(Zombies, on the other hand, aren’t properly scary. They’re dangerous, sure, but the point is that you get to kill them all.)

“What is politics but competing states of consciousness?” – You might not realize it, but this is a metaphorical usage. Perhaps you find it useful. That is fine. However, if you’re reading Wittgenstein and you find it possible to think that any given thing (e.g. politics) is nothing “but” a metaphor for it, I think you might not have grasped him fully yet.

Second:

Like the passage about threads being wound on one another, the very term ‘consciousness’ is so un-analyzed and open to interpretation that you could draw semi-plausible links between them and almost anything, including the Dark Enlightenment. Again, it’s fine if it “works” for you (Wittgenstein was certainly a formative influence for me), but any link you try to draw between these and NR is going to be specious and not really useful to the rest of us, whether we’ve read W or not.

Nobody is saying that W is merely a philosopher of language, but for him and other philosophers of the linguistic turn language is certainly central, even with regard to religion and ethics. Getting past the linguistic turn means rigorously learning and then unlearning this view. The mistake is not to unlearn it (many analytics did not).

As I said before, Anarchopapist’s very personal and recent confrontation with Wittgenstein might provide a better starting point for a discussion of W and semantics, if you’ve read it. My objection is to the idea that your snippets from PI should become slogans for NR. That’s all.

The thoughts which I publish… concern many subjects: … states of consciousness, and other things.

What is politics but competing states of consciousness? Reading it as a book about mere language is to do it a disservice.

Props for trying to bring Ludwig in though. Have you read Anarchopapist’s discussion of W?

(and yes, I still consider him a dead end for our purposes. Wittgenstein was more politically apathetic than any other philosopher in history).

the point is that “social justice” is horrendous, democracy is unsustainable and so on.

There’s a chilean folk song to that effect. I mean, those specific words. (Note: I’m from what we used to call “the third world”, but not Chile specifically; my father lived in several countries as a young man, and picked that up.)

But really, there’s nothing NR-specific to anargument for solidarity. We’re constantly asked to give a little more leeway to the sins of those in our in-groups. The problem with that is that there’s no natural way to draw boundaries — the point is not why I should tolerate the sillier among the “race realists” (and that’s not to say there isn’t some smart folk in the HBD set, but that there’s no clear process to discriminate); the point is that “social justice” is horrendous, democracy is unsustainable and so on.

The point that I gave up continuing last time is that this — NR — is no cure; it’s rather an outward manifestation of the disease. Thus strategy: creep-out is good, precisely because it commits this side to manifesting the disease rather than concocting primitive patent-medicine cures.

You can’t fight progressivism with “your kind of progress is not optimal, this kind of progress is not really that scary once I’m able to explain”. What you can do is show them the wounds, like aggressive beggars sometimes will do in my third world megalopolis — this is what is happening; this isn’t me, this is t he world gone mad.

What you really want is them to develop the disease themselves. This is how anyone wins: oozing from people’s very pores. There’s maybe tens of thousands of Handles and Nydwracus to happen yet before any kind of war is about to begin.

In short: make rhizomes, not roots. Forget militaristic metaphor, the contemporary Left needs to be sweated out.