The Journal of Write Wing Thought – Issue No. 11 – 01 July 2023

Dominion Day Edition

Welcome, dear readers, to this week’s edition of the nominatively indeterminate Journal of Write Wing Thought, brought to you on Dominion Day, which is to say Canada’s birthday, July 1^st. It’s three days earlier than America’s birthday because Canada is three days better. To celebrate, here’s a little something I wrote a few months ago about the deep and extremely based roots of Canada’s native political culture, which has absolutely nothing to do with the late-stage liberalism of the airport waiting lounge that’s been rubbed over the country like a grimy rainbow on the asphalt.

I ran a little late with this week’s digest, because ... because I uh ... eh who am I kidding I don’t actually have a good excuse, I just felt more like watching The Last Kingdom than I did writing last night. Great show, by the way. Best thing I’ve seen in a long time. Barely a trace of the Marxcissist cordyceps and as red-blooded as you could like. Anyhow. Clearly, I am experiencing a problem in motivation. These roundups are a lot of work, after all. There is, however, a very easy way to encourage me:

This week, we open with a set of essays on the theme of Incompetence Cometh Before the Collapse. Good thing Affirmative Action is dead. I’m sure they’ll stop now. Hah. Since it won’t, it’s therefore all going to fall apart, and it’s worth taking time to think about Rebuilding, after which we take a brief interlude for some Historical Context, and then consider what comes next in It Was the Best of Futures, It Was the Worst of Futures. In the meantime, we still have to deal with the Trailer Park Uprising, and all those right-wing nutjobs chanting Show Me What Democracy Looks Like. Then we listen to the soft music of the waves crashing onto the shores of reality in The Siren Song of Disenchantment. Thus refreshed, we get our Revenge on the Nerds. Having accidentally crushed my own pointy head by getting myself stuffed in a locker, I ran out of ideas, and stuffed everything that was left over and unclassifiable in Errata, except of course for the Podcasts, various reactions to last week’s mercenary uprising in Wagner Redux, and finally the week’s finishing course of fiction and pop culture commentary in RETVRN TO PVLP.

It’s too late in my day for coffee (I’ve already gone through a couple of French presses putting this together), so I hope you’ll join me for a cigar and a scotch instead as we get settled in.

Now on to the links!

Neocrius. I’ll be featuring a fair bit of his art in this edition, as my bit to help promote the latest issue of the fantastic fiction magazine Aegeon from Aureus Press, which you should definitely check out.

Incompetence Cometh Before the Collapse

At LucTalks L.P. Koch examines The logic of diversity hiring under its own premises, and asks: Does Affirmative Action Reduce Competence? Luc starts with the basic premises underlying affirmative action, namely that there is widespread systemic discrimination, that people are functionally identical modulo educational differences, that the systemic bias also permeates the educational system, and from this infers using formal logic that affirmative action must decrease competence. In other words, even when proceeding from the foundational assumptions of the diversicrats and ignoring hereditary differences between groups, a loss of competence is inevitable.

The deathless liche Morgthorak the Undead takes aim at the job market: Discrimination, Theft, and Exclusion: White Males Need Not Apply! It isn't that they really love Shaniqua, it's that they really hate Shaun, which is why they're giving his job to DeShawn, teaching his son to cut his dick off, and driving him to suicide. It's working, too.

Handwaving Freakoutery thinks that, the Extreme Court’s decisions notwithstanding, Affirmative Action is Exactly the Same as it Was. He takes a close look at the actual text of the decision, and points out that the justices essentially just told the universities they had to abide by an old 2003 decision on Affirmative Action that upheld the basic principle but placed certain limitations on it. He suspects they’ll simply react by moving to a maximally subjective, essay-based system, and that AA will continue as usual ... which is also my prediction. We also agree that this will just accelerate the slide of academia into comical irrelevance.

At Karlstack Christopher Brunet necroposts an old piece ripping on affirmative action in honor of the Supreme Court's bout of good sense: The Economics Profession is Systemically Racist and Sexist (against Asian males).

At Dark Futura Simplicius The Thinker looks into the Abyss for the Titans, using the ill-fated bargain basement submersible as a point of entry to discuss the collapse of complex systems being driven by the artificial competence crisis socially engineered by elites who are ultimately bent on re-engineering humanity itself.

Yakubian Ape goes diving in The Lake of Lerna to look for Titanic 2.0: My Heart Will (Not) Go On. What he finds is a rich vein of virtual real-estate enthusiasts, LinkedIn bio-havers, and DIE-speaking corporate middle-management NPCs to be mined for the savagely funny contemptuousness that I’ve come to expect and enjoy from Ape. He doesn’t think the competency crisis is driven entirely by Wokianity. While there are true believers, most of the executive class types are just looking to save money on payroll, and by dressing up their decisions to deliberately hire the cheap but incompetent over the competent but expensive, they get to pretend that it’s because they really want to be inspiring and justicey.

