With spring in full swing Down Under, our antipodal brothers have been busy. Social Pathologist has a nice article up on Facial Aesthetics: Implications for Art.
Sydney Trads have a nice quote up this week from Luke Torrisi on the nature of conservatism. A snippet:
Order is important to a conservative because if you have this notion of an inherent moral order, you don’t need some all pervasive government injecting it into you. The inherent moral order and freedom are closely linked for a conservative […] You will note though, that when we talk about an enduring moral order, democracy isn’t a feature. This modern worship of democracy need not apply. It’s a fad, democracy.
Neocolonial returns this week with bullet points On the need for Exile. Borders not only to keep undesirables from entering, but also re-entering.
And then this was just an awesome bit of social theory: Building Fealty, in which state imposed sovereignty militates quite precisely against organic manifestations of it. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
Rounding out This Week in Aussie Reaction, Mark Richardson looks at the numbers in What are the risks? I.e., of death by domestic violence. Any number above zero is, of course, a tragedy. But it is hardly The Worst Thing Ever™ that ideologues would have us believe.
Stateside…
Watson has part 3 (I think the conclusion) of his series on private cities: Transaction Costs. This was an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. (To be honest, Watson deserves a top nod for this whole series, but it didn’t come out all in “one week”… and… Spandrell exists.) Rather than edenic examples of libertarian spergalicious social perfection, private cities are starting to look rather more like a mixed bag—the mix (and bag) being somewhat dependent upon the “local fauna”. But accepting that as given, there is still a lot that Watson has presented here in making sense of the research, the data, and the incentive structures of various kinds of city arrangements.
Antidem makes some bank with a Sponsored Post: One Man’s Pony Is Another Man’s Matrix, Part I. Amazing the serious analogies you can get from MLP.
Tired of swinging for the bleachers and striking out, this time Warg Franklin plays small ball and gets on base with Sanity for Sociality: A Theory of Religion—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. Sometimes its not a question about believing in Leprechauns, but whether Leprechauns believe in you.
E. Antony Gray has an ode: Sun and Shadow. That rhymes. (Maybe that’s required for an ode. Not sure.)
Jim is fantastic here in Thermodynamics, leftism, organisms, and Chesterton’s fence:
The order of society is in Chesterton’s fences. Leftism takes down Chesterton’s fences, deeming them irrelevant obstacles, as bones and blood vessels and lungs and heart and brains are irrelevant obstacles to cancer cells.
Also does Putin read Nrx? Or just “listen in to State Department phone calls”? Perhaps it is both. And, in disheartening news, the Republican party funds the sale of baby meat. Well they were forced to. Otherwise they would have been responsible for “shutting down” the government. And you can imagine the toll of human suffering it would be if non-essential government functions ceased. National parks and forests could be CLOSED, for Heaven’s sake!
Reactionary Ferret has much more than a blurb this week. (Or whatever sound the ferret says). Here is his theory on Where Rampage Killers Come From.
One of the new blogs on the block Migration Period tries to make sense of what comes From the Mouth of Merkel. And it ain’t easy.
Dividuals was busy this week. Here’s a thoughtful piece on Paganism and Masculinity. Paganism, a religious reverence for nature (as it actually is, not hippy-dippy stuff), should be a very masculine and highly sought after elixir for many modern souls. There’s only one problem:
I search and search and search and have to conclude basically this almost doesn’t exist. It should, but it doesn’t. It seems this kind of super-masculine Paganism is almost exclusively an aesthetical category: it is something in metal songs, it is something on the cover art of metal records, it is in some videogames, it is in the TV, it is in fantasy, but does not actually exist as a ritual and practice.
Then he’s got a couple of blog-worthy responses to past Evolutionist X posts: RE: Femininity and fashion which was a fascinating bit of theory on the interplay between sexual attractiveness and status. And RE: Microaggressions and isolation. He traces the concept of microagressions back to utilitarianism. “A right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins” might be compelling principle to a 13 year old or a Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. But the adults in the room know better…
What we are discovering today is that people also find VASTLY different things painful.
Well, good riddance to utilitarianism then. If and when people have incompatible utility functions, you cannot max them all out. You can’t even minimize pain. What’s the next ideology?
Also, Dividuals takes Peter Taylor’s (generally sympathetic) critique to task with The gravest error: misunderstanding the division of power.
Finally a very fine bit of theory here with No Such Thing As Fascism. Except as Anglophone boogey-man.
