2,000 Posts

We reached something of a milestone the day before yesterday: 2,000 posts.

The Orthosphere has been in existence for 8 years now. While we remain tiny in the grand scheme of things across the blogosphere, nevertheless the sheer numbers we’ve accumulated so far are enough to raise my eyebrows in astonishment: we’ve garnered 2.8 million page views, 1,300 followers, and almost 44,000 comments from readers and contributors.

I am pleased that we have continued to refrain almost completely from commentary on the political news of the day, most of which is noise, or else stupid, or both. We’ll try to keep that up, so that our stuff is more or less timeless.

That said, we’d like to hear from readers if there is anything you wish we did more of – or less.

Thanks to all the Orthosphereans – contributors, commenters, readers, and participants in the broader orthosphere at many sites – for what has been so far a most edifying progress over the orthological formscape. There is much still to explore of that great continent, in all its dimensions – intellectual, moral, aesthetic – much still to learn. I look forward to the next 8 years.

The Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right

What is popularly called the Right these days is of course mostly just Right Liberalism; which is to say, Right Leftism. I.e., not Right at all. This had been known in the discourse of reaction since about 2002, when Lawrence Auster, Zippy, James Kalb, Moldbug, et alii, first began writing online.

The Right, period full stop, is not in fact Right. It is rather the “Right.” So have we seen in the last few years the rise of several other sorts of Right, that distinguish themselves from the “Right” with the same urgent animosity that true Communists display in distinguishing themselves from mere liberals and panty-waist Socialists and Social Democrats.

These sorts fall into four categories: the Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Right, the Del-Right, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. These sorts are all more truly of the Right. But only one of them is right, or therefore Right; so that it integrates, and indeed consolidates, all other sorts of Rightness.

Much has been written of the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right takes the deliverances of the Normal Narrative and turns them upside down. Viz., sexual realism, racial realism, national realism, cultural realism, and so forth, as against the Mass Indiscretion, blindness, and Failure to Notice that is so characteristic of those poor pathetic souls not yet liberated from the Normal Narrative.

Then there is the Del-Right: all the ilk of the anarcho-capitalists, the techno-futurists, the thoughtful realistic libertarians, and especially those souls who find their guts arrayed in horror and disgust against the Swamp, against the Deep State, against the Cathedral, against the Cabal, and so forth – against, that is to say, the Cult of Moloch and his babelarchy – who insist that the first and essential step to restoring social equilibrium and cultural health is to delete the political, cultural and especially bureaucratic accrustations of the last few centuries, at least.

Then again there is the Ctrl-Right, who would restore outwardly, and consecrate, the ancient royal and sacerdotal hierarchy that always anyway, somehow or other – nowadays mostly hidden, a corrupt oligarchy that dare not speak its name – administers social coordination.

Then at last there is the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. That’s us: reboot; all of the other sorts of more truly Right, integrated and so kicked up a notch or three.

NB that because the orthospherean Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right [man, that’s hard to type!] includes and subsumes the other sorts, it administers in the process some necessary corrections and adjustments of each, so that they all fit together coordinately and harmoniously.

A Word About My Late Silence

Several loyal orthosphereans have written me privily in recent days, to inquire politely after my health and well-being. This, due to my recent absence from this and every other online forum.

I write now therefore to assure any others who have been likewise worried that everything is fine with me personally, except in one enormously important respect: my wife and I have been for the last few months entirely, and indeed more than entirely, engaged in moving houses (and buying, and selling, too). Moving is irksome and distracting even for a college kid with nothing more than a backpack of clothes and a shelf or two of books. We however have been engaged in a move more massive by several orders of magnitude: downsizing after a career of raising kids in a large house with (we now realize) really ridiculously grand amounts of storage.

The Rectification of Grammar

The Rectification of Names is obviously important, if our talk is to be pertinent to reality, ergo effectual. But prior to the rectification of terms is the rectification of the grammar we use to treat of them. If we can’t agree on the right *way* to talk, we shall certainly find it impossible to agree on the right things to talk *about.*

Too often on sites putatively dedicated to the restoration of the West, or of Tradition, or to Reaction (toward tradition) have I seen writers err grammatically, at the most basic level; even that of the agreement as to number of subject and verb. It makes them look like fools.

Our Deathless Essays

We have just published a new page in the Resources section of the Orthosphere, intended to provide a synoptic view of the articles we think might be of lasting interest or value. A few months ago, we started categorizing such articles as Essays, and introduced a widget on the main page of the site that listed the twenty most recent essays. The new page is intended to supplement that list, and provide an easy way for readers to see all the essays we have so far categorized as such. It is a simple bullet list of titles, ordered by date of publication.

Now, the real work begins. Only the last few months of writing have been consistently evaluated for their timelessness, and we have been publishing here for more than five years. The contributors have a lot of work to do in categorizing earlier posts as essays.

Please let us know of suggestions that would make the page easier to use.

Essays Timely and Timeless

Alert readers will have noticed the recent appearance at the right of this page of a new “widget,” as such things are called in the jargon of WordPress: Recent Essays. It is intended to provide a way of seeing our recent long-form posts that, in the estimation of their authors, deserve to remain in view for a bit longer than might be the case if they appeared only in the main thread of posts.

The New and Improved Comments Policy

There are two changes, only, to the language long present in our Comments Policy. First, we have added a new first sentence:

Comments at the Orthosphere are moderated by the contributors.

Second, we have increased the stringency of our criteria for the sorts of comments we deem fit to appear here, as follows; new language is in bold:

In some cases we may also delete comments on grounds such as libel, obscenity, incoherence or stupidity, or abuse of English grammar, syntax, or diction. The Orthosphere is meant to be a bastion of civilization, so barbarity of any sort will suffer the editorial axe.

Comments that are not immediately intelligible to a moderator will not be posted.

Babelonian Synchronicity

Believe it or not, I only this evening realized that, while my post of the 26th and JM Smith’s post of the 23rd were quite different, both concerned Babylon. I suppose his post must have played a role in my intuition – in an email correspondence with Tom Bertonneau a few days later – that “Babel” might be a suitable name for our Enemy in his current corporeal instantiation. In retrospect, it seems as though it could hardly have been otherwise. But at the time, I had no conscious recollection of Dr. Smith’s excellent essay. None whatsoever. Had you asked me about it, I would have been able to reel off a précis of the piece. But at no point in the writing of my post a few days later did it occur to my recollection.

In this event, at least two things are of interest to me.

A Thousand Essays

The Orthosphere yesterday reached 1,000 posts since we began writing here in early 2012. Meaningless in itself, this passage nevertheless marks a milestone. It is fitting then to reflect on how well we have met our original purpose, of providing a traditional, orthodox Christian perspective on the maelstrom ever in progress here on Earth.

Notice: The Orthosphere May Be Moving

Our domain is expiring quite soon, and we are having some frustrating difficulties renewing it. So we may need to copy the Orthosphere to another domain in the next few days. We’ll keep you posted.

Do any readers have expertise with the process of moving a whole WordPress site from one domain to another? If so, and if you are willing to help us figure out how to do it, please comment below and we’ll contact you by email.

Thanks, all.

UPDATE: The site moved this morning (February 8, 2016) to orthosphere.wordpress.com. This change may or may not be permanent.