Monthly Archives: May 2017

Any Questions?

If you’re planning to major in political science at New York’s Hunter College, you can earn three points by taking a course called “Abolition of Whiteness“. You may now be thinking something like this: “Wow, that’s some pretty blatant racism there; it almost sounds like a call to genocide. Somebody should ask these people: what […]

Domino Theory

Here’s a video clip that dramatically illustrates an interesting and counterintuitive fact: a small domino can knock over a domino up to 50% bigger than itself. This means that this knocking-over can very quickly “scale up”.   How is this possible? The first domino in this video can’t weigh more than a gram, while the […]

Eat A Peach

I’m saddened to note the death of yet another important musician of my generation: Gregg Allman, at the age of 69. They seem to be going faster and faster now.

Introducing: The 2022 Cadillac Eris!

I predict: Before too much longer, new cars will come with an autonomous, “self-driving” mode. In the beginning, at least, this will be an option that drivers can switch on or off. There will be a great many married couples of “a certain age” in which the wife will want the husband to use the […]

The Church of Christ Without Christ

I’ve just run across a really excellent essay, from 2014, about our hegemonic modern religion — a religion that the author, Joseph Bottum, correctly identifies as deracinated Protestant Christianity. The essay is long, but there is very little in it for me to disagree with. To the neoreactionary reader it will sound some very familiar […]

It’s Turtles All The Way Down

From the Federalist: a reasoned response to a student’s claim that quiet, wood-paneled rooms at universities are a form of oppression. The problem, of course, will be that the very idea of persuasion by “reasoned response” is itself an oppressive cultural artifact. And so it is: it is how our culture oppresses unreason. Unfortunately, this […]

Stairway To Hell

Mark Steyn weighs in on Manchester, here. A longish excerpt: A few months ago, I was in Toulouse, where Jewish life has vanished from public visibility and is conducted only behind the prison-like walls of a fortress schoolhouse and a centralized synagogue that requires 24/7 protection by French soldiers; I went to Amsterdam, which is […]

Scoop!

From the Washington Post, a penetrating insight: Some in Manchester, and beyond, see the attack as one that targeted women and girls To read the whole story, go to the Post‘s online search-box and enter the keyword “DUH”. Or click here.

Pet-Rock Democracy

Here‘s a good piece by Victor Davis Hanson on our current political hysteria. And while we’re at it, don’t miss Buchanan’s latest. PS – just saw that our e-pal David Duff had linked the Hanson piece as well. It’s making the rounds.

Bismillah

A jihadi blew himself up in Manchester, England last night, at a pop concert crowded with teenage girls. There will be the usual effusion of pious public responses, followed by some incremental increase in the hindrances, indignities and surveillance imposed on innocent Westerners in their homelands. There will then be a lull of indeterminate duration, […]

Graecopithecus freybergi

Big news, if true: humans emerged in Europe, not Africa.

Facing Down The Witch-King

Following on our previous post, our reader and commenter “Whitewall” has sent along a link to a post by the professor of history at the University of Chicago who was, as it turns out, the object of Dr. Karl Seigfried’s fulminations. The post, a brave and rational woman’s response to a darkening madness that seeks […]

The Very Model Of A Modern Marxist Jabberwock

Our reader and commenter Robert, a.k.a. “Whitewall”, has sent along an item from the University of Chicago Divinity School’s newsletter Sightings. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the postmodern cult-Marx priesthood that haunts the halls of the 21st-century Cathedral. (That is to say, the ones who are responsible for the grooming and education […]

Peccavi

Recently I quoted Col. Jeff Cooper. Our e-pal Bill Keezer passed along the quotation to Bill Vallicella, who reposted it on his blog. Bill did, however, notice that I had offered no source, and remarked that he doesn’t like unsourced quotations. He looked for a source, and couldn’t find one. I can’t either. I have […]

Of Machines and Monkeys

In a response to our Jeff Cooper quote a couple of posts ago, commenter Uriel Fiori linked to a post from 2013 by Nick Land. That post, at his blog Outside in, is called “Monkey Business”, and it discusses a tension in neoreactionary thinking about something called “orthogonalism”. Simply put, “orthogonalism” is a way of […]

Coming Apart

I’ve mentioned Charles Murray rather a lot recently; this is because he is often in the news lately, and has been right on the frontlines of the culture war. The pillorying and excommunication of this meticulous and mild-mannered scholar also shows the extent to which ideological and cryptoreligious loyalties and prejudices have contaminated science as […]

No One Sings Like You Anymore

I note with great sadness the death of Chris Cornell. He was a musician of exceptional gifts; in particular, I consider him one of the greatest vocalists in the history of rock music. He will be deeply missed.

