Well this was week in which Starbucks finally admitted to being racist filth, and “the hipster began to hate”. We’ll see how that goes. At least we’ll have entertaining memes…
Federal Regulation Week over at American Greatness: Who Will Regulate Our Regulators? chronicles a few of Trump’s little heralded victories over the bureaucratic swamp. And speaking of the swamp… Federal Rulemaking: Some Are More Equal Than Others. But as with all things AG, it’s always a story of True Democracy has Never Been Tried.
Also there, Pedro Gonzalez pours some uncut disdain on the New York Times: American Pravda Wins Pulitzer—for Public Service of course. Hopefully, this is like one of those Lifetime Achievement Awards they give to nearly dead actors just because they’ve been hanging around for a while. And I cringed before I peeked at this one: From Angelo Codevilla—whom we generally like: What Is Syria to Us? Thankfully, he comes down on the sane side of that whole issue.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
GA Blog links to this Anthropoetics article: Power and Paradox, which is normie-friendly as well as superb.
Social Pathologist reaffirms the importance of Christianity in the reactionary right: Rules of the Club. This is one of those rare instances where we think he doesn’t go far enough: Any Restoration of the West cannot occur without the institution of an Official State Church. What church that happens to be is a matter for debate, but at minimum it will have to be a church that has sovereignty over itself, which limits the pool quite drastically.
Free Northerner has up his second article in as many months: The Political is Personal. He traces the loss of personal loyalty as a binding agent in modern society, as loyalties to abstract ideas (creeds) took over. Here’s a taste…
At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.
Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?
Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.
The good news, Northerner reports, is that personal loyalty is making a slight comeback in the Age of Trump and Bernie. This should not be too surprising, since it is the natural equilibrium point for humans, irrespective of political fashions. And sometimes, there’s nowhere to go but up. His punchline is devastating, succinct, and 100% accurate. Don’t wanna steal that. Free Northerner picks up a ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his troubles.
Atavisionary kinda liked James Burke’s Connections (2), which I panned a few months ago. “Sucked” may have been a bit harsh on my part. Perhaps it was more seeing Blue Öyster Cult in 2015 versus 1978. Good… but disappointing.
Just before the week-ending bell, Giovanni Dannato reflects on whether To Stand Within or Without the Circle of Life. My own sense of it: Part angel, part ape, man must do both to do either. The Committee liked this one and bestowed an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Anatoly Karlin appeared on an episode of Stark Truth Radio to discuss the Syrian strikes, Russian politics, and the failures of Trump.
This Week in Kakistocracy… Now there’s a phrase we haven’t used in a while! Porter returns after a long hiatus, bringing his trademark contempt and vitriol to bear on a longstanding enemy of his, (well, two if you include SCOTUS) in Conservatism the Hemlock of Conservatives:
Observing the law with an eye untainted by his children’s future, Gorsuch cast the decisive fifth vote with the prog bloc in favor of Filipino burglars, and then the black robes all turned to flit out.
Definitely RTWT; it’s a vicious one this week. And remember, always shoot deserters before you fight the enemy.
By way of Isegoria… When the press hates you: it doesn’t matter. Dog training techniques work on children, too—LOL. Military laser weapons sound a lot cooler than they actually are. Universalist Socialism with Chinese characteristics. India is Indian with Anglo characteristics. And… some obligatory firearm geekery.
Finally, this week’s missive at Cambria Will Not Yield: In the Land of the Stranger.
This Week in Jim Donald
Jim is back from a week off tackling some cultural issues this week. First, Jim wonders about the rise in obesity since losing weight is a solved problem.
Girl in tea dress.
One frequently reads despairing reports that major weight loss is impossible. If you attempt it, supposedly your metabolism slows right down, making you weak, tired, lethargic, slow, and very very hungry.I read in far right and manosphere sources anecdotes from people who claim to have lost a great deal of weight. I followed their advice and lost a great deal of weight: The short of it is weigh yourself every morning, paleo (no wheat products, manufactured foods, or sweet drinks), carnivory (adequate protein, lots of animal fat), fasting, and getting your testosterone and estradiol levels correct.
