Monthly Archives: December 2018

Die Rote Pille?

December 30, 2018 – 4:36 pm

I met a charming and intelligent young Austrian man in a social setting this afternoon. I’d say he’s in his early thirties. He runs a small business, and lives in a very nice apartment here in Vienna with his wife and two small children. His wife’s American parents are here visiting, and we were invited […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (13)

RIP, TWIR

December 29, 2018 – 5:25 pm

I am sorry to report that This Week In Reaction, the weekly digest of writings from around the Dissident Right blogosphere that has been published at Social Matter for the last few years, has gone on what will likely be a permanent hiatus. My friend Nick Steves, the editor of TWIR, simply can’t keep up […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (3)

Offline

December 27, 2018 – 3:18 pm

We’re still in Vienna (for another ten days or so), spending time with our daughter and her young family, and enjoying a year-end break from our usual cares and concerns. I’ve scarcely paid any attention to the news, and I’ll confess that, as happens sometimes, I’ve had very little inclination to take up the pen. […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

Merry Christmas

December 25, 2018 – 5:53 am

…to each and every one of you. May we all put the world and its cares aside for a day to enjoy the sweet blessings of home and hearth and family, and love.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Media Spin On Michael Flynn

December 24, 2018 – 8:09 am

I’ve been out of the country, and not paying much attention to the news, but I did hear about Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing last week. And what did I hear? I heard what the mainstream media wanted me to hear: that the judge at the hearing, Emmet Sullivan, had rebuked General Flynn — whom I […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

The S.O.B. On Democracy

December 23, 2018 – 4:44 pm

The S.O.B. is, of course, the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. I’ve just re-read his Notes on Democracy, after many years, and it is as astringent as I remembered it. For example: It remains impossible, as it was in the eighteenth century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reaction | Comments (0)

Tilting At Windmills

December 21, 2018 – 1:27 pm

It has for many years been a tenet of the Progressive religion that solar and wind power must replace fossil fuels as the source of supply for our energy-hungry civilization. Critics of the idea have said all along that this is an impossible dream, a colossal waste of resources, is destructive to the environment in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Global Warming | Comments (9)

Sayonara, Syria

December 20, 2018 – 9:04 am

There’s been a ruction, unsurprisingly, about President Trump’s announcement that we’ll be pulling U.S. troops out of Syria. I have no objection whatsoever to this decision: Mr. Trump’s promise to disentangle ourselves from pointless and costly wars in far-off snakepits was an important part of why he was elected, and Syria, a viper’s nest if […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Foreign Affairs | Comments (8)

Michael Vlahos On “Progressive” Religiosity And Civil War

December 17, 2018 – 10:25 am

I’ve written for years (as have many others on the dissident Right, most notably and influentially Mencius Moldbug) that modern-day Progressivism is in fact a secularized religion. This diagnosis is plainly evident not only in its form and content, but is also confirmed by its genealogy, which reveals a lineage extending back (at least) to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Special Delivery

December 16, 2018 – 6:24 am

The lovely Nina and I have just welcomed into the world our second grandchild, Declan Calder Wright, born to our daughter Chloe and her husband Christopher (who is as fine a young man as ever there was) here in Vienna, Austria, at 2:40 p.m. on Saturday, December 15th, 2018. (His middle name, Calder, was my […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

December 12, 2018 – 3:33 pm

Here’s an illustrative point from Theodore Dalrymple: Curiously, liberals who have long denied that punishment deters crime””or indeed serves any purpose, except to take vengeance on the weak and vulnerable, driven to crime by their wretched circumstances””are generally avid for strong penalties for hate crime. The way to make people like one another is to […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Localism And Globalism: Ebb And Flow

December 11, 2018 – 10:06 am

As a staunch subsidiarianist, I’ve been pointing out for a while now the perils of centralization and interdependency in global and regional affairs. Just over two years ago I wrote: It is well-known in the engineering disciplines that too-tight “coupling” is at the root of many, if not most, failures of complex systems. Far more […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (1)

Report From Abroad

December 10, 2018 – 5:09 pm

The lovely Nina and I are settled in now in Vienna, and our daughter is due to bring forth our second grandson on Wednesday (though he may arrive sooner). We are quartered in a little apartment in the 3rd District, just around the corner from the Hundertwasserhaus, and we are waiting, well, expectantly. Paris may […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Service Notice

December 6, 2018 – 1:38 pm

Sorry it’s been slow here. We’ve been getting my 97-year-old mother-in-law‘s life in order after her fall last month, and today the lovely Nina and I are off to Vienna, where our daughter is expecting her second child — a baby boy — on the 12th. I’ll be back online once we get settled in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

What If…

December 5, 2018 – 11:45 am

Over at West Hunter, Greg Cochran imagines a counterfactual world in which everything we on the Dissident Right know to be true is false, and everything we are told to believe by our cultural overlords is true. I reproduce this vision below, in full: Since I just found out that someone already wrote the story […]

By Malcolm | Posted in HBD | Comments (0)

The Other Shoe

December 2, 2018 – 2:08 pm

While all the attention has been on Robert Mueller’s abusive inquisition into factitious allegations about Donald Trump’s “collusion” with Russia, there’s been another, far more serious, investigation moling away in the background: DOJ Inspector General Horowitz’s inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Obama administration’s shady dealings with Rosatom and Uranium One. Wiring at National Review, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)