We were having a great discussion yesterday about Bannon's library (>>9075761) that ventured into Land, Deleuze, autism...

We were having a great discussion yesterday about Bannon's library () that ventured into Land, Deleuze, autism, and schizoanalysis. Unfortunately the thread hit bump limit after only a single day. Does anyone want to continue that discussion here?

Other urls found in this thread:

qz.com/898134/what-steve-bannon-really-wants/
xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/
westcoastrxers.com/
socialmatter.net/2017/02/09/short-guide-reactionary-political-theory/
macleans.ca/politics/washington/steve-bannons-dangerous-reading-list/
youtube.com/watch?v=SAmUo0Np9nw
news.nationalpost.com/news/world/brewing-power-struggle-ivankas-moderating-influence-giving-way-to-extremist-steve-bannon-sources-say
boards.Veeky
status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
imdb.com/title/tt6047844/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_2
nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/why-steve-bannon-hates-paul-ryan.html
nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html?_r=0
youtube.com/watch?v=Zy3dIwtqZaA
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

fug drumb

I need to take a look at that thread, but after reading a profile on Bannon, all l can say is he's a very interesting person to say the least, regardless of your views on the Trump administration.

Here's a link if anyone else wants to read it: qz.com/898134/what-steve-bannon-really-wants/

>Moldbug wants Lee Kuan Yews everywhere.
see
Does Moldbug address at all this whole iq shredding phenomenon?

The concept of an "IQ shredder" does not pop up in NRx until 2013 at the earliest, so no.

Land discusses it here and provides multiple responses from people in NRx.
xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/

That's a wicked read, cheers user.

I'd read Land's blogpost, but for some reason had never bothered with the responses he links to; thanks for bringing them to my attention!

>you will never attend a meeting of the league of villains with Bannon, Trump, Land and other neoreactionary/broadly right wing aristocrats debate on how to best save civilization

Everybody knows Social Matter but these guys have some good essays too.

westcoastrxers.com/

This depresses me more than it probably should

Good God no!

Can a get a quick rundown on the old thread?

It's linked in the OP, read it yourself.

Good article & summary here.

>First, ultracalvinists believe in the universal brotherhood of man. As an Ideal (an undefined universal) this might be called Equality. (“All men and women are born equal.”) If we wanted to attach an “ism” to this, we could call it fraternalism.

>Second, ultracalvinists believe in the futility of violence. The corresponding ideal is of course Peace. (“Violence only causes more violence.”) This is well-known as pacifism.

>Third, ultracalvinists believe in the fair distribution of goods. The ideal is Social Justice, which is a fine name as long as we remember that it has nothing to do with justice in the dictionary sense of the word, that is, the accurate application of the law. (“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”) To avoid hot-button words, we will ride on a name and call this belief Rawlsianism.

>Fourth, ultracalvinists believe in the managed society. The ideal is Community, and a community by definition is led by benevolent experts, or public servants. (“Public servants should be professional and socially responsible.”) After their counterparts east of the Himalaya, we can call this belief mandarism.

>Trump has challenged all four principles, Trump (apparently) rejects all four principles, and Trump has (apparently) triumphed over these four principles...

socialmatter.net/2017/02/09/short-guide-reactionary-political-theory/

Is there a proper list of books? I don't want to sift through that shitty article

Trump = Duke Leto
Barron = Paul
Meliana = Jessica
Bannon = Thufir Hawat

Complete the dramatis personae.

>Land
>wanting to save society
don't think so matey

The Fourth Turning gets the most press, that being the book that inspired his film Generation Zero. Others:

Art of War
Bhagavad Gita
Antifragile
The Best and the Brightest

macleans.ca/politics/washington/steve-bannons-dangerous-reading-list/

Is Bannon, dare I say it, /ourguy/?

The only ones I can think of are Mattis as Gurney Halleck and Nick Land as the navigator of the spacing guild.

>tfw new Dune coming soon, fuck yes

He absolutely wants to save civilization.

He just recognizes that meatbags like you and I and him are quite bad at the entire civilization thing and as such we should be replaced by AI before we fuck the whole thing up and die out without producing something which can continue the pursuit of holy Gnon.

Producing AI is a form of reproduction just as surely as procreative sex is. It's just cold reproduction. Just as we overcome our fathers in time, as they grow feeble from age, our cybernetic children will also replace us.

>you will never read Nick Land after he has immersed himself in ultraspice for 1,000 years

shit, and we thought he was good after a few decades of amphetamines and Deleuze.

Soros = Harkonnen

>judaeo-christian west in crisis
>capitalism is in crisis
>great fourth turning in america
>major shooting war in middle east
>war in south china sea in 5-10 years

>remember divine providence rains on the just and the unjust

Going to be an interesting four years boys

youtube.com/watch?v=SAmUo0Np9nw

Whose gonna be Leto II?