I am not going to repeat the advice on how to lose weight here. Rather, I look at the the connection between successful weight loss, and the rightosphere, and the obesity epidemic, and the endless and rapidly accelerating movement left.
Why is it that there is a connection between the rightosphere and sound advice on losing weight, and the leftosphere and bad advice on losing weight?
Is Jim proposing that the accelerating leftward shift is making people fatter? Yes, yes he is, and he may just be right.
Anecdotally, and from my personal experience, low testosterone in men leads to weight gain, high testosterone makes it easier to lose weight. Anecdotally, high testosterone in women leads to weight gain, and makes it hard for them to lose weight. Hence the stereotype of the fat mustachioed lesbian bully from Human Resources berating males for toxic masculinity while groping schoolgirls. In other words, androgyny causes obesity. And leftism promotes androgyny.
…
The diet high in fat and meat is demonized because associated with masculinity. Testosterone is made difficult to obtain because masculine. Women routinely get estrogen, but mighty hard for males to get testosterone. Fasting is ignored and deemed harmful because of the connection to old type Christianity.
In this sense, everything that works to lose weight is right wing, and everything that makes us fat is left wing. The obesity epidemic is connected to leftism in much the same ways as the human immunodeficiency virus epidemic is connected to leftism.
I really think Jim is on to something here. There may be a few individual leftists who look healthy and fit, but on the whole they are not, and are becoming less and less so over time. Someone like Bronze Age Pervert simply cannot be conceived of as a leftist. One man being stronger than another shows egalitarianism as the lie that it is, and that’s leftism finished.
And Jim returns to a favorite topic of his: women gone nuts. The question is asked, why did women go nuts? And the stupid, obvious answer is that there was no particular incentive in the opposite direction, and plenty of incentives in that direction. This is a definite RTWT situation, because I would gleefully quote the entire thing, and several comments too, if my editor would permit me.
When you repress bad sexual behavior by males, and do not repress bad sexual behavior by females, you get very little bad sexual behavior by males, and a whole lot of bad sexual behavior by females.
I see women behaving as if raised by apes in the jungle.
Things are going to hell because we fail to restrain bad behavior that gets right in our faces. Male sexual behavior in the workplace is nigh nonexistent and male heterosexual rape is nigh nonexistent, but to the extent that it exists, the man is looking for a warm wet pussy. Female sexual behavior is different. She is trying to disqualify males, testing as many males as possible to see if they meet her exacting requirements. This testing is necessarily stressful, for she is stress testing men to see if they break under pressure, thus necessarily more disruptive than male sexual behavior, more damaging to workplace productivity, male cohesion, and social cooperation.
In a normal and sane society, ninety percent of fertile age women would within a few minutes of behaving as they now do, be whacked hard with a stick, like a stray dog harassing a farmer’s chickens. And then they would stop. Their owner would be called, and they would be hauled off on a leash.
Jim goes on to discuss results of several surveys of sexual harassment, including one done by Scott Alexander, which find that sexual harassment is most commonly reported in professions where women vastly outnumber men, and least commonly found in areas where women are few and far between. Jim has it right: sexual harassment is not a consequence of horny men lusting after angelic women.
Obligatory woman smoking pic.
All workplace sexual harassment cases of males supposedly sexually harassing females, as near to all of them as makes no difference, are female initiated: It is a fitness test. The chick is looking for a coworker with the stones to beat her and rape her.If workplace sexual harassment is male initiated, we would expect females in predominantly male workplaces to report a lot of it, in particular we would expect engineerettes and female miners to report lots of it, because outnumbered approximately a hundred to one by males, while we would expect actresses and supermarket checkout girls to report very little of it, because they heavily outnumber male co-workers. Survey data is the exact opposite. The more that female workers outnumber male workers (and thus the thirstier the female workers) the more “sexual harassment” by every plausible measure, indicating that all cases of males sexually harassing female co-workers are actually cases of female co-workers fitness testing attractive males, as near to all of them as makes no difference.
