To_Mandalay
28d ago
Robinson shot Charlie Kirk for being Charlie Kirk specifically, rather than as a randomly selected conservative (otherwise he might have shot any one of the people in the crowd). Crusius shot his victims for being non-white immigrants generally, since he didn't know who any of them were personally. So the equivalent to leftists badmouthing Kirk as a man after his murder would be right-wingers badmouthing non-white immigrants as a group after several of them are murdered, which they absolutely do
To_Mandalay
28d ago
Repel them.
With what? Rifles?
To_Mandalay
28d ago
The left has branded Charlie Kirk a "Nazi white supremacist" for citing crime statistics.
Referring to illegal immigration as an "invasion" is totally mainstream on the right. What do you do to invaders?
To_Mandalay
28d ago
Neither Omar nor Hasan said Kirk deserved it. They basically said they thought he was an asshole with abhorrent beliefs, and then Hasan called the killing "horrific" and "inexcusable" and Omar said "my heart breaks" for his family. Whether they're really all that broken up about it, probably not, but they're going through the expected motions, and right-wingers would not be all that sad if somebody shot some left-winger of Kirk's stature either.
Piker does not represent the Democratic Party, either its leadership or its base. He's a self-proclaimed socialist who supports the Houthis, which puts him far out of step with both. He's certainly not comparable with people like Tucker Carlson or Kirk himself, who was a personal friend of Trump's and close to the heart of the GOP. He has about a fifth as many twitter followers as Kirk. Destiny has a fraction of that following.
And all that said, neither of them said Kirk deserved it either. Piker told his fans to stop laughing on stream, and called it "horrific." Destiny refused to "disavow" on the grounds it would be an admission of guilt.
What seems to be happening is right-wingers taking examples of people saying "Kirk was an asshole, but he shouldn't have been killed" and pretending like they're saying "Fuck yeah, more of this, give that guy a medal." It's not enough to condemn the Kirk assassination, you have to be sad about it and talk about what a great guy he was too.
To_Mandalay
28d ago
Citing non-Americans seems unfair, though with the Americanization of global politics, maybe less and less so
To_Mandalay
28d ago
It’s been wall to wall condemnation of the Kirk assassination by Democratic Party figures and media spokespeople. And saying “I hate Charlie Kirk, but he shouldn’t have been assassinated” isn’t justification any more than “we need to close the border and deport illegals, but you shouldn’t shoot up a Wal Mart”
To_Mandalay
28d ago
Rather than January 6th or Paul Pelosi or even the Minnesota legislators, Patrick Crusius and Payton Gendron are the proper right-wing analogues to Tyler Robinson.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
Sure, and it's quite fine for you to have that position, and the topic is a very interesting one for a conversation, but your actual position is a lot less bombastic than you started off.
Well there were two points in my tongue-in-cheek OP. The first is, again, the specific, concrete predictions that They would not "allow" Trump to take office in 2025 regardless of what the vote totals in November 2024 were, and he would not be allowed to do anything if he did. This seems to have been pretty clearly falsified.
The second is the broader idea that "democracy is fake." Admittedly this is not that well defined, because even many people who agree that democracy is fake disagree on exactly what about it is fake. But in any case, I think under most conceptions of "democracy is fake," (RW ones at least) the Trump victory in 2024 is less expected than under the democracy not-fake model.
Sure. But if you advertise a certain maximum level of oppression, and you cross it, you cannot than tell me that everything works as advertised.
Is there an advertised maximum level of oppression? This is, again, somewhat blurry. If the government was literally rounding up hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters and shooting them into large pits I would say "this is not very liberal." The most egregious actions of the Biden and Obama administrations were pretty far from that. Of course, the governments of liberal democracies interfering with the speech of private citizens is nothing new, and there have been more egregious cases in the past, from all of the various scandals of the Hoover FBI to the internment of anti-war critics in 1917. One response is to say, "and therefore, liberal democracy has never been real." Another, which is the response I would make is, such repression, while bad, is significantly less bad than that practiced by not-liberal democracies, even if it's impossible to point to an extremely specific line where you could say "the repression has gotten so bad that the promises of liberal democracy have been exposed as empty lies."
if there's a known and significant case of a line being crossed, that case needs to be punished, otherwise there is no reason to believe the promises were anything other than a lie.
