Even the progs “get it”. It was quite a week. Rarely do you get to see the worm in the act of turning. And when it turns this much in a short time, it is a sight to behold. Thus the confederate battle flag is deprecated, and the rainbow flag suddenly raised everywhere. No more fitting symbol exists for this week than that above. And by analogy it is a fitting symbol for the entire march of progress. Which, tho’ we “celebrate” #LoveWins (and have always “celebrated” it), is admittedly not over. For now, we have always been at war with East Asia.
Porter leads off with an excellent articulation of the prog case against the confederate battle flag in Symbols Clashing.
Banning symbols is important for the left in the same way as banning “hate speech.” For what men stop seeing or saying they eventually stop thinking. And while acknowledging the inspiration of Conan and Joe, controlling your enemies’ very thoughts is truly what is best in life. And that thought must culminate with one conclusion:
You were nothing, you are nothing, you belong to nothing.
One can already witness this in macabre clarity among legions of programmed western youth. These culturally denuded wretches openly lament that whites “have no culture,” “aren’t even a real people,” and “stole everything they have from others.” You might think we could at least get credit for being crafty in this narrative. But even that goes to the noble gypsies, alas.
With the St. Andrew’s Cross as a back-drop, Wasenlightened feigns thanks to his cultural masters at Google on this Sesquicentennial.
Mr. Roach has a fine meditation on The Rebel Flag: “Make no mistake, the leftists will not stop until our entire history is covered in shame”. He concludes:
Roof’s actions had nothing to do with the Confederate Flag, but it became an excuse for the elite to (again) crap on the group that can be mocked, hated, and despised with impunity: rural, Christian whites, who defy the values of the coastal anti-American elites.
And if denigration of the Confederate battle flag was leftists crapping on red-state whites, then Obergefell v. Hodges was leftists forcing them to eat it.
Roach calls the decision Supreme Court Lawlessness.
That’s nothing new, as Porter revisits Scalia’s defiant dissent over Obamacare in A Nation of Expedients.
Neovictorian has Me and My Ball are Going Home in which he considers what Libertarian Megan McArdle calls “a bad ruling for a good cause”. It should be read as a writ of divorce:
Justice Kennedy’s bullshit about how “free speech” isn’t affected by the blessing by the government of sodomy will soon be seen for what it’s worth–“a warm bucket of spit.” You’re “free” to say anything you like, as long as the government doesn’t put you in jail for it. Losing everything else is just “private” responses in our “free, democratic” society. McArdle is a smart woman, and I’m sure she didn’t raise the spectre of “1861” lightly. I can only hope that the gloves do come off, and sooner rather than later.
Real Gary finds Gay triumphalism annoying and doomed in The Price of Princesses.
Spandrell trots out Zhao Gao’s purity test Deer? Or Horse? Look Carefully.
Over at The Mitrailleuse, Robert Mariani considers the Question of Equal Protection and how far it can go. It can and will go as far as our cultural masters need it to.
Over at Future Primaeval, Warg Franklin ties everything together beautifully in We Support Diversity and Equality. Franklin places Václav Havel’s anecdote of “The Green Grocer” up against the images of Corporate America flying the rainbow flag. Almost instantly this article wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. Identifying the psychological forces at work in late-stage Soviet-style Communism with the mad rush to “Social Justice” is absolutely central to neoreactionary thought. For doing so so capably and quickly, Warg wins the week. Congratulations!
As WordPress and the Corporations of the world draped themselves in the rainbow flag in a figurative standing ovation, Bonald warns them that they Don’t want to be the first one to stop clapping. Then he follows up with a fantastic piece on how Opposing gay marriage is already worse than illegal.
The First Amendment assumes a social context that makes its immunities from government coercion meaningful. It was assumed that at least one of the following would be true:
Most people would be self-employed.
Employers wouldn’t care about employees’ beliefs.
If they did care, there would be a diversity of beliefs among employers.
At the very least, government and employers wouldn’t be taking orders from the same group.
