josef k

[Nina]

Nina, I didn't know anything about you until I just looked you up, so bits of the conversation above were a bit confusing. Now, thanks to the internet, less so.

(1) People trying to get you to lose your main job must be really stressful and horrible, and I sympathise on that score.

(2) Your disingenuous response to the whole thing is bizarre. You know that the two people with you in that video, who you seem to broadly agree with on most things, are controversial for good reason. One for defending the 'right' of a space to put on far-right speakers, and one for saying needlessly provocative things in the manner of a 13 year old who craves attention.

What did you expect, not to be criticised?

(3) You seem to have a lot of ideas that are very close to the 'men's rights' schtick. "We can see society as being really anti-men in many, many ways" is a particular low point in that video - whether it's you or Jordan Peterson saying it doesn't really matter. For the examples you give, then the dominant axes of discrimination are race and class rather than maleness. Acknowledging that men have in some senses constructed a prison of expectations for themselves and other men, for example (while also acknowledging that the prison of expectations they have created for women is much worse), would avoid the bizarre implication that society had somehow been created independently of men and was now returning to victimise them.

IN response 1) thanks - the letter is a very strange business: no one is quite sure who wrote it, both those who want to agree with it (thanks guys!) and those who clearly know it's beyond insane. Some people - artist Luke Turner, for example - have linked to it as if it were real, but he has a habit of accusing everyone of anti-semitism without foundation, so I'm not sure what that means. I don't think it's ok to also try to lose me things that are not my 'main job' either for the record. These people rampaging around trying to get everyone cancelled on the basis of paranoia and hearsay - who do they think they are? Who do they think other people are that need 'protecting' from 'dangerous ideas' - not that I am making any, beyond suggesting people should be free to think, read and discuss anything with anyone.

2) This is a mean-minded and reductive description of both people. But I am ok with being criticised for sure, for appearing with people we are - what - supposed to shun? I think Justin's situation is absurd - hauled over the coals for tweets - I mean, really. His case tells us a lot about academic freedom today, which is to say, its disappearance. That Daniel protested the closure of an art gallery - so what? It doesn't make him a fascist.

He wrote about the whole thing here: I reject the idea that we should accept on good faith the ideas of whoever wrote that mad Open Letter because they seem nominally 'left' and reject anyone who questions them because they might be accused of being a 'Nazi' for doing so. Justin writes a thread here about the whole recent thing as well:
3) I don't see caring about men as being in opposition to caring about women. They are not and should not be in opposition. It's not a zero sum game.

 

[Nina]

There’s no explanation of the hand gesture at the time. My recollection is that Josef does it first and then Nina copied him. I assumed it was some kind of in-joke.

I didn't even remember making it. For the record, I had no idea it was a Turkish nationalist symbol - I had vaguely thought it was some kind of cute devil, rock n roll thing. I love making hand signals, so would have just made it to play along. Who knew that I was actually secretly an Erdogan fan or something!

 

[john eden]

2) This is a mean-minded and reductive description of both people. But I am ok with being criticised for sure, for appearing with people we are - what - supposed to shun? I think Justin's situation is absurd - hauled over the coals for tweets - I mean, really. His case tells us a lot about academic freedom today, which is to say, its disappearance. That Daniel protested the closure of an art gallery - so what? It doesn't make him a fascist.

There is really quite a lot of space between "being a fascist" and "protesting the closure of an art gallery". Both of these positions are remarkably context and content free.

I remember a really big protest to close down a bookshop in Welling:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Welling_riots

Which was ultimately successful.

Of course it wasn't simply a bookshop, it was the BNP's bookshop and was selling holocaust revisionist literature.

And it wasn't just selling literature it was the BNP's HQ and main site of organising.

And it wasn't just their HQ, there was a correlation between the HQ opening and an increase in racist attacks in the area (including but not limited to Stephen Lawrence).

And it wasn't just a correlation, people who infiltrated the BNP at that time uncovered direct links between people in its orbit and racial attacks, graffiti etc.