So, RTWT, and definitely give Jim a click to read the concluding paragraph, where he teases a big piece he has planned for next week.
This Week in Social Matter
Arthur Gordian graces the pages of Social Matter this week with: The Structure Of The New Economy. He contends for a new vision for reactionary economics that transcends an utterly inadequate capitalism-socialism dichotomy. And it begins with a proper philosophical grounding in that which we study:
Human nature is fundamentally fixed. This should be taken as a generalistic statement, rather than a universal law of physics; change in human nature occurs on a scale which transcends the lives of political systems. Certainly, one could argue that the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution changed the human creature in some way relevant to political economy, but within the confines of a civilizational lifespan, human nature is unchanging. Political actors cannot expect to change the basic motivations and drives which impel humans toward their ends. They can only channel these motivations and drives toward eucivic outcomes. In other words, we dance with the one that brought us, the human beings that actually exist and not hypothetical “better” men.
Since we understand that human nature is fixed, the past serves as a valid dataset for understanding and interpreting these motivations and drives. The men of Antiquity and the Middle Ages were no different than modern men in their fundamental makeup, thus their examples and situations provide us valuable insight into alternative modes of social, political, and economic organization.
Support comes from an unexpected source: Herbert Marcuse who was correct to point out that markets supply expressed preferences without distinguishing between real needs and fake ones—even artificially induced ones. And even if real needs, how do markets factor in the common good? That’s what we have elites for, except that’s broken too:
[I]n the modern Managerial system, the mass-production of identical, consumable goods serves the interests of the ruling class by impoverishing the middle class, yoking the masses in the bonds of usurious consumer debt, and drugging them from a consciousness of their own exploitation. The globalization of the economy serves to flush out regional styles, tastes, and cultures in favor of an international monoculture which is easier to manipulate through the usage of mass media propaganda, which also serves itself as a consumer good catering to the desires of the masses.
Thus, Marcuse gets rightly impaled on the horns of his own revolution. Led Zeppelin can sell Cadillacs a lot easier than proletarian class consciousness. Gordian goes on to outline more of a properly reactionary view of economics, but I don’t want to steal all of his superb thunder. RTWT! It would have won “Best of the Week” in almost any other week. This week, Gordian must settle for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀.
Continuing a power-packed week here in socio-political theory, C. A. Bond arrives on Tuesday with An Introduction To Power Through The Lens Of Bertrand de Jouvenel. Jouvenel’s On Power: The Natural History of its Growth has been studied, as canonical, internally within neoreaction for years. But this is, I think, the first major exposition of this tract at Social Matter. It was long overdue. (Silly me, Bond expounded upon Jouvenel’s theories here two and half years ago.) The key takeaway from Mr. Bond, by way of de Jouvenel seems to be:
One only has to review the works of the liberal tradition, such as those of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, or Adam Smith to see that the human agent in the modern liberal tradition is one which operates on an individual basis within a moral framework that takes the human agent as an anti-social entity. It is no surprise, then, that all liberal theory takes governance as at best a necessary evil to be maintained to avoid all out conflict (Hobbes) or as something to be rejected entirely as an immoral entity (various anarchisms). All aspects of modernity are tied together by these very same shared ethical assumptions to which all their theories must accord. If, contrary to the modern liberal tradition, the human agent is not an anti-social agent acting from individually determined self-interest, but is instead a social one, then we should see the actions of the human agent being in accordance not only with the individual’s circumstance based interest, but also with the perceived interest of the society within which the individual resides. This would hold just as much for subjects as it would for rulers.
All of modern political theory propped up upon one flimsy—generally untenable—assumption. And now… mowed down. There is of course, much much more here. A canon-worthy effort from C. A. Bond, and an absolute Must-Read, and also an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ winner.