[Fascism] had a historical basis in the post-WWI era, when evil demagogues preying on the psychological vulnerabilities of WWI veterans, and this combined with a crazy Leftist Ingsoc drive resulted in horrific outcomes. But just like the Horned God cult, it was something tied to historical circumstances. Like how Christians projected their fears and hatreds into an Eternal Satan, Liberals projected theirs into an Eternal Fascist. And the Golden Dawn type idiots are just like Crowley – a reflection on the projection.
…
As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as Fascism – it is just a liberal synonym for “nightmare” or “bad LSD trip” or “stuff I fear”.
Silly SJW, fascists don’t real.
Spandrell brings us The Social Module—a significant amount of (biologically expensive) human brain tissue is thought to be dedicated to divining (and improving one’s own, and possibly reducing others’) imaginary Status Points (SP) readings that figuratively float above all human heads. He offers this as an explanatory model for progressive (and presumably most other) numinous behavior. It makes a fair amount of sense crack out of the box:
Now one could propose that the basic principle of human behavior is to raise the SP number. Sure there’s survival and reproduction. Most people would forget all their socialization if left hungry and thirsty for days in the jungle. But more often than not, survival and reproduction depend on being high status; having a good name among your peers is the best way to get food, housing and hot mates.
….
[A]n average human brain has much more neurons being used to scan the social climate and see how SP are allotted, than neurons being used to analyze patterns in reality to ascertain the truth. Surely your brain does care a great deal about truth in some very narrow areas of concern to you. Remember Conquest’s first law: Everybody is Conservative about what he knows best. You have to know the truth about what you do, if you are to do it effectively.
But you don’t really care about truth anywhere else. And why would you? It takes time and effort you can’t really spare, and it’s not really necessary. As long as you have some area of specialization where you can make a living, all the rest you must do to achieve survival and reproduction is to raise your SP so you don’t get killed and your guts sacrificed to the mountain spirits.
For this contribution to reactionary social theory, Spandrell wins the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀.
Alfred Miller’s No Choice is a supremely well and briefly put statement on the resurgence of nationalism arising in Europe in response to the manufactured “Migrant Crisis”.
Earning once again an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀, Mark Citadel presents an honest to goodness treatise for A Reactionary Policy on Marriage. It is excellent. I pretty much agree with all of it.
Reactionary Tree continues his Culture of Critique series with Freud the Fraud.
Free Northerner explains in On Theonomy why he is not a Theonomist. Which is also pretty much why I am not. They seem like good folks though. Also, his Gun Deaths is a great review of how journalists lie when they talk about things like “gun deaths”.
This Week in Social Matter
Official Week Kicker-Offer Ryan Landry kicks it off on Sunday with Hitlers Everywhere. With Sarah (((((Kaplan’s))))) Fnord-packed WaPo Indictment as backdrop, Landry shows us exactly how the Spin of the Media Academic Complex is spun. For this solid bit of neoreactionary analysis he wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
David Grant returns with another great lesson from history: Sulla Belongs In Our Pantheon Of Heroes. Sulla sounds like a getter of things done, whom history has judged overly harshly for not living up to modern legalistic standards.
Where Cicero would have dithered, Sulla acted. During a coup d’état is not the time to be overly scrupulous about the legality of one’s actions. Though Cicero spun a good yarn about the “Harmony of the Orders,” Sulla actually put his ideas into practice and gave Rome a relatively stable constitution that survived him by thirty years. Sulla became worthy, assumed power, and ruled.
Newcomer Ashton Blackwell comes to Social Matter to share her thoughts on The Wedding: A Rebellion Against Modernity. As Chesterton said, defense of the cardinal virtues has, today, all the exhilaration of a vice.
And a Saturday bonus this week. Hubert Collins returns with a rundown on Donald Trump, Middle American Radicals, And The Next Step. His analysis of MARs and their political plight is especially insightful.
This Week in Henry Dampier
Monsieur Dampier kicks off the week by asking Who Sets Your Agenda? If you are not who, then you are whom. Some of the choicest bits:
When you start your day by bathing in whatever story some other unfathomable confluence of interest groups has decided to bathe you in, you cede control of your life — as you actually live it — to someone else.
and his conclusion:
Proactively deciding what to be ignorant about is probably more important than deciding what you ought to know. It’s by ignoring most things that you generate the free mental space and time to grasp what you actually need to know.
Next Henry has some words on Economists and Political Structure.
So, for the United States, the critical concern that the government might have to bring to economists would be figuring out how to fund the social programs put into place by the FDR and LBJ administrations without upsetting the rest of the apple cart of state. Higher questions about whether or not those programs ought to be in place will usually be off the table of discussion, because the programs are so popular. A great many things which are impossible are highly popular. A great way to end your career in what’s called ‘policy’ is to tell people that something popular that they want isn’t possible.
