Outside in » Fission

Quote note (#110)

admin — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:18:26 +0000

Dig beneath the facile moralism, and Tom Engelhardt offers sentences (even the embryo of an analysis) to delect in:

Since World War II, we’ve generally been focused on the Great Concentration, while another story was developing in the shadows. Its focus: the de-concentration of power in what the Bush administration used to call the Greater Middle East, as well as in Africa, and even Europe. Just how exactly this developed will have to await a better historian than I and perhaps the passage of time. But for the sake of discussion, let’s call it the Great Fragmentation.

[…]

The Great Fragmentation has accelerated in seemingly disastrous ways in our own time under perhaps some further disintegrative pressure. One possibility: yet another development in the shadows that, in some bizarre fashion, combines both the concentration of power and its fragmentation in devastating ways. I’m thinking here of the story of how the apocalypse became human property — the discovery, that is, of how to fully exploit two energy sources, the splitting of the atom and the extraction of fossil fuels for burning from ever more difficult places, that could leave human life on this planet in ruins.

Think of them as, quite literally, the two greatest concentrations of power in history. One is now embedded in the globe’s nuclear arsenals, capable of destroying numerous Earth-sized planets. The other is to be found in a vast array of oil and natural gas wells and coal mines, as well as in a relatively small number of Big Energy companies and energy states like Saudi Arabia, Russia, and increasingly these days, the United States. It, we now know, is capable of essentially burning civilization off the planet.

From this dual concentration of power comes the potential for the kinds of apocalyptic fragmentation it was once thought only the gods or God might be capable of. We’re talking about potential exit ramps from history. The pressure of this story — which has been in play in our world since at least August 6, 1945, and now in its dual forms suffuses all our lives in hard to define ways — on the other two and on the increasing fragmentation of human affairs, while impossible to calibrate, is undoubtedly all too real.

This is why, now in my eighth decade, I can’t help but wonder just what planet I’m really on and what its story will really turn out to be.

Fission II

admin — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 16:33:13 +0000

The Umlaut has long been doing an embarrassing amount of our thinking for us, and perhaps even more of our controversy. The latest installment, by Dalibor Rohac, is here. The connections it makes are frankly disturbing to this blog, whose pro-capitalist, post-libertarian, and general Atlantean sympathies have been pushed as hard as realistically possible, along with an explicit attempt at differentiation from those tendencies with an opposite — I would argue self-evidently anti-Moldbuggian — valency. It is going to be difficult to condemn conflations of NRx with the ENR for so long as the ‘voice’ of Neoreaction includes remarks of this kind:

.@DaliborRohac is scared by nationalist stirrings. https://t.co/OhzEVKTBsR

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) August 6, 2014

NRx, across its whole spectrum, is neither libertarian nor fascist. There is, however, a remarkable polarity — our axis of fission — which is based upon which of these associations is found most disreputable. From my perspective, this distinction lines up extremely neatly with Alexander Dugin’s Hyperborean / Atlantean continental forever war. It seems to me beyond any serious question that the inheritance from Mencius Moldbug lies unproblematically on the Atlantean side of this divide. The standing Outside in prophecy is that, by the end of this year, a definitive break along these lines will have taken place. There’s no reason I can see to back-track on that expectation.

ADDED: “One could see a situation in which libertarian inattentiveness to political concerns, in the face of masses of people that are growing frustrated with democracy, abets extremism. If freedom and democracy are incompatible, like Peter Thiel thinks, it is important to articulate ways to preserve freedom.”

Chaos Patch (#11)

admin — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 04:57:24 +0000

Time for one of these, I’m told …

(Launch topic — Entryism.)

ADDED: Anyone applying for retro-entryist special ops from our side has first to pass one simple test. Re-phrase the following statement briefly in your own words, without sacrificing any of its intellectual rigor:

gender binary is rooted in white supremacist, anti-Black and colonial logics

— Che G. (@chegossett) April 20, 2014

Once you’ve completed the exercise, you’re ready for this. ADDED: … but this was supposed to be about Project Idaho. So a little prodding —

@MikeAnissimov @Outsideness But as long as we agree on the importance of Moldbug’s neocameralist project there is no reason for conflict.

— Hurlock (@_Hurlock_) April 24, 2014

@_Hurlock_ @Outsideness I don’t agree on it. There’s no reason for conflict because my position is already dominant.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) April 24, 2014

@MikeAnissimov @Outsideness Out of curiosity, why did you abandon Moldbug’s project? (if you were ever interested in it in the first place)

— Hurlock (@_Hurlock_) April 24, 2014

@_Hurlock_ @Outsideness muh, I abandoned it nearly as soon as I found it. I care about Europeans, not some cultureless shekel-worship.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) April 24, 2014

… and just one more (for now), which exactly captures my sense of the present trajectory:

@Outsideness @_Hurlock_ Which’ll come first, do you think, Kool-Aid or cannibalism?

— Mr. Archenemy (@mr_archenemy) April 24, 2014

ADDED: Some relevant satirical free association from Fuimus.

ADDED:

“They laughed at the trailer park.”