And if you though this week at Social Matter couldn’t have gotten any better… well you’d be wrong. On Thursday, Portuguese language and history specialist Wolfgang Adler trots out the final installment of his monumental Salazar series: Vatican II And Rome’s Betrayal Of Salazar. The entire series has been one of hopefulness in the regime tempered with the doom of certain failure; but this is perhaps the saddest installment of them all: António de Oliveira Salazar never lost the ability to distinguish friend from foe, but the Catholic Church he loved, served, and protected did exactly that—her temporal princes did so at any rate. As usual, it’s difficult to excerpt Adler into a synopsis, not least because the work itself is synoptic history. But one bit stands out:
Given the deleterious effect of the [Vatican] Council on Portugal’s social and moral cohesion, it is not surprising that one of Salazar’s greatest defenders was none other than the most vocal bishop in the opposition at Vatican II, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the Society of Saint Pius X. The late Archbishop described Salazar as “exceptional, admirable, and profoundly Christian of a leader” who set a model for the entire world.
It’s difficult not to be inspired to continue that struggle. But with lessons taken. The Committee were at loggerheads attempting to choose a single “Best of the Week” amid such strong competition, but the nod finally went to this one with respect to for the sheer breadth and depth of the research. Adler’s entire series may be perused at his Author Page. Over the last year, Mr. Adler has produced 7 articles of original (and original language) research on the Salazar regime, weighing in at over 42,000 words with many hundreds of footnotes. This is effectively a graduate seminar—guaranteed poz-free—brought to you, dear readers, at no cost. This one takes the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
The multi-talented Michael Andreopoulos returns for Saturday Poetry & Prose with Orbes.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Gregory Cochran summarizes the history of group mixing in Africa and India. Next, he takes a look at David Reich’s professional journey. Cochran also takes time to examine the genetics of modern stallions . He finds room to inserts his, almost weekly, reminder that every group isolated and endogamous for a period of time will have significant local adaptation.
Woman with coffee
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Thoughts on the Loss of Social Capital. She counts the ways we’re losing in the West and looks at some of the root causes. Fine piece and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
I’m not sure if I’ve heard this thesis before or not, but filed under Big if True: Did tobacco become popular because it kills parasites? But not that big, because nowadays we may have too few parasites.
Finally, for Anthropology Friday, we have excerpts from Evolution of the Japanese, Social and Psychic, Part 2, with commentary thereupon.
By way of Audacious Epigone, Neoconservatives may not quite be “an ethnocentric death cult”, but Nobody does Russophobia like Jews do. South Africa’s demographic black hole. Also, nothing too surprising in GSS reported Support for wealth redistribution via taxation.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
This was a slow week over at Thermidor. N. T. Carlsbad starts things off with Giacinto de’ Sivo: Enemy of Italian Unification. De’ Sivo provides a scathing assessment of the Risorgimento and the incompetence of the national government.
Richard Greenhorn offers up a book review: The Failure of Why Liberalism Failed. Author Patrick Deneen believes the power of liberalism to be waning, an error undermining his general critique of liberalism.
The primary reason Why Liberalism Fails itself ultimately fails is because Deneen never satisfactorily adopts a definition of liberalism. For this reason, no matter how trenchant some of his arguments are, he is always dependent on the definition of liberalism which liberals have assigned to themselves. Sometimes this is enough. But since Deneen’s goal seems to be attacking liberalism wholesale without an adequate definition of the enemy, he is often left with arguments that do not follow to logical conclusions, and prescriptions that are inadequate to the task at hand.
Finally, Jake Bowyer has some fun with Dan Piepenbring in To Liberate from Urbanite Smarm. Piepenbring is terrified of a monster rising from the deep to menace his beloved New York City: the monster known as Chik-Fil-A. Bowyer contemplates the Lovecraftian horror.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
Bonald identifies some of The marks of anti-intellectualism.
