the alt-right

they included emet ve-emunah (principles of conservative judaism) but if they wanted reactionary religious jewish works i could've hooked them up with stuff that made a lot more sense!

there are a lot of great / interesting books on that list tho if this is what they're reading (i'm sure they're mostly not) it seems pretty formidable

they included emet ve-emunah (principles of conservative judaism) but if they wanted reactionary religious jewish works i could've hooked them up with stuff that made a lot more sense!

― Mordy

why would a reactionary want to read something that "made sense"

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

i meant made more sense for a bunch of reactionaries looking for religious traditionalist works. not something that necessarily made internal logical sense.

i'm guessing they don't know what "conservative" in "conservative Judaism" means

that seems like a safe bet

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

― jolene club remix (BradNelson)

no, but they pretended to read it, and ultimately isn't that what's really important?

maybe they just think all germans are on their side automatically

xp fascinating work, dylannn. Thanks for sharing here.

I don’t know very much about the internal dynamics of china.

And many americans i assume are in a similar boat

I wanna get you on a dunno boat re: china

Our class read "the Chosen" when I was in fifth grade

took this pic in the library the other day

http://i63.tinypic.com/22ixk6.jpg

hope this list doesn't get him cancelled :(

this is /lit/ not exactly representative of the alt-right as a whole or even 4chan, also has a large faction of non-alt-right people too
but good place to get turned on to obscure-to-me books (i'd never heard of julian jaynes the origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind until browsing /lit/ today)

also thanks treezo!

none of these people have fucking read the magic mountain

i'm fucking livid it's included

Magic Mountain is super centrist-liberal if it's anything. Settembrini is an airy-fairy idealist with vague notions of Brotherhood Amongst Peoples, Naphta a harsh doctrinaire extremist. Iirc Mann originally planned to have these two serve as equally valid/flawed points of view but as historical events mounted up he sided with Settembrini. I guess from a conservative pov you can suggest the book is Owning The Marxists but their counterpoint is basically a EU stan avant la lettre, which doesn't really reconcile with modern conservatism (well, within the EU it sometimes does).

the magic mountain is not a reactionary text in any form or fashion. i think mann thought there was a problem with liberalism in that it didn't integrate the darker impulses of human nature -- something like the death drive -- in its account of reality. but naphta, who gives himself over to human irrationality, is clearly depicted as more than a villain. if the novel has a "message" it's that the enlightenment needs to be more dialectical if it is going to avoid getting bulldozed by evil.

mann thought there was a problem with liberalism

Sounds like he deserves to get posthumously cancelled.

I mean, he wasn’t someone I’d want to be friends with, given the things he wrote in his diary about his young son klaus. But the magic mountain is an incredibly complex book that doesn’t flatter any particular ideology.

Mann expressed his belief in the collection of letters written in exile, Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!), that equating Russian communism with Nazi-fascism on the basis that both are totalitarian systems was either superficial or insincere in showing a preference for fascism.[32] He clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist, but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future. He said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".[33][34]

I was being facetious btw. That reading list deserves praise for including complex, ambiguous writers, assuming whoever put it together grasps those nuances in the first place and doesn't use polysemy as an excuse to further spread their own dumb ideology ('let me tell you what Mann really meant…').

I knew you were. I just wanted to further emphasize how much that book doesn’t fit into a “right wing” list.

ime these dark cathedral / intellectual alt-right guys can be extraordinarily fascinating to talk with partially bc many of them read lots of weird shit. moldbug always had a corpus of alt-canon he was plugging (a lot of which is on that list)

anybody who takes their display name from mencius is obviously going to be fairly well-read

which mostly serves as an object lesson on the limitations of being well-read, sadly

All too true, sadly. Renaud Camus, who coined the phrase 'the great replacement' is an excellent prose stylist and a 'learned' man. He's also partly, albeit indirectly responsible for the Christchurch mosque shooting.

on first read-through this seems like a good analysis of the manifesto, touching on some of the "absurd" points made above

https://medium.com/@emilypothast/what-the-christchurch-killers-manifesto-tells-us-about-the-radicalization-of-white-men-c55857149b33

sorry by "above" I mean in the "fucking spree shooting" thread but I think this is better here

sleeve do you know emily who wrote that piece? she's a friend of mine and writes very singularly about this subject

no but I noticed that the person who pointed me to that article has numerous FB friends in common w/me

I had a few friends in common w her and liked her writing enough I added her on Facebook. Always good stuff.

