Your Journey to the Alt-Right.

[linebaugh]

18 pages before eugenics talk...pretty good

 

[luka]

Eugenics is probably not as easy as it looks. There are all sorts of questions regarding what you are breeding for and why and obviously all sorts of questions around complexity and unintended consequences. But I would suggest starting your own strictly limited eugenics program to gather information through trial and error.

 

[WashYourHands]

Eugenics = condoms, right there. And you how the papacy regards prophylactics.

 

[sus]

Eugenics is probably not as easy as it looks. There are all sorts of questions regarding what you are breeding for and why and obviously all sorts of questions around complexity and unintended consequences. But I would suggest starting your own strictly limited eugenics program to gather information through trial and error.

only if you do it by human selection

if you do it by natural selection, then the criteria is pure fitness

everyone can have children, no problems, but then all the babies are put in big pens, and only 10% get to leave it.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

seems to be hollow at the heart, or at least so densely insulated by nihilism that the heartbeat can't be detected from the outside

South Park is only nihilistic - the bad kind, that which destroys for the sake of destruction - if you take its worldview as synonymous with Cartman's

but Cartman isn't the whole - he's a raging id (Stan ego, Kyle super-ego, obv)

as a whole it's actually deeply earnest in a hokey way, in the belief people can actually learn life lessons etc

certainly Parker and Stone were way ahead of the curve in expressing feelings that were boiling under the surface of late Pax Americana

in a way that no one - including them - could have really articulated at the time, I think

but it's a very 90s, pre-Internet culture view of snark, earnestness and the relationship between the two

the boys don't only "learn something today" - they always resolve their differences enough to coexist peacefully

I think it's easy to misread in the impersonal toxicity of online discourse, where nothing is ever resolved

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and of course it's easy to just go lulz Cartman, in the way people actively rooted for Gordon Gekko or Tony Soprano

but I reckon Parker and Stone would be, or are, at the least deeply uneasy with Cartman as alt right avatar

similar to the way that David Chase, in later seasons of The Sopranos, seemed to actively loathe his audience for liking a character he created

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

"I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn't then why would I say I am?"

"I don't give a fuck if you don't like, my shit/cos I was high when I wrote this, so suck, my dick"

 

[constant escape]

Eugenics ought not be conflated with racist eugenics. CRISPR babies built to avoid AIDS, or whatever the reasoning was, is far removed from building a superhuman program that privileges one race over others.

And anyway, I think the real ubermensch state is accessible to anyone with the appropriate psychic wherewithal, regardless of demographic. If you don't have it, you just need to will yourself there. If you don't have the will, you just need to exercise it. Its essentially living, thriving, without a God. Cosmic sovereignty.

But I would also be interested in elaborating a progressive program that takes as its foundation the raw, dominative dynamics upon which fascism thrives. The power relations arose as they did, if even due to circumstantial difference. I think much of the discourse of the left is predicated upon denying this, rather than radically interrogating it and transforming it. Squabbling over what to call "third world countries", "developing nations" so as to not offend anyone.

They're behind in the race because they got ripped off, but a mark needn't stay a mark. The mark doesn't stop being a mark by reorienting the discourse around oppression. The same could be said, in different renditions, about all dimensions of oppression. This is what a progressivism with an alpha attitude would look like, no? That hierarchies exist, and they exist sheerly because one side overpowered the other - but these hierarchies aren't essentially immutable.

And regarding your point @suspendedreason about breeding mediocrity - I do think that is largely what the dominant left discourse is successfully doing, no? Coleman Hughes pointed out that people were being taught how/when to be offended. This, instead of being taught how the situation arose, such as it is, and how to dismantle it from the inside. You don't change the current model by ignoring the current model.

One of the central matters would be how to engineer pathways for our underlying vitality that lead to genuine progressivism, instead of mere denial of power relations, and instead of outright capitulative fascism.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

in retrospect there's plenty of those prefiguring markers for the alt right and related, which South Park sits ambiguously among

pockets of 90s gamer culture, Columbine, the original PC backlash (especially on campus - "cultural Marxism"), etc

combined obviously with yr traditional far right/racist/conspiracist/etc milieu

 

[sus]

@constant escape My biggest worry is that there's a class of people in society whose problems won't go away just because we give them a nice safety net, or a better education, or a cushy monthly check

"Eugenics" is mostly a joke in that vein, but I think it's a serious problem

I think a lot of progressives are either too optimistic about nature vs. nurture. Thinking everything's nurture is really optimistic in a way—it means we can fix things, make a perfect society.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Eugenics ought not be conflated with racist eugenics. CRISPR babies built to avoid AIDS, or whatever the reasoning was, is far removed from building a superhuman program that privileges one race over others.

slippery slope

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I'd sooner see a hyper-capitalist environment with good safety nets and serious eugenics than I would a communist state that just breeds human mediocrity and slave morality for millennia as standard of living slowly crumbles

good thing those aren't the only choices

 

[sus]

Maybe the second problem is realizing that there's a huge class of people who won't be able to contribute meaningfully to society, i.e. there will be no work for them, and getting subsidized to be useless might be comfortable, but it's not meaningful, and it won't make people satisfied or happy.

There might be good solutions to these problems; I just think they're hard and maybe underacknowledged

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

A lot of progressives are pussies who can't or don't want to bite necessary bullets, it's all good-feely stuff

I'm sure all the people who ate literal bullets (or nooses, etc) to end inhuman labor practices would be glad to hear that, if they weren't dead

it's a nice caricature tho

 

[WashYourHands]

@constant escape My biggest worry is that there's a class of people in society whose problems won't go away just because we give them a nice safety net, or a better education, or a cushy monthly check

"Eugenics" is mostly a joke in that vein, but I think it's a serious problem

I think a lot of progressives are either too optimistic about nature vs. nurture. Thinking everything's nurture is really optimistic in a way—it means we can fix things, make a perfect society.

No - it means you and every generation has to strive and work for progress.

Eugenics? Come the fuck on. And you could never fall into such a state or class of undesirable?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I'm sure all the people who ate literal bullets (or nooses, etc) to end inhuman labor practices would be glad to hear that, if they weren't dead

in b4 someone hits me with my own argument that all those practices were just outsourced to other places

true. can't blame that on the people who were trying to end them, tho.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

The deep layers are veganism, Singer-style expanding circle, utilitarianism, Rawls's invisible veil, identity fluidity/flux

The surface layers are an interest in technocracy, libertarianism; a distaste for identity politics; a flirting with voting for DJT (undecided)

I would like know how this mishmash of deeply conflicting ideas is brought anywhere close to unity

 

[sus]

I'm sure all the people who ate literal bullets (or nooses, etc) to end inhuman labor practices would be glad to hear that, if they weren't dead

it's a nice caricature tho

Come now, play fair. I said "a lot," that just means a sizable portion. You don't think a fair number of people on the progressive side of things are a little squeamish about tradeoffs?

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Eugenics? Come the fuck on. And you could never fall into such a state or class of undesirable?

people with the unbelievable presumption to entertain the notion obviously cannot imagine themselves as undesirables to be culled

 

[sus]

I'd sympathize with this kind of ire if I was in any position to publicly impose a policy, or even propose or vote for a policy, or even went around campaigning for it on Twitter, but I'm surprised given it's stemming from shitposting on a music forum that was immediately backed off from in favor of more serious feelings, such as the limits of economic redistribution