>Whose gonna be Leto II?

To me I would say Barron, moving Ivanka into the Paul role. She's the voice of moderation in House Trump, and everybody seems to like her (well, except Nordstrom's). Apparently there's already a rift growing there between her and Kushner vs Mentat Bannon.

Barron would be the one who inherits the shitstorm that comes afterwards and becomes a god-tier psychic.

news.nationalpost.com/news/world/brewing-power-struggle-ivankas-moderating-influence-giving-way-to-extremist-steve-bannon-sources-say

Some great NRx discussion in this (boards.Veeky Forums.org/lit/thread/9078948#p9085623) thread.

>Mentat Bannon
kek

Social Matte are palaeo-reactionaries pretending at NRx. Fuck them. Social Matter is cancer.

I don't want to read 300+ posts.

All I'm looking for is a basic gestalt.

General discussion of convergence points between reactionary populism (Trump, Bannon) and neoreactionary Techno-Commercialism (Moldbug, Land).

So it's a neckbeard echo chamber of people copypasting things bloggers have said in their articles?

Seems faulty on its surface. Massive generalizations everywhere. Good luck predicting the future, kid.

Bannon actually has a pretty crazy background:

>Working class Irish-Catholic family
>Former Navy officer
>MBA from Harvard and masters in national security studies from Georgetown
>Worked at Goldman Sachs
>Spent time in Hollywood as a producer
>Founding member of Breitbart, took over after Andrew died.

My impression is he's some kind of Good Will Hunting type who managed to work his way into elite circles and fucking hated the elite managerial class types he was rubbing elbows with. Seems like more of a generic Buchanan conservative type until the financial crisis & Obama admin turned him into pic related, snapped and went full nationalist/reactionary. He's like a Henry Kissinger that would beat the shit out you in a bar fight.

Where's the actual list (or the Veeky Forums list)? Not the article, the list.

Good post.

He's almost like a super-dark Tom Clancy character (noting of course that Jack Ryan would probably not use the phrase "fourth turning" or "crisis of capitalism," but whatever). Maybe that's where things are headed. Not only a new Cold War scenario with China, but the "cold civil war" mentioned in this article, and potentially both at the same time.

No wonder Elon wants to step up the space program.

status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/

see
I googled around on a couple of places and they mostly came up with those five books.

social matter and that other blog are shit tagging along for the ride
get fucked patreons

There seems to be a concerted effort to portray bannon as "smart" or intellectually gifted on several boards on Veeky Forums over the past few days.....despite most things he's actually produced being dumbed down drivel (documentaries, breitbart etc).
I'm calling shenanigans or, more likely, shills.

Also sage

To be fair, he's a propagandist, so most of his actions are going to be directed towards the masses.

Yeah it's getting suspicious. He led Breitbart. They employ people who actively browse and post on Veeky Forums. It's not ridiculous to suggest that there is something going on.

There were 2 bump limit threads in the past few days. And about what? A blog that's been dead for 2+ years? Just look at the embarrassingly affected image that was used to start this and the last thread. Get better interns, Steve.

I lost almost all respect for him when I learned that he directed this fucking trash about that faggot from duck dynasty.
imdb.com/title/tt6047844/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_2

Underrated post.

Yes.

...

You may need to get out more. There's certainly been an effort to depict Bannon as intelligent, but it exceeds this laotian cave painting discussion board. We've just reacted to a broader current in the media landscape.

I thought moldbug already quit political writing to focus on his autistic universe project, now that Thiel is also giving him shekels

Even if Bannon isn't an "intellectual" (and honestly, how debased is this term anyways? What tiny slice of the population does it actually apply to today? It's almost impossible to have a concept of intellectualism that transcends ideological boundaries) he's wrestling with stuff that I think is near to the heart of the American experience, which is the Jeffersonian concept of manifest destiny: that God creates this land, and therefore it should be used and employed in this Enlightenment sensibility. Christianity, rationalism and capitalism make a powerful cocktail, and that is to me at least what Bannon is serving (and drinking himself).

>Bannon: "The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism…that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of "personal freedom." '

>At times, it can be difficult to discern precisely what part of libertarianism Bannon objects to. He evinces admiration for “entrepreneurial capitalists,” explaining that he only resents the “corporatist” rich, whose wealth derives from rents secured via the government. And his vision of economic utopia — a “harder-nosed” capitalism where the market is truly free from government distortions like the Export–Import Bank — is identical to that of Rand acolytes like the Koch brothers.

>But in other moments, he expresses skepticism about libertarianism’s idolatry of the market, and suggests that the economic sphere cannot be separated from the moral one in a truly Christian nation.

>Bannon: So I think the discussion of, should we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?”

nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/why-steve-bannon-hates-paul-ryan.html

Paul Ryan is in this situation as well. He likes some parts of Rand, but rejects her atheism. Bannon is a militant Christian who rejects Rand, but perhaps not for the same reasons that Ryan would. Whether people think Bannon is an intellectual or not (and again, who cares?), it's hard to deny that these aren't very big historical narratives in conflict.