So on the surface "campaigning for a bookshop to be closed down" is a terrible (almost fascist) infringement of "academic freedom". But under the surface these things operate in a wider context and are not just free-floating thought experiments in the "marketplace of ideas".

Now I'm not saying that LD50 is by any means on the same scale as the BNP, but it is a bit of stretch to describe it simply as an art gallery.

 

[Mr. Tea]

the blog post John eden shared (https://write.as/7v8fbjq9ekoaxl3z.md) has as it's lead image the two of them making that hand gesture, though. I didn't watch enough of the video to see it happen, so no idea of the context.

Looks like a pretty standard "rock on, dude!" 'devil horns' sign to me.

 

[IdleRich]

Looks like a pretty standard "rock on, dude!" 'devil horns' sign to me.

On the other hand though, here it is being demonstrated by a noted Turkish extremist...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Turkish, Texan, whatever.

 

[luka]

Here's an email I got from znore the author of the groupname for grapejuice blog. Obviously the Marxists here won't like it but here you go

"That Open Letter, though, is delusional. These guys hear dog whistles everywhere. They are fighting phantoms and by doing so turning everyone into a phantom. The way to deal with this crypto-Nazi shit is to engage with it. There is some excellent stuff within Evola's work, but it's fundamentally flawed. This can be analysed. But it does require a new sense of spirituality. Not all paganism is equal. Evola's version is race/nation-based, hierarchical, solar and patriarchal, but throughout his work he opposes an earlier polyracial/inter-tribal, egalitarian, lunar and matriarchal/gender-balanced spirituality. His work can be deconstructed to find these threads. And systems like Tantra and Taoism exist in a crossover zone between these two versions of paganism, making the situation even more difficult to disentangle. Yet just throwing all of this out with the bathwater, as this Open Letter seems to advocate, condemns the Left to the worst type of soulless, reductionist materialism and, because nobody is really satisfied with this for long, it eventually pushes anyone of spark and spirit into the hands of the Right."

I read and have got a huge amount out of Ezra Pound so obviously I'm fine with his approach to Evola. I personally have never known anyone with appreciable amounts of spunk and spirit go over to the Rihht but I agree that Marxisms materialism is the thinnest of gruels.

 

[thirdform]

he used to be left af

So fucking bloody what? Gustav Nosk was also as left as they come but was one of the most vociferous advocates of german imperialism in ww I germany. you're too obsessed with petty-bourgeois debate, Vim.

And yes, abolish the left is a classic communist slogan.

 

[thirdform]

I didn't even remember making it. For the record, I had no idea it was a Turkish nationalist symbol - I had vaguely thought it was some kind of cute devil, rock n roll thing. I love making hand signals, so would have just made it to play along. Who knew that I was actually secretly an Erdogan fan or something!

It's Alparslan Türkeş, not Erdogan btw...

 

[luka]

I was hoping third would discover this thread and rip it apart like a dog with a feather pillow.

 

[thirdform]

Ld 50 mainly but more broadly winding up liberals so that when they get pissed off you can go, ha! Look, intolerant liberals

Well they are fucking morons then because far rightists have more in common with classical liberalism than do critical communists.

