the alt-right

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.

well we are all totally immersed in the ridiculous lie that is the progressive worldview, the virus that ate america when jefferson's continent-of-monticellos didn't happen, so they would prob say that they are exposed to the equivalent just by going to school/talking to anyone. but no they prob don't read jacobin or whatever? xp hah yeah what mordy said.

This is a little off topic but I've noticed a big talking point on the right is that BLM has endorsed Hillary. They have trouble distinguishing between moderate liberalism and further left groups and get confused when you explain that such orgs are freq opposed to Dem "neoliberalism" and will likely vote 3rd party.

(otoh land as a philosophy prof in the 90s was presumably better-acquainted w the state-of-the-art than i am xp)

the jewish right-wing has a similar issue. like they keep conflating the anti-israel flag burners outside the DNC with the DNC itself - missing the point that they were outside the convention hall bc they are not a part of the Dem coalition.

gotcha, that makes sense

mostly curious because it seems like lefties here (myself included) have a certain grotesque fascination with the alt-right (hence this thread), and i've never seen the equivalent (unless it's someone who abandoned the radical left and made an about face)

They have trouble distinguishing between moderate liberalism and further left groups

yeah this as you say is a problem all over the right -- from now-squishy old-guard stuff like NRO to hardcore trump fans/demon-summoners. feels weird to keep mentioning nixon as he wasn't a "political philosopher" or anything but he more than anyone else is who i think of when i read this stuff. the perception that everyone to your left, from the wapo to mao, is smooshed into a big malevolent world-dominating ball of wrongness and perversity.

idk at least in a social media sense there's some contact between the irony rude left and the bizarro right, at least the more self-aware people in it (not clowns like milo or the hapless pickup guys).

anti-hillary and anti-centrist writers, vice's michael tracey as an example, get a lot of traction over there. that said i'm not certain what mtracey's politics are...

Isn't Glenn Beck obsessed with Marxism and Fabian socialism? He had the leader of a minor socialist third party on his show once.

He preferred him to Obama because at least he was honest about his socialism.

Holy shit, the Dave Aurini dude wrote a book! It is naturally set in post-apoc Ontario

http://www.castaliahouse.com/review-as-i-walk-these-broken-roads-by-d-m-j-aurini/

And this is a stolen joke, but somebody elsewhere pointed out that post-apoc = SKULLZ

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CNn-M8TUAAAPg3U.png

https://mobile.twitter.com/shoe0nhead/status/637820321526095872

idk at least in a social media sense there's some contact between the irony rude left and the bizarro right, at least the more self-aware people in it

this is interesting; my understanding of modern vanguard politics is prob totally crippled by not being on twitter tbh. are anti-neoliberal leftists sometimes considered as fellow critics of the cathedral? or like of parts of it? or

when useful i've even seen st0rmfr4nt posters quote the intercept approvingly

goole doing quality work here as usual

cf https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=theintercept.com+stormfront.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#safe=off&q=theintercept+site:stormfront.org (would link to sf direct but idk if this thread is deindexed yet?)

gonna take yr word for it

it's not a difficult thing to google

a) this is not the best conclusion to draw imo
b) check those likes

https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/783994097912741888

a couple rouge billionaires

thought he was orange

Split the diff, call him a sickly salmon hue?

gotcha, that makes sense

mostly curious because it seems like lefties here (myself included) have a certain grotesque fascination with the alt-right (hence this thread), and i've never seen the equivalent (unless it's someone who abandoned the radical left and made an about face)

― jason waterfalls (gbx), Thursday, October 6, 2016 12:44 PM (thirty-six minutes ago)

might be a bit biased but i tend to think people on the left are a bit more intellectually curious than those on the far right

plus we're cucks

i tried to read that moldbug DE blogpost and it was utterly insane and incomprehensible. i'm an ex-catholic, and he started out making his case by making up completely nonsense gibberish about catholicism. ok, maybe it's dated badly, the "pope" he's talking about is benedict and progressives are MUCH more favorably disposed towards francis than they were towards benedict, but even if i mentally displace francis as "pope" in my head with benedict, it's nonsense. he's trying to convince me that he understands progressivism by failing to understand the catholic church.