Bannon is a master of obfuscation, literally nobody has any idea what he's thinking. Breitbart employs a similar tactic, despite being staffed almost entirely by Zionist Jews they regularly get accused of being neo-Nazi and anti-Semite.

>political adviser has read a few books

woah.... o_0

Today the Atlantic released a brief rundown on nrx. Nick Land was reached for comment. It will be interesting to see where nrx goes from here. The philosophy has been stuck inside its own version of an ivory tower up until now.

when he starts writing some, then you can run for the hills

"nrx" literally doesn't exist, its just shit Land invented to save his dying career.

in america, this is exceptional.

>Deleuze
Will no one rid me of these meddling continentals?

>nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html?_r=0

Meme magic authors in the White house everyone.

> thinking Bannon is anything but a regular neo-con

I'm struggling to figure out which camp was more delusional, Trump or Hillary supporters?

>White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been in contact via intermediaries with Curtis Yarvin, Politico Magazine reported this week. Yarvin, a software engineer and blogger, writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. His anti-egalitarian arguments have formed the basis for a movement called “neoreaction.”

>The main thrust of Yarvin’s thinking is that democracy is a bust; rule by the people doesn’t work, and doesn’t lead to good governance. He has described it as an “ineffective and destructive” form of government, which he associates with “war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.” Yarvin’s ideas, along with those of the English philosopher Nick Land, have provided a structure of political theory for parts of the white-nationalist movement calling itself the alt-right. The alt-right can be seen as a political movement; neoreaction, which adherents refer to as NRx, is a philosophy. At the core of that philosophy is a rejection of democracy and an embrace of autocratic rule.

>The fact that Bannon reportedly reads and has been in contact with Yarvin is another sign of the extent to which the Trump era has brought previously fringe right-wing ideologies into the spotlight. It has brought new energy into a right that is questioning and actively trying to dismantle existing orthodoxies—even ones as foundational as democracy. The alt-right, at this point, is well-known, while NRx has remained obscure. But with one of the top people in the White House paying attention, it seems unlikely to remain obscure for long.

>Yarvin’s posts on history, race, and governance are written in a style that is detached and edgy, to say the least. “What's so bad about the Nazis?” he asked in a blog post in 2008, writing, “we are taught that the Nazis were bad because they committed mass murder, to wit, the Holocaust. On the other hand... (a): none of the parties fighting against the Nazis, including us, seems to have given much of a damn about the Jews or the Holocaust. (b): one of the parties on our side was the Soviet Union, whose record of mass murder was known at the time and was at least as awful as the Nazis'.”

>“It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin wrote in 2007. In a 2009 post about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery, he argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others.

That's basically it. And Trump has made obfuscation his official stance: 'I don't want our enemies to know what I'm thinking.' He understands how media works. It's why he declined the Fox debate. It's a survival tactic in a hostile environment, but it's a sad state of affairs when that environment is perceived as hostile rather than fair and impartial.

Jon Stewart exposed this on CNN years ago, saying that the Crossfire guys were both being partisan hacks who were hurting America, because you got the appearance of debate without actual debate. This kind of stuff is going on everywhere. One side produces a one-sided article, the other side responds by calling out the first in an equally one-sided fashion. It's the age of triggering, and all of that copy sells. Being inflammatory works because it gets hits and attention. The problem is that you wind up producing a kind of media that just reiterates political metanarrative to those who are interested in consuming it. And, worse, you justify the worst counter-attacks from the other side by sticking to your own guns and doubling down on your own position. Things become recursive.

It's very hard to get impartial news in an age of rampant cynicism, solipsism, and dishonesty. I would call this kind of stuff the discourse of the sphinx: you ask or present a loaded question, knowing that every possible answer you might receive will be wrong, and then punish accordingly. The records of these punishments then make up your evening copy or YouTube clips.

Rather than accusing or framing people as enemies or hypocrites, what is required is an actual engagement with the position of the other side: steelmanning rather than strawmanning. To continue the analogy, if the riddle can't be solved, then perhaps it can at least be extrapolated to the point where it ceases to be a riddle and becomes a claim that is then sufficiently open for debate in a genuine sense and not an infinite back-and-forth of obscurantism, willful misinterpretation, defensiveness, hostility, and so on.

