the alt-right

i think the key attribute marking the "alt" (a p fraught and dumb prefix imo) is determinism.

xp

I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

― frogbs, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:54 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god knows if i can or want to find it again but there are forum posts out there by him that are the now-standard post-libertarian line, like: "i used to be apolitical and in favor of freedom, but now i see that america has been ruined since the civil rights movement and feminism, it needs to be purged" etc

Wait hold on, Breitbart is core alt-right.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:57 AM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they are johnny come latelies

it's really not. it jumped on the alt-right bandwagon thru Milo but he started as just an observer and tho the alt-right will pretty much accept any celebrity legitimacy they can get, he remains a controversial figure in the movement (bc he's gay and jewish). he wrote this around the time breitbart began embracing the alt-right: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ - where you can see that he's interacting w/ them more as an anthropologist than a participant. xxp

didn't realise that Yiannopoulos had jewish heritage

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/203888/donald-trumps-little-boy

frogbs you've seen this? https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-alt-right-has-its-own-comedy-tv-show-on-a-time-warner-ne

― Mordy, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:56 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I never really followed the persona behind it too closely. I read a lot of that stuff as a parody of the alt-right, though I suppose at this point, what's the difference

goole you always amaze/scare me with your knowledge of this stuff

Dark Enlightenment feeds into this, right?

i guess my knowledge of this stuff is just unsurprising :p

dark enlightenment seems v tenuously related i don't think alt-righters are reading yudowsky or less wrong

k3v: yeah i still don't know what to think of it all

weirdly i can trace how i found this shit back to ilx! sort of. to simon reynolds, to marxist anglo music bloggers like k-punk, to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

xp it's bigger now that it used to be, lots of factions and true scotsman stuff, but i think "DE" is def part of it

this is the first ive heard of dark enlightenment

i want to know more but i aint googling it

cybernazis

Does Dark Enlightenment = neo-Reactionaries, i.e. people who are 'conservatives' in the 18th century sense (oppose democracy and egalitarianism, want to return to monarchy and aristocracy and explicit patriarchy)?

Because if so, that's actually kind of cool (as long as they don't gain any real power).

to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

who are these people?

yup

like i said about determinism, the 'enlightenment' part i guess is their justifications are scientific, not solely (or blended with) tradition and religion

xp ogmor: key guy is nick land

it's just a couple of angry media studies lecturers trying to blow minds with their edgy racism

Do any of them go so far as to fully embrace feudalism or do they still want to somehow preserve capitalism and the market?

re DE/NrX people

xxp the Spiked crew are part of that side of things, right?

this is a good thing from moldbug that goes into the DE ideology:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

we discussed it a bit on the political philosophy thread maybe a year or so ago?

also these Slatestarcodex pieces are good:
(apparently the website is down but when it comes back up)

slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

i feel like with a lot of the dark enlightenment stuff there are good critiques of contemporary liberal society but rather than follow them to a reasonable place of like participatory dissent they move into this insane territory of 'well if things aren't perfect today that means we should all become monarchists' which is pretty dumb. i also don't think it's v related to the alt-right i don't think your average white supremacist alt-right 4-chan do-it-for-the-lolz poster is thinking very deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas. like you might think that DE is giving intellectual cover for bigots but i don't think those bigots want or need that cover.

Goddamn, that Unqualified Reservations thing is long and I haven't got to an interesting point yet.

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here, but their basic beliefs about the world look identical to me. because of the internet there's a ton of crossover now i guess. the energy of an election season has run a lot of it together too.

an uhh illustrative example (and god forgive me, as many whacko blog posts i may have read, i don't know all the details) is a dude name mike anissimov, who worked for a transhumanist/AI think tank, then had some kind of scheme to set up a settlement in idaho to reestablish feudal hierachy after the US collapses, i think? so you have the tech nerd economy and D&D fantasy royalist stuff tied together with white power and antisemitism

At what point does he stop making dumbass red-state/blue-state stereotypes and generalizations and get to DE ideology?

xp

it's like 8 or 9 articles. i like when he talks about colonialism and the third world and the meaning of liberation/nationalism etc. there are productive contradictions embedded in left-wing post-cold war ideologies (like third world nationalism v. globalization secularism) of course you don't need moldbug to tell you that but he imo makes some provocative points. xxp

um - end of first letter beginning of second iirc? he spends a lot of time making spurious conclusions about crime in victorian england which is a bummer that scott addresses in his anti-reactionary faq.

goole: Wow

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here,

i think like current poland + russia are aspirational models for some of these white americans

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

i haven't heard anything like that - seems crazy (not like mainstream DE isn't)

I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

have u noticed a pattern wrt this claim

That moldbug guy makes a pretty terrible argument.

could swear that's in nick land somewhere but maybe it's just my own cult-of-moloch fanfic xxp

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

― florence foster wallace (difficult listening hour), Thursday, October 6, 2016 10:53 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh i would read the shit out of a novel about this

it sounds close to the concept of this Dilbert cartoon from 1996:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQqnskzW8AAfFzo.jpg

It is a terrible article, in a terrible tone - intentionally rather than accidentally Donald Sutherland when he's just playing with you, before he turns steely.

weird soap opera detail: nick land is jeremy greenspan's (junior boys) brother in law

i am wrong in notable ways. from this thing about him by robin mackay:

Digital technology, according to Land, unveiled a side of numbers that subtracted them completely from the power-structures of meaning and signification that made language a prison-house for thought; it even removed numbers from the stratified realms of mathematics, into a pure, flat plane of immanent materiality inhabited only by ‘tics.’ Accelerating ‘in-silico’ Capital’s planetary experiment of ‘tacking’ human culture onto these tic-numbers so as to tear it apart, Land believed, would allow him to complete what deconstruction could only gesture at in its endless cycles of philosophical titillation: It would dismantle the power institutionalized in language and sense, and open up a reliable communication line with something unknown – a pure material dispersion not preprocessed by models derived from the past.