The works continues to get progressively stranger by the minute.

lol the guy who murdered the Gambino mob boss repped QAnon in court pic.twitter.com/MtYE6vRJGA

— egg boy (@lib_crusher) March 18, 2019

That's like the murder equivalent of beginner's luck or something. Only someone completely stupid and detached from reality would attempt and succeed at that kind of thing.

ime these dark cathedral / intellectual alt-right guys can be extraordinarily fascinating to talk with partially bc many of them read lots of weird shit. moldbug always had a corpus of alt-canon he was plugging (a lot of which is on that list)

Do you get the impression they're reading much stuff that has case studies in it or are they more into, I suppose, dark aesthetics?

They tend to mistake the latter for the former.

“I want his mother and his father dead! I want his house burnt to the ground”

“Says here his father already got whacked at Deely Plaza in 1963, boss”

— Wyatt Chet Failson III esq. (@TheFanciestLad) March 19, 2019

As far as the reading lists are concerned i think there's a ton of play between pleasure of text and discourse as rational structure that people - quite rightly! - blur and lose themselves within

i.e. I don't believe in "not getting it", the possibilities for what you get from something as a reader are the heart of reading

the worst solecism is thinking that you understand your pet writers in ways that yr ideological foes don't

Does that cover nazi readings of Nietzsche?

I think so but i was also thinking of non-nazis insisting that those readings are definitively wrong

I mostly agree with you, unless you exacerbate your relativism to such a degree that all readings become equally valid for the sake of an omnipotent hermeneutics, in which case I'd argue that texts are entities in and of themselves and as such they allow for a limited set of interpretive possibilities, i.e. you can't draw just any conclusion from them (cf. legal texts) although the field remains quite open in the grand scheme of thins.

*things

I guess my take on that, such as it is, is that i'm open to a limitless hermeneutics but in practice the argument is fundamentally unimportant, any value a specific reading has is far more tied into the value (including aesthetic pleasure) of the reading itself. Outlandish interpretations probably tend to uselessness but probably not because of their disconnect from a true reading.

Struggling to be clear there but hopefully you get my gist

i'd argue that, just like with people, if you torture any text enough it will tell you what you want to hear

And that's aside from arguing that claims to understand a text from people far removed from the cultural context of the author are flawed as fuck

But i don't believe a reading is torture - again, you're implying a fundamental correct reading of something which doesn't lend itself to a transparent rendering of truth

But i don't believe a reading is torture - again, you're implying a fundamental correct reading of something which doesn't lend itself to a transparent rendering of truth

― Helel Cool J (Noodle Vague)

well, as one example, the current legal doctrine on the meaning of the second amendment is the result of not just a tortuous reading, but one that does actual malice to the text

i don't know about "fundamentally correct" reading but damn if there aren't fundamentally incorrect readings

I do get what you're saying, NV, and concur. My position, which is that reading is a two-way street (the reader is free to read the text as s/he sees fit but his/her reading is also shaped by what the text has to offer, which tends towards limitlessness but can never quite achieve it) doesn't contradict yours as I understand it.

To go back to Nietzsche for a second (or the Bible or Heidegger or Cioran, etc.), extracting a white supremacist übermensch out of his work requires that you disregard major swathes of it (almost of all it tbh), so while nothing prevents a given reader from doing that in practice, it's still pretty fucking dumb and lazy in my book.

Put differently, I can read whatever I want into absolutely anything. But some texts make it more difficult for me to do that, for better or for worse.

I think my underlying belief is that the wrongness lies in the white supremacy so any reading that wants to argue for that is fuckwd at that point, language games aside

xp rush, i get what you're saying there. there's something about legislation as text that wants to treat legal text as different - more concrete? - than other kinds of writing. I don't have a pat answer to that, but i think intentionality arguments hit similar difficulties