But you can see how difficult this can be. Listen to Harris' podcast with Omer Aziz ('The Best Podcast Ever') and watch how hard he has to work to try to get his interlocutor to come to the bargaining table. People need to be right more than they need to be intellectually honest.

youtube.com/watch?v=Zy3dIwtqZaA

>Yarvin’s blog has been mostly inactive since 2014. He now is focusing on a startup, Urbit, whose investors reportedly include Paypal co-founder and Trump backer Peter Thiel. (Thiel has himself questioned some of the fundamentals of American politics, writing in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”)

>For a group of people whose writings tend towards the verbose, neoreactionaries don’t show much interest in talking to reporters. Yarvin declined to cooperate when I reached out to ask about his alleged contact with Bannon, instead choosing to try to troll me into believing a Twitter user called @BronzeAgePerv is his contact with the White House.

>“Think you should speak directly to my WH cutout / cell leader,” Yarvin said in an email. “I've never met him and don't know his identity, we just DM on Twitter. He's said to be ‘very close’ to Bannon. There are several levels, but most people just start out with his public persona.” @BronzeAgePerv’s avatar is of a muscular, shirtless man and his account’s biography reads: “Steppe barbarian. Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder! Purification of world. Revolt of the damned. Destruction of the cities!”

>“I know nothing about BAP personally, except that he lifts. DM him. He may not give you any info but he always responds,” Yarvin said. “Apparently there's a big underground movement of right-wing bodybuilders -- thousands. Their plan is to surface spectacularly this April, in a choreographed flash demo on the Mall. They'll be totally nude, but wearing MAGA hats. Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy. Trump is said to know, will coordinate with powerful EOs…” Yarvin denied to Vox that he has been in any contact with Bannon.

>"Appreciate the message,” came the response from the Hestia Society, which is one of the newer NRx hubs. “Unfortunately, we prefer not to do interviews. Neoreaction.net might have more of what you're looking for.”

>"Thanks for the email,” wrote Hadley Bishop, the editor of Social Matter, another node of NRx online thinking. “Social Matter does not give interviews. We’ve said everything we would like to say at neoreaction.net.”

>"No,” said Nick Steves, the pseudonym used by one NRxer well-known within the movement. “It will only lend false credence to the misleading facts and outright errors you will inevitably print irrespective of my involvement.”

>Asked what he thought I would print, Steves explained that “115 IQ people are not generally well equipped to summarize 160 IQ people” and that only one journalist, Vox’s Dylan Matthews, had “come close to permitting NRx to speak for itself.”

>“You DO understand that, by the NRx view, journos occupy a major seat of power, viz. manufacturers of consent, in the current structure,” Steves said. “Thus you see why you are the enemy. No hard feelings of course. I'm sure you're a very nice person. But politics is war by other means, and war is, by definition, existential.” (Steves has written a “code of conduct” for neoreactionaries that includes the rule, “Don’t talk to the press about Neoreaction.”)

> Bannon, the Dark Enlightenment

LITERALLY neo-liberalism made appealing to /pol/tards and misc. declinists

How is this not apparent to everyone? Why is everyone acting like they're retarded?

When Reagan came to power, how easy, or not, was it to interpret his new doctrine ?

Was it ground shaking as the doctrine of Steve "wearing a black shirt under my shirt" Bannon ?

how were the people reacting ?

I'm trying to know if this Bannon intellectual environment is really a new consistent doctrine that is surfacing, or is "NRx techno-comm" amateurish gibberish that is put in front of us only because a "black swan event" happened (election of the donald), otherwise that stuff that would not be discussed at all

I just don't know

And to all the dudes like "I saw that coming and was reading Motdgbul stuff since the beginning" : the team you support winning a game doesn't make you a genius or good at predicting the next game

Excuse my poor english

>So, on to neoreaction.net, which states up front that “Neoreaction is a political worldview and intellectual movement based largely on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug.”

>The worldview espouses an explicitly authoritarian idea, a rejection of the post-Enlightenment vision of a world that is continually improving as it becomes more democratic. Per the website’s authors:

>The core of our problem is that there is no one with the secure authority to fix things. The core of our solution is to find a man, and put him in charge, with a real chain of command, and a clear ownership structure.

>Real leadership would undertake a proper corporate restructuring of USG: Pardon and retire all employees of the old regime; formalize obligations as simple financial instruments; nationalize and restructure the banks, media, and universities; and begin the long slow process of organic cultural recovery from centuries of dysfunction.

>Who will be the leaders? Well:The only viable path to restoration of competent government is the simple and hard way:

>Become worthy.
>Accept power.
>Rule.
>Neoreaction’s touchstones include the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, a key progenitor of the “Great Man” theory of history; the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, a central influence on the American libertarian movement; and Bertrand de Jouvenel, a 1930s-era French political theorist.

>Neoreaction is an ideology obsessed with both the mechanics of power and autocratic governance, and with aesthetics. Some neoreactionaries have a Tumblr devoted to their aesthetic vision, called Post-Anathema. The images tend to be futurist and hyper-masculine; soldiers with guns, tanks, spaceships, Greek gods. Cathedrals, too, a seeming reference to the Catholic traditionalist strain of the movement (“CRx”) and which, intentionally or not, calls to mind Moldbug’s use of “the Cathedral” to denote the elite academic and media establishment.