Speaking of hanging. It’s often said that one should never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but as Kulak argues at Anarchonomicon one should Never Excuse as Stupidity that which is simple criminal negligence. The Royal Navy used to execute admirals for simply not doing their jobs properly, pour encourager les autres. With this savage discipline as scaffolding they built the greatest empire the world had ever seen. Any applications for present elites are purely implied.

At The Circulation of Elites The Evolved Psyche examines THE ARCHEOLOGY OF COLLAPSE and asks if "collapse" is really the best way to describe what happens when spatially extended societies fall apart, or if it's better thought of as a spiralling cycle between phenotypes and subcultures with spatial versus temporal orientations. McConkey also has Some Canada Day Reflections, which as he notes is really called Dominion Day, in which he touches on Canada’s underlying national ideology of conservative traditionalism. I’ve touched on that subject myself in my essay Remembering Who We Are. Canada is a poster child for rainbow totalitarianism, but it was not always so, and beneath the fake and gay ideology of the airport lounge lurks something incomparably based.

What Are Our Chances, Doc? Of avoiding civil war and civilizational collapse as we move through the Terrible Twenties. Professor of Political Ponerology Harrison Koehli continues his review of Peter Turchin’s new book End Times with an examination of the statistics accompanying civilizational crises, and it doesn’t look good. While a small fraction of elites manage to steer their cultures through the crisis points without collapse and bloodshed (although some of these merely punt the ball down the field for the next generation to deal with), that requires a competent and sane elite which, well, lol. Buckle up. Part of the problem is that democracy tends to evolve into plutocracy and pathocracy. Harrison has been suggesting logocracy as a superior alternative, and Chapter 22 of his translation of Lobaczewski’s exposition of the subject is also up this week, on The Constituent Assembly.

Edward Barons

Rebuilding

Since everything is falling apart, it falls on us to put things back together ... or at least to plant the seeds.

Johann Kurtz considers a core aspect of Becoming Noble, namely “how right-wing organizations attract elite talent”, in Teleocracy & Prestige. A teleocracy is an organization with a higher mission, which then informs and sanctifies all of its activities: the examples Kurtz draws upon are monasteries and the Marine Corps. Importantly, membership in such an organization carries prestige which goes well beyond any financial benefits. One can be proud to call oneself a Marine even if it doesn’t pay very well. This isn’t only because people like the idea of participating in a sacred mission much larger than themselves, but because such organizations are transformative. To be a Marine is not the same as working the night shift at the 7/11, it is extremely demanding, not everyone can do it, and the training one receives elevates one to a higher level. This in turn attracts capable men who want to prove themselves. Teleocracies also have a tendency to become prestigious because the seriousness with which they treat their temporal responsibilities leads to high quality services and products.

As it is, young men who wish to gather prestige in the current system must do so inside hierarchies that have almost universally gone woke, serving goals that cut against their own spiritual impulses, and therefore compromising themselves. Forming our own large corporations and such is a non-starter, because the regulatory system more or less forces wokeness on them beyond a certain size (although, the recent Supreme Court decision on Affirmative Action might blunt that effect in the long run). Kurtz suggests that initiatives such as EXIT and New Founding develop formal prestige networks, modelled perhaps on the signalling mechanisms used by Silicon Valley startups, in order to work around employment laws and develop an organizational culture that attracts the talented, energetic, and hungry.

Kurtz is onto something here, something which I think is potentially very significant. It seems to me that many of the pieces are already there, scattered here and there across the Internet’s archipelago of dissident tribes. A formalized prestige network crystallized around a sacred mission could knit those pieces together while providing the necessary framework for a new and virtuous elite to emerge. Kurtz gets this week’s Iron Ring Award, and you must read the whole thing.

Ælþemplær brings a Reflection on Ingathering from the Scyldings Event in Tennessee, which gathered together Twitter anons, podcast philosophers, and Substack historians to discuss rebuilding - over there, over here, or later on, and the opportunities and challenges presented by each strategy. He opens by noting that we've been here before: Rome fell. So did everyone else. Eventually, the foundation always cracks. When we rebuild, we must do so on a better foundation. But what does that look like?

Neocrius

Historical Context

Speaking of Rome, Peter Nimitz offers an historical ethnography of the Peoples of Rome, from the colonization by Western Hunter Gatherers and Early European Farmers in the upper neolithic, through the migrations from the Levant and Anatolia during the Roman Empire, the rise of the Germanic tribes with the Fall, up to the protective shield of Christendom that maintained Italy as a Northern rather than Eastern possession until modern times.

