Good to have != need. Having a critic is great. Needing a critic means I’m disconnected from reality and I am connected to the status framework.

Good criticism is reality faster

I call bullshit on this fodderall that takes Hume’s simple warning to consider why things ‘are’ + ‘is’ and not confuse and miscegenate them with ‘should be’ and ‘ought’ …. requiring as always a unending vortex of complex meta-verbiage that increases in torque until it spirals up the thinkers ass and into his brain and out his mouth. Correct me for being misinformed, but I didn’t read Hume as suggesting the ‘is/ought gap’ was the new advent and a fit occasion to build a royal suite of sandcastles in the sky. He was observing that people often build rube goldberg philosophical contraptions in their head that always seem feverishly obvious when tested by the same fallacies used to build it. An Architect does not design or build on ‘oughts’, nor does any other physical science unless you call applied dialectical marxism a physical science as some used to if they hadn’t been assigned to the dustbin of history (I’m hoping permanently). There is no conflict between ‘is’ and ‘to be’, but there is a problem with ‘ought’ and ‘to be’, in that ‘ought to be’ is passive, feminine, whining and annoying, especially when expressed in a torrent of psuedo-philosophical logorrhoea. Who wouldn’t, as Göring suggested ‘reach for his revolver’?

But as neoreactionaries we should make ourselves informed on the subject, because arguably the “Is-Ought Gap” is a result of the same intellectual/philosophical error that led us to where we are now.

I highly recommend reading Alasdair MacIntyre, who covers this (and also why the Enlightenment Project had to fail – which does not mean we need to dismiss the worthy parts of that first Enlightenment, simply the unworthy parts).

I also highly recommend Edward Feser’s “The Last Superstition,” which, among other things, critiques the whole Is-Ought gap, and/or his Aquinas book.

Also, Phillipa Foot’s “Moral Beliefs” paper.

Noting that the work that has been critical of the “Is-Ought distinction” tends to have been done in the Aristotelian philosophical tradition. Hopefully that’s reactionary enough (without having to buy into everything any Aristotelian ever said).

ANd yes, Hume did shift the burden of proof (look up “Hume Shifts the Burden of Proof” on friesian.org).

Also while I’m plugging away, the “divergence point,” intellectually, seems about the time as many other divergences neoreactionaries tend to note (here I’ll dirgress and recommend North’s “Postmillenialism and the Progressive Movement,” and Quant’s “Secularization of Postmillenialism,” pdf’s of both articles being online for free. I’ll also recommend McCloskey’s book on Bourgeousie Dignity; which while not explicitly highlighting Postmillenialism, picks out exactly the place, time, and intellectual/rhetorical strains that a good neoreactionary would expect to find; and noting that even we neoreactionaries wouldn’t want to throw out *all* of this. As many have said, we ourselves are a sort of heretical offshoot of the Cathedral, reacting against its most pernicious strains, and the flaws in its inception which led us to where we are now. Critical flaws that tend it towards hypertrophy and civilizational dissillusion, and thus which need to be corrected. But now I’m digressing wildly).

Grant agencies seem to have similar leverage, but grant seats are determined in part by who publishes the most…

@Ht: if this is so, how it worth money? I expect new journal editors are chosen by the old journal editor. If I’m out to prove I’m disenfranchised so that I can discredit ‘democracy,’ mission accomplished – except that ‘democracy’ need justify itself to no one.

Seems that this information would be worth millions if not more. The keys to the kingdom.