Well, this was the week Kanye West tore a hole in reality. I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about this. Definitely grab yer popcorn.
Over at American Greatness, Brandon Weichert counts the The Cost of Doing Nothing About Venezuela. Esther Goldberg has a fine good riddance for Kevin Williamson—tho’ anti-semitism registering at pico-hitlor levels was quite far from his worst feature.
We saw a massive purge of Anti-Trumpers over at Redstate—the wailing and gnashing of journalists’ teeth is veritable music to our ears.
Let’s see… what else was going on?
Navigate…
Fritz Pendleton kicks of our week with an aphoristic length Sunday Thoughts—Eternal Anglo meets Eternal Jew edition.
Neovictorian shares Some Background on Sanity—the Novel, of which I was a draft reader. So I need to re-read due to edits and dash off a review.
GA Blog returns to high-test linguistic philosophy in this week’s The Discourse of the Center.
Quincy Latham cuts the tension with a machete in Nine Hypotheses on Women, Status, and Education. Along the way he elucidates (for the first time of which I’m aware) a spectrum with reactionaries between primitivism and traditionalism.
All reactionaries hate the modern educational system; but what traditionalists resent above all else is its low standards, whereas primitivists are suspicious of the project of “education” itself. Traditionalists cherish Western civilization and have contempt for liberals who squander its treasures, primitivists take the liberals for its malformed fruit; traditionalists assume reactionary thought will be vindicated by its accuracy and erudition, primitivists are inclined to abandon the models of dialogue and inquiry entirely.
An articulation that immediately resonates with my experience over the years with reactionaries of many sorts, much of it quite frustrating. Speaking of education…
Wearing his primitivist hat, any good reactionary can explain to you the dangers of over-educated women. Wearing his traditionalist hat, any good reactionary can tell you the importance of a genuine ruling class, one that is actually more competent than the loyal subjects it protects. But you don’t get brilliant colts from idiot dams.
The age old Educated Woman Question (EWQ), so what to do? Latham dials back earlier rhetoric just a little. And just long enough to look for societies that may have educated ruling class women without causing a rift in time-space.
[H]ow did they do it? If there really were some ruling classes that solved the female-status problem, what might explain their ability to navigate the potential dangers of female education?
Carlyle Hotel, view (I think) from Central Park.
His nine invaluable hypotheses stem from this study, the thunder of which I’ve no wish to steal here. Except “Enlightenment philothottes”… LOL! Latham takes home the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ for his work here.
Also there, a brief note from the notebooks: Jaucourt on “la race”.
Gabe Duquette exlplains What [he’s] been thinking about and hopes to write about over the next year. If so, it will be an interesting year.
Moose Norseman seems to have had a fourth second child—for a family total of four. Congratulations, sir!!
Parallax Optics presents an extended discussion with an unnamed mysterious interlocutor On Cults—Intellectual ones of the late 19th and 20th centuries principally.
Alf contemplates religion and the apparently essential role it plays in Cooperation, which seems to enhance group adaptive fitness more than it harms individual fitness. At least up to a point.
Atavisionary delves into why sociologists just might be confused that conservatives view them as unscientific—the few that don’t already know that conservatives “hate science” at any rate. An interesting little side bar on how, as late as the 1960s, sociology was still trying to police itself into a respectable objective science. Trying, at least.
At Jacobite, Diana Fleischman offers a meditation on the implications of sexbots in Uncanny Vulvas. SFW… except for the title.
Anatoly “Friend of This Blog” Karlin covered the dawn of the floating nuclear power plant. Suck it, Greenpeace! We here at Social Matter can certainly agree with this sentiment:
There’s no limits to the imagination on what we can do when we finally round up the atomophobes and send them down to the uranium mines.
Anatoly also corrects the record on a persistent dirty commie lie: No, Solzhenitsyn did not ask the US to nuke the USSR.
Malcolm Pollack has a detailed report on his trip to Austria.
