This week featured an unexpected bounty of great posts within the Reactosphere. If you, like many had the good sense to get away from it from it all in these the Dog Days of Summer, you might have missed some. That’s why This Week in Reaction exists. And this week was a truly great week…
Nydwracu is back to his “main” blog with 2065. It’s a bit of speculative fiction. A taste:
The word is German, of course: the Germans are honest. They’ll tell you what they’re going to do. They want VGs, they’ll tell you they want VGs. They don’t want VGs, they’ll tell you they don’t want VGs.
If you want to know what the VGs are, or who, you’ll just have to RTWT. Probably twice. For his excellent work, Nydwracu wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Spandrell talks about Trump and Female Journalism.
I don’t care if he’s a fraud and will sell out to Soros and the Gay lobby and names Bryan Caplan to lead the border patrol. It’s refreshing to see a high status man behave like a man these days, if only for the message it sends to the great masses of mimetic humans who automatically ape what they see on TV. Good for him.
And good for the people, too. Trump’s power over women like Maureen Dowd is what’s really interesting:
[F]emale journalists are a very important part of the Cathedral. They may not be able to dominate the discourse, especially now that gays seem to be running most newspapers, but female readers do take the input from female journalists way more seriously. Signaling inputs are cognitively constrained; you only take advice from people you want to associate with, i.e. plausible friends. You may listen to the priests homily to learn what you’re supposed to pay lip service too; but real advice is asked to high status neighbors of the same sex.
I’ve never bought the “he can’t win with women” protestations. He’ll do better with women voters than with men of the same political cohort. I’ll bet money on that. Also from Spandrell: a quick TED Talk on biological fitness: Only Fitness.
Rhys Caerwyn has started (??) what looks to be a monumental series: Civilization From Chaos. He drops about 7700 words on the subject this week on Russia’s civilization. These are in four parts: part one, part two, part three, and part four. Beginning in 862 with some Vikings taking power in Novgorod, Caerwyn traces the ups, downs, and sideways of Russian politics, down to cusp of Peter the Great’s installation. More is to come indubitably. Caerwyn’s work here was one of three I felt were good enough to win it all in any ordinary #NRX week. This was, unfortunately for him, far from an ordinary week. Therefore he’ll have to settle for the ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
If you’ve the stomach for it, Reactionary Tree has The Uncucking, which inspires us with some hope that Gavin McInnes may give up on some of his late color-blind holiness signaling. Also, this is a very promising development: Tree collects lotsa links for the Immigration Round-up.
Neovictorian has some thoughts on Building a Neoreationary “Tribe”. The “tribe” (as it were) appears to be coming together. The origins myth admittedly still needs a little work.
Neocolonial (the other Neo-) goes all biblical on us and has some very compelling bullet points on faith: Be thou my vision.
People do not follow a man of visions. They follow a man of faith, a man who possesses a title deed to the future they describe.
That faith itself exists as a proof of things yet to come is utterly remarkable; we see that men follow faith. Men contribute wealth to see faith brought about. At times, they even contribute blood.
Thus today, as western civilisation continues to be hollowed out to the point of collapse, people are searching for faith in the heart of men. We are returning to the time of great men. Men of quiet determination, driven by a heart that holds to something real.
Be those men.
This gets a lot right in very few words with this article. Vision is not the end goal, but the faith—an apprehension of that which is not yet—that it inspires. And the deeds that follow it, and give evidence of faith’s existence. For this fantastic bit of analysis, Neocolonial wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Sydney Trads have nice excerpt up from George Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty (1896).
Social Pathologist, Slumlord characterizes Trump as The Black Night. I’m not convinced that good leadership is utterly divorced from moral goodness. All that rises converges. But I think Slumlord’s main thesis—i.e., that the mainstream right and most Christians have put social niceties above a defense of the truth—is quite well argued and well put. An addendum from Slumlord: G.K. Chesterton on Men and the Gentleman.