The Church turned over heretics to the secular arm; she would not have claimed this constituted freedom for heresy on her part. Now the media gives the orders. Whether they’re executed by the Department of Justice or the Human Relations department of your company doesn’t make much practical difference for you. The old distinctions are now artificial. Government, NGOs, private corporations–it’s all the same group of people. They went to the same schools, read the same papers, and often openly coordinate with each other.
For his efforts, Bonald wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Chiming in as well, Evolutionist X notices Now that gay marriage is the law of the land, everyone wants to pretend they were in favor of it from the start.
Let’s see… Was there any non-flag related news?
Jim pulls out his big stick: Why human hypergamy is dysgenic. As usual, Jim is magisterial: An ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Watson continues to put great stuff. This time he asks: What if We are Wrong? Blue Pills soaked in Red #13. He takes a look at our world, but with the Bizzaro perspective that every economic and social policy has the exact opposite effect from what was intended. And paints a picture of exactly the real world at it is.
…AND… Watson and Count Ø-Face have started a (freakin) podcast: Caligula’s Council.
West Hunter has an excellent line in Inverse Weathervanes: “Without those grannies, sociologists wouldn’t know what to disbelieve.”
Over at The Future Primaeval, Warg Franklin responds to rationalist rationalization about why they don’t take tradition very seriously.
In an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Atavisionary considers Adjusting the Connotation of White Privilege. Since color-blindedness is working out so badly for whites like him and myself, congenitally disposed toward color blindness, Atavisionary says it’s time to start make active race preferences a part of our everyday lives. I can’t disagree. Preferring ones own people is perfectly natural. Preferring groups with positive stereotypes, which stereotypes were indeed earned by such groups collectively, is perfectly rational. This is the essence of privilege. One that European peoples should very well get around to availing themselves of.
By way of Isegoria, some real gems from Foseti about Ian Smith and his times:
The post-independence period in all the sub-Saharan countries followed a strangely predictable pattern. Smith called it the “one man, one vote, one time” pattern. In addition to the rise of (generally Communist) dictators for life, the independence movements were also characterized by the rape and slaughter of any remaining white Africans (although it’s supposedly important to protect minorities, protecting whites in Africa is apparently affirmatively bad), massive reductions in economic output and the general decay or outright disappearance of any semblance of civilization. Nevertheless, the Americans and the British (and, of course, the Russians—purely coincidentally, I’m sure) continued to push for independence.
“Freedom” came to Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960), Congo (1960), Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zanzibar (later part of Tanzania), with largely predictable results.
Also from Isegoria, bad news for brains in crisis.
Nick Land thinks the visage of London’s She-Guardian worth a post. As do I.
Donovan Greene also think “She-Guardian” is pretty kewl too in his Friday Frags—Also-Prohobitionists-were-exactly-like-SJWs Edition.
Our old friend Antidem makes an appearance with an edition of Short Takes: June 2015.
Spandrell is not at all sanguine about the prospects for Free Speech. If free speech is outlawed, only outlaws will speak freely.
Free Northerner is looking out for normal guys because almost nobody else will. Then this was simply fantastic: Why Young People Leave the Church—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀
If the church doesn’t capture its young people through marriage and love, the secular world will through sex and pleasure, and the church will continue to collapse.
Is the church really going to allow the depersonalized meat market that is online dating to be the most effective way to find a Christian spouse?
Of course, church’s aren’t entirely to blame: where are the parents? Look at that blue line? Why has this generation completely abandoned their children to fend for themselves?
If you want to see the church renewed, if you don’t want your young people to continue abandoning the church, fix this. Bring your young people together and get them married. Don’t abandon them to their own devices and allow the secular world to devour them.
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry kicks off the week with a prediction regarding The Next Media Cycle To Expect After Trans*. The culture war has never not been about the institution of the nuclear family:
It is a cliche (but completely true) that the family is the building block of society. It is the mechanism for transmitting culture, social norms, and group mores. This is why progressive education has changed from the norms of yesteryear that focused on facts and figures and moved towards socialization and group programming. The goal is to separate the child from their family’s culture and to inject elite values in its place. Education is compulsory for a reason, even if it does not educate students.
So after Gay “Marriage” and trans mainstreaming, what’s left to destroy? Landry’s bet is on: poly. And what could be gayer than that?!!