By way of Isegoria… A few of the strategic advantages of being Trader Joes. Leftists should appreciate The Case Against Education, for mostly the same reasons we do. A powerful autobiographical vignette from John Ringo: Children in the snow. Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press. Firearms geekery: Maximum Effective Range of Buckshot. And… Moneyball, applied to warfare.
This week in CWNY… The Stone Which the Builders Rejected.
This Week in Social Matter
After an astoundingly rich publishing week last week, things slowed down here at Social Matter. For Saturday Poetry & Prose, newcomer Alexander Johkheer has some freshly minted verse Isti Mirant Stella.
This Week in Human Biodiversity
Greg Cochran continues his invaluable “Who We Are” series with #8 India.
The Aryan-Invasion-Theory sure looks to be basically correct. As for the archaeologists saying that there’s not enough evidence of devastation, Reich points out that they can’t really detect the fall of the western Roman Empire, which hardly means it didn’t happen. War and migration are well-known important factors in written history—why not in prehistory? Because many contemporary archaeologist and historians think that wishing can make it so. They should be paid accordingly.
Evolutionist X kicks off the week with Homeschooling Corner: Math ideas and manipulatives for younger grades. We have counting bears, not penguins, but the exact same sort of pattern blocks. And enough legos to step on for a 1000 year stint in purgatory.
Next, she riffs off a superb essay from Gwern (must-read in its own right) and wonders: Maybe Terrorists are Actually Just Morons?. (Gwern has a patreon, BTW. Who Knew?) Terrorism is strategically ineffective, so maybe terrorists are stupid… But maybe not:
The article recounts an amusing incident when a terrorist organization wanted to disband a cell, but struggled to convince its members to abandon their commitment to sacrificing themselves on behalf of jihad. Finally they hit upon a solution: they organized social get-togethers with women, then incentivised the men to get married, get jobs, and have babies. Soon all of the men were settled and raising children, too busy and invested in their new families to risk sacrificing it all for jihad. The cell dissolved.
Starting a wife pipeline is definitely not stupid. Mrs. X steers the conversation to sorts of terrorism that live closer to home in the states, and to sorts of terrorism that aren’t all that terrorizing, and to sorts that aren’t terror at all: Activism. When it comes right down to it, there’s no clear line one can draw between terrorism and activism. And everybody knows activists are only in it for the chicks. Well… so are the terrorists.
One wishes Cathedral Roundup worked like this.
Liberal groups seem to be better at social organizing–thus I’ve had an easier time coming up with liberal examples of this phenomenon. Conservative political organizations, at least in the US, seem to be smaller and offer less in the way of social benefits (this may be in part because conservatives are more likely to be married, employed, and have children, and because conservatives are more likely to channel such energies into their churches,) but they also do their share of social signaling that doesn’t achieve its claimed goal. “White pride” organizations, for example, generally do little to improve whites’ public image.But is this an aberration? Or are things operating as designed? What’s the point of friendship and social standing in the first place?
Anyway, I don’t wanna steal all her thunder. But this article about terrorists turns out to be about a whole lot more than terrorists, and snags an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ this week.
Finally, Mrs. X presents the next installment of her invaluable “Cathedral Round-Up” series… Checking in with the Bright Minds at Yale Law.
Over at Audacious Epigone’s, scientific literacy among Democrats and Republicans—not much difference. And… AE attends an apparently successful (and peaceful) Hater’s Ball in Tennessee. Day Two and Day Three.
This Week in Kakistocracy
First up at the Kakistocracy this week, Porter explains why identity politics are Safe at Home on the Left:
The topic of the essay was identity politics—that is to say tribal politics—and why those on the left who would eschew them are wrong. And for the first time ever at such a site, I thought the author was absolutely correct. Of course his premise was flawed in that antipathy for white people, white culture, and white nation-states is the modern left. There is simply no other adhesive holding its many disparate factions together. So telling the left to not be anti-white is telling it to not be. And taking away what moves and motivates its foot soldiers is hardly a better idea.