Empedocles, the Darwinian Reactionary, has a Part I to a delicious-sounding series: Restoring a Virtue-Based Ethics For The 21st Century.
So for Plato and Aristotle, evaluating the goodness of a person is a lot like evaluating the goodness of a car, computer, or other manufactured device. The first thing you do is figure out what the things function is; then you figure out if it possesses the features that allow it to perform this function. Take something like a computer. Its end it to produce information for its users, its function is to take input, process it, and produce output. A good computer is one which possesses the features which allow it to do this: a fast processor, fast and sufficient memory, input devices, and so on. These features are the excellences or virtues—the good-making qualities—of computers.
Teleology Bitchez! This article is high test neoreactionary thought throughout. Do RTWT. Empedocles outstanding work here earns him ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀— and that in probably the stiffest week of “Competition” yet. Congratulations, dude! Try not spend all that in one place…
Reactionary Tree’s idea of Fourteen Words Game was put to the test. Roissy was impressed with the results.
Nick Land celebrates Shenzhen 35th Birthday. Also, Huge News (if true). (I’ve come to the conclusion that Zero Hedge has its heart in the right place, but…)
E. Antony Gray has some short poetry up this week: Physics. And Determination
Wouldn’t quite call it a movie review, but Kill to Party finds the moral logic of anti-choice intrinsic to the story of Dorothy’s trip in Over The Rainbow: The Dark Enlightenment as Anti-Choice. An excellent bit of reactionary anti-modernist thought:
A dutiful citizen is necessary for a functional civilization—this includes duty to family, duty to community, and duty to country. Although duty isn’t necessarily enjoyable by the modern understanding of the term—flashing lights and lines of cocaine—it must be prioritized above personal pleasure. Duty must be foremost, and whatever enjoyment gleaned from life beyond duty becomes secondary.
Amen to that. RTWT. It isn’t too long.
Also at Kill to Party… this was a really good article: Femininity and the Cancerous Female Ego. A very strong formulation here:
The Feminist will look at the Feminine woman’s calm surrender as a display of weakness; she will swear that the Feminine woman not continuously grasping at power will leave her open to being taken advantage of by men; that the Feminine woman’s submission inherently implies a lack of standards—that this submission must mean that the Feminine woman is settling for a lesser man than she deserves.
This is not the case. The Feminine woman’s display of submission is merely a lack of Female Ego to protect. The Feminine woman is so genuinely confident in herself that she doesn’t need to win petty arguments with men to prove her worth- this is true female confidence.
Kill to Party, a recent newcomer to the sphere, takes home an an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this piece.
Antidem finally gets around to part two of his review of John C. Wright’s The Book of Feasts & Seasons: Never Write A Christian Novel.
Filed under It’s a Dirty Job But Someone’s Gotta Do It: Richard A. Brookes takes a look at UK politics to get a window into the human soul in The Corbyn Effect, which I take to be the force responsible for the fact that almost all candidates for office are mid-witted mediocrities, next to which candidates like Corbyn (or Trump) appear to be quite stunning.
It is a complex question why the likes of Clinton or Nixon no longer appear on the political stage, but among many reasons, the most important is that it has been becoming more obvious to potential recruits that party politics is not where the real power is. Business, academia, journalism, or pressure-group politics are more reliable mechanisms for turning personal superiority into influence and status than competing for votes.
To me it is yet another indicator of Brezhnevian Sclerosis. We are in the late, and likely terminal, stages of Democracy.
Esoteric Trad says, “Becoming more attractive to women is great-n-all, but… there’s No escape from a ‘cucked’ society“. Also part one of A Primer on Defending Yourself. A good read, what is common sense among those who regularly need to defend themselves is not so common anymore.
Mark Citadel writes In Defense of Book Burning. I absolutely agree, but I do worry about making a public ceremony out of it. Ideally bad books would not be published. If they were, it would be best they would not sell, but rather be ignored. If they could not be ignored, then that is the time to make a swift, yet edifying example of an egregious few. And then Citadel goes onto the Big Stage over at Return of Kings to talk about Why Modern Men Must Become Aristocrats of the Soul .
