[Added. I said in the trailer I had missed some stuff. Missing Jim was a lacuna you could drive an H2 through. He’s got How to really win the “Hispanic” vote; Kin altruism, reciprocal altruism, and ethnic altruism; How to stop mass illegal immigration to Britain and Skittles guy and female agency. Read Based Jim!]
A fantastic Two-Fer over at The Future Primaeval this week. Let’s lead with that.
Anton Silensky brings us A Disney World. Silensky finds in Disney’s genius for building a primordial version of neoreactionary thought. And a great inspiration for Hestia Society. Please watch the video. If it seems dated to you, you’re missing the forest for the trees. Don’t let 50 year-old fashions fool you. They drape a vision that exudes so much technical capability, so much confidence in human potential, properly ordered and understood, that it seems a futuristic fantasy by the drab politically correct standards of today. I especially loved this bit from Walt Disney:
“As you can see from this master plan, the theme park and all the tourist facilities fill just one small area of our enormous Flordia project. The whole area encompasses 27,400 acres. That is 43 square miles—twice the size of the island of Manhattan. Now the area we propose to develop is between the Reedy Creek Swamp and the Bonnet Creek Swamp. So one thing we don’t need is a fence to protect us from trespassers.”
When #NRx says “Build”, yes we mean building our own selves, our families, our own local communities, our own voluntary communities. But we also mean stuff like Disney’s vision for EPCOT. For the former, properly done, will be the very engine of the latter. Silensky goes on to narrate the failure of EPCOT to embrace and live up to that vision. The great man’s own death only months after the filming of the video may well have been to blame. Also, Disney’s own failure to choose a worthy and capable successor. That may have been his greatest failure of all. So as yet, Walt Disney’s vision remains a “frozen future”. Silensky concludes:
Frozen futures, however, can lie in wait, whispering “Realize me!” to those who will listen. And when the stars come right again, especially sensitive individuals may be somehow convinced to revive them. But the editors of this blog must disclaim as superstition any suggestion that we have been convinced of any such thing by any mysterious phone calls…
For this inspiring and original work Silensky receives an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Next, Warg Franklin takes the Ghost editor over at TFP for Passivism and The Procedure. It is not at all unrelated to Silensky’s article. If you cannot see how they are related, read them back-to-back, over and over, until you see how they are. The Procedure fits on a cocktail napkin:
Become Worthy
Accept Power
Rule
We are all in Step 1. Passivism is:
the political methodology that is behind the Procedure. It is almost exactly the opposite of activism. The activist looks at the world and sees problems in the system about which something must be done. He leverages his political rights to convince and agitate the public, affect change through various mechanisms, and get society to fix the problem. The passivist, on the other hand, has no political rights, and he does not try to shift public opinion or influence the system in any way.
Whenever you feel that urge, programmed into you by your life in decrepid modernity, to “fix” the system, by using your “voice”, rest assured you have violated passivism. Become worthy… harder! You may be skeptical: “What legitimacy could this so-called procedure possibly have? Surely Warg is joking! LARPing like Yoda!!” OK. What legitimacy did Walt Disney have? Ownership. He literally owned 43 square miles of hitherto unusuable swampland in Flordia (“twice the size of the island of Manhattan”). And look what he almost did. Are you man enough to complete it? If so, the world will be yours. At least 43 square miles of it. Step 1: Become Worthy! For this crucially important work, Franklin receives an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Well… make it a three-fer. Warg Franklin also posts a tantalizing list: Our Areas of Research Interest..
If you’re wondering how Based Tetrarchs Silensky and Franklin can only get “Honorable mentions” this week, then A)you have to understand that taken together, as a real two-fer they crush everything else like a bug; but B)it was such an awesome week in #NRx thought, that an even stronger single article awaits you. Keep reading…
Donovan Greene has some first class #NRx theorizing with Cloak and Dagger—A Grounding Framework for a Theory of Deep States. Donovan receives an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Donovan also has up his usual Friday Frags—Neoreaction-Is-Doomed-LOL Edition. Then, hot off the presses, from today (which technically belongs in next week’s news) Greene announces his goodbye to the Reactosphere in Ab Ovo Usque Ad Mala. All should rest assured that his departure is on the very best of terms with the entire community. The IRL world beckons, I suspect. Donovan, your time with us was too short. There shall always be a seat at the #NRx table for you. Fare well, Sir!