Then, he comments on being on the Right Side of History (and the Wrong Side of an Ice Pick):
One of liberalism’s most unflattering mottos is being on the right side of history. The fact that this not a compliment of one’s morals but rather an indictment is hardly a nuance noticed by right-siders.
It’s familiar ground, of course, but Porter always manages to put a fresh spin on things.
Next, tongue jammed firmly in his cheek, Porter has some sad news on Islamic Terror Attacks: How Japan’s Strategy is Failing:
The proposition being that doors keep people who want to hurt you out of your house, which frustrates the people who want to hurt you, so remove the doors. There is one group who will always appreciate the simple elegance of this theory: people who want to hurt you.
Really can’t get a handle on what those Orientals are thinking. How can we figure out which Muslims want to kill us until we invite millions of them in? No, really, someone (bugman) actually suggested this. Hopefully, that’s the last time I need to link to CNN in my tenure here; I feel like I need a shower just reading that.
Finally, a quick look at a liberal who does believe that correlation equals causation (at least on one issue). Porter reminds us that Healthy Lives Aren’t Bought With Dollars.
In many ways wealth serves as the blanket bete-noir for the liberal worldview. People whose group pathologies are most conspicuous suffer not the results of their own agency, but strictly from want. And white people are guilty of perpetually under-providing. But who provides for whites? Why privilege, naturally: the dark matter of social sciences.
As an aside, I love the word “agency”, despite the libertarian connotations. Using it on a leftist is like reading from the Vulgate Bible in an exorcism.
This Week Around The Orthosphere
J. M. Smith was very busy this week over at The Orthosphere. He starts with A Note on Victims and Victimology and the increasing frequency of human sacrifice. Then he notices that most audiences are simply seeking To be excited for an hour—and, if possible, amused. Smith next puts a Marxian twist on a poem by Blake regarding Whores and Gamblers, Gamblers and Whores. And for this week’s lesson in etymology, The Meaning of Sexual Debauchery is to render one insensitive to his natural duties:
Manustupration debauches the genitals because it isolates the orgasm as the summum bonum of erotic desire. Fun is transformed from a happy accident of sex into its defining purpose. Whanking is not the only means whereby this transformation can be accomplished, but it is certainly one of the most common ways in which eros is debauched.
Thomas F. Bertonneau covers Nicolas Berdyaev on the Despiritualization of the West. Big quotation incoming…
Carlyle Hotel, NYC.
What are the characteristics of this “bestial” world, in which “inhumanity has begun to be presented as something noble, surrounded with an aureole of heroism” and in which also “man, in making himself God, has unmanned himself”? It is first of all a world dominated, not by “the human personality, or the value of truth,” but rather by “such values as power, technics, race-purity, nationality, the state, the class, the collective” and in which also “the will to justice is overcome by the will to power.” Berdyaev sees in these phenomena something other than “the triumph of base instincts,” those having been always present, because they are elements of human nature, without exercising the same extreme distortion in the overlapping social, cultural, and political environments. He sees them rather as the outcome of fatally attractive errors made five hundred years ago and steadily compounded over time. If there were a return of “idolatry,” for example, that would be precisely what one would expect in a society almost totally visually mediated whose orientation to simulacra of reality began with the obliteration of symbolism in the dominance of perspective in painting. If there were a destruction of politics and law in an upheaval of “instincts of revenge,” that would be precisely what one would expect in a society that has consummated the rejection of the Biblical morality that began in Humanist skepticism. Berdyaev sees, in sum, “a return of the human mass to the ancient collective with which its history began.”
Matt Briggs examines a headline from GQ: Holy Bible Repetitive, Self-contradictory, Sententious, Foolish, & Ill-Intentioned. Then he takes some Gallup polls and maps the statistical Correlation of Non-Procreative Sex & Lack of Traditional Religion. And in the Uncertainty Book Report, it looks like Briggs’ book is doing well. Finally, gender quotas in the workplace, male exclusion from the workplace, and for good measure, witchcraft in the workplace, all in this week’s Insanity & Doom Update XXXI.
