St. Valentine’s Edition. Hopefully you celebrated the holiday by being romantic. Preferably within licit bounds. And in either case were inspired to bring new above average children into the world. “The future belongs to whoever shows up for it” is the True Meaning™ of St. Valentine’s Day.
Friend of the blog, Pax Dickinson has an important announcement to make: Introducing Wesearchr, An Information Marketplace. This is a project he’s doing with Chuck (Based) Johnson in the underdeveloped market for social information.
US Supreme Court Justice Scalia died last Saturday. Sydney Trads have a eulogy Justice Antonin Scalia, Requiescat in Pace. He was one of the good ones. Irreplaceable. Malcolm Pollack has an In Memoriam as well. Also some practical considerations in light of the great jurist’s untimely demise.
Speaking of which… You know Social Matter has a forum. It’s public, but you have to be registered to post. There’s a lot of quality contributions going on over there that aren’t getting the attention they may deserve. It is definitely not a Shit Show. We smack that down faster than you can say, “Puritan Question!”
Jim’s big, sweeping, impressionist work of art this week: Leftism, suicide, autogenocide, and cosmocide. This ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ is not without hyperbole. Of course. But not in this bit:
Your ordinary leftist, for example Scott Alexander is undeniably a nice guy. But he has no enemies to the left, and no friends to the right, which means that all his friends are his enemies, and all his enemies are his friends. He is incapable of seriously criticizing those to the left of him, and does not dare allow himself to comprehend those to the right of him. Thus Scott will completely and accurately identify some problem with leftism “but still, quite sincerely, ritually abase himself to it. He writes long sincere thoughtful screeds pointing out that baby sacrifice is lowering the birth rate and causing family trauma, though of course he fully understands and endorses that Lord Moloch must be sated with the only food acceptable unto him.”
Leftism is holiness, and in any discussion, any consensus, the holiest leftist or cuckservative always wins, so nice leftists always lose to evil crazies, and piously agree that they deserve to lose, since the holiest, being holier, should get their way.
After putting his supposed non-whiteness out to pasture last week, Mark Citadel finds time to Address Philosemitism. As expected he strikes the perfect balance on the question.
Antidem asked me a question about whether I’d be signing up my girls for the draft. I hadn’t even heard of it. Thank goodness I got friends who pay attention to the news… Ya know… In case the world ends or something… Anyway, Free Northerner has own well-constructed thoughts on Drafting Women.
Speaking of Antidem, he has a post up: Why My Waifu Is More Fash Than Richard B. Spencer. It’s about more than waifus. Thankfully.
Spandrell has some Data on Muslim fertility rates in Europe. He continues to like Islam for its ability to solve actual social problems. I wouldn’t deny this. But I don’t think Islam solves any more social problems than Christianity, if each were left to their own devices. Fewer actually. Of course, it could be that multi-culti-Europe will ((((shut down)))) any attempt at Christian renewal, but give Islam free-reign so as not to seem rayciss.
Reactionary Future (RF) has a pretty fair Criticism of the Alt-Right. In my view, it’s becoming clear that the Alt-Right really isn’t anyone’s property. Like all unowned resources, it will be wasted. Next he has a Criticism of HBD. If “Alt-Right” is an unowned thing, then “HBD” is even more so. There are of course manifold ways to be retarded about human bio-diversity, but HBD per se seems to be a fairly stubborn fact.
Also at RF, an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀: Humans are mimicking animals. Life, indeed, imitates art… when our cultural masters want it to. I think this is a significant contribution to Menciian theory. RF hoists liberalism by its own petard in a way I hadn’t seen before:
Liberalism and all philosophy post Descartes, especially post Smith and Hume, place desires and wants as primary – reason a slave to the passions as famously stated. This all ties in with the mechanical view of humanity and the idea of extreme individualism. The desires and wants stem from the human individual who is sovereign, hence you can have shit like utilitarian ethics. Yet, when Liberals act to spread their ideas and concepts they employ role models and refer to norms – they implicitly in their actions renounce the liberal concept of the human. Isn’t that funny?