Nick Land is fantasic here with Tribal Epistemology:
This is how a civilization is burnt to the ground. By selling their souls to the New Church, all epistemologically-relevant social institutions trade authority for mere power, or the capacity to command tribal allegiance and conformity. In response, trustlessness is installed as the foundational principle of realistic socio-political analysis, or informally manifested in a spreading and deepening cynicism. What little exists of counter-knowledge is mostly sheer refusal, or opportunistic deference to the enemy’s enemy. No Antiversity exists. It too is invoked, in the interim, only as a refusal. Its entire meaning, up to this point, is that we don’t any longer believe what we’ve been told.
Also by way of Land Peak Insanity: South Africa doing the same things over and over and expecting the Laws of Physics to change.
Spandrell tells the story of why East Asians like History more than Metaphysics. Also a real-life dialogue on Biologically informed Morality.
Shylock Holmes takes us through some Great Ways to Troll Progressives About Colonialism.
Rhys Caerwyn checks in with some brief (for him) remarks about History and Americans (Or, Americans Are Whiny Bastards). The whiners inspiring this post happened to be the Memphis Mayor and City Council, who voted apparently to dig up the corpses of KKK (the original one, the necessary one) founder Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife for a Show Trial. In unrelated news, Memphis is about 63.3% black. Let us hope that laws of the great state, while it lasts, of Tennessee that currently forbid this operation, will hold against such vituperous lawlessness.
I hadn’t actually heard of Evidence-Based Decision-Making, but Free Northerner shows that when a concept this obvious is deemed worthy of that selfsame obvious name, it’s a pretty good bet the folks doing the promoting are selling something else.
Social Pathologist Slumlord is not thrilled with how #Cuckservative is getting thrown around. I think his equation of white nationalists with neo-nazis or national socialists is a bit tendentious. He concludes:
[A]s soon as “cuckservative” begins to be defined as someone who doesn’t have enough race consciousness or gives up “White Interests” the game will be lost. The Roissy version frames the concept along masculine lines, an area where the Left is weak. Reframing it along racial lines plays onto the Left’s electoral strength. Already the the Left response to cuckservative is that it is a code word for racist.
Yes and no. The masculine sense of the term is the better one. But what could be more masculine than laughing in the face of someone who calls you a “racist”? That word, as we’ve seen, has really never had a meaningful denotation. It’s leftist black magic, and the sooner it loses it’s power over normal people, who experience natural affinity for their own kind, the better. Yes, there is plenty of over-the-top, low-brow white nationalist silliness. It is for neoreaction to capture and hold onto the non-silly kind.
Also from Slumlord, a review and discussion of Keith Stanovich’s Rationality and the Reflective Mind with plenty more flirtations with #NRx heresy. Which makes for good conversation.
Stanovich approaches the subject of human rationality from his background in heuristic and biases research which demonstrates that for majority of humans, thinking is a “least effort” exercise, resulting in predictable errors and faulty logic. Stanovich places himself in the Meliorist camp, in that he believes by understanding the errors of human reasoning people can be taught to think better and avoid the mistakes. I’m more pessimistic than Stanovich is in this regard and I feel that humans have always had a compelling interest in getting things right and the fact that they don’t learn means that group stupidity is part and parcel of the human condition. I suppose I’m a pessimistic Meliorist. The opportunities for human improvement are minimal.
Slumlord, over some protests in the community, gets an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.