my sense is that many in the alt-right - and not exclusively the alt-right - are highly creative lunatics. you know, when i was growing up the lunatics were, well, pretty boring people. they would talk to you about how rock and roll was the devil's music, about fluoridation, about communism.

and the alt-right are not like this in that they can come up with a new bizarre thought pattern every five minutes. this is REWARDED. this is CREATIVITY. reminds me of henry ford and his anti-semitism. a guy like oculus rift guy, he gets rich for "thinking outside the box", and he has no incentive to ever stop doing it.

and i can relate to them because, ok, i say some pretty crazy shit, though i've learned to stop saying most of it on the internet. i think some pretty crazy shit. how do you argue with me when i'm saying crazy shit like that? you can't. it's a weird kind of reactionary ideology in that it's post-rational. once you start believing in the singularity or the matrix or whatever, your little brain can come up with all kinds of fevered delusions, and "talking sense" into them is not an option.

we're afraid of them, they're afraid of women and non-whites

they're also afraid of not being the best ones

I don't think I've come across this. Good to know before I accidentally hate-punctuated something, although they really shouldn't be allowed to get away with taking punctuation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses

"For non-antisemitic punctuation marks, see bracket."

who uses triple parentheses in the course of normal punctuation?

Lisp programmers?

SSC website appears to be back up in case anyone wants to check out the links above

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

tumblrinaction

SSC's summary of NRx turns out to be more readable than the Moldbug original.

i think it's important to keep in mind that the relationship between reactionary philosophy and the alt-right is super tenuous and i'm more inclined to say that they share a similar nouveau right-wing flavor bc they're both emerging in this 21st century western milieu but i don't think 4channers are reading these guys and getting really turned onto neo-reactionarism. if anything i think probably the same things animating the 4chan right-wingers are animating ppl like moldbug but they're smart enough to come up with an intellectual veneer to justify it to themselves. it's not comparable to - for eg in another 'hip' right-wing ideology - libertarians who read ayn rand and that was formative. red pillism is kind of DE lite in that they both are awakening you to the cultural tyranny of liberal mainstream institutions but honestly you don't need either to get there - hating these orgs was the formative bit, not the metaphor used to explain why.

also kinda interesting phenomenon is the alt-left. not as it's generally used to - i think - mean the 'regressive left' (or if you google 'alt left' the entire Democratic party bc of the aforementioned ideological compression by the right), but leftists like platypus who probably share a lot of the same values or inclinations of people like moldbug in terms of preserving western culture but where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners. they both have a lot of the same enemies - post-colonialists, islamists and PC liberals. ultimately you are trying to justify why the west must resist alternative cultural memes, and more practically why you need to oppress 'fifth-columnists' or limit immigration.

highly creative lunatics

they seem to me like people who were way into d&d in the 80s and matured with the intellectual/social fashions (kind of the way, elsewhere on the social landscape, food became a thing, music stopped being cool, ppl are enthusiastic to the point of value-identification about 'netflixing' i.e. watching tv, grown adults wearing cartoon costumes in public is a thing, etc.) into trying their hand at running ~a far more real kind of campaign~

like, being juiced by the phenomenon of the internet into the belief that social reality is much more alterable than a politico/philosopher-king of yore would have ever wished, they're frenzied into treating the socioeconomic affairs of common life as if they were a matter of creating character sheets and designing maps of dragons' lairs, doing all that 'world-engineering' work via a bizzaro-world version of enlightenment-era 'rational debate', republic of letters, etc.

where mb sees the enlightenment as the source of corruption they see it as the thing worth protecting against the hordes of anti-enlightenment non-westerners

Isn't this a more mainstream right-wing view, though? I thought this is basically Yiannopoulos's position.

no mention of gamer gate yet? this was a core moment for the alt-right imo..

I remember reading all the coverage when it started and thought to myself 'if the GOP is smart they would be using this as a route to get to young people'.

at the very least paying lip service to it i think you're right xp

gamergate is also when milo went from fringe breitbart writer to cult of personality

he turned into "jared leto getting into character for the joker" so gradually we hardly even noticed

was hardly alone in this but the moment gamergate started i thought "oh god this is it" -- white male nerd culture had been toxic and resentful for ages by then, just a big lock awaiting a big fascist key