It seems likely that, various people who participated in anti-RW repression during the Biden administration, for whatever value of "repression" we're using will indeed be punished to some extent under Trump.
Anyway, if some exceptions are allowed without it disproving the broader point, I don't see why we should dismiss Yarvin wholesale.
It doesn't entirely disprove his whole theory, even though I do think he's wrong. It is a data point against it. He himself admits he's surprised. I threw a jab at Yarvin, but I mostly have in mind actual, concrete predictions that They were so powerful and so well-entrenched, and democracy is such a fraud, that Trump specifically would not be allowed to win.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression, we're just more subtle about it".
All political systems engage in repression to some degree. But differences of degree are important. Less is better. The repression experienced by the American right over the past several years has been quite mild compared to even the mildest of twentieth century dictatorships, which is why terminology like "the Regime" (obviously chosen to imply an equivalency between liberal democracies and the various states most people imagine when they hear the word "regime," Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and others) is very silly. I expect Trump will exercise some degree of repression against the left over the next four years as he's promised to do, though it won't be particularly severe by historical standards either. And if the GOP loses in 2028 (or even loses badly in the midterms), it will stop.
That's not a promise of liberal democracy specifically, all democracies promise that, including illiberal ones
I don't consider "illiberal democracy" to be a very useful term. All states have some democratic features. Even the Soviet Union in the 1930s did. All states have some non-democratic features. It's also a matter of degrees, and there are edge cases, but that doesn't mean the distinction between non-democracy and democracy is nonexistent, just like there's a distinction between purple and blue despite the seamless blend.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
That liberal democracies never employ repression against political opponents, or that their doing so immediately falsifies the premises of liberal democracy? I don't think this is really held by anyone. Certainly I think very few defenders of liberal democracy would argue that, though they may argue that liberal democracies tend to pursue political repression less than countries which aren't liberal democracies, or do so less harshly, both of which I believe are true.
Granted that's my fault for glibly talking about "advertisement" as if there's a CEO of liberal democracy. A more important promise of liberal democracy is that if you don't like the current government, including if you think the current government is ineffective, corrupt, or unfair, you can vote it out, and the government you vote in its place will pursue different policies.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
No, but they advertise that if the government is being mean to you, you can go in the booth and press the button next to the name of the guy who says he'll make the government stop being mean to you, and make it be mean to the other guys instead, and if more people press that button then press the other button, the government will stop being mean to you. This is what just happened.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
He only got to do that because more people pressed Trump button. That's the central point, if more people had pressed Harris button, Trump wouldn't get to hire or appoint anybody. Yarvin is as turgid and obnoxious to read as usual, but "moral energy" is conveniently unquantifiable.
RWers have spent the past several years LARPing like they were Soviet dissidents living under a regime of red terror when it turned out they actually lived in a liberal democracy that functioned as advertised the whole time.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
Also Trump has to be one of the most Zionist presidents the US has ever had. He was grand marshal of the salute to Israel, he just passed an executive order on antisemitism.
And yet a supermajority of American Jews voted for the D candidate, like always. The only Jews that vote GOP are observant Orthodox that have very little political influence. Trump and Republicans in general are probably more Zionist than your average secular American Jew.
To_Mandalay
8mo ago
I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.
In any case, Trump is president now.
When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.
When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.
This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Based™ by the Deep State.
Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.
Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.
While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?
All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Not to get deeply entangled in this discussion, but I suppose the steelman to IGI is that the material improvements that we live under are far from permanent, and could well disappear before we realize it, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the brutal state of affairs known to the past.
Well I don't disagree with that proposition. Does anybody? What is supposed to be drawn from that? Yes if we were reduced to the material level of the 15th century we would probably live similarily to 15th century people. But so what? What is the use of pointing out such a banal fact?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
That it is impossible to live without the solutions in the world we have created, and that these solutions require an Empire to maintain, which means we are addicted to structures of control.
I still don't see an issue with this. Controlling nature and human behavior are good things.
There are specific examples of technologies that do not have this problem and empower the individual instead of enslaving him to large organizations.
What are some good technologies and bad technologies, in your view?