"The ideologues of the bourgeois class clearly consider the victory of these modern schools over traditional Christian and scholastic philosophy to be a “definitive” achievement of human knowledge, which is why they believe that the representatives of proletarian socialism also have to pay homage to it and go under the same philosophical roof. In other words: one believes, and this is a commonplace, that the socialists have adopted the ideological victory of bourgeois critique over medieval fideism and that philosophy – and with it the various theories of society and history – which emerged from the old doctrines of faith – is also an indispensable foundation and a prerequisite for it.
This is a dangerous mistake, because even if the ideologues of the modern bourgeoisie dared to break openly with the principles of the Christian church (which was by no means always the case), we Marxists do not see atheism as an ideological platform shared by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, the proletariat is the protagonist of future history, and that dispute of ideas was about the struggle between the emerging bourgeois classes on the one hand and the old landed nobility and its feudal constitution on the other. When that class struggle on the great historical stage came to an end with the victory of capitalism over the old order and another class struggle broke its course, the new protagonist, i. e. the proletariat, had its own theory, which has nothing at all in common with that which formed the framework of the bourgeois struggle against the Middle Ages, even if there had to be factual and armed alliances in real political struggle.
According to another commonplace, it is German critical philosophy (one of the most important fields of the modern movement, which found its highest expression in Hegel’s work), from which Marx and Engels would have developed their teachings. Historical truth, however, is that, together with their not insignificant group of scholars and agitators, with whom they worked out an open and clear criticism of the Hegelian system together, they immediately opposed Hegel’s students and treated them as bourgeois and petite bourgeois ideologists, who even then were not spared from ridicule when they had apparently not understood their master.
In the preface to the “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” of 1859, Marx says that Engels, Heß and he went to work out their views in contrast to the followers of Hegel and Hegel himself, whose great system they had thoroughly studied, but, he goes on to say, the material had not been written down for printing, because it had become clear that the course of studies led from the field of philosophy to that of economics, where it was a matter of subjecting the English bourgeois classics to criticism; or even more so from the field of studies to that of practical struggle, where it was a matter of continuing the work of the though crude French communists."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bo...4uVdjODpGlN6vm4x3OCixQoASUejeEB9MsOfGaPfF0_Ag

 

[luka]

Two groypers in human form and Nina there cos she's sick and tired of trying to stay out the red in an economy of virtue and vimothy, bless his virgin heart, asking me to take it seriously, like it's real intellectual nourishment, like it's not beavis and butthead trolling and snickering.

 

[thirdform]

Here's an email I got from znore the author of the groupname for grapejuice blog. Obviously the Marxists here won't like it but here you go

"That Open Letter, though, is delusional. These guys hear dog whistles everywhere. They are fighting phantoms and by doing so turning everyone into a phantom. The way to deal with this crypto-Nazi shit is to engage with it. There is some excellent stuff within Evola's work, but it's fundamentally flawed. This can be analysed. But it does require a new sense of spirituality. Not all paganism is equal. Evola's version is race/nation-based, hierarchical, solar and patriarchal, but throughout his work he opposes an earlier polyracial/inter-tribal, egalitarian, lunar and matriarchal/gender-balanced spirituality. His work can be deconstructed to find these threads. And systems like Tantra and Taoism exist in a crossover zone between these two versions of paganism, making the situation even more difficult to disentangle. Yet just throwing all of this out with the bathwater, as this Open Letter seems to advocate, condemns the Left to the worst type of soulless, reductionist materialism and, because nobody is really satisfied with this for long, it eventually pushes anyone of spark and spirit into the hands of the Right."

I read and have got a huge amount out of Ezra Pound so obviously I'm fine with his approach to Evola. I personally have never known anyone with appreciable amounts of spunk and spirit go over to the Rihht but I agree that Marxisms materialism is the thinnest of gruels.

I'm not really bothered though. the left vs right thing is a struggle between different factions of the propertied class. their existential tears really do not concern me one bit. I'm not talking about eco grime on red bull.

 

[thirdform]

as for josef "winding ppl up", the signal fact is how little it takes to count as provocation - not only is it impossible to communicate across partisan lines, but anyone claiming otherwise is instantly drawn by the escalatory logic of situation into one camp or another

Should have got the rudeboys to shoot u lot in the rave before u killed jungle, pretentious ponce

 

[thirdform]

if that's the case we're on an unstoppable trajectory towards fascism

perhaps you would bother to stop guzzling bacon sandwiches and read this.

http://www.sinistra.net/lib/upt/intpap/pitu/pituccocae.html

 

[thirdform]

With regard to the dialogue thing, I'm not sure who there is to initiate it with. The figureheads of the alt-right are too beholden to their audience and their audience don't seem to care about dialogue and rarely argue in good faith; maybe I haven't looked into it thoroughly enough, but from what I've seen on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, 4chan and Youtube and from people like Milo, Alex Jones, McInnes, Bannon and the rest is that these people are making a living from and base their entire 'brand' around opposing the left. How do you engage with that?

