits. They’re disfiguring to the souls of everyone involved: […]