Change “aliens built the pyramids” to “religion”, and one has a common new atheist attitude. I can respect an atheist who thinks that religion is bunk and has no time for the sophistries of the theologians because, hey, life is short. The moment he decides to devote energy to attacking religion, he makes it his business to work through the theologians and their sophistries, if he wishes to engage in an intellectual rather than an anti-intellectual pursuit.
Another tea dress pic.
And over at the home blog, Bonald has us Imagine how it looks to Mark Zuckerberg right now.
Briggs writes about that Christian trojan horse moving into New York City, Chicken Chicken Chicken Chik-Fil-A. Also, a story with a happy ending when Penn Professor Amy Wax Under Fire For Speaking Hate Facts Receives Academic Courage Award for sticking to her guns. And A Society Run By Atheist Scientists Would Be Horrible because science doesn’t distinguish between right and wrong. And Israel Falou is basically the reactionary answer to Colin Kapernick. Rugby Player Raises Hell. And the UK really is trying to ban kitchen knives, Democratic party defectors, institutional racism in Australia, and sex-ed sit-outs, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXX. As a bonus, Forest Bathing & Ecosex: To Save The Planet, Have Sex With The Planet.
Bruce Charlton asks of the Reckless global elites—are they afraid of something?
Dalrock covers the Boston Marathon’s history of Tackling the patriarchy, holding the door open for trannies. Then he points out this dead canary: Casual dating and serial monogamy as lost virtues. Finally, there’s money out there for people willing to destroy the family: She got the message.
One Peter Five offers Suggestions for Those New to the Latin Mass. Which is probably most of you. The blessings and benefits of the TLM simply cannot be exaggerated in this dark hour in both the Church and the World.
By way of Hapsburg Restorationist… “Theology without praxis is the theology of demons”.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale continues the series of sonnets, with Sydney on Saturday, and Ann Locke on Sunday. “Stella” probably wasn’t quite worthy of all Sydney’s praise… but there’s something to be said for escapism and ideals.
At City Journal, Myron Magnet outlines Project Freedom; or how Trump can really bury the welfare program for good. Freedom to starve, I think, but I still heartily approve. I give more of my unimpressive income to the government than Henry VIII demanded of his people in wartime so that my neighbor can get fat off her EBT card and beat her bastard daughter where I have to hear it. Mr. Magnet seems to think ending the programs will uplift people, but I hope it brings on the horsemen.
Bruce Charlton at Albion Awakening takes a look at Yeats’ The Second Coming, which is reactionary poetry 101. He ties it into current events, but in this ‘umble intern’s opinion, Yeats’ antichrist has been slouching around this corner of Bethlehem for a good century.
Also there, William Wildblood also has a defense of the British Empire in Empire and Albion, which is always a good bit of deprogramming to feed a man.
There can be little doubt that when what became the British Empire began in the 17th century, and right through the 18th, the impetus behind it was enrichment of the mother country with little to no thought of the countries colonised. But the motives in the 19th and early 20th century gradually changed and so did the actual purpose of Empire viewed from above. It became a vehicle to spread civilisation throughout many parts of the world that had either fallen into a kind of stagnation or else needed bringing up to speed because they lagged behind in terms of development, both intellectual and technological and even, dare one say it, moral.
Anyone else of the opinion that British imperial corporatism worked as well as it did because it produced an unintended (ultimately unstable re: democracy) but effective simulacrum of the feudal männerbund in contrast to the clunky bureaucratic absolutisms of France and Austria? (Yes.) Wildblood picks up an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for his fine contribution here.
Harper McAlpine Black at Out of Phase introduces Sydney Long and Australian Paganism—the short-lived artistic movement that tried to capture the spirit of the Australian land. Short lived, of course, because it was eclipsed like most things by execrable postmodernism. Black includes a lot a must-see images. Reminds me a bit of the Hudson River school stateside.
This week at Logos Club, Kaiter Enless offers highly poetic prose in Fording The Liminal Sea. He seems to be extolling the potential of the web media. If so, it deserves extolling. With the obligatory caveat of Sturgeon’s Law.