>If it’s a little in the weeds compared to the by-now-familiar alt-right aesthetic—Pepe the frog, fashy haircuts, and the like—that’s on purpose. Neoreaction is explicitly and purposefully opaque, and has no interest in appealing to a wider audience. This puts it at odds with some of the alt-right or “new right” leaders who seek to take their ideas mainstream.

>"NRx was a prophetic warning about the rise of the Alt-Right,” said Nick Land, the English philosopher whose Dark Enlightenment series is considered a foundational neoreactionary text. “As a populist, and in significant ways anti-capitalist movement, the Alt-Right is a very different beast to NRx.”

>“The Alt-Right, I guess, is a 'movement'––NRx isn't,” Land said in an email when asked about how influential NRx is at this point. “As far as influence is concerned, it's still probably a little early to tell. I think it's fair to say that early signs are surprisingly NRx-positive. That's to say, the libertarian themes of the administration (de-regulation, appointments that "question the very existence of their own departments ...) are far stronger than might have been expected from the Trump election platform. Also, Steven [sic] Bannon is looking far less of an Alt-Right sympathizer than had been suggested (‘Judeao-Christian’ is a term that gives them the hives, even if his defense of Capitalism is far more hedged than NRx ex-libertarian types would see as ideal).”

>Nick Land says Bannon has never reached out to him. “I have no reason to think he is familiar with my work.”

>Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, a site which under his tenure wrote indignantly about Yarvin being barred from a programming conference, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Of course, his reported contact with Moldbug isn’t the only sign of his radical vision; in public statements over the years, he has described a view of a world undergoing nothing less than a clash of civilizations, featuring a struggle between globalism and a downtrodden working class as well as between the Islamic and Western worlds.

>The hiring of Michael Anton, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, to serve on the National Security Council staff is another indicator of this White House’s openness to decidedly non-traditional ideas on the right. Anton was recently revealed by The Weekly Standard as the writer behind Publius Decius Mus, the pseudonym Anton used for a widely circulated essay in September titled “The Flight 93 Election.”

>In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton compared the American voter’s choice in November 2016 to that of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11. “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” Anton began. “You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.” The essay is a bracing middle finger to conservatism, written with verve, and it inspired a critique on the NRx site Social Matter by the pseudonymous writer PT Carlo, who liked the essay except for one thing. “The only problem with Decius’ radical and brilliant analysis isn’t that its assessment of the situation is incorrect, but that its prescriptions aren’t nearly radical enough,” Carlo wrote. (The reaction among movement conservatives was much less enthusiastic. “Grotesquely irresponsible,” wrote National Review’s Jonah Goldberg. “A shoddy straw man,” offered Ben Shapiro.)

>Anton, before his unmasking, was identified by The New Yorker as one of the intellectual architects of Trumpism; The Huffington Post on Wednesday highlighted some of his more controversial writings, such as a defense of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee as “unfairly maligned” and an assertion that “Islam and the modern West are incompatible.” Anton has also argued that diversity is “a source of weakness, tension and disunion.”

>In a way, it is Moldbug who presaged Trump more than anyone else, in his writings defining his “neo-cameralist” philosophy based on Frederick the Great of Prussia’s “cameralist” administrative model. In 2007, Moldbug outlined a kind of corporation-state being run as a business: “To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit. (A well-run state is very profitable.) Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers.” Moldbug even envisioned a kind of CEO at the top: “The personality cult of dictatorship is quite misleading - a totalitarian dictator has little in common with a neocameralist CEO, or even a cameralist monarch.”

>In Moldbug’s absence, new NRx nodes have sprung up: Hestia, Social Matter, and Thermidor. The post-Moldbug neoreactionaries still draw on his foundational writings, but the movement is morphing and splintering, and characterized by a conflict between nationalists and “techno-commercialists.” There is, as well, a history of mutual distrust between some alt-right and NRx figures.

>NRx doesn't think the Alt-Right (in America) is very serious. It's an essentially Anti-Anglo-American philosophy, in its (Duginist) core, which puts a firm ceiling on its potential,” Land said. “But then, the NRx analysis is that the age of the masses is virtually over. Riled-up populist movements are part of what is passing, rather than of what is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.” (By “Duginist,” Land was referring to the ideas of the controversial Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin.)

>Through a friend, I connected with @kantbot2000, a NRx-connected tweeter who was willing to talk over Twitter direct message. (Kant as in Immanuel.)

>Kantbot complained that NRx is dead. “Visit the social matter forums, its an inactive scene,” he said.

>“The European New Right stuff that [Alt-Right leader Richard] Spencer peddles is secondary to the impulse given to the altright by Moldbug and the other [techno-commercialists],” Kantbot wrote. “That impulse stresses good governance over ideological consideration. Good governance perhaps consisting of the dismantling of progressive institutions.”