Another Down Undah correspondent, Neocolonial, was very busy with notes and structured arguments this week: the concept of Limited Sovereignty; The Veil of Peers and why you need to select them carefully; and The limitations of the Individual, in this case as an object of study in the broader nature/nurture debate.
Mark Citadel makes the equation: Progressive Christianity is a Weak Tumor. It’s good reading. Part call to arms and part imprecatory psalm:
I call in the vaguest terms for pure action and letter. Liberal Christianity is a treacherous heresy which deserves a target over it. Call me “un-Christian” if you like, but know that I am in keeping with my forebears on this point. It is I who stands shoulder to shoulder with the martyrs of the battlefields for Christendom and those who brought our sacred Faith to dominate a continent from Lisbon to Vladivostok, It is in fact the detractors who have sold out to the Modernist perversion of the Faith that has as its stated purpose the complete destruction of Christianity, and subsequently all ancient religions that might pose opposition to the Cult of Progress. This is the legacy and plotting of those who hide crooked daggers behind their slick suits and disgraced vestments!
Also from Mark, moar Dávila with notes in The Authentic Reactionary: Part II.
If recent history could be summed up better in one graph, I’m hard pressed to think of one better than Reactionary Tree has up: Entropy.
Count Ø-Face has: A Little Twist of Cain: A Review of Grendel.
This Week in Social Matter
Ryan Landry’s Big Sunday article is a page from Hidden History: How Oil Won World War II:
Geniuses in Los Alamos building the bomb, Rosie the Riveter, radar, the Jeep, lady code breakers… these groups all get a glorified showing in Hollywood and news media recaps of WWII. These are easy, progressive-approved items of technology and diversity. The millions of Russian dead get air time when politically convenient. Few, if any, give a nod to the good roustabouts, pipeline architects and petroleum engineers that made everything go. Like our modern world, no one ever wants to admit that everything we enjoy floats on a sea of oil.
David Grant’s The Cathedral is Democracy is another of his trademark history lessons, but this time not without controversy.
And… a two-fer this week for Descending the Tower, the unplanned, awkward little sister to Ascending…. Descending the Tower 2 was recorded Friday 7/24. SB and I were joined by regular Based Tetrarch Warg Franklin, E. Antony Gray, and Mark Yuray. We answered a lot of questions, including the dreaded #cuckservative one. Then in a hastily arranged recording on Thurs 7/30, Mike Enoch and Seventh Son from TRS joined us for Descending the Tower 3, wherein the peace pipe was smoked by both groups. Lots of fun and hopefully good listening in both of those. Mike Enoch a great bit of fantastic extemporaneous thinkaloud in the waning minutes of Episode 3 that I wanted to highlight:
There are still parties, leftist parties, in New York City, Marxist, Jewish Marxist parties, that hold fast to a hard, perfectly ideological Trotskyist, Marxist line. Or whatever line they’re following. And there’s like… 10 people in them. And they are still fighting that battle, despite the fact that somebody that might have split off from their party 30 years ago is in a position of immense power now, and they will know these same people, but because this one person compromised on this-that-the other, moved into this-that-the other, they’re now in a position of tremendous power, but these people are not compromised, are remaining totally sectarian, remaining totally ideologically committed to things that sound like you’re speaking an alien language for any normal person that walks into the room. They can only communicate with each other, and they’re completely separated from any structure of power. So we all have our particulars, and we can talk about those, and we can argue about those, but you really can’t just ostracize and attack everybody else that agrees with you 75% or 90% or whatever…. I just don’t think that’s working.
I wanted to make one other point as far as institution building: From having seen time on that radical left wing side of things, all they ever talk about is alternative institution building. It’s like it. The same thing that left-libertarians and libertarians talk about. But they have no skills. They have no ability to do these things. And people in this movement that I’ve met are actually people that are impressive. People that have skills, that have intellect, they have money. So if we actually band together, that could be something impressive. A bunch of fucking Marxist faggots banding together? These people can’t hold jobs at Starbucks. You know we hold jobs… I won’t say anymore…. They’re not barrista jobs: Serious careers, businesses, money, we have it.