Come and be an individual, just like everybody else! If liberalism is correct in its fundamental assertion that the individual is the autonomous pre-social building block of society, why does liberaliism only spread by vertical control over the organs of education and propaganda. To ask the question is to answer it: liberalism is obviously not correct with regard to the sovereign individual, and can only spread by the fervency of wishful thinking. Very very fervent wishful thinking.
And also several brief notes: One on Science and Capitalism and how nobody can agree what those even mean. And this reading between the lines at La Wik about Machine politics. The difference between a “political machine” and the “civil service” would seem to come down to little more than implied approval. Also he thinks the Italian Anni di piombi may be the most likely formula for an American reactionary future.
Dividual catches the Worm (in the Act of Turning) over at La Wik which prompt an outpouring of thoughts on Leftism and Christianity. Leftism is quite adequately summed up as supporting prophets over kings… and not vetting the prophets very thoroughly… and letting them become kings instead.
Anticipating his next jeremiad, Social Pathologist has up a couple of classic videos in Rethinking Race and Identity: The Doll Experiment.
Nick Land pulls up Andrew (Based) Mellon’s quote about liquidation. So far as I know, all of NRx—not just the “Outside in version”—is on board with that. There is of course more to a well-run society than liquidation of mal-investment. But certainly not less than that. What bothers me about Doom Circuitry is not that it is an educated guess about the future so much as it seems like a statement about how the future ought to be.
This too was interesting Sub-Cathedral Media. Journalists generally wear the pants in the journo-pol relationship in The Cathedral, even if sometimes it’s to expose a pol wearing the occasional pants.
Retrochronal notices Reaction plays by its own rules. Why Yes. Yes it does.
Alrenous goes Sophist Hunting: finds Scott Adams.
Anomalyuk has some thoughts on Neoreaction and Twitter.
Dutch NRxer Alf contemplates (in English) The Ultimate Brahmin. Or the next one, at any rate. Continuing on that theme: Prophet loopholes. Alf cracks me up. (In a good way.)
E. Antony Gray brings us A Canticle for Flight
Butch Leghorn wonders whether Lady Gaga Flashes Fash? Seems overly hopeful to me. She sang a plausibly reverent National Anthem. That’s about it.
Cambria Will Not Yield’s Saturday Missive: From Out of the Darkness of Utopia.
This Week at Social Matter
Official “This Week” Kicker-Offer, Ryan Landry recalls that time When Feminism Started A War. Well maybe not feminism, but people making bad decisions because of it. Landry chronicles the predictable missteps of April Glaspie, the first female US ambassador to an Arab nation. Iraq. In 1989.
David Grant adds his finale to his review of Star Trek: Chain Of Command. This one covers the second of that classic two-part episode, and offers deep analysis of the characters, the narrative, and applications in the Real World™. The Cardassians, whom we are supposed to regard as evilfascisthitlers by the writers, come off rather well in Grant’s telling. And Picard, progressive to the bitter end, comes across a bit shallow.
And…
Social Matter got an upgrade on Monday. Not only is SM not your grandfather’s conservatism… now it doesn’t look like it either. The web-lackeys are still ironing out some of the bugs, but overall I am pleased with the change.
Landry comes back on Wednesday with episode 12 of the Weimerica Weekly podcast. This time he is joined by Christian turned pornographer turned Jew, Luke Ford.
Newcomer Thomas Barghest makes a smashing premier with That Word Called ‘Order’.
Whether it is the decrees of God or Nature or inscrutable Power, the philosophy of the right is a philosophy of thriving under conditions set from outside oneself. Without these, reaction properly appears to be a caricature of stasis and regimentation–but the left recoiling here is simply a 5-year-old grossed out by sex, seeing only the possibility of cooties and none of the depth of love.
A virtuous society repudiates order without outside influences, like virtuous men repudiate sex without love. A closed system lives on its own excrement, and perfect autonomy and complete madness are indistinguishable. However, like sex without love is tempting and all too common and callous, closed autonomy is also tempting and also all too common. How much easier it is to be a shut-in with whisky and opinions rather than to raise a family. How much easier, even as a husband, to renounce one’s headship rather than to lead. But lazy sex is no argument against good sex, and lazy order is no argument against good order.