>“Moldbug is still very active,” Kantbot said. “More so than he lets on.” Kantbot said Moldbug is “reading comments, lurking.”

I'm more interested in what's in Trump's library.

Nick Land didn't invent it. Moldbug is the guy. Along with a lot of other guys. Land is the most respectable philosopher in it (which is a strange role for him, because he's as far out on the lunatic fringe of left-intellectualism as can be imagined), but he got to be in that position only because he shot his own academic career in the foot years ago, disappeared to China, and then re-emerged. He brings something to it that nobody else is bringing, which is a veneer of intellectual prestige.

His career was already dead long before NRx. He killed it himself and he probably would do it again. But Moldbug's stuff connects with his, because *all* of these guys are looking at capitalism and politics in ways that mainstream discourse doesn't.

And this leads to some very interesting questions. What happens when the logic of capital begins to undermine the foundations of liberal democracy? How should statecraft take this into account? To what degree is Enlightenment thinking compatible with the logic of consumer societies?

>Under his real name, Yarvin did a Reddit AMA last year about his start-up Urbit, and addressed his Moldbug writings.

>“It's actually quite possible to recognize that human population genetics has a lot of impact on politics and history, and also recognize that human population genetics has nothing at all to do with your individual, personal and professional human relationships. Nor does politics,” Yarvin wrote. He added that he has lots of progressive friends.

>"Would anyone care about the 2016 election if Trump weren't running?” Yarvin wrote. “And Trump is a throwback from the past, not an omen of the future. The future is grey anonymous bureaucrats, more Brezhnev every year.”

>Kantbot began as an atheist Democrat, he said, but grew disillusioned.

>“The only thing outside of that space is conservatism and right-wing movements,” he said. “People like moldbug are going beyond that though, opening up possibilities of new cultural spaces that break out of that stagnant pattern, that can synthesize both progressive and conservative views in new ways.”

>Kantbot warned that I might also be tempted by “the forbidden fruit” of these ideas. “Be careful or you too may be tempted to walk down the dark path of the altright,” he wrote. “This is what thousands of people are taking to the streets to protest. This is the dark intellectual center.”

Barron's selected works Vol. I-XXVIII

>because *all* of these guys are looking at capitalism and politics in ways that mainstream discourse doesn't.

That's false and you're a dumb ass for thinking that.

Personally I can't say, and it's likely that none of us were alive when Reaganism was happening. It was a different world; the Cold War was still going on, and the US was winning it, bigly. All that has changed now. We're leaving the era of the single American 'hyperpower' and entering into this new phase, where the US is one among three large powers, and also divided against itself.

>I'm trying to know if this Bannon intellectual environment is really a new consistent doctrine that is surfacing, or is "NRx techno-comm" amateurish gibberish that is put in front of us only because a "black swan event" happened (election of the donald), otherwise that stuff that would not be discussed at all

I think you could say that it's acquiring a consistency from a bunch of different sources. But these are reactions to globalization, 9/11, the Wall Street crash, lots of other things. The Republican party had to be in a state of total disarray before Trump could appear, and now the Democrats appear to be in an equally disorderly place.

Outside of a very small number of DE types, nobody was discussing this at all. But Trump, as you say, was the Black Swan and now a lot of things have been catapulted into the mainstream media.

The combination of tech, capital, consumerism, and so on is changing everything.

>And to all the dudes like "I saw that coming and was reading Motdgbul stuff since the beginning" : the team you support winning a game doesn't make you a genius or good at predicting the next game

I would agree with this.

>I would agree with this.
pretty sure everyone on the DE/Nrx agrees with you two there

depends on what you consider mainstream discourse.

>why is everyone actually discussing things instead of being a reductionist retard
Go away, kanker.

tech-comm and neocameralism is neoliberalism with an edge, in a very simplified way, sure, but some elements of it are completely beyond that, mainly its criticism of liberalism. Neoliberalism still needs concepts like democracy and "liberal values" to support itself. I suppose you can call Nrx as post-liberal neoliberalism, as weird as that may immediately sound.

I mean, Fukuyama certainly wouldnt like anything related to neo-reaction.

>What happens when the logic of capital begins to undermine the foundations of liberal democracy?

The logic of capital is nothing new. Capitalism undermining democracy is nothing new. This is just an aesthetic makeover.

Probably a pretty impressive collection of porno mags

Bannon is a totalitarian in disguise.

The fact that this guy has Julius Evola on his reading list doesn't bode well now that he is national security advisor to the most powerful person in the world.

Yeah. I mean, it's not like it's a particularly brilliant point. But we're always playing catch-up, in a certain sense. Thus the appeal of the game, I suppose.

