Your Journey to the Alt-Right.

[Mr. Tea]

not true, I'm actually the most violent on here, I reject democracy entirely, even its direct participatory kinds.

Beaten anyone up recently?

 

[thirdform]

s O r R y maybe i've read too much nietzsche but that's just like, your opinion, man

an amateurish, schoolmasterish reading of Nietzsche, congratulations. Not that he was remotely communist, but you entirely neglected to emphasise his conception of spirit.

 

[thirdform]

@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.

Correct, your class. sitting on the internet writing poncy paragraphs thinking they are profound whilst we have to smell yer baked beans digest faecal matter whenever you deign to use a lavatory.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's the baked beans again! Always the baked beans.

What is it with the beans, thirdy?

 

[thirdform]

I've seen a fair number of comments in the last month, on this thread and others, claiming—without any felt need for justification—that the alt-right is nothing more than a cover for racism. These comments went unchallenged and in some cases were seconded. I don't need to link them because I really don't care about proving obvious shit to you.

Tapping out of this conversation because it's lame and stupid

no, you said some imbecillic teenage edgelord shit, got pulled up on it. If you want to really talk about conservatism you would read Edmund Burke and speak of the sublime, something you evidently cannot have a taste for, what being an American.

Game over, GiT GuD!

 

[thirdform]

I do think @suspendedreason is articulating something that is at play, consciously or unconsciously, in many people who would identify as progressive. I feel what he's talking about.

I get that that is an unfalsifiable claim, but it is something of a working belief.

progressives are his friends though. he wants hypercapitalism? No eager defender of it than the progressive left. He doesn't understand what real conservatism is like Ben Shapiro. He needs to get cultured if he is attracted to the right wing, then we can begin to respect him.

 

[thirdform]

@padraig (u.s.)

It's true I might be guilty of mixing up my takes getting called arrogant for my person getting called it. But I feel I was pretty clear what my actual concerns are in this thread, and nowhere was it an advocacy for eugenics. Unless you count my suggestion we put babies in "pens" and let them duke it out as a sorting algorithm.

If you think my concerns are misplaced w/r/t the economic and cultural conditions that are rapidly developing (meaning crisis, automation displacing work, cognitive inequalities exacerbating), or the limits of redistributing money (we could divide it up evenly & in 50 years we'd be back to deep inequality)—then I'm curious to hear that. But I don't get why such a half-assed troll as an insincere "eugenics" namedrop has taken over and dwarfed the discussion I was trying to have about those things, including how someone who fanboys for Rawls & Peter Singer could be tempted by the alt-right, or its technocratic leanings—a question you yourself asked me!

But as you I'm sure know, this package of thought goes all the way back to Plato, and resurfaces in parts of the alt-right, especially its rationalist side. Eugenics is a part of that historical picture of paternalism, which is why I even namedropped it in the first place. It's part of the vague ideological vibespace.

My feeling is there's a hard tug-of-war in political philosophy between paternalism and libertarianism, and I don't think it's easy to answer which high-level philosophy (freedom or optimization) is right. Utilitarianism has a lot of ugly implications, but so do all our other moral philosophies taken to the limit

philosophy is just religious theology in its most abstract form. if you reject religion, then you have to superceed philosophy, inherently. otherwise you just reinstate religion. This is what the Hegelians did not understand.

 

[thirdform]

you're right I fetishize hypercapitalism, I love it, adore it, can't get enough of it. I lick its bootheel

Cool, i prefer to fetishise Vanya, or fanny as a Diminutive. Shame you can't invite her to join the conversation, I suppose. Aren't you going to be a master and cary out yer duty?

 

[thirdform]

Beaten anyone up recently?

Why would I need to do that? I equate democracy with oligarchic gangsterism. The violence I defend is existential chaos.

 

[Mr. Tea]

sweet!

 

[thirdform]

It's the baked beans again! Always the baked beans.

What is it with the beans, thirdy?