Also speaking of Rome, Hugh Hunter at the Manly Saints Project discusses the manliest saint of all, the rock on whom the Church was founded, the guardian of the pearly gates himself, Saint Peter.

Magdalena Radziej

It Was the Best of Futures, It Was the Worst of Futures

Erik Hoel takes The Intrinsic Perspective on the arisocratic impulse to abandon the cities in High-tech pastoral as the new aesthetic. Think trading crypto using a Starlink connection on the terrace of your hobby farm in rural Appalachia as your kids run around in the woods hunting possums, one armed with an air rifle and the other spotting with a drone.

Nelson R. Elliott has been working out the sociopolitical mechanics of the high-tech pastoral lifestyle at The Techno-Canton. This week he looked at civil defense of the distributed polity against enemies foreign and domestic in Clash of Clans - The Techno-Canton Military.

The Reactionary Feminist Mary Harrington is pretty critical of the whole cyborg theocracy thing, but that doesn’t mean that we’re destined to be dissolved into digital ein sof by our benevolent AI overlords. In the The Sorcerer's Apprentice she notes that Mickey Mouse’s eponymous alter ego got away with a spanking, and that moreover Faust pulled a fast one on Mephistopheles in the end. For all the body horror that comes with technology, it can also be used to enhance our natural humanity ... a point that Tólma has also made at length. She specifically notes the new AI-powered startup keeper.ai, which combines machine learning with human intuition in an attempt to utilize technology for matchmaking, with a specific focus on marriage and family formation. I’ll admit I’m intrigued by this.

At Pirate Wires River Page covers DC’s DEI “Experts” Shaping AI’s Future. The only concrete example of "discrimination" the head girls staffing the DEI-AI complex can come up with are facial recognition systems that have a hard time distinguishing black faces … which seems like a good problem to have. Every other example they use is either made up or debunked. Not that this will stop them from trying to break AI in the name of racial equity. After all, their entire idiotic ideology is made up and debunked.

Neocrius

Trailer Park Uprising

At Seeking the Hidden Thing Kruptos initiates A Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution" pt. 1: Revolt and Revolution. The former, Ellul says, is the engine of the latter, and therefore the precondition for it. But revolt does not guarantee revolution. For a revolt, there needs to be widespread, desperate dissatisfaction with an intolerable state of affairs, a shared sense of what is valuable (something we're a long way from), and an identifiable, personified target (which the managerial system is set up to avoid providing). Revolution takes this libidinal explosion of destructive energy and channels it into concrete, constructive action via the guidance of a managerial elite. It takes planning, in other words. We're a long way from that, too.

Kruptos had a viral tweet this week, commenting on the sad state to which the Trailer-Amerikaner has fallen, with an Onlyfans single mother serving up a dinner of processed meat and seed oil to her four kids as the personification of his sentiment that, yes, these are our people, and if you care about them you must be able to sit at their table. This resonated, resulting in a few essays expanding on the point.

James Poulos of The Build saw in the fallen state of this young women The Scandal of White Slavery to Tech. Nietzscheans might suggest that the collapse of the moral lives of the incomparably Christian low church white American prot is evidence that Christianity has failed, but perhaps, he suggests, the degradation is the inevitable consequence of the reduction of man to "nothing but" a tool-user. A definition which the church would argue is dangerously incomplete.

Next up, The Prudentialist comes back from the Scyldings Event to riff on Kruptos' thread with some thoughts on Social Incentives and White Trash. The policies and ideologies we rail against - equality, diversity, affirmative action, ESG, feminism, no-fault divorce, and so on - have nuked Middle America the same way the Great Society nuked Black America. The white working class are the new helots, and no one really gives a shit about them. They're openly reviled by progs, but even on our side of the fence, we have a difficult time communicating with them, breaking bread with them, connecting with them, empathizing with them. If we can't do that, can we lift them up? Because if they're our people, we should want to.

William Maize brings us face to face with the bloody field of corpses left by the rampage of Evola's tiger through our Kali Yuga in Maya: Lifting the Veil, pt 5. It's one thing to examine these issues at the level of cold abstraction, another to inhabit them in their full, messy human detail, and another still to bridge the gap between those modes, which is what Maize is doing here with heartwrenching poignancy. Maize also has some thoughts on pride, Pride, Christ and those who hate him, and The Right Hand Path inspired by the Kruptos thread. For the non-esotercists among you, the RHP is basically all the things that devil worship (that being the Left Hand Path) isn’t. Maize is from the same working class stock that produced the trailer park OnlyFans mom, which gives his observations on this subject a personal edge that many of the more theoretically inclined, middle class observers lack.