So if we actually started organizing hierarchical structures, based around the amount of capital that we actually have at our fingertips…
That sounds a whole lot like #NRx thinking to me. Walt Disney, the man not the caricature, would be proud.
Mark Christiansen returns to posit: Disciples Of Collapse: A Thought Experiment. This is the most complete discussion I’ve yet seen on a number of intertwined #NRx topics that get bandied about a lot. Hard to excerpt, but… A Must Read article. For this outstanding contribution, Christiansen wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
And… Henry Dampier returns to Social Matter on Thursday with Mutations in National Pluralism. This one is an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:
States can only maintain so much pluralism while maintaining coherent enough to administer. When there is a great deal of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity within a state, the religion must be unified, or else the difference in outlooks among the populace will lead them into permanent conflicts with their neighbors.
Similarly, when religious pluralism is permitted, little diversity in other matters can be permitted without risking serious strife and civil war. The first lasting government in the United States — a state with more religious pluralism than most others formed at the time — didn’t make it a century without a bloody civil war, demonstrating the dangers involved in religious toleration.
So in modern states, there tends to be minimal religious diversity permitted — all must bow down to humanism and a raft of other progressive beliefs — but there is maximal ethnic diversity mandated, because the latter policy is intended to demonstrate an absolute commitment to the doctrines of humanism. If leaders believe in humanism, then they will avoid enacting policies that might hint that they don’t believe that all humans from everywhere are equal in value.
As Moldbug said: “We don’t live in something LIKE a theocracy. We live in an ACTUAL, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy.” Understanding this is #NRx 101. And Henry does a great job of fleshing that point out here.
This Week in Henry Dampier
Filed under Better Late Than Never, and after weeks of muted concern, Based Tetrarch Henry Dampier emerges to inform us he has been on a work-related Hiatus.
One day after which, he proceeds to drop his first significant article in about a month: Don’t Criticize the GOP for Performing Its Function. This function is of course to absorb most of the energy of the regime’s true dissidents, and channel it into occasionally inspiring, very expensive, and ultimate useless tokens of opposition. Dampier notes:
The American conservative movement is, broadly speaking, an administrative arm of the left that acts to consolidate the political gains of the broader leftist faction. They make sure that recalcitrant citizens get with programs affirmed in the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, or at other points in time, to say little of planks of the program established earlier in the 20th century. They permit some quibbling over new developments in international leftism, in exchange for unquestioning obedience to the larger platform which has already been implemented.
Unprincipled exceptions abound as Cato Institute Forgets About Civil Rights Legislation. Watching Conquest’s Second Law in action with full documentation… Priceless.
And on Financial Friday, Dampier has Rising Interest Rates & Fried Unicorn Meat. Or a lesson in why they call it between a rock and a hard place to begin with.
This Week in 28 Sherman
On Monday, Son of Brock Landers follows up his Social Matter piece about Oil being an unsung hero in WW2, with an article about an unsung (hwite) hero in the Everette Lee DeGolyer + Modern Convenience. Oil is not just an unsung hero of WW2, but an unsung hero in creating a world where 7+ billion people can actually live. This one is an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:
You think modern medicine is what it is without that marginal oil production and padded EROEI from work originated by DeGolyer and other technical experts? Does food production reach its amazing productivity levels without oil? No. It is a slower growth world, maybe even a world of actual famines in Africa that destroy the population rather than the famines that somehow created higher populations in African nations after they started than before. Do suburbs and exurbs grow out, expanding our population reach and putting off resolving our social policy dysfunction? No.
Looking at it this way, oil, similar to fiat money, puts off dealing with hell and horror and selection pressures by making everything easier. Mr. Land calls it the Malthusian Suppression Machine, but our modern world of technology built on European civilization keeps the horror at bay. Just look at the historical population graph for Rome. Something unusual? Oil keeps the tough questions of who should be around in a generation or two at bay. Some on the Left will chant to get rid of whitey, but if the likes of Mr. DeGolyer are tossed out of the lifeboat, who will keep it afloat?
