… the (short) play:
A: We’ve got nothing against you personally. We don’t even know you. It’s just that we’re more comfortable restricting club membership to upper-income straight white male English-speaking Protestants.
B: Then you’re not very good Protestants!
A: Damn! You’re right …
Ideo-thedish categorization done right:
Red tribe
Blue tribe
Grey tribe
Color-out-of-space tribe
— Deity Of Religion (@DeityOfReligion) January 1, 2015
Atlantean/Hyperborean/Turanian could be generalized out into a political typology.
— Wesley Morganston (@nydwracu) December 14, 2014
That’s roughly Gregory Hood’s title, for an article making the case for a return to paganism. As his point of departure, Hood examines, unflinchingly, the indications of an Occidental desire for enslavement or destruction by Islam. “It’s a kind of ethical exhaustion — liberal Whites are weary of the moral responsibility of existence and survival.” (The diagnosis seems hideously plausible to me.)
Islam is Nature’s solution. Like the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded, it is Nature’s way of saying that “There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.” It is stultifying, depressing, and tyrannical. It is an enemy of real culture, with the most militant variations smashing the tombs and shrines not only of other religious traditions, but of their own. Modern Wahhabism is funded by Western decadence, enabled by Western weakness, in many ways a product of Western postmodernism and self-hatred. […] And lest what I say be misunderstood, it is obviously, laughably, and comically false. It is sustained by the protective cordon it has created around criticism. Yet believing that a pedophiliac illiterate transcribed the literal word of God still makes more sense than believing all men are created equal. Islam’s refusal to allow critical analysis of itself is a sign of strength, not weakness.
Islam is the first term in Hood’s tetralemma. It’s the executioners blade for a civilization that has lost all cosmic purchase upon existence. A disgusting way to die, begged for by the broken, in the end (which is already) — because at least it’s a way to die.
The remaining three terms entertained by Hood are the “god of our grandfathers, the White Christ upon whose image the West was built” which “is dying”, faithless liberalism (including modern Christianity), and paganism. Among these options, he declares, “The Old Gods are my own choice.”
Mark Lutter advances the following thought experiment:
Earth is dying, unable to further sustain human life. Mankind has thrown their last resources into creating a space ship that can reach a habitable planet. However, the space ship can only carry 10,000 people and little is known about the planet beyond gravity and oxygen levels. With the literal fate of humanity lying before us, who do we send and why?
After that, it gets WEIRD (+ ++). In a nutshell, Lutter’s ‘we’, while — apparently in absolute innocence — employed to represent the voice of humanity as a whole, is self-evidently processing the problem in a way that would make no sense beyond its own peculiar thede. ‘We’ could probably all come to the reasonable conclusion that only the Swiss get to survive. (Right?)
In passing, he notes that ‘we’ all agree multiculturalism is a dysfunctional mess: “For all the praise of multiculturalism, no one would seriously bet a diverse group of cultures would give the greatest chance for success. …” (The whole paragraph is a jaw-dropper.)
The main point, however: “Picking a cultural group to colonize a new planet and save humanity forces the mind to focus on positive and negative attributes of the cultural group.” This perfectly exemplifies the weirded out intelligence of libertarians, expressed as a detached universalism wholly incognisant of its own deracination. The obvious rejoinder: No one thinks like that (except you guys). It might be over-compensation to suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population would respond to the total extermination of the Swiss with vague amusement, but it’s at least as plausible as Lutter’s assumption that the good people of Helvetia would be neutrally evaluated, selected, and then cheered on as the sole remnant of ‘humanity’, to such an extent that not being Swiss would be cheerfully accepted as an ethnic death sentence.
This isn’t meant to be any kind of denuciation — it’s very possible Lutter is playing his (weird) audience hard, and doing something subversively dark around the back. As barb-hooked bait for libertarian nuttiness, his post is really something. I can’t wait to see what his comment thread looks like.
ADDED: “I do not believe anything I wrote was terribly controversial …” (At least one of us has to be psychotically dissociated — not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
There is far too much pointless moralism on the Outer Right. It’s a form of stupidity, it’s counter-productive, and it wastes a lot of time.