Cambria Will Not Yield draws inspiration from Edmund Burke in this week’s missive: We Labor and Weep.
Adam Wallace stirs up a pot (or two) with Chanernative Right. He’s studied his image boards:
There are posters of nearly every stripe—which might confuse those who haven’t spent a massive(ly unhealthy) amount of time on /pol/—but the only group which is not present (at least not noticeably) is that of a kindly liberal, socially progressive persuasion.
…
The hostile and anti-outsider zeitgeist chans tend to envelop themselves with is a survival mechanism so that the site maintains a stable foundational identity. Newcomers are discouraged from posting, from using names, or from essentially breaking the specific unwritten rules which preceded their arrival. You submit, and become another nameless ideologue where the only things which matter are facts, humour and brotherhood-in-anonymity.
Anonymity kills Left Holiness Spiraling. Enforced anonymity actually throws the spiral into reverse: Rightward Anti-holiness Spiraling. Necessary, but not sufficient, I think, for the Rightly-oriented polis.
This Week in Social Matter
Mark Citadel sits in Ryan Landry’s chair this week as Official TWiR Week Kicker-Offer. He brings us Paying Tribute To The Kakistocracy. The modern age, he says, in not characterized by a flattening of hierarchy so much as it is an inversion of it, where the dregs of society now run the show. To some extent this is true. Anarcho-tyranny is real and becoming realer every day. But I think the high offices the weak, the uncivilized, and the wicked now fill are mostly ceremonial in nature. They serve as camouflage to the White and Jewish elite males who retain real power of pen and purse; and also as a cudgel to beat back the one caste who could present a genuine challenge to them: white middle-class cis-het males.
David Grant comes in on Monday to spread more of his pet heresies: Ancient Democracies Weren’t As Terrible As Modern Democracies. Admittedly the case against democracy does not have overwhelming empirical backing. That’s why the case is principally deductive and logical.
In a very strong piece, Henry Dampier pens A Letter to Mass Immigration Advocates. He characterizes the deontological principles waved around as a gloss for the real conflict of who ruling over whom at home.
In democracies like the United States, the winners of domestic political conflicts have imported foot soldiers to use against their rivals, both in a literal sense and at the ballot box. Ambitious Americans from the founding onward have seized upon dislocations and conflicts in Europe to gain an upper hand in their domestic schemes. When the ambitious see fewer advantages in importing a new class of foreigners, they tend to stop doing it. That’s one of the reasons why, in the early 20th century, Progressives opposed immigration for a time—they were trying to bust local political machines run by largely Catholic rivals descended from immigrants.
…
Intellectuals under liberalism tend to see themselves as warriors in the ‘battle of ideas,’ but really, ideas are just the early skirmishes in the actual battles in which people shoot each other over scraps of land to determine who controls it and under what terms. The ideas are important, but the people doing the fighting over those ideas — and the results of those fights — are what tend to matter more.
For his true to form work here Henry wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
And an unexpected Friday treat, newcomer Isaac Lewis pens An Ideological History Of Early Christianity. He begins with an admirable, if not uncontroverted, take on the 4-5 hundred years of Christian history, and finished by looking at:
The obvious question for the alt-right—is Christianity ultimately a preserver or a destroyer of civilisation? Is it conservative, or revolutionary?
No spoilers from me.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Landry is still en vacances, but things are gearing up for next week I hear.
This Week in World Crass
The late Fr. Richard Neuhaus used to call the NYT “our parish newspaper”. It wasn’t entirely a joke. Crassus notices the eerily religious flavor of the Grey Lady in New York Times front page is Sunday sermon for churchless progressives. I think that is quite literally true.
Here he has some astute commentary: Monarchy would have advantages over America’s pretense of democracy.