This might seem like a hard sell, but this has some media push behind it going back for a few years. Multiple outlets have spotlighted polyamorous couples. The writer, usually a woman, is living or in a relationship with two men, usually all wretched looking but HAPPY with the arrangement. Some outlets have even tried to sell cuckoldry as some new, hot fad in the elite. The groundwork is there, so why not push for it to be in marriages?
Acid on natural institutions is money in the bank for bureaucrats. Your money. Their bank.
On Monday, David Grant with another apposite history lesson in Hail To The Tyrant! This is lesson in being careful for what you wish against:
What did their anti-tyrannical ideology buy for the Greeks, after all? War. War and death and murder, slaughter unlike anything they had ever experienced before. The one-hundred-thirty-one years between the battle of the Eurymedon, which ended the Persian threat, and the battle of Chaeronea, which established Macedonian hegemony, were a political and moral catastrophe.
Henry Dampier’s How White Supremacy Developed Into the Diversity Agenda. This points out the vacuity of mainstream conservatives’ cry “Democrats are the real racists”. The original explicitly racist, separate but equal policy was well-intentioned and worked to achieve intended results. That is until progressives decided they hated the wrong sort of white people more than they loved blacks.
Mark Citadel proves every bit as capable of sitting in that Thursday Seat as the great John Glanton. He proceeds to answer a question the neoreaction has been getting a lot lately: Are We Social Engineers? This of course depends entirely upon what you mean by “engineer”. It’s going to take a bit of human design and planning to undo the massive and destructive social engineering undertaken by the Left over the past few centuries. That doesn’t at all mean it’s “unnatural”:
The kind of society the reactionary proposes is one that a human being, unmolested by our current and very deliberate liberal social engineering, would thrive in. The aim of this political project is not to lead man further out to sea and yet in a new direction to horizons unheard of, but rather to bring him back to the shores from which he waded. Our modes of society are the straight and narrow path from which man deviated during the ‘Enlightenment,’ and on which he had traveled for the most part unflinchingly up to that point.
…
My works will always advocate the abandonment of this rather unhelpful paradigm created by liberals and conservatives, that is, the power of the state in tension with the power of the people. Politics should not be viewed in in these terms; they are only ancillary to a greater struggle: between good governance and bad governance, between stable society and entropic society, between tradition and modernity. That is a truer political dichotomy.
Mark wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for the 3rd week in a row. I trust he is not growing too accustomed to this bridesmaid role.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Over on his home blog, SoBL begins with A Note on Marriage—a pretty large note actually. He finds it risky, but worth the risk. Living in accord with your nature has benefits that are hard to properly account for.
Another big piece on The Mad Men Effect.
This is Mad Men the water cooler show for the hip. How could I Love Lucy trounce it in the ratings? Why was Mad Men only pulling in 3.3 million viewers for its final episode? Part of this might be the idea that people say they like a show or say they watch but in reality do not. How much of Mad Men’s cultural pull was just the mid-20th century aesthetics and LARPing that viewers could enjoy? It might be that Mad Men was a water cooler show to talk about the show’s looks and eye candy but not about the actual show. Mad Men could be a SWPL thing. Like all SWPL things, the SWPLs claim to know all about it, but in reality, they know just enough to make small talk and appear knowledgeable.
It is always and everywhere true that elite opinion will out-weigh commoner opinion. It is far from always true, however, that the former will be deliberately constructed to marginalize the latter. In fact, it’s pretty darn despicable.
A brief A Note on Writing, as SoBL gets back to his book.
On Wednesday, SoBL agrees, amplifies, and accelerates with It’s Time We Let the South Go.
Finally, another great WW1 pic: Italian Bicycle Troops.
This Week in Evolutionist X
More good stuff from my best new read Evolutionist X. Tuesday he brings us The Marxist Meme-Plex as Cargo Cult of the Industrial Revolution in which it is examined why, if Communism was to be the natural outgrowth of Industrial Capitalism, did it almost never outgrow there?
Also No, you don’t “build up your immunity” by getting sick. Gonna hafta cut back on all the “that which doesn’t kill me” then. Evolutionist X also wonders Why do Patriotic Americans like the Confederate Flag? Elthedic signalling: It pisses off the right people.