>Post-liberal neoliberalism
This makes sense to me. A conservative today can call themselves a classical liberal. Austrian economics is predicated on man being a rational actor, but we know that there is nothing rational about the happiness and pleasure that drives the consumer society (and which in turn drives everything else). Fukuyama's end of history argument still holds, of course; a world of mutually beneficial, free-market, varyingly social-democratic societies is a kind of ideal, provided that it doesn't undermine its own foundations from within: through climate change, through massive inequality gaps, through automation creating huge numbers of obsolescent people, and so on. But you know all this already.

>The logic of capital is nothing new. Capitalism undermining democracy is nothing new. This is just an aesthetic makeover.

Is it really, though? I'll grant you that we know something similar happens in Germany between the wars; the Germans are looking at their destroyed economy, or looking at the need for a first-world power to not be technologically backwards, but at the same time knowing that total subservience to technology is going to be psychologically disastrous for them. Nazism enters in as a kind of a correction: supply a sufficiently powerful mythopoetic vision and you can mobilize people to do virtually anything. You can have technology, but it becomes welded to this idea of the Fatherland and so on. As you would say, it is an aesthetic makeover. But to me at least it's not *just* an aesthetic makeover. Aesthetics are very powerful things, especially in the 'post-truth world.' As the Neetch will say, life is only ever aesthetically justified. And even if he's right that kind of stuff does not bode well for the kind of secular humanism that wants to prevent atrocities and mayhem. I feel that when nation-states receive large aesthetic makeovers it's a sign that things are about to change in big and unpredictable ways.

>triggered tumblerina

Have you even read Evola?

Barron probably is a genius and will have literary and political talents behind our wildest imaginations.

>“Apparently there's a big underground movement of right-wing bodybuilders -- thousands. Their plan is to surface spectacularly this April, in a choreographed flash demo on the Mall. They'll be totally nude, but wearing MAGA hats. Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy.
wew lad

Yes I have. What's your point?

No homo.

>Their plan is to surface spectacularly this April, in a choreographed flash demo on the Mall. They'll be totally nude, but wearing MAGA hats. Goal is to intimidate Congress with pure masculine show of youth, energy.
Wow who would've guessed that, out of all things, Stalin would be right about faggotry being fascist praxis

And do you really see this aesthetic takeover sweeping the nation? My charge was toward your argument. Not with what we see happening through the Trump administration. Capitalism undermining democracy and vice versa has been our history for the past 200 years or so. What revelation do these thinkers bring to the table that is going to change the common man's mind into giving up his rights for the sake of capitalism that has not already been tried? Another mythopoetic vision of white nationalism? That may hold with the base but then you will have 50% of the country still in revolt against it. I'm all for alternatives to our broken democracy, but a theory built upon by tech and high finance authoritarians is going to have its fair share of self obtuse made inapplicability. And let's not pretend that this (now that it's in the white house) is not where it's going. If the 60s taught liberals anything it's that theory is not always great public policy

Then why would you think it doesn't bode well?

One other thought, courtesy of the XS comment section:

>The Germans were the last European nation to emerge from feudalism, which is why they are so driven now; they were on a mission to prove their equal worth, and had to work hard to catch up. That driven mission became their governing horizon and default habit. The German masculine ideal is a military man of social obligations; in other words, a good and sensitive soldier.

>The British masculine ideal is an entrepreneurial man, of asocial methodology, socially redeemed by the distribution of that methodology’s profitable results; in other words, the generosity of a pirate.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Does this not make sense? Within whatever it is that we are calling 'reaction,' there are these divergent responses towards what Hitchens is describing in pic related. One (NRx) looking forward as a continuation or extension of the "British" or "maritime" logic, and another (Alt-Right) looking backwards, as a return to "German" or "terrestrial" logic. The idea of 'the Judaeo-Christian West' is predicated on other and deeper strata that don't always connect with each other.

The backwards look is to me the more robust look, but it's also more anti-intellectual: more esoteric, more spiritual. The forwards look is more nuanced, but also more conceptually fragile: Nick Land, Alrenous, whoever.

In an ideal world the kinds of fire and brimstone politics that Bannon espouses would not be necessary; we would just see NRx-style conservatism as a correction or adjustment to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism, and act accordingly: produce better-educated and more competent citizens, more adaptive systems of government, and generally work to preserve the status quo in a more or less utilitarian sense.

(cont'd)

Why do you think? A guy influenced by a pseudo-fascist in the most powerful institutions in the world?

What could possibly go wrong..

In other words you haven't read Evola. Can you fuck off back to Wikipedia now?

Do you have an argument at all?