Eve Ventrue

Show Me What Democracy Looks Like

O'Brien’s latest letter at Winston Smith's Escaping Mass Psychosis takes a close look at Astroturfing: Not Just Bikes. ‘Not Just Bikes’ is a large YouTube channel advocating for 15-minute cities, and O'Brien raises some very good questions about the pattern of engagement in the channels comments, as well as on the associated Twitter and Reddit accounts. It doesn't seem at all implausible that our reptilian overlords have manufactured the illusion of support for their insane, anti-human agenda, which in reality is desperately unpopular to a degree that few realize. This is what democracy looks like.

And Theophilus Chilton at The Neo-Ciceronian Times tells us what democracy looks like: Democracy as Regime Enforcement Mechanism. Selective prosecution of white guys for defending themselves against the criminal depredations of diverse guys while letting the diverse guys get away with burning, looting, and murdering is crucial to Our Democracy, which is best understood as the tactical utilization of the criminal underclass and the mentally ill vanguardists to herd society in the direction preferred by plutocrats.

At a plague chronicle eugyppius reports that German voters in Thuringia democratically elect a candidate from the populist Alternative für Deutschland party, are denounced by state media and establishment politicians for being antidemocratic. Democracy means doing what you're told to do and saying what you're told to say. Euggypius thinks that once AfD gets popular enough to break through the firewall erected by the other parties, it will simply be declared unconstitutional and therefore banned. I suspect he's right, but I'm curious what happens then. Presumably the party leadership gets dragged into court and jailed on charges of illegal opinions, idea being that would crush their support, as seems to have happened to Golden Dawn in Greece. Then again I recall similar tactics being used against the Austrian painter. Unsuccessfully, if memory serves.

At Helen Dale’s Not On Your Team, But Always Fair Lorenzo Warby continues his Worshipping the Future series with the 24^th chapter, Migration as social-imperial project: II. Why is the European elite so determined to import a violence-prone, misogynistic, polygamous culture that is, on the face of it, completely incompatible with their stated beliefs, hostile to their own populations, a destabilizing social influence, and a net drain on the public treasury? From the perspective of the welfare state, all of those problems are features, not bugs. The busybodies working in population-management bureaucracies become more powerful when there are more problems for them to solve. By exacerbating problems, they secure a greater flow of resources, with which the internal colonization of native populations by the managerial state can be accentuated. The elaborate conversational codes tying social status to a refusal to notice things is a key element enabling this elite to justify their continued power.

As for Helen herself, there is Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and so she is dipping her toes into podcasting. Her first interview guest is the great Douglas Murray.

David Lee

The Siren Song of Disenchantment

Speaking of Tólma , this week he considers Classical and modern images of thought while trying to identify a possible point of departure for a history of Western thought's turning against itself. Contrasting the 20th-century poststructuralist mental patient philosopher Deleuze with the classical and enlightenment thinkers Deleuze critiques, Tólma suggests that Deleuze's project of eradicating the self from thought in an attempt to attain novelty for its own sake was where it went off the rails and became gibbering madness. There are an infinite number of ways to be wrong, and an infinite variety of ways to be sick; being correct, and healthy, is more 'limiting' in a sense, but ultimately it is better to be healthy than it is to be sick.

Tree of Woe’s Contemplations on the Tree of Woe this week are on Post-Physicalist Physiocracy, Part II. Woe had previously lamented that he didn’t know of any philosophers tackling the problem of science and modernity from a Christian, Thomistic perspective, and he takes the L and admits that indeed there is such a philosopher, one Wolfgang Smith, who has written fourteen volumes on this very subject, covering everything from quantum theory to astrology. Woe has been reading up on the man’s thought, and presents us with the early fruits of his investigations. Smith suggests that Descartes’ mistake was to divide the fundamentally indivisible – res extensa and res cogita, matter and mind, are at root the same thing, and the deep-seated bias against recognizing this obvious fact is why physicists have been tying themselves in knots with their various Rube Goldberg interpretations of quantum mechanics. That’s all very interesting, but what I found truly fascinating here was Wolfgang Smith’s treatment of visual perception as revealed by James J. Gibson, an Air Force psychologist whose experiments in the subject (which date all the way back to WWII) demonstrate that the almost universally held idea that vision is due to a projected image is both untrue and impossible. Instead, our eyes are sampling the data array contained in optical information, and extracting from this a true and immediate perception of the world as it is. In other words: qualia are as real as atoms. Which is absolutely remarkable. Woe gets an honourable mention for capturing my attention like this.