Under the best systems of monarchy, rulers rule without needing to lie elaborately to their subjects, pretending that the subjects are the real rulers. Inferior monarchies, such as Russia’s depend on constantly manipulating the public. The science of controlling public opinion has reached an advanced state, allowing Putin to maintain a popularity above 80% despite Russia’s failing economy. But to do this, he must must often do odd things that distract from the task of ruling. Most notably, he must often pose in movie-set-like scenes in order to be portrayed as an action hero.
Formalism, in #NRx-speak, is minimizing the absolute distance between legitimizing myths and how power structures actually are.
Here we find Hillary once claimed the security of her email made her a better person than Edward Snowden. “Law & Order Candidate”. LOL. Among the law abiding classes, sure!
If Russia cracks down on gay propaganda, leave it to the UK to do precisely the opposite.
The FDA approves Viagra for women not because it was shown to be safe and effective, but as a Civil Rights Symbol. You go, (old) girls!
Au contraire, every mass shooting is the Perfect Time to Talk About Gun Control, whether that would have done any good or not. Probably not. When it comes to gun violence, the media is like your pal who is a higher up in Amway who will take any opportunity, however tenuous, to talk about Amway.
Speaking of body counts, Crassus asks How many people have been killed by Black Lives Matter?
Finally this: CNN is clearing the path for Hillary in a very undemocratic way indeed.
This Week… Elsewhere
Pax Dickinson steps back up to his blog with a quick note on Vox Day’s new book SJWs Always Lie. Recommendation: Buy and hold.
Matt Briggs explains SJWs at the Hugo Awards. Also in view of the upcoming Synod on the Family, he takes note of the fact that There Is No Mercy Without Crime. And here, Briggs announces the winners of (first annual IIRC) Dumbest & Most Frustrating Modern Invention Contest.
Filed under No This Isn’t Orwellian… AT ALL: University of Tennessee Tells Staff & Students To Stop Using ‘He’ & ‘She’.
Pat Buchanan debunks one of America’s Great Foundational Myths in Who Plotted to Destroy Nixon? Also at Imaginative Conservative, an interesting slice of advice from George Washington and the Gift of Silence.
And here is a blast from 1993: the late Milton Hinus reviewing Irving Babbitt’s Against Romanticism (1919). More Babbitt quoted here: Humanism: The Corruption of a Word. Dewey and others get taken to the woodshed for co-opting the term for their rather anti-human ideologies. Birzer hopes it is a word that might get stolen back, concluding:
Humanism is not only not the enemy of conservatism; rather, it makes conservatism meaningful. Humanism is the very thing we conservatives must conserve. The term is well worth defending and reclaiming.
Evolutionist X has a big article up on The Utility of Anxiety, part big facts, part big speculation. Interesting reading. Also: Wimmins, wherein she reveals she not exactly a typical female. That isn’t entirely all a bad thing.
Also from Evolutionist X, nothing like the heat to bare fangs: Moderates are Dumb, Trapped in a Random World. Actually, I think it’s the other way around!! She is right that IQ is the ability to discover patterns. And a pattern I’ve noticed is that people tend to talk about climate change when and only when the weather seems unusual.
Dalrock articulates The Law of the Double Standard… perfectly.
With an assist from Audioslave, Ace deigns to give men some “actionable advice” in “You thought you made a man, you better think again…”.
Al Fin has a nice run down of the thwarted terrorist attack on the Amsterdam-Paris Train. The goal of raising dangerous children is to make dangerous adults—dangerous most especially to the bad guys. Related: Why Dangerous Children Learn Mindfulness — On Top of Situational Awareness.
Kristor takes on the pernicious notion that Nature Never Sucks.
Nature is indeed teleological, and teloi are not superfluous entities subject to excision by Ockham’s Razor, but rather are indispensable to any adequate explanation of natural phenomena: it is logically impossible to account for the fact that things tend if you are going to rule out tendency per se and ab initio.
Nevertheless, it is not Nature herself that sucks Nature into her natural order, but something exogenous to her. It is, i.e., not Nature that is doing the sucking.