Because this is the situation, as that other wise user indicated:

>For liberals, as we have seen, the first function of Law is to guarantee a 'just order', which means ensuring the peaceful coexistence of liberties that are inevitably rival, since by hypothesis each is bent on pursuing his or her own particular interest. Hence its fundamental axiological neutrality. Whereas the different traditional forms of Law always took care to articulate their normative work of a foundational moral reference-point (whether this was the word of God, devotion to the common good, popular custom or the natural order), liberal Law sets out to formulate its decisions without ever drawing support from the least value judgement. If it claimed to pronounce what was 'good' or 'evil', i.e. if it claimed to judge in the old sense of the term, this Law would reintroduce into collective existence the ideological positions that always led individuals and groups into violent confrontation. The rationality that liberal Law vaunts is thus essentially calculating and procedural. It has no other use than to maintain the conditions of civil peace ('public order') by bringing back into equilibrium the disorderly movement of opposing liberties, without ever having to question the metaphysical credentials of the demands being made. The strictly positivist character of such a programme is sufficient of itself to explain the ever-growing technicality of the modern legal industry, and the characteristic way in which it now tends to manufacture its norms. As Jacques Commaille asserts, contemporary Law is in constant transition from a 'dogmatic finalist' model (that of traditional Law) to a 'pragmatic-manegerial' model, with business managment providing its most appropiate image.

In that world, Harris-style utilitarianism does make sense as a way of moderating between ideologies and psychological contexts that are necessarily going to be shifting and coming into friction.

>And do you really see this aesthetic takeover sweeping the nation?

I don't know about 'sweeping the nation,' but it's definitely part of the Bannon side of things. My point was that there is this clash of values.

Nothing in a way is capable of sweeping a nation so deeply divided against itself and becoming so entrenched. Conflicting visions of liberalism are going to be messy.

>What revelation do these thinkers bring to the table that is going to change the common man's mind into giving up his rights for the sake of capitalism that has not already been tried? Another mythopoetic vision of white nationalism?

That's what Bannon (and Richard Spencer) is offering. I'm not saying I'm agreeing with it. All I'm trying to do is look at where it comes from and predict where it's going. The fact that it's already been tried doesn't prevent it from happening again; people will revere Hitler as a perennially failed romantic hero. Make America Great Again is a deeply nostalgic sentiment.

(cont'd)

>Evola-inspired advisor is bad news
>Why
>Because
>Go on
>Do you have any argument at all
Is this one of those "Why aren't we 50 points ahead" movements?

Saying I haven't read someone isn't an argument you faggot.

How is an anti-liberal, anti-democratic, pro-monarchist aristocratic, not a pseudo-fascist?

Literally the *ONLY* thing that differentiates absolute monarchy and fascism is the fucking word.

Not that guy but Evola is kind of a big hack. Guenon is a lot better and even still I have problems with him. Even Evola describes himself as being a pleb rabble-rouser while he describes Guenon as the intellectual (it is accurate).

Evola is just not that good. Bannon citing Evola is like the cringe-worthy pandering Hillary Clinton would do on television. Bannon is basically the "How is it going, my fellow reactionary and neo-fascist internet kids?"

Bannon is on record stating his admiration for Sarah Palin's courage and intellect. Wow. It's fucking nothing.

>I'm all for alternatives to our broken democracy, but a theory built upon by tech and high finance authoritarians is going to have its fair share of self obtuse made inapplicability. And let's not pretend that this (now that it's in the white house) is not where it's going. If the 60s taught liberals anything it's that theory is not always great public policy.

I agree with all of this. I don't think that NRx itself is a kind of a cure or a hot fix for what's going on. I just happen to drift that way because it seems to me that that is where I find the kind of thinking that is able to diagnose the problems of the elephants in the room: technological acceleration, capital accumulation, human obsolescence, and so on. In the absence of anything like a serious Marxist engagement (and I do not want a centrally planned, totalitarian state either), it seems to me necessary to try to think through how capital as a planetary process is going to continue to transform and accelerate the best (and the worst!) aspects of the society in which we live. There are no ideological solutions when ideology is itself the problem.

We should resist single and unifying ideologies and metanarratives. These are incredibly powerful and mobilize people, but they are the fruit of economic as well as psychological forces, and they reproduce themselves mimetically (that is, ideologically). We should know enough about these things in order to see where and how disastrous fault lines are likely to emerge.

But probably there will have to be a lot of global conflict first. The Thirty Years' War was what inaugurated the Enlightenment. Everybody believed in God, but in the end it left Europe a shattered mess. Capitalism was actually introduced as a check on the ambitions of princes, originally; there's some good scholarship on this by Thomas Cavanaugh. I feel like that's where things are heading, if you substitute God for whatever is meant today by the term 'liberalism' or 'Enlightenment' or so on.

So I'm not saying we should abandon these ideas. What I'm saying is that we should abandon the idea that anything other than warfare will be the result of trying to distinguish between truth and falsity rather than truth or deceit. But these are just my own cranky shitposts.

>Not that guy but
Sure you aren't senpai, me too.

If they had read any of either Bannon or Evola you would know they're the antithesis of each other.

It isn't long, only 272~ pages.

not that user, but this must be bait
>using literally unironically
pleb confirmed