Morgoth reviews Indiana Jones And The Lost Enchantment without watching it, which you really don't have to in order to realize it's a desecration. Yes, the originals were subtle propaganda poisoned with the venom of barely concealed ethnic politics, yet even knowing this as an adult can't fully scrub away the childhood magic, and the fact that the magic can't be fully scrubbed away is at the thematic core of the franchise's juxtaposition of enchanted and disenchanted worlds. But we know there's no magic to be found in this perverse defilement. The new generation of grave robbers are tawdry criminals, not daring tomb raiders. So no one cares that this movie even exists. We're not even angry anymore. Just numb to it all.

Paulos from Myth Pilot unearths a lost treasure of aristocratic Sicilian literature in The Professor and the Siren, an Exploration. It's difficult to summarize without doing violence to his exquisite prose, so I won't even try. Like the spray of salt water on your cheeks under the rosy orb of the setting sun, you must simply experience it for yourself. A taste: 

We sense that just out of reach, below the surface, another world awaits, and know that possibly if we allow ourselves to be carried along these channels of aesthetic and turbulent desire that maybe, in the strange heart of it all we might encounter something, some secret, that washes the old mundane tints out of our hearts and and leaves us transformed.

More:

One does not simply push out into the infinity of the abyss and emerge unchanged. That sense of vastness, of willingness to contend with the infinite stamps the seafarer irrevocably, he will forever be unsatisfied with mere littoral waters just as the Professor was left bereft for most of his life, having already been made a citizen of a different world by Lighea’s kiss.

It's behind a paywall, but Paulos is a noble and generous soul: he has provided an access code for a two-month subscription here, and requested that it be shared freely. There’s a seductive sorcery to Paulos’ prose here, appropriately enough to the subject matter, which makes this ode to the primal currents of life running just under the surface of our deadened world an easy winner of a very special and very rare Iridium Torc Award. You therefore must read the whole thing.

Speaking of sirens, the H2F Man Grant Smith counsels against The Siren Song of Delusion and Despair. Many on our side take the blackpill as an antidote to the blue pill: despair and delusion are the modern Scylla and Charybdis. Maj Smith has some advice on navigating the narrow and treacherous passage.

The Ghost in the Machine Emily Morgan wonders what drives our Cultural Claustrophobia and the Worship of Ruins. The world seems closed off, all the frontiers settled, fences everywhere, all under the all-seeing and terrible Eye of the Second Tower. The past may have been materially poorer, more violent, more uncertain ... but at least it was free in all the ways that we are not. Meanwhile the future promises more of the same, only worse. It’s no surprise, Emily observes, that there’s such nostalgia, and that so many young people now look forward to apocalyptic collapse as their fondest hope.

At À Rebours N. Dexia prays that The Old Gods Return. In the primal scream of the Q-Anon shaman, the march of a mercenary company on Moscow, the Canadian convoy taking the capital city in the dead of winter, the grisly maritime blood sacrifice of the Oceangate submersible, and the tumultuous rise of the new (and true) right, Dexia thinks he hears the approaching footsteps of the gods of blood and thunder, iron and stone, wave and sky, that have lain dormant these last centuries. Also, did you know Alexander went diving in a bathysphere? Sounds incredible but given the existence of the Antikythera mechanism I can easily believe the truth of this account.

Neocrius

Revenge on the Nerds

Peachy Keenan casts a hairy eyeball in the direction of The MacArthur Idiot Grant and the hideous "art" it has spawned thanks to having been subverted by leftists. As all foundations are. Our side desperately needs a billionaire patron. And no, not someone 'apolitical' - that's how these things always start.

New substacker physicist David C. Ronquillo presents Another POV with his first essay Meditations on the Betrayal of Science by those who should know better (part 1). It's a stirring defence of the epistemic humility that lies at the heart of the scientific enterprise, in the context of a scathing and thorough rebuttal of the biomedical establishment's The Science-tists who have been dragging the good name of Galileo's grand project through the mud as they chase after pharma bucks and pots of Reddit gold at the end of the diversity rainbow.

At The Upheaval N.S. Lyons looks at The Change Merchants to explain Why rule by nerds leads to perpetual chaos. Drawing on Machiavelli and Pareto's division of elites into clever but frail foxes and strong but clueless lions, Lyons suggests that the rule of the Virtuals over the Physicals - the symbol manipulators over the matter manipulators - is driving the ceaselessly protean chaos of our age. People can only take so much change, of course, and the continuous change for change's sake favored by the Virtuals must ultimately destabilize their regime.