I can’t really excerpt my way to driving home Barghest’s points. This is NRx Canon material. Winner of the ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀ It’s just. That. Good. RTWT.
This Week in Idaho Royalist
I hope someone tells Rhys Caerwyn that dumping a giant pile of posts on your blog all in one day is not the best way to drive traffic. Spacing it out keeps people tingling for moar. Still, he dropped it all on a Sunday, which is a good way to catch that Monday morning “Back @ Work” crowd. And then there’s me, your humble curator (well, humble pointer-outer) to send a bit of traffic a week later. This week, Caerwyn, Idaho Royalist, has for our enjoyment a scholarly series The Tortured History of Post-WWI Bavaria (part one, part two, and part three). Weighing in at about 8300 words, this fills a major hole in 20th century history. And the lacunae of history are exactly where we need to be looking, because when Official History decides to ignore something, it usually good Official Reasons.
Part One of Caerwyn’s history covers the devastating last year of WW1 in Germany to the surprising and rapid rise of Berlin-born liberal socialist Kurt ((((Eisner)))) to overthrow the 700 year-old Bavarian Monarchy and become the first republican premier of Bavaria and his equally rapid downfall.
Part Two of the series zooms in on Eisner’s assassination, bloody aftermath, and wild days atop the government in Munich in 1919. The legitimate “Majority Socialist” government (the not too horrible guys) went into exile. The flamboyance of what remained of Eisner’s regime seems matched only by its short expiration date.
[Ernst Toller’s] Coffeehouse Anarchists lasted all of 6 days. Then, the Communists arrived.
These communists weren’t simply one of one or two dozen alphabet soup socialist parties vying for power. They were called “the Russians”. (((Russians!))) Caerwyn goes on to identify the major ones: Towia ((((Axelrod)))), Max (((((Levien))))), Eugen ((((((Levine)))))), and an actual goy German: Rudolf Egelhofer. The independence minded Bavarian “Majority Socialists” were no match for the Reds and were forced to appeal to the central government in Weimar to hold on to any pretense of power in Munich.
Part three covers the brief and blood-thirsty history of “Soviet Bavaria” and its fall, mercifully, to the Freikorps—initially battle hardened veterans of WW1 serving the Weimar government. But everyone likes a strong horse. In response to Red atrocities, the Freikorps, swelled by ranks of university students and the middle class, unleashed their own, killing 1000 revolutionaries and not-so-revolutionaries in a 6-day period, at which point they’re asked kindly to leave.
Caerwyn returns Friday with the Epiloque to the story. And a good bit of analysis for what this brief historically underappreciated period of German history foretold.
In a 6-month period they had been under 6 different occupations and governments, in rapid succession: it began with the monarchy, which was overthrown and replaced with revolutionary Socialism, moderate Socialism, anarchy, and Communism in quick succession, and it all ended with a savage military operation designed to bring Bavaria back into the fold of the central German government of Weimar. It succeeded, but the 6-month period of turmoil ending with a blood-soaked disaster in May would leave a city and region in ruins.
The liberal Weimar government seems to have been quite ill-prepared to handle the political passions of the Freikorp mercenaries.
What the Bavarian Revolution showed was that the government would lose control of these units and their officers, and would never command their respect and allegiance as they had in late 1918/early 1919. The Freikorps would continue initiating street battles with Communists until the rise of the Nazi Party, where in 1934 many of the Freikorps surrendered their standards and pledged their allegiance to the NSDAP. The more troublesome Freikorps leaders were simply killed off in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
Well, it’s history. So it’s hard to excerpt. Rhys Caerwyn has already condensed it down to a large extent, but you can probably guess where this bit of “Hidden history” is going. He writes in an exciting narrative style, and is an under-sung asset to The Reactosphere®. Get over there and RTWT! For his troubles, the Idaho Royalist an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. (Indeed, this would have been a winner most weeks, but Barghest’s masterpiece above was just too much.)