There's a Sartre quote about antisemitism that's been doing the rounds, and, from what I've seen and encountered, it certainly rings true:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

nah i think the alt right are basically just a symptom of the decay of politics. they will be subsumed into the new technocracy in 10 years time, at the most. Like you can engage with them but it's fruitless and utterly pointless because they have nothing to be convinced of.

Anyway, the point that always gets left out in these discussions is that yes the fascists can lose, but what happens when fascism as a specific form of state organisation wins? which is what happened in 1945. But to go down that line would show that fascists put the bourgeois left (social democracy's) programme into effect. That's why i really couldn't care about this and vimothy is being an edgelord and should go back to listening to arcade fire until he actually has something substantial to say.

 

[thirdform]

This is partly why I see a space for a renewed psychedelia albeit it would inevitably leave casualties in its wake. But then so do riots.

There was a new psychedelia though. acid house and hardcore acid and belgian techno and all the derivatives. this is my problem with the hardcore continuum discourse, some of its advocates (not simon and john and droid) have lost their compass and advocate some pretty conservative music these days. because their relationship with transformative culture per se was always transitional. and now what happened is that the petty-bourgeois indies won. That's one thing i agree with Mat Dryhurst on, despite his utterly execrable sub-adorno takes otherwise. like the problem is u can only be leftfield musically if you take as your principle freestyle or Soul II Soul. whereas with deconstructed club there are like 1000 people into it at most and they fetishise deconstructing pop and commercial dance music rather than violently imposing their value set on it. so they are not leftfield when you know what you're getting. not psychedelic. Of course culture is a ground of contention and violence, of course. Anyone who wants cultural pluralism plays right into the hands of the de benoist types who would rather french Algerians be restricted to the most ruthless patriarchal authority of communitarian elders whilst hoping for the mythical rediscovery of pre-christian Europe. won't happen, and this is why they are utterly impotent and irrelevant because they are in consensus with all state ideology.

"Fascism steals from the proletariat its secret: organization. ... Liberalism is all ideology with no organization; fascism is all organization with no ideology." (Bordiga)

 

[Mr. Tea]

Should have got the rudeboys to shoot u lot in the rave before u killed jungle, pretentious ponce

Heh, this reminds me of the good old days with hundredmillionlifetimes. You two would have got on well, I think.

 

[luka]

There was but it was 30 years ago.

 

[thirdform]

There must be better ways of determining whether or not someone is a fascist than libel laws, or weird anonymous blogs with no evidence.

I knew people in the 90s who really rated Evola's writings on yoga, but they were pretty clear he was a fascist as well - and I think it's undeniable that he's one of the major influences for esoteric fascists.

It seems pretty clear to me that Evola was sexist, racist, conservative, and elitist. His differences with Hitler and Mussolini seem more sectarian ideological disputes between people on the same side than denunciations. For example he was hugely anti-semitic but thought that the Nazis fetishised anti-semitism too much.

Evola was arrested a few years after World War 2 on charges of inspiring a clandestine fascist organisation. He was acquitted of that charge, but his defence statement includes this:



If there is a different legal case to this one then I would be interesting in knowing about it. Even supposing he had won a libel case, it's entirely possible that this was just covering his arse in the period after the war.

I think his ideas and followers speak for themselves. If there is a truly anti-fascist reading of Evola then that would surprise me.

100% agree with this post, let us not forget that Spengler also had similar criticisms of Hitler, for outwardly fetishising the logics of industrial capital and accumulation too much and fetishising antisemitism. Evola likewise. Fascism has always needed its conservative revolutionary wingnuts to legitimate it, which most leftists (gag) refuse to study as their politics can be boiled down to state control of all enterprises.

given that small scale production or directly feudal and patriarchal forms of exploitation are never going to come back these conservative ultra-fash people always operate on the metapolitical terrain. they are smart enough to know that they can't be directly politically involved in much. so actually they are a product of the consumer society they lambaste. useful idiots for capital though...