Personally I am not convinced the Malthusian Trap cannot be, for all practical purposes, permanently outfoxed. Man can become better and better at getting a positive return on energy. He spent a good part of his history doing so. But societies will not be able to stay ahead of this curve by tolerating cultural degeneracy and the sort of envy politics that derive from Enlightenment foolishness.
SoBL proposes are a new pop culture beat: What’s Soros Doing This Month? He seems to be forgetting that the very reason pop culture beats exist is to crowd out the Soros Beat. Actually, he knows this and that’s his point:
This might be too much to lay at the feet of one man. After all, the Ford Foundation started by Henry Ford eventually became a CIA front, channeling money to Harvard, non-profits, research institutes and everything to advance the Anglo communist agenda. This is why the Soros beat would be a great endeavor. What other entities or billionaire patrons are sending money into Soros’ non-profits to push public opinion one way or the other? How many media members are complicit in suppressing this information? For an industry claiming to want to speak truth to power, the media finds a way to dodge old Georgie’s dabbling whenever they can.
And wasn’t Henry Ford like a Nazi or something?
On Wednesday: Will This Libyan General Get American Support? “It’s me or ISIS” could be one of the best new strategies for manipulating USG moribund foreign policy in decades.
Finally, in SoBL’s WW1 series, remembering an American Homefront Tragedy.
This Week in World Crass
World Crass pays attention to the news so you don’t have to…
Obama thinks illegals have as much right to America as Israelis have to Israel because ‘facts on the ground’.
This was good: “Black Lives Matter!” 3 words, 12 logical fallacies. Yes to black lives. No to sophistry, slander.
Filed under Pas D’Ennemi à Gauche: Pollard: “I sold U.S. nuclear secrets to Israel, which sold them to the USSR.” Obama: “I don’t mind”.
Filed under Maybe Slightly Less Asymmetrical Warfare: Microsoft gives malicious drones a strategic advantage in cities.
Big cat dies. Legal grey area in black Africa. Confused, liberals mix up cat lives and black bodies. #CatLivesMatter trends. Related: Open season on hunters.
A very inspirational story here: Child porn drone shot down by hero dad. Dad arrested.
Filed under Not That Lion, the Other Lion: NPR featured story: Lion that isn’t Cecil’s brother probably isn’t dead. Slowest news day on record.
Finally: Protecting ISIS from feeling terrified, U.N. should admit stopping genocide is low priority.
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist X begins the week waxing poetic about Scientific Nostalgia. Pluto, we barely knew ye. But welcome back, Brontosaurus.
Filed under Sounds Reasonable: Has eliminating hookworms made people fatter?
Filed under When My Mental Models of You Look an Awful Lot Like Me: Conservatives and Liberals Assume Everyone Else is Like Themselves.
A big piece on psychological health: How Much anti-Psych Research is Funded by Guys who Think all Mental Illness is Caused by Dead Aliens?
Why Evolutionist X cringes when she hears people say Epigenetics. “What epigenetics probably doesn’t do is everything people want it to do.” And a whole lotta reasons why. A taste:
Everybody who isn’t adapted to the Western Diet gets high rates of diabetes and obesity if they start eating it, whether they had historical trauma or not. We don’t need epigenetic trauma to explain this.
This was interesting: The Recent Development of High European IQ. Another big, data rich piece.
Filed under Or Maybe It’s the Other Way Around: Whites like Goth and Metal because Whites are Depressives.
Capping off the week: Chapter MMDXXIV in Anarcho-Tyranny: “the Navy is charging Lt. Commander White with unlawful possession of a firearm on Navy property after he stopped a gunman in the midst of a mass-murder.” Unbe-friggin-lievable.