Richard Carroll takes a look at something of his own private interest: The Pillow Book of Art Garfunkel. “Pillow Book” being a way to make a diary sound hip and exotic.
PA has a nice two part series: Greeks Bearing Gifts (and songs)—Part 1 and Part 1.
This Week in the Outer Left
The left came through with some takes on Syria this week, both of which can be filed under “agreeing, but for different reasons”.
The Baffler voiced their opposition to Trump’s strike on Syria, but did so in a manner that can be described as fairly weak. Still, the author, Max Sawicky, understands the sheer inanity of what he calls procedural objections.
I’d like to dispense with some secondary objections to Trump’s attack on Syria. The most common is procedural—that deeply idiotic policies should first be ratified by the U.S. Congress. Of course, this isn’t wrong, but it glosses over critiques of the deep idiocy itself. It’s defensible as a momentary tactical move, to try to slam on the brakes, except it never works.
A related objection is that stupid military exercises should only be done in concert with our allies. It is vulnerable to the same rejounder [sic], and even so, Trump has checked that box.
His broad point that procedural objections never work is one that every procedure-and-rules obsessed conservative should have shouted at them until they submit. Sawicky finishes by admitting that he is no Middle East expert, but then supports vigorously arming the Kurds. I too am not a Middle East expert, but the fervor with which the Deep State is in favor of arming the Kurds makes me very suspicious of such a project.
Over at Jacobin, Greg Shupak offers a much more blunt and full-throated argument for getting the US out of Syria. There is little opinion here, he just lists out (some of) the facts that you aren’t supposed to know. So, I suggest you RTWT and marvel that we are in almost total agreement with anything being published by Jacobin. Happens occasionally.
Craig Hickman continues his deep read of Žižek, looking at the prospect of Christ without God.
We don’t believe in extra-judicial executions around here. But if we did, Tim Wise would be one of the first out of the helicopter.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
Jordan Peterson discusses free speech and the softness of modern society with Bill Maher—and then joins him on his Overtime panel. If you want to see Cathedral priests’ disdain for Trump supporters in action, watch this video.
Quillette interviews Steven Pinker, who expresses surprise that nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment principles have remained as “resilient” as they have. You may drive out Gnon with a pitchfork, yet still He will hurry back…
Also at Quillette, Coleman Hughes discusses Kanye West and the future of black conservatism, Nick Phillips (whose writing in three separate publications has now been covered by TWiR) argues that mainstream media is in desperate need of viewpoint diversity, and Neema Parvini contends that incentive structures within academia encourage groupthink.
Heterodox Academy’s Musa al-Gharbi publishes a study in The American Sociologist suggesting that the role of racism in the 2016 election was greatly exaggerated by anti-Trump researchers. (Sad!) Ian Storey defends intersectionality.
Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Kenneth Sinozuka analyzes the quantum mechanics of identity.
This week in demographic geekery, Lyman Stone is back at Medium with Aging America: A Brief Spin Through the New Age Estimates
This Week… Elsewhere
By way of Al Fin, if you’re Still Waiting for Peak Oil, plan on waiting a while. And this week in The Dangerous Child: Working With Your Hands—and no, that does mean operating handheld electronic devices. Unless it’s building them from component parts, of course. That’d probably be okay. Also: Discoveries in Learning and Forgetting. And… Do. Or do not. There is no feel. Not only does doing count for more than how you feel, but it usually changes how you feel.
Over at PA’s, Nationalism: Amateurs, Criminals, Leaders. Not nearly enough of the latter, but he notes, “Cream is already rising to the top.” Indeed it is.
If you’ve the stomach for such non-analysis, Orthodoxy discovers how Baizuo Contemplate Black Infant Mortality, which is every possible way that won’t do any good.