One Thing Leads To Another

“If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls […]

Power Tools

“Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools […]

Emmanuel Goldstein Murray

Recently the social-sciences scholar Charles Murray was assailed by a hate-filled audience at Middlebury College. It happened again today in a Congressional committee room. Watch the video here.

Tank Slapper

I haven’t written much about the ongoing siege of the Trump presidency; I haven’t frankly, had much to add. But I should say something, I suppose. It should be obvious to all that a bloodthirsty coalition of the media and members of the United States Government (especially, in the latter category, members of the judiciary […]

The Future, By The Numbers

Making the rounds is a video by Mark Steyn in which he discusses the demographics of Europe and Africa, and Steve Sailer’s “Most Important Graph In The World“. Take particular note starting at 9:55, if you’ve been wondering why Europe’s leaders don’t seem to give a damn about the future.

Stuff To Read

I’m busy in the obvious ways this Mothers Day (Mother’s Day? Mothers’ Day?), so I’ll just pass along two articles that are worth your time: Angelo Codevilla on our cold civil war, and Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn on three ways that democracies become tyrannies (the Tocquevillean model, quoted here just recently, is number three).

Word Of The Day

Two, actually: baizuo, and shengmu. They’ll come in handy. Learn more here. Update: I was remiss not to give a hat-tip to Nick Land for this.

You May Say That I’m A Dreamer…

If I may, readers, I beg you to allow me a momentary departure from our customary rigor and gimlet-eyed realism: Conjure this up in your mind’s eye: a nickel-iron meteorite, ten or twenty meters in diameter, plows into the National Mall at high velocity on a busy autumn weekday. In stroke, it’s all gone — […]

Ship Of Fools

When I linked to Andrew Sullivan’s New York article about neoreaction last week, I hadn’t realized that it was just one piece of a much larger Festschrift the magazine had thrown together for its April 30th edition. I’ve just had a look at the rest of it. The collection is, like the modern West itself, […]

The Edacity Of Hope

According to the Express, Barack Obama is going to be paid $2.5 million dollars for a speech he’s giving in Milan today. This follows on a $400,000 speech he gave on Wall Street a while back, and a $65-million advance he and his wife were given for books they (or someone) will be writing. Mind […]

A Bit More Optimistic?

I just paid a visit to Bill Vallicella’s website — I hadn’t stopped by in a couple of days — and saw that he had mentioned me in a recent post. Bill quoted a remark he had made in a comment-thread back in 2015: We need a broad coalition of the sane which would include […]

Reacting To Reaction

Here’s a remarkably frank look at neoreaction, from the increasingly red-pilled Andrew Sullivan. I’m too busy at the moment to comment — other than to say that Mr. Sullivan still has too much universalism and Progressive optimism in him to grasp the nettle just yet — but it’s encouraging to see the “progress” our side […]

Service Notice

After much wrangling with Bluehost, I believe the server-side caching problems we’ve been having with the site are now fixed. Please leave a comment if you see any more odd behavior.

Nye’s Quadrant

For today, some climate heresies: In a post at her blog, Actual Climate Scientist Judith Curry discusses a diagram that divides scientific work into four quadrants. The corners of the diagram represent high vs. low priorities on two different axes: the pursuit of some kind of practical utility (X), and the pursuit of basic understanding […]

Harris And Dennett, Again, On Free Will

After posting the Sam Harris interview with Charles Murray last week, I browsed through some of Dr. Harris’s other podcasts. Among them I found a conversation with Daniel Dennett on a topic about which the two of them have had a public spat: free will. Both of these men are, obviously, uncommonly intelligent and articulate, […]