So not only is economics inherently political, but it’s practitioners nowadays are selected for their articulate support for fantasy.
Here are some notes on How To Persuade People in Politics. Or how not to. Or at least not to expect anyone to suddenly change their political beliefs. These things take time, if they happen at all. I tend to be distrustful of rapid conversions. Growing up Baptist, I saw many very convincing conversions that were full of sound and fury, but signified nothing in the way people lived their lives in the long run.
Thursday, Henry lays down the law on Vulgar Racialism:
Any racial group that defines Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Swedes, and Albanians as essentially the same people is missing an enormous amount of detail. It’s not even really the opposite of the one-worldism-race-is-a-social-construct vision of recent vintage liberalism
Sometimes the “wrong kind of white people” really are the wrong kind of white people. They need edification. Not collectivism. And certainly not a right to “vote” for their own collectivism.
Hot off saying “Sucks to your Muh Racial Puritah”, Dampier adds Sucks to Your IQ too.
In a similar way that the reductionist view of race is stupid, the reductionist view of intelligence and its importance is also misguided. If we follow this reductionist view, we would have to ignore the fact that there are far many more smart liberals who deny that intelligence is innate than there are smart people of any political persuasion who say that it isn’t.
That’s not to say intelligence isn’t mostly innate or that it isn’t important. But selecting only for that is as retarded as selecting only for whiteness. All retarded things are retarded each in their own way save one: they are retarded.
And finally, Henry enjoins us to Visit California and Enjoy White Power.
This Week in 28 Sherman
On Monday, SoBL follows up his Social Matter article with A Hitler They Missed.
For all the comparisons to Hitler, Obama really fits the bill from a zero to leader rise and the odd background. No one would make the comparison due to Obama being on the media’s side. Some on the right like to make the comparison when it comes to gun grabbing and ruling by executive directives. Obama is a creature of his system as was Hitler. The German bureaucracy and state machinery was in place for him to co-opt. Obama is just a figurehead to place on top of the USG system.
The Obama-Hitler parallels break down, of course; basically in skills where Der Fürer completely outclassed America’s Teleprompter-Reader-in-Chief.
Treasuries Tuesday, he brings us Dumping Reserves and New QE. In Soviet America, the Treasury pretends to sell high grade debt and the Federal Reserve pretends to by them. It will keep on working. Until it can’t.
Wednesday, SoBL’s got A Note On Bulging Biceps and Male Feminists. And how don’t expect the first “man” to major in “Women’s Studies” at UMass-Amherst to know anything about lifting or masculinity. Toxic or otherwise.
And This Week in WW1, he’s got pictures from The Invasion of Serbia, October of 1915.
This Week in Kakistocracy
Porter talks about our opinion leaders talking about MARs Attacks. “Middle American Radicals”, or in other words, the “Wrong Kind of White People”. Or in other words, the kinds of people who cannot or do not wish to keep up with all the latest trends in moral signaling.
Some good commentary here on the Swedish bishopess who decided that crosses in Christian churches might be offensive to seekers. In Anger, Wrath, and Great Indignation:
Viewed ecumenically, the Christian church has largely become untrammeled from original intent and now seems to find its purpose keeping God in man’s good graces. It does this mostly in the manner of all modern Western social institutions: through conspicuous marketing to out-groups. The more hostile or incompatible these groups are to the institution’s own core constituency, the more frantic its expressions of fealty. Whether the sons of hinduism, judaism, or islam, it seems the Christian God most covets his neighbor’s flock.
No cult, no culture.
In No True Neocon, Porter tests out the theory that government is best which spends the least fraction of GDP—a core “conservative value”, say “conservatives”.
They can keep rat poison out of your sausage, take down Silk Road (twice), and bust you for selling lemonade without a license; but keeping out an illegal invasion? Utterly unrealistic. This is not Negotiable.
Finally, Porter digs up ancient memories of ABBA, Broadway immortalized, and still (apparently) impeccably liberal and more Swedish than thou: They Took a Chance on Them. I.e., the not quite so Swedish.
This Week… Elsewhere
Mencius Moldbug finally makes an appearance in Alan Jacobs’ Dialogue (with himself) on Democracy over at TAC. (Parts one and two.) More to come. Apparently.
Briggs has pre-game coverage for the rubber match of the Vatican’s Extraordinary Synod on the Family: The Battle Over Sexuality In The Catholic Church Begins. Here he has a reminder: Never Adopt The Enemy’s Language—at least not un-ironically. A litany of good examples is included. Language is how progs do their black magic.