Over at Zeroth Position, Insula Qui continues her epic series On Libertarianism and Statecraft: Part IX: Trust. She does a fine job of motivating why social trust is important, which should be familiar to reactionaries. As usual, though, it gets a little hand-wavy as to how that social trust gets created and preserved, in which the reactionary would assign no small amount of emphasis to enforcement of norms and the punishment of defectors. How much punishment? As much as is necessary, unconstrained, we’d suggest, by libertarian taboos. Left unaddressed is the importance of shared religion, culture, ethnicity, and heritage—forces largely coercive and rarely contractual—in building social trust. As for why commons should be privately-owned versus state-owned, I think libertarians and reactionaries simply speak different languages. If the prince owns the park, is that privately-owned or state-owned? I don’t know… but he must own it, if you want it to be a long-lived free resource for the enjoyment of all (non-defectors). The best libertarian paradises are created, we think, at the coercive end of a gun.
Also there, Nullus Maximus expounds On Degeneracy, Loss, and Civilization, exploring the unsettling thesis that civilization could be degenerate. We certainly hope he doesn’t mean per se degenerate, which would undermine our entire raison d’être. But he means civilizations becoming degenerate, rotting as a fish from the head. He has a clever answer to what defines a degenerate civilization: One in which…
…the above definitions of civilization conflict with each other in such a condition. Namely, there is “a relatively high level of cultural and technological development” and “a situation of urban comfort”, at least for those at the top. But a degenerate civilization is not “characterized by…restraint”; it either lacks “refinement of thought, manners, or taste” or perverts such refinement into something sadistic and grotesque. This is an unstable status which will end with either a restoration of restraint and proper refinement or a loss of culture, development, and urban comfort.
Or, in other words, becoming uncivilized. A degenerate civilization is one that is dying. Civilization takes energy: enormous energy to build and substantial energy to maintain. So when you start spending that energy on trans-bathrooms in North Carolina, your civilization might not be dead, but it’s bleeding badly. Maximus is great until he gets into bashing the state, “the most degenerate possible foundation for a civilization”. With which we simply cannot agree. States don’t care about trans-bathrooms. University professors, journalists, and clergy do. And because states are weak and cannot drop professors, journalists, and clergypersons out of helicopters—not without other professors, journalists and clergypersons electing a new state—we burn up precious civilizational energy on trans-bathrooms. The problem, within reach of English-speaking media at any rate, is not so much the state as the insane prog theocracy that’s calling the shots.
Ace channels the Black Crowes (one of my fav bands) this week: “And no one ever wanna know, love ain’t funny; a crime in the wink of an eye…”
Nishiki Prestige had a long piece that he hopes will function as an escape pod for young radicals. If you know any young guys getting into anarchist or leftist stuff, make them read this, skipping the first seven paragraphs, which I suspect only make sense to Nishiki’s Twitter cadre. But the actual escape pod begins as reflections on Nishiki’s own time on the radical left and morphs into a guide for the young radical to make sure that the left fringe doesn’t chew them up and spit them out.
Anarcho-CyberMarxism actually wants you to get in a fight with Uncle Bill at Thanksgiving dinner. It wants you to “cut out the toxic influences” from your life, like for instance, your mom and dad, AND.. your old friends! The group may even reward you for dressing or behaving in life-crippling ways (see: crust punk, )
Do not do this! This is the way that people become trapped within fringe ideologies and subcultures.
Tolerate your racist uncle. Tolerate your heteronormative old friend. Politics is secondary to these bonds. Do not let ideology use you. Marxism does not care about how your life turns out. But I do.
Welp… That’s all we had time for. A lighter week than average at about 100 links. But more words (5600) than I’d expect for the given number of links. Probably because someone likes quoting Jim so much! This week at Social Matter was simply incredible. Things are looking a little light for next week, but we’ve got great things continually going into to the pipe. Many thanks to my excellent and utterly on-time TWiR Staff: Egon Maistre, David Grant, Hans der Fiedler, Aidan MacLear, and Burgess McGill, I couldn’t do it without ye. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