Bonald is (his usual) fantastic here: Catholic defensiveness vs. pious humbug, aka. “Pious BS”.
Some examples of pious BS:
expending all our missionary effort on people who are the least likely to convert
dismissing the “ghetto option” because it means we won’t be evangelizing the world, even when it’s clear that in conditions of openness the world is gaining more converts from us than we are from them
claiming to have exclusively “pastoral” interests and then showing little interest in how people are to know or whether they are likely to believe the basic doctrines of the faith
worrying more about extinct heresies (e.g. “Jansenism”) than live ones
responding to ecclesial crises with meaningless commemorative events (e.g. responding to widespread loss of faith by declaring a “Year of Faith” or suchlike)
reckless lack of concern on the part of prelates for how their statements, often made while seeking favor from small groups already hostile to the faith, can be exploited by the Church’s enemies
Formulation and defnition of “Pious BS”, Bonald wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Also from Bonald: What the Republican Party is good for. If even that.
Roman Dmowski over at Man-Sized Target has a nice bit of analysis on the WDBJ-7 Roanoke shooting in Fanning the Flames.
Liberal elites and black elites suffer from several forms of moral dementia. First, they make a cult of the criminal, when in fact, criminals should be marginalized. Two, as part of this cult of the criminal, they create a narrative of a white oppressor class, whose demonization is nonstop. Finally, they construct a willfully blind mirror image of reality becuase there is not a significant number of violent white on black attacks–by police or otherwise–whereas there is disproportionate black criminality against blacks and whites too. Indeed, it would be much higher, but for the strenuous efforts of whites, Hispanics, and Asians to avoid black neighborhoods. There is a genuine black crime problem, and, instead, a visitor from Mars would think we live in a world of genocidal white violence against non-whites. It’s a patently ridiculous lie. And that lie is encouraging the marginalized to feel justified in committing the most horrible crimes.
Filed under Less Damnable Lies, Abandoned Footnotes has a nice piece The Mismeasure of Growth. Singapore’s meteoric rise to first world status is re-reconsidered and found to be impressive again. But that is just the foreword to a really impressive amount of research and effort. This was the third article this week that I felt could have won it all. But it was a super strong week. Xavier Marquez settles for an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Speaking of speculative fiction (and filed under sin categoria) Carlos Esteban brings us El hombre que pudo ser rey.
Chris Gale has a bone to pick with these nine “sins” that the “church” ignores (most of them aren’t even sins). Which actual sins is the church “ok” with these days? All of the biggies. Also Some hope for PTSD. Real PTSD, not the kind you get from growing up in a society that fails to treat you like a special snowflake 24/7 for 23 straight years.
Porter clearly knows enough about financial markets to not make any firm predictions about them, but something is quite amiss in the incentive structures our government has built. Astute commentary on the WDBJ-7 Roanoke murders in Eggs and Omelets.
It does not require spacious contemplation to grasp the inevitable results of years of liberal hostility incubation in blacks. Fomenting a sense of bitter victimization among a low IQ, high impulsivity population has few alternate endings. When that population is told their sorrows have a specific source, the advice is eagerly taken. This morning that source was just two young reporters trying to do a job. Generations of these people did this to you manifested in a manner as predictable as a parent’s tears. Liberals were, as always, admirable in circumspection. Gun nuts did this!
This too The Kakistocracy, Porter draws some lessons from Ashley You Little Slut. Also this was great: Mictlantecuhtli Shrugs. Porter begins:
Imagine you could conjure a word and then watch generations of your enemies destroy themselves trying to prove they are not that word.
You won’t believe what happens next! Thoroughgoing and utterly deserved mockery of Redstate’s ineptly named Erick Erickson. Porter earns yet another an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this entertaining and insightful work.
Welp, that’s all folks. Hope you had an enjoyable week. We don’t get many like this one in terms of quality. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!
Filed under: This Week in Reaction, Weeks' Best