While you’re here, what were your thoughts on Radish’s commentary on your debate with Arthur Chu? I noticed you didn’t comment on the article at the time, but assumed that you were aware of it?

And here I thought the left was too willing to privilege social over biological aspects of gender.

Anyway, I take offense at this. My social life is, at most, five and a half sigmas nuttier than the mean.

I’ll be sure to check out Vladimir and James Goulding, thanks for the pointer. One of my favorite things about the community surrounding NRx is the how you respond to respectful disagreement in kind. “Scratch a reactionary, find a liberal!”

@Lesser Bull

Who should I be reading in order to grok the failure of conservatism? Websites are fine, but I’m not afraid to pick up a book, either.

Personally, I have a lot of respect for SA’s intellectual approach and personal integrity, even if I do think he is still substantially pwned by his progressive heritage in many areas of his thought. Perhaps you should google search this blog for comments made by Vladimir and James Goulding, which presented an independent critique of some of Moldbug’s ideas without being compromised by such a weight of residual progressive assumptions.

reading neoreactionary blogs has been enormously valuable for me, but it has not brought me over to your side. like many neoreactionaries, i came from a classical liberal/libertarian bent. moldbug has shown that classical liberalism has evolved into something utterly incompatible with its original stated goals many times (see communism, nazism, american progressivism, and european socialism), and thus asks us to abandon the goals of the enlightenment and instead accept order or stability as the sole goods of society.

i’m not ready to give up on the goals of the enlightenment, and neither is SA. he’s using the weapons of classical liberalism (reason, equality, free association and exit) against its modern day heirs, and it’s working. he’s breaking new intellectual ground at an amazing pace.

meanwhile, neoreactionaries are still debating techno-commercialism versus hereditary monarchy. though i refuse to throw an angry fit (as most progressives would) upon hearing those ideas proposed, i will say that it seems like a dead end to me.

I’m assuming you’ve read Moldbug’s An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, where he deals with this explicitly? For me it deals an absolutely devastating blow to the idea that the progressive / conservative political binary consists of anything other than two different strands of the same virus, or two different quasicriminal political machines. As you say (or as Modbug says), it’s hard enough giving up Catholicism / Progressivism without having to become a Hindu / Conservative at the same time.

Furthermore, “…many people will think exactly this: if you stop being a progressive, you have to become a conservative. I suspect that the primary emotional motivation for most progressives is that they’re progressives because they think something needs to be done about conservatives. Game over. Gutterball. Right back to the insidious grip [of a false political ideology].

So, what Moldug is putting forward here is as much a critique conservatism as it is progressivism. Even if it was nothing else, Neoreaction is the cognitive toolkit to think outside the box of this false political binary, and see that the truth lies outside the mainstream political machine. You clearly have a distance left to travel before these ideas are able to more fully penetrate your progressive defence mechanisms. My advise would be to keep reading. And if you haven’t read An Open Letter… start here:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

“Quoting Michael Ignatieff, Kagan speculates candidly that liberal civilization itself “runs deeply against the human grain and is achieved and sustained only by the most unremitting struggle against human nature.” Perhaps, Kagan adds, “this fragile democratic garden requires the protection of a liberal world order, with constant feeding, watering, weeding, and the fencing off of an ever-encroaching jungle.” But he can’t seem to face the challenge posed by the new shots heard ’round the world from America: The jungle and its encroachments begin not only abroad but within our own garden.”

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/04/we_the_people_are_violent_and_filled_with_rage_a_nation_spinning_apart_on_its_independence_day/

most of the progressives/brahmins that i know would be horrified if their ideological training included instructions to regularly “purge oneself of thinkable thoughts” and “fight a war” against “toxic ideologies.” they see themselves as rebels, yes, but on a mission of peace to cure a sick society.

if you manage to convince them that they are, in fact, The Man and that their beliefs are, in fact, making the world a worse place, then they’ll cease being progressives. it turns out that it’s hard to do this when your audience consists of the brightest and most motivated people in your society, and the only available substitute to what they believe (conservatism) is clearly bogus and evil.

in saying what he did, arthur chu showed himself to be a fool and an ideologue. he is not what liberalism represents.