Mark Richardson shares A refreshing take on the wage gap.
[Hadley Heath Manning’s] second argument is even more significant. She observes that married fathers end up earning the most, but that this is because these men make sacrifices in order to financially support their families. She then makes the very logical point, one that I have made before many times, that the extra money that these men make does not go into their own pockets but is shared with their wives. It is not as if the extra efforts of these men at work deprives women of money—the money ends up being made available to women anyway, and gives to women some degree of choice in their work/life balance that is not available to men.
HT to Lex Corvus for Carlyle Hotel Meme.
Over at Albion Awakening, William Wildblood writes broadly on the Deviations of Modernity from truth.
And John Fitzgerald raises Tolkien’s The Music of the Ainur as a candidate for official Christian creation myth.
In the context of girls entering the boy scouts, Dalrock notes that chivalry, while inapplicable to women, is only with regard to men Visible in absence.
By way of Faith & Heritage, author Adi presents a defense of tribal Christianity against Marinov’s Attack on the Boers, Historical Christianity, and God’s Covenant: Part I. Marinov sounds like a Calvinist prog shit-stain utterly not worth your time, but Adi’s exposition is worth the trip. Here’s Part 2.
Cologero makes a (now somewhat rare) appearance to drop some ancient wisdowm on Space Aliens, Pigs, Roosters, and Snakes. Just the tiniest taste…
There are two belief systems. The modern view is that all will be known in the indefinite future. The traditional view is that all important knowledge has been given to us already, but has been forgotten.
This Week in Arts & Letters
Chris Gale continues both series of sonnets, which creates a nice contrast between the ornate, sensual neoclassicism of Sydney on Saturday, and the spartan religiosity of Ann Locke on Sunday.
At City Journal, Micheal Ledeen plugs David Horowitz’ latest book I have no idea how cucked or not Horowitz is, so take this with a grain of salt. And the generally not very cucked Joel Kotkin suggests Giving Common Sense a Chance in California.
At Logos Club, Kaiter Enless reprints an old Futurist Manifesto of Achitecture. It’s an interesting read, mostly because history in this domain proved, as in most things, modernist optimism and disdain for “traditionalist cowardice” disastrously wrong. He also continues The Origins of the American Literary Tradition, Part 7 and Part 8
Richard Carroll dives into another of Plato’s Dialogues: Ion. This time on poetry. In answer to Richard’s reservations about Socrates’ assertion that poetry is more divine inspiration than a work of craft, I seem to recall that the old Greeks used a very specific word for the Homeric epics that became a keystone of culture, and that Plato is referring more specifically to these foundational works rather than any few stanzas that can be dashed out by an amateur.
By way of Imaginative Conservative, a handy primer on The Legacy of C. S. Lewis—an author I have a habit of recommending. A short bleat about American Children and the Culture of Disrespect, and practical tips on what to do about it. Gustav Mahler and the Curse of the Ninth Symphony. And a timeless essay from Russell Kirk on The Essence of Conservatism.
PA weaves some original translation into the theodicy problem.
And Harper McAlpine Block offers two pictorially beautiful and, as always, lovably idiosyncratic essays this week. The first: Old Roses Renamed—the Cis Binary Rosarian. And then a Portuguese infused Vintage Daughter—a little shop in Malacca.
This Week in the Outer Left
So, let’s understand this: the outer left took weeks to get together thinkpieces on the Syrian strike, but managed to get out material on Kanye West and the Beta Uprising damn near same day as things happened? Priorities, I guess.
The Baffler was the one who came through on both the Kanye and beta uprising fronts. The beta uprising one really just looks like a placeholder for a longer thinkpiece later, as they just extensively quote an older one from 2016 by Angela Nagle, of Kill All Normies fame.
The Kanye essay is a thing of beauty though. Pure staggering towers of BS grasping-at-straws overanalysis from start to finish. Let’s be frank here, it is amusing that Kanye West is tweeting out some things that make the libs uncomfortable, but he is only in a position to do so because the media hyped him so much as some sort of spokesman and voice of a generation, when he’s probably barely literate.