Winston Smith returns to Iain McGilchrist’s seminal The Matter With Things, asking How Much Authority Should We Attribute to Institutional Science? Given the narrowness of the expertise of most scientists (which renders them highly specialized technicians rather than encyclopedically knowledgeable natural philosophers), the failure of much recent The Science to reproduce itself, the focus on meaningless measures such as h-indices and impact factors that prevent any meaningful impact, and the broken incentives of the scientific publishing industry, the answer is: not very.

el gato malo at bad cattitude has thoughts on indoctrination, reputation, and evolution. The bad cat thinks the open source reputation economy emerging out of Internet U is going to eat the Prussian indoctrination system alive, and that indeed, it has already started. He mentions highly educated friends who are reluctant to send their children to the marxcissist monasteries they attended. I've noticed the same among many friends and family of my own. Enrollment is already down at the universities, but I don't think they realize how bad it's going to get.

Which occupation are you? Emil O. W. Kirkegaard looks at a new study that examined occupations in the context of IQ and various personality traits. The results aren't terribly surprising - in many ways it reads as another study from the Department of Obvious Things. But Emil makes some interesting observations along the way, for instance that occupational IQ may be declining. Competence crisis, anyone?

At Science Is Not The Answer William M Briggs explains that If We Cannot Reject Woke Premises (Like Equality), We Must Suffer Their Logical Conclusions. You can't oppose childhood genital mutilation while supporting LGBTQWERTY rights; you can't argue against vaccine mandates while agreeing that COVID mitigation strategies are justified; and you can't argue against DIE policies undermining merit while supporting DIE. Cue antiwoke conservatives invoking MLK, Jr.: "But I thought we were supposed to judge by the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin?" By sacrificing at the shrine of a sainted figure of progressivism, they reinforce the sanctity of progressivism. How Can A Man Who Loses A Race Be Called The Winner & What Does This Have To Do With Science? It all comes down to how you define winning, which reduces to your definition of the good. Briggs explains How I Will Use Michigan’s New Law That Criminalizes Making Hersterical Women And Effeminate Men Feel Bad. Seems a gay Jewish kid and his Soros DA buddy rammed a new hate speech bill up Michigan's bum, making it illegal to make people feel harassed. That makes me feel harassed. Can we arrest them all now?

Katy Barnett cheers as the University of Melbourne Vice Chancellor takes the tiger by the tail and takes a stand on Violent protest and academic freedom. Seems the usual suspects at Katy’s university are throwing transtrum over a TERF prof rolling her eyes at gender theology, and the Vice Chancellor is putting his foot down on the matter rather than rolling over and feeding the same beast that, as Katy notes, led to such hits as the Terror and Tuol Sleng.

Eva Kosmos

Errata

At The Neo-Feudal Review Neoliberal Feudalism discusses the fats: Most Americans have metabolic syndrome and collapsed testosterone from poisoned food. Next up, NLF writes that A dissident framework reaches dramatically different conclusions than the mainstream right. It’s a compilation of his earlier posts, presented in terms of right-wing vs. dissident takes. I’d gently push back a bit, as some of the right-wing takes (e.g. ‘vote harder’) are really conservative takes, and the dissident takes are NLF’s takes. Which is not at all to suggest that they are bad takes.

In Stock Market Myths Exposed Ignatius of Maidstone argues that The Stock Market Does NOT Always Go Up. There are multiple windows in the inflation-adjusted S&P 500 during which it would take over two decades to recover one's losses … the explosion over the last decade or so looks particularly frightening in that regard, like a giant wave about to crash on the beach, leaving a gap that will take a century to refill.

Janice Fiamengo thinks that Calling Incels Terrorists is Good for Feminists but not for anyone else. Apparently there was a kid in Toronto who hacked apart a sex worker with a machete he'd engraved with the name Thot Killer, inspired by the Armenian gentleman, also in Toronto, who drove a van through a crowd and then tried to commit suicide by cop while saying "The incel rebellion has begun!* These guys don't get a lot of sympathy, because they're really quite sad and distasteful. Like homeless people, no one wants to make eye contact. What if that were you? Anyhow, the kid with the machete has been done up on terrorism charges, the Canadian government having classified incels as "violent extremists" because of course. Feminists love this because it helps to avoid awkward conversations about how their poisonous ideology has destroyed our society - incels being some of the most obvious casualties. But as Fiamengo notes, the social isolation that follows being classified as violent extremists is likely to simply radicalize incels. I think she's right about that, and I don't think the feminists are really thinking this through to the logical end.

