sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Can we all agree with the following?:

SJW's/ political correctness/ anti-discriminatory bodies have achieved, and work to achieve, many things that are helpful and morally justified.

There's a contingent within these groups that go against enlightenment and democratic principles when trying to limit free speech or shut down debate. Possibly this phenomenon is not as widespread as elements of the right would have you believe, possibly it is.

There is a resurgence of white nationalism. Some suggest that the white house, or elements within the cabinet, are sympathetic to this ideology.

The president has used authoritarian rhetoric and federal agents have recently defied court orders in favour of the president.

Though all threats posed to democratic and enlightenment values are unacceptable, the threat that is emanating from the Trump presidency is far more immediate and concrete, and deserves far more of our time and energy, than the questionable tactics of some politically correct university students. Moreover political correctness shouldn't be rejected as a whole due to some questionable elements of it.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Yeah, that all sounds pretty reasonable. Although I'd replace "Some suggest" with "It is abundantly clear" - but perhaps you were going for ironic understatement here...
 

luka

Well-known member
glad youve had a turn around from your far right moment you were going through a few weeks ago barty. things change quickly when youre young though, i appreciate that. seems a fairly decent summation. i cant remember where josef is on the spectrum? probably changed since he was last here. goldsmiths accelerationism? post alt-right contrarianism? spectral realism?
 

luka

Well-known member
Political correctness is anti-intellectual and anti-democratic

Trade unions were too powerful in the 70’s

Nuclear weapons are good

Capitalism is good

Globalisation is good

To the Victor belong the spoils

Western military intervention is a force for good

Railways shouldn’t be renationalised

etc
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
If memory serves, SMB wasn't actually positing any of those things as positions that he (necessarily) holds himself.
 

luka

Well-known member
he said he was fully intellectually and morally wedded to those positions. tbf theyre all defensible.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Given that it's not logical to hold all Mexican rapists and that Trump also said that among them are 'good people', a more charitable transcription of ðeə ˈreɪpɪsts may well have been 'their rapists' rather than 'they're rapists'.

.
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Accelerationism, Left and Right

Not a bad essay here -

https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-right/

Some highlights

Most of us, especially if we go to elite colleges, and especially if we take classes in the humanities, are exposed to the left-wing variety. Marx, Freud, Foucault, Fanon, Adorno, Benjamin, Gramsci, Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze-Guattari, Judith Butler, and Zizek (who else?) form a sort of quasi-radical cultural theory canon that achieves a limited but significant penetration in the mind of many American students.... As for right-wing anti-liberalism, however, many people’s intuitive understanding is that it is some sort of bizarre atavism; a product of racism, religious indoctrination, and/or ignorance, with no possible substantive content. No doubt, some of it is – ressentiment is a powerful thing. But calling someone a racist – even if they are a racist – can only get you so far in dismissing an argument, especially if they don’t actually care about the social consequences that usually give a term like that its power. And it would be foolish to simply assume that the fact of their racism (or whatever else) is in itself evidence of their stupidity. Carl Schmitt was a Nazi, and also a brilliant political theorist. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Nick Land’s neoreactionary, right-wing accelerationism is racist in any conventional sense of that term. Yet Land is also a quite interesting thinker of capitalism, and because capitalism, broadly defined, is the reality that structures and will continue to structure human existence throughout the foreseeable future, he is perhaps worth paying attention to. His overriding political and ethical ‘goal,’ from which his racism, his eugenicism, and technological fetishism spring, is optimize for intelligence, which for him is both the Darwinian law of the universe (‘Gnon’), as well as a functional description of what really-exisiting capitalism actually does...The thesis I proposed, however – and its one I know that Twitter (in)famous communist Jehu shares – is that for all the good intentions of the Left-Accels, Land’s “right” version of Accelerationism is the only authentic and logically consistent form of Accelerationism, as well as the only one that helps us understand anything about the dynamics of capitalism.

[W]ithin the orthodox Marxist schema, the labor theory of value (LTV) provided a built-in theoretical escape hatch from capitalism in the form of the revolutionary proletarian subject. Both Landian Accelerationism and orthodox Marxism acknowledge that the technological drive of the capitalism leads towards the increasing superfluousness of human labor to economic production. Within the LTV frame, however, as living human labor is the ultimate source of all value, the abolition of human labor from the productive process is ultimately the abolition of the law of value itself: a work free, high-tech Eden, the end of mankind’s prehistory, communism. Yet absent the LTV – which has grown increasingly difficult to maintain in the 20th and 21st centuries, and which Left Accelerationism makes no serious attempt to defend – the entire schema falls apart...