Have you ever asked yourself seriously why you prefer one over the other instead of assuming without inquiry that they are equivalent?
In other cases my personal feeling goes the other way. A lot of right-wingers think people only pretend to like modern art for clout but I am an unironic modern art enjoyer. I think this is much cooler and more pleasant to look at that anything Da Vinci, or Caravaggio ever produced.
How familiar are you with Kant and the categorical imperative?
I know the wikipedia definition.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Being a middle class-ish American doesn't make me an aristocrat. And if I am then so is everybody else on this forum.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
I am, but would appreciate either elaboration or a link to what you consider the strongest version of the Luria argument.
I don't really know what I'd call the strongest version of the argument, as I don't think Luria really was making an argument (well he was, but the argument was that socialist development was raising the mental level of the peasantry which is not really interesting) so much as just collecting data. But in any case here's a summary of the research. Here is Russell T. Warne describing a study in Africa which showed the same phenomenon.
ut I'd like some detail on exactly what consequences you expect to derive from this claim, such that you think the absence of this ability would make their thought alien to me.
That's a matter of taste. I would find it extremely frustrating and yes, alien, to hold a conversation with someone who was incapable of entertaining a hypothetical.
None of these features seem alien in any way. Widespread examples of all of these characteristics are available in the modern world, and in America even,
Killing somebody over a card game or killing a cat for fun are pretty alien to me. If someone did either of these things I would stay far away from them and consider them dangerous and anti-social, as would everybody else I know. Some people do do these things even today in the modern USA and they are generally considered to be acting in an extremely aberrant and objectionable way.
None of this is even close to as alien as, say, the Apache or Comanche, and I would not describe them as bizarrely alien.
I would. The Comanche used to teach their children how to torture prisoners of war to death. That is bizarrely alien to my experience and I think it probably is to yours as well.
To be a bit more specific, they were "like us" in that they had exactly the same vices and virtues as we have, in roughly equal proportions; only the detail of how these were expressed culturally seems to differ.
That's burying the lede pretty hard. The details of how base emotions, most of which are shared even by non-human animals, are expressed, are very important.
I'm pretty sure they had bullying, crushes, sweethearts, rivals, hated enemies, ambition, jealousy, deceit...
Wild animals above the level of insects have all these too. Maybe not jealousy.
Truly, how could anyone communicate with such alien savages?
You're the only one using the word "savage." They were different from us, which doesn't necessarily make them worse or better. I'm not even passing judgment. I wouldn't wanna live like they did, but that's just my personal preference, being as much a product of my environment as they were.
By the 1600s, the Germans are down to around 10 murders per 100,000, and the dread Italians are around 35.
Compared to Germany's rate of 1 per 100,000 today, I would call that shockingly high.
At that point, the 1600s Guido Menace would have moderately less violent that American blacks in the 2000s, and moderately more violent than those same blacks in the 2010s. I'd guess the Vile Huns were somewhere roughly in the ballpark of Appalachian whites from the same era. American blacks, in any case, are likewise not entirely unfamiliar with domestic violence, or indeed with animal cruelty for sport. And they're like this in the modern world with all the blessings of modernity, not least of which is a system of truly remarkable trauma medicine to turn 1600s murders into mere 2000s woundings. I used to work with a lot of underclass Blacks in an underclass job. Was I likewise underestimating how "deeply alien" my black coworkers were, or are these feelings of alienation reserved only for the distant past?
I can't speak to that specifically, but yes there are pockets of life in modern society which are extremely alien to me. I have also interacted fairly extensively with "underclass" people, or at least people from a different social class than me, mostly whites and Mexicans (including some who have spent time in prison for violent crimes). Yes I have found their experiences and backgrounds very alien to my own, to the point where it was often difficult to find the common ground necessary for any kind of fruitful conversation. The feeling was mutual, and I imagine it would be even more the case with a 17th century peasant commune.
I imagine German or Italian peasants would be horrified by a description of American abortion practices, or OnlyFans, or Pride Parades,
No doubt.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
This is what Ted denounces, that we made our bed of autism and tooth decay and are decided to invent and sell solutions to the problems we created that only make us less adapted to our environment.
This is a common critique ("We are creating problems which we then have to solve") but I don't really see what the issue with that is. What's wrong with creating new problems and then solving them with new methods?