Let us see what was up over at Ryan Landry’s home base, eh?
This Week at 28 Sherman
Landry kicks off the week discussing Deutsche Bank The Bagholder. The bagholder, that is, for Wall Street.
Next he puts on his #NRx Hat and takes care of some housekeeping around the sphere In Defense of Spandrell but not Jim. Both cranky writers with much to be cranky about. The tl;dr? “Hey, folks, can the Alt-Right Donatism!”
This week in WW1 Pics: Colorized Ones
This Week in Kakistocracy
Coverage of the 34th (34th? really?!!!) Republican Presidential debate last week, prompts Porter to demand: Let’s dispel the fiction that this blogger doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
Next up coverage of New Hampshire, which to the American Consciousness is only important about every 4 years. And increasingly less so. For reasons. Porter recalls with some wistfulness the day when an Political Adult won the primary there.
Porter has some commentary post the commentary post Trump’s big win in The Granite State: Trump, the Very Bad Ungood. The breathlessness of the liberal establishment commentariat is herein duly mocked. Verily, it makes me wish that all the scary things they impute to a Trumpian future might come true. The reality, I suspect, will be far more mundane. Not that an inability of the media to correctly predict the future will ever be held against them of course. They are prophets, speaking ostensible truth to ostensible. Who’d ever be so impious to question that?!
Filed under Not Even Sure I Wanna Click That: Your Hi-Tech Sex Goo Future. Porter isn’t really interested in the nanobot-enriched ectoplasmic goo, as he is a potential future in which articles like this will be read as a sort of history:
And so in the day’s final twilight I find myself bivouacked in one of the area’s vast stock of available housing. Peering through one of the few unbroken windows of my casa for the evening I notice one lonely sentinel in the driveway: a ripped-apart Saab? Volvo? with its bumper-sticker appeal still defiantly pristine. Vote Smart, Vote Democrat. Funny. Democrats and Republicans. I haven’t seen one of those since the day it happened. Ideology went out just a few minutes after the power did.
There’s a reason men don’t organize by politics in prison. And about 320 million of us learned why over the course of a few days. For a vast many, the lesson came with somber finality. But that’s history, and who the fuck cares now anyway? But before wrapping myself in whatever rugs and carpets the house will relinquish, I noticed an old article sitting in a dusty printer tray. May as well settle in with a good bed-time story.
Porter has a big brain dump from the ADL Powering the Future and Beyond. Seems like they’ve discovered the “Alt-Right”, and boy-o-boy nothing like a bunch of… well… ADL folks to lay spread that schmaltz.
Finally: Athens on a Hill.
Given that human nature holistically is something much less malleable than the mind of a white college student, I think certain forecasts are fairly viable. One of those being the likely successor to a scenario of dissolved Western nation-states. It won’t be a frictionless liberaltopia of brownish-yellow consumer units, I can assure you. Though we’ll return to that shortly. For sake of foreshadowing, I think the “right side of history” may make a jarring U-turn to the past.
The past may be a foreign country, but quite a few Americans have been there. And still speak the language.
In pre “””Great Society””” America, a poor white family could still afford a safe, peaceful, and homogenous living space. As these were the amenities of their national birthright. Ones enforced by community standards and vigorously defended borders. Though 1964 ended the right to choose our associations domestically, while ’65 extended the restriction to the the world. And so we began the fitful process of turning our country into a petri-dish.
He goes on chronicle what has happened to some of those prices. It comes down so much more to “Good Schools” these days.
So what was going on with that Other Exception that Proves the Rule…
This Week in Evolutionist X
Evolutionist kicks off the week with Short thoughts on French and Russian Revolutions.
She has more on The Progressive Virus. Horizontally transmitted ideas might be beneficial… but that’s not the way to bet.
How do we know Progressivism is viral rather than mitochondrial?
Simply put, because Progressives do not reproduce themselves. Mitochondria can only reproduce themselves by being passed on to your offspring, and thus are incentivised to maximize your reproductive success.