More strikingly, absent LTV, the problem posed to humanity by the technological drive of capital is not how to reach the New Jerusalem that the elimination of human labor from the production process will allow, but that this elimination will simply result in humans becoming superfluous to an increasingly autonomic system of machine production. What we will do with a warming planet of 10 billion people when progressively fewer of them can be productively integrated into the global economy, the marginal cost of their labor sinks below the cost of their own social reproduction, and states are obliged to provide for larger and larger numbers of unproductive workers at the expense of smaller and smaller numbers of high-skill workers who can still be plugged in to economically-productive roles? This is an entirely different economic, political, and ethical problematic. In this landscape, Land’s killer AI, speciation, and Galt’s Gulch-style ‘exit’ all begin to look like provisional speculative (if malevolent) answers to the question of: what do you do with all these (economically) useless people?
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
That's all well and good but on a less rarefied plane you might find that identifying anti discrimination initiatives with The Enemy wins you a set of admirers and allies who haven't been reading Lacan.

To be clear, I don't find myself personally triggered by SJWs, but I don't meet them too often.

but youre on the wrong track. as craner says earlier in the thread its the danger of living exclusively in a world of ideas.

To be fair, we are talking about a philosophical movement on the internet.

Also the interesting element isn't ideas, but desires - and especially, the desire for identity constructed against a certain image of the other, upon whom it depends.

I don't think there's much point in denying that hard-left activists and demagogues can be just as obnoxious, hysterical and unencumbered by concerns with factuality and evidence than their hard-right counterparts.

My claim is that they structurally imply each other, like a policeman and a criminal. The police require criminals, otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for the police. Accordingly, it acts to criminalize.

Similarly, if your identity (= your imaginary compensation for your useless education) is based on anti-racism, or anti-fascism you are going to need racists and fascists. Perhaps you will need to create them...


This video will have been reposted on every right-wing website in North America as a perfect demonstration of the racist, crazy, violent, terroristic (Muslim!) Left.

Joe White clicks and watches, and what does he think?

"Hmm, maybe white supremacy's not such a bad idea."

Well yeah, maybe, but there isn't currently a hyper-PC SJW installed in the White House, is there?

But how did he get there? Nick Land suggests "Breitbart, and then Bannon, made the punt that the leftist-tears flavored popcorn market was the largest untapped opportunity out there."
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
My claim is that they structurally imply each other, like a policeman and a criminal. The police require criminals, otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for the police. Accordingly, it acts to criminalize.

Similarly, if your identity (= your imaginary compensation for your useless education) is based on anti-racism, or anti-fascism you are going to need racists and fascists. Perhaps you will need to create them...

Well you might have hoped there was no need to create racists in a world that contains Bannon, Spencer, Yiannopoulos and all the rest. I think it's a grave error on the part of some of the more out-there hyper-left activists to use 'racist' and 'fascist' as slurs against anyone who thinks or speaks differently from themselves, because it de-fangs those words and makes their wider cause into a laughing stock by extension (as you point out, of course).

This was gone over fairly thoroughly here a few months back, shame you missed it I think.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Also the interesting element isn't ideas, but desires - and especially, the desire for identity constructed against a certain image of the other, upon whom it depends.

My claim is that they structurally imply each other, like a policeman and a criminal. The police require criminals, otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for the police. Accordingly, it acts to criminalize.

Similarly, if your identity (= your imaginary compensation for your useless education) is based on anti-racism, or anti-fascism you are going to need racists and fascists. Perhaps you will need to create them...

The analogy doesn't really work; more importantly, it's strange that you are focusing on the identity needs of those who oppose racism, whereas the obvious thing to focus upon in the current world are the identity needs/desires of those who employ racism. (If I'm not wrong, you yourself quoted James Baldwin on the very issue of the destructiveness of white identity politics not long ago. And following from that quote/sentiment, when a lot of white people mention 'identity politics', they seem to forget that white people even have an identity, in rather the same way as people from the south of England forget they have an accent, because they're so focused on using the Other to define their own identity.etcetc)

Even more obviously, a lot of people are anti-racist and anti-fascist as part of their identity, because, well, y'know, racism and fascism threaten them directly. In fact, I might suggest that such people form the vast majority of anti-racists and anti-fascists, even were they not to desire to identify themselves as such.

But I think the focus on identity and the desire for identity is spot on in trying to understand so many things about the world.
 
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josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
Who are the fascists?

"[O]nce we have made practically certain that the LD50 gallery is closed permanently and that the people who live in its vicinity know exactly what it was doing – once this has been achieved, how do we reconceive our own art to ensure that it never again serves as a conveniently indeterminate incubator for those who would gladly destroy us, our friends and neighbours and comrades, along with any latent possibility of a genuinely open and revolutionary culture or emancipated society?"

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/it-ok-to-punch-nazi-art-gallery
 

sufi

lala
4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him.


Interesting on the nihilist/victim-complex end of the sub-dom pivot in the alt-right/trumpite current, and it's incompatibility with snowflakeist safespaceisms and whatnot

(via @sarahkendzior <- if you didn't yet, then shut up til you have btw)
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Interesting on the nihilist/victim-complex end of the sub-dom pivot in the alt-right/trumpite current, and it's incompatibility with snowflakeist safespaceisms and whatnot

(via @sarahkendzior <- if you didn't yet, then shut up til you have btw)

Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite — a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about his outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure he must assault women.

Huh, that's actually pretty perceptive. Good piece, cheers.
 
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