Charity impostor's baked beans stunt leaves victim unamused

A WOMAN was duped into allowing a man claiming to be raising money for Comic Relief to cover her feet with food including baked beans.

www.heraldscotland.com

that is literally what makes me vomit about baked beans.

English lit a-level teacher called mrs. Woodridge wanting her partner to rub it all over her body, genitalia and feet as foreplay. the sauce, dear lord the sauce and how it will stick to her body as muck that needs to be scrubbed off excessively in the shower. gag.

 

[thirdform]

sweet!

won't be sweet when yer crying, old boy!

 

[luka]

progressives are his friends though. he wants hypercapitalism? No eager defender of it than the progressive left. He doesn't understand what real conservatism is like Ben Shapiro. He needs to get cultured if he is attracted to the right wing, then we can begin to respect him.

Suspended Reason was basically raised and nurtured by Ben Shapiro

 

[luka]

A lot of his generation were. Surrogate father figures in button down shirts.

 

[boxedjoy]

When I was seven years old I saw a show about a girl who got a baked bean stuck behind her eye and it haunted me for weeks after. Even now I can't really with beans on a plate at a table I'm sat at, they're just revolting to me.

 

[thirdform]

A lot of his generation were. Surrogate father figures in button down shirts.

yeah, just huxters. not even proper conservatives. slave to the base passions. no refinement, no noblesse oblige... Identity politics for their (lack of) social base.

 

[sus]

Correct, your class. sitting on the internet writing poncy paragraphs thinking they are profound whilst we have to smell yer baked beans digest faecal matter whenever you deign to use a lavatory.

Rightttt, my class. We all coordinate. Remind me again what my class is? People who eat baked beans? I don't eat baked beans. Or something else?

 

[boxedjoy]

I'm sure there's a lot in that, and I recognise the stereotypical South Park superfan, but I don't think the causal link between that and the rise of the alt-right is all that straightforward. For one thing, there's certainly a strain of nihilism in various elements of the fringe left, too - tankies, I guess, and the Putin-fetishists and other unpleasant weirdos who exist in the murky red-brown hinterland. For another, pure nihilism is ultimately apolitical, because even the most bloodthirsty ideologies - colonial imperialism, Nazism, Stalinism - ultimately have to stand for something, as well as against something else, and nihilism by definition can't actively be in favour of anything, except perhaps immediate personal ego-gratification (which is why I think Trump has become the figurehead for an ideology without actually being ideological himself).

Then there's the extent to which the alt-right isn't so much a new phenomenon (granted that it's taken a form that could only have been enabled by the internet) as a revival of a type of conservatism that the Republican party moved away from during the Reagan/Bush/Bush years, and probably before that to some extent, when it prioritized The Market above all concerns about culture. So now you have all these kids and young adults - and some not-so-young adults - trading in memes all about WWII, European colonialism, the Crusades and even ancient history - "the Chad Roman Empire vs the Virgin Ottoman Empire". Researching their ancestry and talking earnestly about Y-chromosomal haplogroups, genes for lactase persistence and the Bell-Beaker Culture. Luka's mentioned influential right-wing Instagram accounts that are full of photos of Greek sculptures and gothic cathedrals. The Spengler revival.

So if nihilists are people who don't care about anything, then these guys care very, very deeply about things that they think the left hates and that normie, neoliberal conservatives are indifferent to.

I don't think the path is directly South Park to Pepe Memes but I think that what South Park etc contributed to was the lack of empathy that is endemic to what the contemporary far-right seems based on. The freedom to be prejudiced and bigoted against Othered identities, "I don't give a fuck about them and their rights or struggles"

 

[thirdform]

Rightttt, my class. We all coordinate. Remind me again what my class is? People who eat baked beans? I don't eat baked beans. Or something else?

American kids.

 

[sus]

no, you said some imbecillic teenage edgelord shit, got pulled up on it. If you want to really talk about conservatism you would read Edmund Burke and speak of the sublime, something you evidently cannot have a taste for, what being an American.

Game over, GiT GuD!

What's "the sublime"? Edmund—what did you say his name was? Burke? You say he was a conservative thinker?