Evolutionist X goes on to present a nice summary of the myriad of evidences that progressives do not manage to replace themselves with actual offspring. Instead, they attempt to pass their infection off horizontally. This is was an interesting point:
To be fair, ideas that began virally can become mitochondrial. Christianity in its early stages was viral, but later became mitochondrial. For an idea to become mitochondrial, it has to confer greater survival benefits on people who hold it than on people who don’t. Right now, Progressivism isn’t doing that.
The interesting question, therefore, is what Progressivism will do over the next 50-100 years. Remember that this situation of liberals not reproducing themselves is (most likely) a novel result of recent technological innovations. Will society keep moving leftward as Progressivism keeps spreading successfully to the conservatives? Or will future conservatives, having been born to the conservatives least susceptible to Progressivism in the first place, become, essentially, “immune”?
Indeed one wonders if the rise of the Alt-Right, and extreme politics throughout the Western world, might not be an attestation of this very process: A significant fraction of the population become completely immune to horizontal transmission of the prog virus. Evolutionist X earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.
Next, she has a very interesting Genetic Map of Europe.
Also a good bit of research in this: Intra-ethnic violence is crime; Inter-ethnic violence is war. There are good biological reasons why we care more about one than the other. It’s really been about a century since the project began in earnest (“Make war illegal”) to smush both concepts together into the crime category. And the body counts since are up.
This was very interesting. Some number crunching and speculation about Judaism as Memetic Model.
This Week Around the Orthosphere
Matt Briggs has another one up at The Stream: Obama’s Climate Challenge. Do Business Leaders Dare To Take It? Playing Russian Roulette is all well and good, until you put an actual bullet in the gun.
He shares his thoughts On Twitter’s Shadow Banning that we discovered last week. Like all media companies, Twitter needs to decide whether it wants to make money or enforce “social justice”. Trying to both usually means you do neither well. Anybody who still trusts the government or the media needs to have his head examined. Or hers as the case may be.
Here Briggs throws a bucket of cold metaphysical caution on the otherwise very interesting LIGO discovery. And also this: Science Confirms Astrology! Plus, Machine Learning, Big Data, And Causes. Same ol’ snake oil; new testimonials!!
Simon Wolfe has solid exposition of, and commentary upon, the Return of Kings Witch Hunt. Also at Iron Legion, Brother Antony pens Cycles, Cultural Entropy and Faith, with a pretty impressive oath for legionnaires of The Christian Military and Agrarian Order of the Iron Legion.
Over at Imaginative Conservative, a Timeless Essay (from not that long ago actually) on St. Augustine, Modernity, & the Recovery of True Education. Also a big big essay on Humane Economy or Romantic Utopia? The Vision of Wilhelm Roepke.
Giovanni Alighieri has a good essay on Christ’s Kingship and Man’s Obedience. Natural hierarchies are all of a single piece:
Is it any wonder, then, that in the centuries after the war against monarchical authority, one also witnessed an attack against every form of patriarchy, even within religion itself? Is it any wonder that the same people who would protest the rulership of an earthly king would also protest the rulership of a heavenly king? One would be very hard pressed to find someone who despised earthly patriarchy yet supported the notion of a heavenly patriarchy.
Speaking of colorized WW1 Pics: Cheshire Ocelot has some stunning ones from The First World War in Colour. And some good commentary too.
Chris Gale identifies one of the greatest privileges of all: Good Parenting. And as liberalism continues to eat away at the sinews and large-scale structures of society, that privilege will only become more valuable. And probably more offensive.
This Week… Elsewhere
Kill to Party has astute commentary on Hollywood’s forumulas in Movies Are For Girls: “Terminator: Genisys” (2015)
Hollywood has hijacked and redefined the boy-movie to primarily appeal to girls in its writing and thematics with the idea that boys are only looking for familiar shapes and colors.
So there’s blue pill movies. And blue pill movies, painted red. Enter Terminator: Genisys, which he sees as “an apology letter for “The Terminator” (1984). It’s more of a do-over than a remake.”.
Also from Kill to Party, thoughts on the Christian virtue of Humility, and how the progressive mindset is utterly incapable of seeing it, much less achieving it.