This was interesting: Corporations are Meta-Organisms and so Should not be Allowed in Politics—because they tend to out-compete individuals. I agree. I also think individuals should not be allowed in politics.
A very big, research-piece here: AIDS and California. I am reminded of the guy in Seventh Son’s Standard F**k Party video saying, “Some of the diseases I have, like I said, they don’t know what they are”. Evolutionist X swears its arrival on the same day as the SC Obergefell decision was purely a coincidence. Related: Anonymous Sex with Strangers still Spreads Disease.
This Week… Elsewhere
Real Gary tells us why he Didn’t go to Church on Fathers’ Day. Also filed under “Truth is stranger than Fiction because Fiction has to be plausible”: CDC to admit aliens with VD.
In other breaking SCOTUS news, Wasenlightened notices a monstrous shape in 5 Tentacles To 4.
While many of deformities of diversity are becoming more widely known, Porter takes note of one less than well remarked upon: the damage it does to intra-group cohesion.
For the 2,781st time, Briggs says: Randomness (or chance) is not a cause of anything. He’s a stickler, no doubt. But the world needs more stickles:
Probabilities become substitutes for knowledge of causes, they do not become causes themselves.
Briggs goes on Stream to tell us everything you need to know about The Scientific Pantheist Who Advises Pope Francis. In defense of Pope Francis, it is probable that Schellnhuber is a really nice man in person. This has made the Briggs a highly sought after commentator, which he deserves. But some money would no doubt be nice too.
He goes on The Stream the second time in a week to say Why Gmarriage is Worse than You Think. Gay marriage? Not exactly. Government-defined Marriage.
Not sure I get the graphic on it, but Curt Doolittle’s got a good explanation of “Incremental Suppression” of free riding.
Over at FPR, Jason Peters targets a good bit of jocularity at this story over at The Chronicle. In dispute: Whether College is “Worth It”. Tho’ I’m sure Peters and I would agree that the stakes should be sufficiently low so as not to merit violence, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for the question to come to blows. The Education Industrial Complex is arguably the single most influential seat in the hall of American power, which since WW2 has been tantamount to global power. To question the Official Orthodoxy—i.e., yes of course it’s “worth it” because America must remain “competitive” in the “global marketplace”—is practically a case of treason these days.
Over at his home blog, Mark Citadel turns his focus toward the east with an image-rich piece: Ukraine and the Black Hundreds.
Kristor notices Roosh warming up to traditional ways of thought. This by a process Kristor had identified two years ago.
A particularly perceptive quote from Ezra Pound’s Economic Nature of the United States over at Sydney Trads.
Dark Brightness quotes a bracing dose of Roger Devlin in his discussion of how In the secular world, Lechery and Acedia are endemic.. They’re not too rare in the religious world either.
Sunshine Thiry wonders Do pastors [really?] tear down men on Father’s Day? Apparently some do… and some used to. And some people used to think “Cats in the Cradle” was fit for liturgical use. Alas! Some still do.
Dalrock looks more closely at the history of the wage gap. It’s real of course. Unfortunately, it appears to be shrinking—that the Evil Patriarchal Cartel is losing its power to overpay men for the “same work”.
Filed under New-to-Me: Devin Helton’s Intellectual Detox is a great new read and has a two-part series up that is near and dear to the heart of the neoreaction: How to identify and quash ‘offense-bullying’ and “Offense-bullying” Part II: The Origins of the Ferguson Riots. From this very week, Helton’s got up Conspiracy Theories, Meme Theories, and Bureaucracy Theories.
Millennials are constantly in the news these days. Sonic takes notice of the fact that they appear to like stuff. Who knew?!
In Gaming (I think) News, Dante’s Breaking Down the Tale of Tales Death Rattle.
Welp, that’s all I had time fer, folks. Lemme know if I’m missing anything. Argue with me about the opaque selection process for rewards down in the comboxes. I’ll be happy to artfully side-step any questions you may have. Keep on reactin’! Til next week… TRP, Over and Out!!
Filed under: This Week in Reaction, Weeks' Best