Briggs has a nice mashup of metaphysics and weather science in There Is No Such Thing As A 1000-Year Flood. Also, with Volkswagen’s clever (but not clever enough) trickery in the news, he asks How Many Deaths Does Reading @Voxdotcom Cause? Cause! “You keep saying that word. I do no’ think ita means what you think ita means.” Finally: This Week in Doom—F-bombs Edition.
Evolutionist X has some research and some extra thoughts African Americans, Hispanics, and longevity. This was interesting: Further implications of hippocampal theory. From her “Species of Exit” series: Species of Exit: The Sentinelese, the world’s most isolated people, with a brief detour through the Onge people, about whom more is actually known. She observes:
Long term, total isolation is a policy with very low survival odds.
She also has a meme-rich article contemplating Communism’s Death Toll: Bug or Feature? I tend to doubt that most people are “on board” with killing millions of people. But most people are “on board” with going along to get along. A skillful minority always rules an unskilled majority.
Brett Stevens scores many strong points in Egalitarianism is the god of our time—an insane god. Who drives all his most devoted followers insane. Also at Amerika, this was a pretty good overview of the Consent Manufacture Industrial Complex: Rise of the moderate extremist.
Voters specialize in blaming politicians and big corporations for their woes, but those two groups are merely service providers who cater to the need of the voters for illusion. This illusion must paint the voters in a positive, almost heroic light, so it is always patriotic and/or altruistic. It must explain away actual threats by categorizing awareness of them as racism, and invent imaginary threats which can never be solved and therefore will serve as a perpetual jobs program for politicians and bureaucrats, who are all parasites. The voters create government by being, as a group, incapable of agreeing on anything but comforting lies and convenient illusions.
Also from Brett: Everyone is a crypto-conservative now. Well, maybe not everyone. But Progressivism is a hilariously easy religion to fake.
Sunshine Thiry’s got a pic-rich post on her Autumn doings. Tending her own garden well is the sort of thing for which women deserve attention.
Fair amount of theory behind Kill to Party’s The Emotional Pedestal and Sympathetic Manipulation.
The true difference between The Red Pill and The Blue Pill is in the understanding that women are wired to exploit male sympathy. The sad reality of modern living is how vital this information has become.
Imaginative Conservative goes into the wayback machine to 1951 with Mortimer Adler’s essay: Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education. And here is Eva Brann again with Image, Being, and Form in the Platonic Dialogues.
Bonald makes The case for zero annulments.
Which way to err? It is clear to me that we must error strongly to the side of presumptive validity. In fact, a good case can be made that the Church should never grant annulments, even though there presumably are some invalid marriages out there.
Umm… pretty much. Also this:
Common sense rebels against the idea that many people who’ve gone through a wedding ceremony and years thinking they are married may one day discover that they are in fact not married. Is getting married really so hard? If so, shouldn’t we all abstain from sleeping with those whom we believe to be our wives, because there’s a fifty-fifty chance that we would actually be fornicating?
Related, filed under What Could Possibly Go Wrong: I’m Sure.
Bonald also wonders Who deserves to be in hell? He looks at the modern apologetic approach of “absolving” God of sending sinners to hell by saying sinners send themselves there. While that’s technically true, it deforms the spirit of divine punishment which the Bible and Church Fathers were perfectly comfortable with. We are neither more merciful, nor more just, than God.
With rampage shootings as a backdrop and an assist from Milo, Al Fin talks about Saving Boys from Skankstream Culture that Alienates Boys and Men. This is an inspiring bit of social commentary and theory. For example:
Shadow economies, shadow infrastructures, and shadow governments of a relatively ad hoc nature must be devised, capable of hiding in plain sight — but ready to emerge should disaster and widespread catastrophe strike. And at the rate the skankstream idiocracy is going, such catastrophes could happen unpredictably and chaotically at almost any time.
For this important contribution to reactionary social theory, Fin wins an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.
This Week in Fed Up (without the hyphen), Real Gary finds Nigel Farage getting it.
Cambria Will Not Yield’s Saturday epistle: The One Great Truth. This one goes deep into the centuries’ old liberal War on Reality.
Filed under rectification of words, Venkatesh Rao has a strong piece at Ribbonfarm with Alice and Bob Discover Capitalism. He contends, “Capitalism is the indirect manipulation of illegible human relationships, through the peaceful manipulation of decision contexts.” He spends the remainder of the essay defending that carefully worded formulation.
Peppermint reminds us that Regret Rape is nothing new. Only the targets of it have changed.
That’s all folks. Think local. Act localer. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!
Filed under: This Week in Reaction, Weeks' Best