Aaron Jacob serves up a heaping bowl-full of Christopher Lasch, inter alia, with Impermanence and the imperceptible. And takes some exception to standard Dissident Right hermeneutics:
It has become a commonplace among those who have defected from the established Left and Right that we give insufficient consideration to the lessons of the past. But I’m going to suggest something different, if not contrary: that we have insufficient cultural technology by which to experience and interpret the present, and that simply reading about the past, or attempting to relive a particular period in the past, are inadequate or even counterproductive means of redeveloping such technology.
If true, this explains a lot. Among other things, the complete and utter failure of cultural conservatism to even hold, much less gain, any ground. Not only is there a culture war Side L vs. Side C, played out by feces flinging partisans, but underneath it a devolution of human capacity to connect psychologically to culture at all. The Culture War™ is thus seen not so much as a war between cultures as a war on culture itself.
Brett Stevens draws out The paradox of liberalism. Basically, it’s a system that always tries to make the world how “ought” to be, hard facts be damned. Which is a fun game to play… with somebody else’s money. Impenetrably hard facts. Be damned. Also parte deux of Andrew Jackson and the anti-Cathedral. “Honor,” Stevens concludes, “Is OS Freedom.”
The government, and all the apparatchik shrubs that constantly want more of it, are not here to help you. They are here to help themselves. They are here to help themselves to you and all the stuff that is currently yours. The only alternative to the managerial state that allows the progressives to use your butt as an ATM to pay for their perpetual Visigoth Holiday is an emergent concept of honor. The concept that was most fully embodied in Jacksonian America.
And moar from Brett: The American Nativists were right. Indeed, and that’s why they’re the “bad guys”. And this was quite inspired (and inspiring)—an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀: The next thousand years are ours. If we would but take them.
These are Soviet times. There is a right way to think, and those who think that way will be rewarded; those who do not will be destroyed by the angry crowd. The normal people cower in their homes and jobs hoping to be spared, but if history is any lesson, they will not. Still they do nothing. Like moss, they grow on their warm rocks, unable to change their fates.
Finally from Brett: The basis of civilization. Transcendence, says he. I think it may be more than that, but certainly not less.
Giovanni Dannato sounds kinda fashy here: Money Should Only Belong to Cooperators. But he scores several strong points. Especially about financialization. Money should belong to those who own it. Governments tipping the scales (e.g., financialization) to make sure “the right” people own it has vast pathological repercussions. On a much less Fashy note, Dannato also takes a stab at Rethinking the State. To fash, or to anti-anti-fash? That is the question.
Frost has juxtaposes the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge with those of the 21st century.
Thesis: millions of young western men are suffering from a crisis of spirit that is morally comparable to genocide.
Their dying is less painful, but slower and more dehumanizing. By allowing this massacre to occur on their watch, Western governments are as morally culpable as Mao and Stalin. Pickaxes to the forehead, mass starvation, poisoned wells, firing squads – all these are the crude, low-tech, messy and obvious tools of 20th century genocides. Why go through the trouble of actually killing people, when you can persuade them to do it on their own?
He goes on to outline the ways Western men are doing just that, both figuratively and occasionally literally. And also what might be done about it.
Al Fin asks What Can Dangerous Children Do About the World’s 10 Most Murderous Cities? Besides stay out of them. Also: A Few Reasons for Being Tough and Resilient.
Roman Dmowski points out that the The Libya Disaster was not simply “a failure to provide air support to a besieged compound that went wrong”.
This week in outrage porn, Real Gary contrasts Moschino Barbie ad versus the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook.
Greg Cochran has even worse news about toxoplasma:
Adam Wallace makes a nice stab at a taxonomy for the Disaffected Right (my favorite term for it): Defining the Online Dissident Right. Also a big paste from René Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World: Passing thoughts on the Inner European. With a bit of commentary.
BW Rabbit likes Seattle, architecture-wise.
Welp. That’s all I had time for. Not as long as the last couple weeks. (And hopefully better organized.) We’re gonna call this 1 1/2 days late. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week, TRP… Over an out!!
Filed under: This Week in Reaction, Weeks' Best