...

For Land, such theoretical propositions were also machines for excitation, devices to meld with and accelerate the planetary intensification that would finally allow the ‘body without organs’ to shed its human skin. If Philosophy thereby becomes a species of hype (or ‘hyperstition,’ according to the CCRU’s neologism) then are Land’s detractors (now, as then) right to say that his outlook is ultimately indistinguishable from a passive acceptance of a ‘neoconservative’ agenda – that his theoretical advocacy of the ‘acceleration’ of the capitalist process, in practice, simply endorses the maintenance of capitalist power structures rather than their dismantling (whether revolutionary or ameliorative)?

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[...]

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level 2?

so the way i described the human hierarchy in such a world is tres old-world. humans and humanity are shed. in this piece land's potential "neoconservativism" afaict relies on this divine birth/radical deconstruction not happening -- or at least not happening yet? i might think that chasing such an apotheosis of capital is going to create a prison-world even if it's successful tho? idk?

(second quote block there -- "nothing human makes it out" etc -- is land not mackay)

yeah afaict land's thing is we (or 'intelligence') have to escape this planet, and we can't do that if democracy doesn't fall, because it makes people stupid and gives power to the wrong ones. basically the singularity and a return to 19th century heroic/intellectual/colonial values are by nature the same. or something

funny he was such a cheney-ist pro war kind of guy when bush was in office. which makes his turn away from neoconservatism and towards austrian economics, the old right and racism look pretty cynical after all that fell apart -- after obama, after the housing crash.

xp and if you wanna read land tie the capitalist-genetic singularity fetish thing in with just reams and reams of hot takes on trayvon martin and john darbyshire (+ with moldbug's aesthetic stroke of subbing in the evocative word Cathedral anyplace nixon would have said Establishment) here u go

hah i didn't know that website existed

Probably not a good idea to stare directly at the Moldbug

ilx policy is actually to ban anyone who talks about moldbug in order to prevent the possibility of bringing him into being

hey so goole/dlh --- since you guys seem to make the occasional foray onto these guys' home turf: do you ever get the sense that they're out there reading the equivalent lefty literature/writing? maybe this is just too much time on ilx, but i do get the sense that a lot of ppl here actually go out there and read the horrible primary sources of the right, whereas i've never really thought that the right does likewise

Probably some of them are reading left-accelerationist material so they can argue against it?

I don't get the impression that they're reading left wing media like counterpunch or jacobin but yes NYT WPost as emblematic of "liberalism" - they are opposed to mainstream liberalism not to far left radicalism which is only on their radar insofar as they conflate it w the mainstream.

something really disturbing is happening in this country, I genuinely feel government has broken down and we are near Mad Max conditions--why aren't these fuckin' guys disarmed and declared terrorist groups? The government can't even assert its own monopoly on violence. One bright spot is the vigorous prosecution of Jan 6 people, I have to admit.

the foundation of the monopoly on violence is white supremacy

Meanwhile, and, unfortunately, probably not totally unrelated, a bomb threat was called in to (checks notes) “all over Cook county’s highways and librarys." I don't know what to make of the highway part, but there are 73 libraries in Cook County. They closed all of our libraries today out of an abundance of caution, but clearly all it takes are a few seconds of assholery to essentially cause state-wide chaos.

yeah they've been pretty serious about the J6 stuff, which actually gives me hope that Trump might actually see jail time, for despite their built in political advantages and the fact that the police tend to be on their side it does seem like the criminal justice system takes this shit seriously

xp Josh - yeah, that's a scary threat, especially coming a day after threats to specific libraries in other northern suburbs. didn't realize the threat you mention was an entirely different one, wtf is wrong with people?

Our local paper reported:

A threat of explosions across Cook County highways and libraries caused the Oak Park Public Library to close Monday. Library officials promptly called the Oak Park Police Department after the threat was received at 7 p.m., Sunday night through the contact page on the OPPL website. A police report has been filed.

“There will be a big explosion all over Cook county’s highways and librarys including Chicago gurnee and oak park. It will explode sometime tomorrow 8/21/2023,” the threat reads.

Gurnee was not the only northern suburb to receive such a threat, but Oak Park appears to be the only western suburb at this time. Several libraries across the northern suburbs received similar threats on Aug. 17, including in Morton Grove, Park Ridge and Wilmette. No explosives were ever found or detonated, according to Dan Yopchick, spokesperson of the Village of Oak Park.

instead we get the heckler's veto on civic life and public goods

Not sure this is the best thread for it, but since we had some discussions about this upthread... another round of bomb threats against local libraries, including the one in my city:

https://www.wbez.org/stories/libraries-in-chicago-suburbs-receive-bomb-threats/96196768-b467-4e75-bf13-dda8eee99ba8

Libraries in Chicago and surrounding suburbs were closed Tuesday after receiving bomb threats.

An employee at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State St., received an anonymous email saying that there was a bomb inside the building, Chicago police said. A bomb squad and canine units were sent to do a sweep of the building at about 3:50 p.m. but did not find any sign of a threat.