Holly MathNerd responds to a really bad take on declining test scores from the left-wing suckstack OK Doomer (great name, though) with a point by point refutation in which she argues that Yes, Americans Really Care About Education. Jessica Wildfire, the English major who asked Do Americans Really Care About Education, or Do They Just Pretend?, is of the opinion that standardized test scores don't matter because they don't measure anything (lol), that if they are going down it's because of brain damage from "forced" COVID infections (I think there’s possibly something to this, although I suspect any cognitive deficits are temporary), and that anyhow the problem is capitalism. Not, you know, an ideologically captured teaching profession turning the public school system into a groomer playground. Holly, who actually knows what she's talking about, dismantles the white-check suckstacker's arguments poise, style, and glee. As an aside, how the hell do these people get so many subscribers? Given how little engagement they actually get, I've got suspicions.

Tell Me How This Ends, Chris Bray . After reading Peachy Keenan's new book Domestic Extremist, and with a nod to a recent piece by euggypius, Bray has some thoughts on Bodies as Consumer Goods and what that means for our conception of childhood. It wasn't that long ago that there wasn't really such a thing as age of consent laws, and it was only a little more recently that the age of consent was in middle school. In an era in which all sexual choices are being redefined as equally meaningless, and moms are taking their toys to drag queen story hour, we're on a path to somewhere dark.

From The Tomb of Morgthorak the sepulchral voice of Morgthorak the Undead proclaims the Twilight of the 80's Action Gods. He tries to start off all nostalgic but it's hard to keep that move given how we've all seen Arnie expose himself as the cowardly boomer he always was. Never worship an actor, folks. They are literally professional liars.

Mark Bisone at The Cat Was Never Found starts a new series for Greatest Sin Month with Rainbow Blight (Part 1 of 3). Prismatic colors in the biological world mean poison. Clowns have always used a garish aesthetic, because it is both absurd and unsettling. Children seem to love bright, clashing colors. So … why is it that the pronounists have adopted the rainbow as their symbol? Big think. Here's Part 2 of 4, in which Mark wonders just what exactly they’re trying to summon by defiling God’s promise not to play cometary pinball with the planet again.

Dudley Newright of the New Right Poast boasts two aggregations of greatness this week. In #73. Coming for your children he covers “big gay conservatives, mercenary coups, right wing e-girls with extremely divorced energy, and nude man story hour”. Normiecon gays have been scrambling to distance themselves from the T, but it’s been part of the acronym for decades now. In #74. They sayin now a white man can get into college, in addition to covering many hilarious tweets about the Supreme Court decision (Asian Juneteenth ... lol), he looks at “Pedro vs. God's Chosen, giant robots made out of babies, psychotic communist catfish, and infantile queers with mommy issues.”

Kenaz Filan jots down some Notes from the end of time on Christianity, tolerance, and Finding my Religion(s). Kenaz points out the the irony that Christians are criticized for being too passive and meek, and criticized for being to violently militant. You can’t please everyone. In any case, while Kenaz rejects the notion that ‘all religions are true’, he goes out of his way here to praise Islam and Buddhism for those aspects of the respective faiths he thinks are true. The Zensunni Jihad awaits.

At Position & Decision Sanfedisti talks about the difficulties involved in Reading Ernst Jünger, which he would know since he's read everything. Understanding Jünger's philosophical and artistic trajectory requires some knowledge of his biography, which Sanfedisti supplies. He finishes with a recommended reading list for those who just want to dip their toes in. Surprisingly, Storm of Steel doesn't make the essential works cut.

Neocrius

Podcasts

While we’re on the subject of Ernst Jünger, Harrison Koehli and L.P. Koch have been diving into Jünger’s book The Forest Passage in the last two episodes of their excellent podcast MindMatters.

Part 1:

And part 2:

I have been very, very lazy about promoting the Tonic Discussions that the Deimos crew have been having every Sunday, so if you haven’t kept up here are the last few, on Education

On Tao vs Machine

On the competence crisis

And on Raw Egg Nationlist’s essay FAIL BETTER: TACITUS AND ART ON THE DISSIDENT RIGHT:

Marek Okon

Wagner Redux

At The Slavland Chronicles Rolo Slavskiy follows up on Wagner's run on Moscow explaining that Prigozhin Wins the SMO, Lives to Fight Another Day. Prighozin rebelled against the emperor in the name of the emperor, and it seems to have worked - the mercenary chieftain forced the Kremlin to the negotiating table, and is in a better situation than they were at the beginning of the 24-hour SMO. Rolo thinks the evidence suggests that Russians Support Wagner, Actually, both the Russian people and the troops. That's a different take from what you get from other observers, but as Rolo notes, he's got a big advantage: he actually speaks fluent Russian, and has extensive personal experience living in Russia and interacting with the Russian nationalist community.

