Month: September 2014

The white radical’s burden

It’s rather fascinating to see the social radicals fight amongst themselves. Hilarious, even. Especially when it turns into a high school gossip match.

That is one takeaway from the “backlash” that spouted from Michelle Goldberg’s recent New Yorker piece, “What Is A Woman?”  While I haven’t read the piece in full, there are definitely some moments of introspection here and there mixed with some intellectual sloppiness (but then, social radical thinking was always filled with that).  It’s not a great piece, but it’s definitely readable, all things considered.  It’s one of those rare moments where the “radical” feminists actually take a look at themselves and say, “The fuck are we doing?”  It comes at a time when the radfems (such a dumb name) are really at odds with what social media has done to them: Creating nihilistic pursuits of ideological purity through groupthink combined with incentivized “sharing.”  But more on that in a moment.

More interesting in all this is not Goldberg’s piece, but responses from various “radical” transgender sources. Autostraddle, a “intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community” that is neither smart, funny, nor challenging or stimulating (but then I don’t watch television and film), dropped a turd of an article whose title basically states its own weakness:

“The New Yorker’s Skewed History of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism Ignores Actual Trans Women”

Putting aside the fact that headline is incredibly long and ostentatious, it shows that the writer (some nerd who probably failed journalism class named Mari Brighe) is too busy focusing on their own personalized agenda to notice that they sound incredibly stupid when they say these things.  I mean, if it’s about these so-called TERFs – which, by the way, even my friends in the Down’s community called a retarded acronym – why would they discuss trans people in any great length?

Brighe tries to make a case about how awful Goldberg is:

Let’s start with the numbers. In the piece, Goldberg mentions the names of 14 radical feminist activists (frequently providing physical descriptions), and provides quotes from nine of them — including two from books penned by radfems. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

Forgive me if I stopped after the first sentence. You’re forgiven if you’ve done the same: Slights disguised as statistics do not an analysis make. Utter nonsense. Maybe nausea, but that could just be because I haven’t eaten yet today.

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Political influence, in Virginia and ‘all creation, U.S.A.’

Bob McDonnell, governor before today’s Clinton satrap, became the first chief executive of Virginia to be convicted of a crime last week, being found guilty on 11 of 14 corruption-related charges. Now he faces prison time for his connections to Jonnie Williams, the now-retired CEO of Star Scientific, a chemical company operating somewhere close to the line between pharmaceuticals, supplements, and various other things — they were among the first to develop dissolvable tobacco lozenges (here is a picture of Lindsay Lohan at the launch party for them).

According one of the better articles on the relationship, by Peter Galuszka, that was actually an attempt to shore up the business in the midst of a patent battle with R.J. Reynolds, regarding what is claimed to be a way to process tobacco to be less carcinogenic when smoked, the invention of which reportedly involved Williams microwaving tobacco in his kitchen.

Needless to say, he’s an adaptable man, and much as George Washington switched to wheat when he proved to be an inept tobacco planter, at the time the scandal broke Star Scientific was marketing a new product said to be in part for smoking cessation, which is currently tied up by the FDA.

It behooves someone in an industry that straddles so many different types of regulatory regime to have powerful friends. When besieged rich people get political, sometimes bad things happen.

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Sacred Harp 89: ‘The Church’s Desolation’

Well may Thy servants mourn, my God,
The Church’s desolation;
The state of Zion calls aloud
For grief and lamentation.
Once she was all alive to Thee
And thousands were converted,
But now a sad reverse we see,
Her glory is departed.

And has religion left the Church
Without a trace behind her?
Where shall I go, where shall I search,
That I once more may find her?
Adieu, ye proud, ye light and gay,
I’ll seek the brokenhearted,
Who weep when they of Zion say,
Her glory is departed.

Some few, like good Elijah stand,
While thousands have revolted,
In earnest for the heav’nly land
They never yet have halted.
With such religion doth remain,
For they are not perverted;
Oh may they all through men regain
The glory that’s departed.

The end of the cult of Buckley

What to think of a magazine that feels it necessary to defend Phil Robertson but not Pat Buchanan?

That first tweet strikes me as probably correct, but it’s worth breaking down a bit.