And, over at Jacobin, a bit of a surprise as they make the left case for Brexit. As you might expect, this is very much an instance of agreeing with them but for radically different reasons. I try to avoid turning the coverage of the outer left into a point-and-laugh session, but this one sentence is just too perfect.
The Left’s anti-Brexit hysteria, however, is based on a mixture of bad economics, flawed understanding of the European Union, and lack of political imagination.
The left engaging in hysteria based on bad economics, flawed understanding, and lack of political imagination? No, surely not!
Craig Hickman sums up Žižek’s philosophy in a nutshell and also ponders the limits of the mind.
This Week at Thermidor Mag
Doug Smythe kicks off the week at Thermidor in full form with Progressivism on Steroids: The “Conservative” Anti-humanism of Jonah Goldberg. Smythe gives Goldberg some credit for originality, but that of course does not spare him from good-old reactionary ire.
[F]or Goldberg, society isn’t the opposite of barbarism, but the very substance of barbarism; not the telos of evolution, but that which must be discarded by it. In this respect, I’ll grant that the cult of Progress on steroids is at least honest with itself and about itself here. Society must be destroyed to safeguard the Miracle of civilization; and man’s instinctual propensity to mutual aid and association on a personal and intimate basis—that is, to form human relationships—is to be suppressed in order that impersonal bidding and other bureaucratic procedures administered by an impersonal bureaucratic State can take their rightful place as the ordering principle of a globalist anti-society of de-socialized bugmen at once promiscuously thrown together and rigorously isolated from one another.
Concise and articulate as always, Smythe earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Silver Circle Award☀ for his troubles here.
Europa Weekly this week: NEETbux for NEETsocs.
N. T. Carlsbad offers up another review of an unjustly forgotten reactionary with Boulainvillier’s Project for Aristocratic Rejuvenation. The comte de Boulainvillier was held by contemporaries as a republican, but his aristocratic republicanism was very much out of step with the spirit of his age.
In the perennial debate of whether nobility is about blood or virtue, Boulainvilliers answered both. The noble title “gives an absolute right that the favors of princes can neither give nor communicate with wealth and jobs alone since it is attached to the bloodline that births us.” (“Essais sur la noblesse de France”.) At the same time, he stresses worthiness and even proposes revocation of title for those who shame the nobility. Above all, he seeks to discredit the idea that nobility should be meritocratic. Blood and stoic conduct are the essence, not administrative, artistic or scientific success.
Thomas Bradstreet and Dominic Foo make their debut with Be Thou My Dignity: A Reformed View of Human Dignity. Our authors make the case for a conception of human dignity standing in contradistinction to the contemporary liberal version.
[T]he dignity of man provides the right to be recognized as one with a capacity to contribute to community but does not directly demand any duty from society to provide individuals the autonomous space, supports, and resources to become the person of their choosing in that society. In other words, individuals deserve recognition for their formal capacity, whose expression is made possible only by membership in a particular community. But the content or particular nature of that membership—the decision concerning one’s place in the social, economic, and political order—is shaped by a combination of the natural ends of the community itself and contingent historical character of it, not according to the natural ends of the individual.
Bradstreet and Foo impressed The Committee, earning an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Jake Bowyer offers commentary on the Leftist commentary following the van attack in Toronto with Inciting the Incels.
Finally, N. T. Carlsbad rounds out the week with Cultural Marxism: An Alternative History. Carlsbad argues that the origins of Cultural Marxism long precede the infamous Frankfurt School—indeed, clear germs of it can be found in the writings of Engels and Lenin themselves.
This Week in Liberalism Besieged
In a conversation with American Magazine, Jordan Peterson says that the Bible is the pillar of Western civilization, advises the Church on addressing modern world, and describes his own journey to faith. He also in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia audaciously suggests that not all differences between men and women could be erased by legislation.
