the alt-right

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

He fears Islam because it is homophobic, anti-freedom, etc.
xps

specifically remember going to a bar in 2007ish w some old high school lan party friends and thinking what is happening to these people

(nb #notalllanpartyfriends and even some of those specific people really pulled out of it with time)

I mean, "they hate our freedoms" is basically expressing this idea, I would think:

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

Hard to see what is "alt" or "left" (except maybe in the 18th century sense) about this.

He fears Islam because it is homophobic, anti-freedom, etc.

i think the trouble w/ the right-wing and the enlightenment is that they're prepared to jettison all kinds of essential elements of it to 'save it.'

sorry re alt left i left out some important bits - obv if that alone constituted their political identity they would just be conservatives but they are marxists

Ah, I get you. So they are, um, nationalist socialists?

No I wouldn't say so. They're in a clear real Marxist tradition in their writing and there isn't an obvious nationalist or racial component as much as a general pro West one. Also pretty sure they're anti fascist and probably more socially liberal at least when it comes to ppl we shouldn't lock out of the gates

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.

I think this is broadly right but I'd say thin or tenuous rather than super-tenuous - I get the sense there's a chain of reddits mediating between them - also it's early, like you can see Moldbug/Land hardening into Canon as alt-right becomes an accepted position. But yeah, I don't think they're causal. 'same things animating' is true I think - & probably why the aesthetics all fit together if you squint- horror seems like a primary genre for this stuff, above all Lovecraft.

Land's recent fiction seems to be in that vein, w/ a dash of technothriller, but fucked if I'm going to read it.

what gets me is - what is their culture? what is their art? what do they even like?

― imago, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:49 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've encountered a lot of people like this on the internet, and not only recently - it's the debating style honed on 4chan of course, and I once read a very interesting article about the internal logic behind it, but can't seem to find it now.

Anyway, whenever I've asked "so what do you actually like then?" the response has always been something along the lines of "ha, I'm not fooling for that one, whatever I say you'll just say it's shit" - which is wrong (I am actually interested and wouldn't just say it was shit. of course.) but also very telling about their fear of being seen to sincerely love something.

which is weird for me because i feel like peak sarcasm was, like, three years ago. maybe with them it never stopped.

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.

― Mordy, Thursday, October 6, 2016 5:00 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'll admit i'm not familiar at all with 'platypus society' -- a quick google shows it's some kind of marxist reading group? -- but the rest of these terms like 'alt-left' and 'regressive left' are so recent and fraught and borne of social media conflicts, that, idk man you lost me

"alt-left": a non-conservative who doesn't like hillary clinton and isn't above a little twitter trolling
"regressive left": what you say when you realize calling someone an SJW makes you sound like a dipshit

i'll look into platypus tho. is it some kind of laschian class/econ left + social right kind of thing?

i said this above but didn't really elaborate on it: the tension between enlightenment and hierarchy is p easy to square if you share their determinism -- this is where all that bell curve and (code phrase) "human biodiversity" shit comes in, ie only people who are by their "nature" intelligent and industrious are capable of bearing or enjoying liberty. everyone else gets the whip.

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

holy shit i had no idea until right now that one of old c.c.r.u. dudes was a major alt-right figurehead.

one minute you're reading kodwo eshun, the next you're lamenting that william wilberforce wasn't hanged for treason

i'll look into platypus tho. is it some kind of laschian class/econ left + social right kind of thing?

social right in effect but i do think there's a meaningful difference between 'cultural memes' and 'human biodiversity' even tho i realize most ppl feel the former is just a more acceptable wrapper for the same stuff the latter is doing

Alt-right now, baby, it's the alt-right now

Can we label the pricks at Spiked!/LM the alt-left? Because they are still very much around, and use many of the same tactics as the alt-right.

Spiked are left-wing now?

the alt-left is a pretty big movement though - in essence (imo) they're lefties (usually full communists) who hate safe spaces and *hate* gender politics and really don't have time for identity politics of any kind except class. think this has been covered upthread though