In his defense, the CIA had great taste in journalism back in the day. Read this piece by Carl Bernstein if you doubt it:

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the oldSaturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress. The general outlines of what happened are indisputable; the specifics are harder to come by. CIA sources hint that a particular journalist was trafficking all over Eastern Europe for the Agency; the journalist says no, he just had lunch with the station chief. CIA sources say flatly that a well‑known ABC correspondent worked for the Agency through 1973; they refuse to identify him. A high‑level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966; he does not know who they were, or who in the newspaper’s management made the arrangements.

On the one hand, I suppose working with the CIA is better than, say, Claud Cockburn’s counter-espionage work in Spain on behalf of the Soviets. On the other hand, when a news media that lathers up the American people into scares about domestic extremism leads to a situation like Ruby Ridge, there is no functional difference, right down to the execution. The SPLC is a kind of counter-espionage organ, in other words.

(Ask yourself, if the CIA were to get involved in journalism today, which publications do you think it would be working with? Maybe one with unusually good access to foreign, often dangerous locations, posturing as subversive while actually helping to solidify American cultural imperialism? Fits the profile…)

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Towards a Neoreactionary Aesthetic

‘Neath an eyeless sky, the inkblack sea
Moves softly, utters not save a quiet sound
A lapping-sound, not saying what may be
The reach of its voice a furthest bound;
And beyond it, nothing, nothing known
Though the wind the boat has gently blown
Unsteady on shifting and traceless ground
And quickly away from it has flown.

Allow us a map, and a lamp electric
That by instrument we may probe the dark
Unheard sounds and an unseen metric
Keep alive in us that unknown spark
To burn bright and not consume or mar
Has the unbounded one come yet so far
For night over night the days to mark
His journey — adrift, without a star?

Adrift Without a Star

Generally, most cultural studies are done post facto, that is, to analyze that which has already taken place and is, because it is no longer taking place, a motionless body subject to dissection. We imagine that we understand culture that has passed from us because we can examine its ephemera from a safe distance; we inherently grasp the paradox of Heisenberg. For to say something about a living human culture is to alter that living human culture (provided that culture is aware of what was said.) To describe a person living is either to insult or flatter them; we may attempt zero proscription, but vanity comes not from an opinionated mirror but a neutral mirror and an opinionated gazer.

It is worth beginning a tradition of cultural self-examination, if such a thing did not exist, a way of describing what is ongoing and thus a way of describing that entails knowledge of something as living, and not a detailed examination of its husks and fossils. When I use the term ‘towards’ I do not mean to imply this is something that does not exist; rather, that it is something extant but nascent; something which, once it is named, will be recognized.

When I started following neoreactionary writers and blogs a while ago (at first, unintentionally, since there was no formal label to it) I began to collect impressions — informally — of the way in which neoreaction expresses itself. While some thrived on the notion of the different parts of neoreaction as being different, I looked instead for the reason why they were somehow able to cling together.

This is by no means exhaustive; these concepts are emergent and I have only included those that I have become certain of due to emphasis and repetition.

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Michael Oakeshott 2

Review of Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott

This summer I read what is now one of my favorite books, Rationalism in Politics, by Michael Oakeshott.  One of the premier conservative thinkers of the 20th century, his work is criminally underrated.

Rationalism in Politics is a collection of essays.  The best are in the beginning.  He makes arguments similar to Hayek in Law Legislation and Liberty: Rules and Order, attacking rationalism, the belief in the use of reason to re-organize society.  Instead, we should be aware of the limits of our knowledge, and not be too presumptuous in our ability to use reason to re-shape society.

Perhaps the best analogy to understand Oakeshott’s thought is to compare it to the Austrian idea of the market process.  Austrians dislike the economic focus on equilibrium, instead arguing that the market is a process by which knowledge is learned and society is organized.  Oakeshott makes similar points with regards to politics.  Rather than decry the messy reality, he embraces it.  People acting on imperfect and wrong information is inevitable in the political process.  It is only through such interactions does politics come to resemble the order that it does.

I highly recommend Rationalism in Politics to anyone interested in politics or economics.