Steven Pinker, who has been making the rounds lately defending the Enlightenment and arguing that mankind is better off now than ever before, answers personal questions for the Financial Times—which observes (we hope with an appropriate sense of irony) that Pinker is “thrice-married and childless.” But he does have better oral hygiene than his 18th century ancestors.
Quillette’s Matthew Scott explains the United Kaliphate Kingdom’s laws pertaining to the tragic case of Alfie Evans. Helen Dale and Shazia Hobbs discuss free speech in the aftermath of the Count Dankula case. Robert Showah grapples with the impact of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s communist views on his legacy. (The obvious concern is that King’s communist views might taint his otherwise irreproachable legacy of infidelity, orgies, and plagiarism.) Terry Milewski recounts the violent history of the Sikh independence movement.
Over at Heterodox Academy, Christian Gonzalez contends that conservatives often talk past progressives because they do not understand the roots of progressive rage. Feelings, as it were, don’t care about your facts…
Finally, Ribbonfarm’s Vanketesh Rao proposes mediocrity as a means of surviving and thriving in a world of AI, based on lessons from evolutionary history.
This Week… Elsewhere
Heartiste reprints a heartwarming story of What Makes A MAGA Man. Also good insight in The Abortion Test.
An emotionally dead woman is a faint echo of womanhood; her coldness on matters fetal belies a pact made with the devil: the nurturing part of her feminine essence in exchange for a veneer of empowered self-guidance.
Demons are real, and people still make pacts with them. Women who do so used to be called “witches”—as if it were a bad thing.
By way of Al Fin, Paul Ehrlich is a one-trick pony who’s still doing his one good trick. And… Is Trump Bringing Latin America to Its Senses? Or is it just natural consequences??
This week in Zeroth Position, Benjamin Welton goes a bit current events in commentary On American Intervention in Syria. Fortunately for Syria and Trump, the recent Western missile attacks don’t seem to have done much. Welton brings up a very interesting angle: Was Syria even the intended target, metaphorically speaking…
It appears that conservatives, liberals, and all colors beyond the political pale gnashed their teeth over very little. Trump’s decision to bomb Syria will not stop President Bashar al-Assad from winning the war. Indeed, some pundits have even suggested that the Syrian strike was not truly aimed at Assad, but rather at North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Michael Malice, who reported on his journey inside of North Korea in his 2014 book Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Biography of Kim Jong-il, told Breitbart that he believes President Trump is playing the “bad cop” to China’s “good cop.” By cultivating a reputation as a loose cannon, President Trump is allowing China to whisper in North Korea’s ear something along the lines of “Reform your state along our guidelines before that crazy Yankee decides to bomb you.”
If so, it seems to have worked. Welton goes on to argue that American and Syrian civilian interests are well-aligned in America getting the hell out of Syria and/or supporting Assad. A position with which we at Social Matter can wholeheartedly agree! This one earned an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
At 80-Proof Oinomancy, Ace checks in “No way to prepare; impending despair…” He makes the case that the thing men who are good with women have in common is profound Loss.
Speaking of Kanye, “If you have cultural power, you have political power”. Both of which are synonyms of “power”. Hip-hop artists, reality show hosts, and tap dancers shouldn’t have much power. The fact that they do is a bug in our power system, not a feature. But they’re certainly no less likely to wield power well than professional politicians or NYT editors. And infinitely more entertaining.
After almost a week of warnings that this article would be published, TUJ finally does so on Saturday: The Only Thing to Look for in Negotiations With North Korea. He may have been aiming at a moving target earlier in the week. He remains skeptical about North Korea, but not without hope.
Nishiki Prestige did an interview with the notorious musician of internet fame, School Shooter.
That’s all we had time for folks. Our Based TWiR Staff™ did much of the heavy lifting. Many thanks to: Burgess McGill, Hans der Fiedler, David Grant, Egon Maistre, and Aidan MacLear. Keep on reactin! Til next week: NBS… Over and out!!