This Week… Elsewhere
Dante was busy this week with AN OPEN LETTER FROM TRD TO MATT LEWIS. And by way of follow up: FROM THE DESK OF THE TRD EDITOR/WRITER/BLOGGER-IN-CHIEF: I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO. Yeah. Dante yells a lot on his DRAMA (!!) blog. Then at his regular (Vidya, non-screaming) blog: RIP Hulkamania.
Porter is all over the #Cuckservative Meme this week with The Needed War (i.e., the one within that which is called “conservatism”) and Cuckholm Syndrome. It has finally dawned upon me, and I trust he takes it with the generous spirit in which the observation is offered, that Kakistocracy’s signal achievement is: Outrage Porn for the Discriminating Connoisseur. Another taste from his sampler platter is in Cooking with Conservatives:
Though decline isn’t just about the frivolous pleasure of trans-hermophrodite orgies sprawling beyond a crumbling cabana. There remains many serious souls seeking sanctification–their own pole of totems to worship. And watching all of these comically disparate components being shoe-horned into our choreographed election process might just be the most sensual delight there is outside of Senator Graham’s bedchambers.
Two of those most fascinating for furtive consumers of Hate are the cute master/slave fetish couple of liberal and conservative. Everyone understands the asymmetric power distribution in this relationship. Liberals march, conservatives follow. Liberals accuse, conservatives grovel. Liberals demand heads, conservatives chop them. Liberals eat their lunch, and conservatives mop them. In political terms, conservatives consolidate liberal gains…and are called racist for not having their hearts into it. Well that’s all changing now. Because conservatives have had a sort of internal “come to Jesus meeting.” That being Hey-Sus. And he seems to have made quite an impression.
This is not the output of any ordinary outrage pornographer, but that of a well-trained artist who loves his craft. You can’t swing a dead cat by the tail without hitting scads of outrage porn on the alt-right, most of it crappy… and depressing. If yer gonna get some, definitely get it from the best: The Kakistocracy. Also: Technical Glitching into History.
Argent Templar of West Coast Reactionaries begins a New Series on Existence of God with about 9 Youtube audio recordings. He also has a good article on Faith, Moral Responsibility and Identity Politics, in which he answers “How you be so rayciss and be loving Jesus?”
Matt Briggs goes on the Stream to discuss Vatican Environmental Conference: A Marriage of Bad Governors and Bad Science. Also This Week in Doom: Baseball Edition. And this: Writer Says Discovery Of Extraterrestrial Life Would Be Bad News For God. God Says Nope. Yup. God was just quakin’ in his boots.
Sydney Trads find a very perspicatious observation from Eugene Genovese’s The Southern Tradition.
Kristor frames social exit in a new light: Be the Scapegoat. Moar thoughts along that vein in: How the Goat is Scaped.
And Kristor was on a roll this week. This was quite good: The Disastrous Recusal of the Western Patriarchate. Basically, The Patriarchate still exists, has immense power but little authority, which the The Patriarchate itself threw away; and that’s pretty much why everyone hates it. RTWT. A short (for Kristor) post.
Jim Kalb is optimistic about the burgeoning pessimism of First Things, under the headship of Rusty Reno, regarding liberal democracy. That’s why he writes there. (That FT link is paywalled… full Kalb text here.) That they encourage him to do so is indeed an encouraging sign.
Interesting article here by Xavier Marquez of Abandoned Footnotes: Propaganda as Signaling—vis-à-vis indoctrination. The latter being much harder to accomplish.
Cheshire Ocelot considers judging a fan by the art he likes and vice-versa. Also a review of The 10,000 Year Explosion.
Al Fin asks: What Can Peter Diamandis Teach the Dangerous Child?. Also: A Society of Chumps vs. a Society of Dangerous Children.
An abbreviated TWiR this week. There are only so many hours in the week, and I’ve been sleeping for far too few of them. My apologies if I missed you, or anything else worthy of note. Please let register your complaints in the combox. As always, keep on Reactin’! Til next week, TRP… Over and out!!
Filed under: This Week in Reaction, Weeks' Best