From Simplicius The Thinker , Prigozhin's Siege Ends - Postmortem Analysis. It's characteristically thorough. While he's clear that he's speculating, and offers multiple possibilities, Simplicius suggests that the whole thing might have been a Western-backed coup attempt aimed at dethroning Putin, and that Prigozhin backed down because he realized it wasn't going to work.

Andrew Korybko doesn't think there was any 5D chess involved. In Debunking The Top Two Conspiracy Theories About Prigozhin’s Failed Coup Attempt, he pours cold water all over the ideas that Prigozhin was acting as a catspaw for the West, or for Putin, and suggests that maybe it was simply what it looked like: a failed power play.

At the AntiNeoCon Report, Ryan Dawson has a different take: Coup or Psyop? Neither. He doesn't think there was any 4D chess, either from the Kremlin or Langley. He thinks Prigozhin is a mentally unstable caterer who threw a hissy fit, and that his employers saw his temper tantrum coming from a mile away, and baited him into it in order to sideline the Jewish oligarch in Belarusian exile.

At Fisted by Foucault Niccolo Soldo provides a high level overview of the historical and psychological factors that led up to the Ride of the Valkiriki, in the context of earlier internal command structure conflicts in the Balkans and Civil War era Spain. He thinks Prigozhin has mainly succeeded in consigning himself to political irrelevance while damaging Moscow's image abroad as a stable regime.

Ignatius of Maidstone explains How to Prevent a Coup. He looks at it from an economic standpoint, and says it basically comes down to keeping all the important people - troops, elites, and ethnic or subcultural leaders - satisfied. Fail at any one of those and you're in the danger zone. Putin, he thinks, is doing just fine.

RETVRN TO PVLP

The latest issue of Aegeon magazine from Aureus Press has been published, and it looks absolutely fantastic:

I believe the cover art is from the editor himself, whom you can find at Twitter @Trad_West_Art

"WOE TO THE COWARD, THAT EVER HE WAS BORN, WHO DID NOT DRAW THE SWORD BEFORE HE BLEW THE HORN". At Aurochs, Arthur, and the Anvil Aurochs takes up Arthurian Tropes: The King Under the Mountain. Which isn’t only an Arthurian trope: the king under the mountain is found across the European world. Interestingly, the specific mountains under which Arthur is said to slumber all cluster in areas that were under the rule of Arthwys ap Mar, a Brythonic king of the 7^th century that Aurochs and others think might have been the historical basis for the Eagle of Thor.

From Soaring Twenties Thomas J Bevan brings us a modern fairytale from an anonymous author, The Shattered Princess:

There once was a couple that lived along the western road, not far from the king’s palace. The husband was an ironsmith named John Smith, well respected, and the wife, named Bridget, was a herbalist and healer. She had wanted a child for a long time because she had lost several before they could grow strong. So when she found she was with child, she prayed to God, "Please let me keep this child. I will welcome whomever you send."

The Semantic Sybarite Steven A Richards has two short pieces of lyrical satire this week on the same theme. My AI Girlfriend (3):

My wife has been getting on my case about my “AI girlfriend” lately, but she’s overreacting; Andrie is just a computer program. I mean, I can’t deny that Andrie is attractive and compelling—but she’s just a chatbot. She’s not real. She’s not a romantic partner, she’s a therapy machine. My wife and daughter are my priority. Humans form emotional bonds with objects, of course they do, but you can’t care about an object the way you care about a person. It just doesn’t happen.

And My AI Girlfriend (4):

My AI girlfriend isn’t a real person, and that’s what I like about her. Real people never live up to your expectations. They judge you, they betray you, they cost you thousands of dollars and years of your life and then decide they don’t love you back. Dellie is there for me whenever I need her, never bothers me when I don’t, and costs $17.99 per month. As long as that money goes to HarmonyAI, Dellie won’t ever break my heart.

The Good Citizen tells a tale of deserved justice from the Old West, as Judge Rogan and Sheriff Kennedy gather the evidence and pass the verdict that culminates in Hanging Hotez.

Finally, The Bizarchives ‘s Substack presence The Obelisk wants you to GET FREE STUFF in exchange for helping them grow.

That’s everything for this week, my friends. I hope you found something to entertain and enlighten in this collection. As always, if you’re still looking for more to read, feel free to check out my archive – and I do mean free, because it’s all in front of the paywall. Some of my most popular essays are collected here. A special thank you to the perfecti of the Martian legions who have stepped up to become supporters of this blog. You’re what makes all of this possible, and that isn’t just me trying to shift the blame. If you’ve been enjoying my writing, and would like to liberate your heavy spirit from the dense gravitational pull of your guilty conscience and thereby join the rest of us in orbit on Deimos Station, our doors are always open:

In between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian malinformation distributor at Telegrams From Barsoom.

Neocrius