Naturally, if people are able to haul themselves — or be hauled — to any significant extent from out of their condition of total depravity (or default bioreality), that’s a good thing. To argue the opposite would be full-on Satanism, and we wouldn’t want that. Lamenting immorality, however, is something to be done quickly, and comprehensively, before moving on — without looking back. Man is fallen, naturally selected, and / or economically self-interested, and this is a basic condition. It’s not a remediable flaw, to be thrashed out of a mud-spattered angel. (No faction of the Trichotomy has any grounds upon which to base moral preening.) Realism is, first of all, working with what we have, and that’s something approximately Hobbesian. There’s social order, and there’s homo homini lupus, and in fact always some complexion of the two.
Anybody motivated to improve themselves is already doing it. As for those not so motivated, moral exhortation will be useless (at best). At its most effective, moral hectoring will increase the value of moral signalling, and that is a worse outcome — by far — than honest cynicism. It is worthless, because it is incredibly cheap, and then worse than useless, because its costs are considerable. A ‘movement’ lost in moral self-congratulation has already become progressive. Having persuaded itself of its worthiness to wield power, it has set out on the road to perdition. We have seen what that path looks like, and even given it a name (the Cathedral).
It is by empowering moralism that modernity has failed. This is not a mistake to saunter complacently into again.
The circular argument to end all circular arguments from John Gray:
Social evolution is just a modern myth. No scientific theory exists about how the process is supposed to work. There’s been much empty chatter about memes — units of information or meaning that supposedly compete with one another in society. But there’s no mechanism for the selection of human concepts similar to that which Darwin believed operated among species and which later scientists showed at work among genes. Bad ideas like racism seem to hang around forever, while the silly idea of social evolution has shown an awesome power to mutate and survive.
(Gnon laughs.)
Mark Yuray has made me a believer. From nominal head-nodding towards the Moldbug model of caste identities, I’ve been dragged into utter compliance (with an even simpler variant), in awe-struck wonder at its explanatory power.
@AimlessGromar @Outsideness @ClarkHat The difference between #Rx and #NRx IMO is only caste.
— Mark Yuray (@MarkYuray) November 4, 2014
@Outsideness @AimlessGromar @ClarkHat The disagreement seems to be whether theorizing is necessary or not i.e. a caste difference.
— Mark Yuray (@MarkYuray) November 4, 2014
Time preference and provincialism are both special cases of salience preference.
— Gate Of Heavens (@GateOfHeavens) October 31, 2014
On the assumption that most reactionary-types will want to refuse the idea of an integrated ‘salience preference’ — what is the counter-argument? (I’m also wondering whether ethico-political humanism — in its restrictive rather than expansive usage — can be bound into the same super-syndrome.)
Another blog comment reproduction, this one from More Right, where Nyan Sandwich lays out the basic stress-lines of a potential tech-comm schism (of a kind initially — and cryptically — proposed in a tweet):
There are definitely two opposing theories of a fast high-tech future. I call them “Accelerationism” and “Futurism”
“Accelerationism” is the perspective that emphasizes Capital teleology, that someone is going to eat the stars (win), that humans have many inadequacies that hold us back from winning, that our machines, unbound from our sentimental conservatism could win, and advocates accelerating the arrival of the machine gods from Outside.
“Futurism” agrees that someone is going to win, and wants it to be *us*, that we can become God’s favored children by Nietz[schean] will to power, grit, and self improvement. That the path to the future is Man getting his shit together and improving himself, incorporating technology into himself. That Enhancement is preferable to Artifice.
Someone is going to win. Enhancement or Artifice? Us, or our machines?
I’m a futurist Techcom, Land is an accelerationist Techcom.
FWIW I think this is nicely done, but the complexities will explode when we get into the details. Fortunately, distinctions closely paralleling Nyan’s enhancement / artifice option have been quite carefully honed within certain parts of the Singularity literature. Hugo de Garis, in particular, does a lot with it — through the discrimination between ‘Cosmists’ (artificers) and ‘Cyborgists’ (enhancers) — although he thinks it is ultimately unstable, and a more sharply polarized species-conservative / techno-futurist conflict is bound to eventually absorb it.
It’s also interesting to see Nyan describe himself as a “futurist Techcom”. That’s new, isn’t it?