I don't like that. I think we can have technology without this problem.
I doubt it. I think Marx was right at least that culture and society are largely a reflection of underlying material conditions. The customs and morals that developed in a pastoral society 3000 years ago cannot be freely transplanted onto the 21st century. If they could, it would not last very long. And I doubt there are new moral systems that could be developed to significantly ameliorate the problems of modernity. The only salvation is to hope humanity can technologize itself out of the novel problems it's created for itself by earlier technologizing, and I don't see any problem with that.
I couldn't disagree more. You may as well say there is nothing special or essential about the feeling you get when you are interacting with a great piece of art.
Well, I agree with that too. I don't think there's anything qualitatively different between the enjoyment a person gets from watching Marvel slop #28493 and beholding the Reims Cathedral. And I say that as someone who doesn't like Marvel movies and would probably prefer visiting the Reims Cathedral.
So you are a Kantian of sorts. What is then your stance on Natural Law?
I'm vaguely familiar with both the Lockean kind and the Aristotlean kind from readings in college and a few Catholic apologist books, but I don't recall being convinced by the idea that metaphysical rights or duties of any sort exist.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Whether women wanna date men who make less money than them is a totally different question from whether the disappearance of traditionally masculine jobs from the economy contributes to a crisis of masculine identity.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Marx's specific criticism of capital...
I think this is mostly accurate but the main thing that separates Marx from the reactionaries is that he believed that fundamentally the liberal bourgeois revolutions and the transformation of the peasantry into industrial proletarians was ultimately a good thing.
Read the Autonomy and Surrogate Activities sections of ISAIF and you'll get a precise idea what I mean. Man wasn't meant for email jobs. To cater to your materialism I would say that man is not adapted to such things because they are too recent.
I do not take the suffering of humanity for millennia to adapt to the specific needs of society to be a reasonable course of action. Tradition holds that society should conform to us and our nature in its design.
What I believe Kaczynski misses here is that the humans of industrial society are not the humans of pre-industrial society. Even if we assume a pre-industrial hunter gatherer would give an "8" if asked "how fulfilled are you?" and a modern office worker would give a "5," that doesn't mean the office worker would report an "8" if made to live the life of the hunter gatherer.
I also don't buy that humanity at large is "suffering." In some ways, sure, but this suffering is not particularly greater than the suffering has ever been. How would this would even be measured in theory?
Build a table from scratch until you get a result you like, and then tell me that the feeling you are getting isn't real and what really matters is what's in the spreadsheets with a straight face.
Spreadsheets are not enjoyable and there are other things I find enjoyable like reading, exercise, or wasting time on the internet. If you want to call that actualization you can, but there's nothing special or essential about this feeling. Probably some people do like spreadsheets. "People have to do unpleasant tasks" is not a unique flaw of modernity. I think I would feel much less actualized if I was an illiterate farmer who never got to read an interesting book in his life. The oppression of nature is not preferable to the oppression of industry and the modern state; it's much worse.
I'm not sure his style will appeal to your materialist biases however,
I don't really consider myself a strict materialist. There are obviously some immaterial entities that exist like numbers or logical laws and maybe even more, which is why I don't even consider myself an atheist, but I don't see any reason to include human ideological constructs like the ones I've mentioned in that category.
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
Because you have a solely material understanding of what is good.
Why shouldn't I? I don't believe honor, glory, virtue, or tradition exist as real transcendentals beyond the human mind, and I place no value on them. They are only fictions whose persistence is simply because they produce a pleasant (and ultimately, physiological and material) sensation in the bodies of those who cling to them, and because they are useful tools to organize society in a way that also produces pleasant (and again, physiological and material) sensations in those same people. This isn't really an argument against liking those fictions, there's no rational argument why someone shouldn't, but there's no rational argument why someone should either, unless they already do. I believe the same thing about fictions from the opposite side of the aisle like freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, but you probably agree with me on that.
This is the only charge against the Enlightenment that sticks, and yes it sticks just as well when Marx says it than when Evola says it
I don't think Marx ever made that charge.
The life created by the unrestrained mercantile impulse is inhuman and torrents of blood have already been unleashed to tamper its excesses or realize its promises.
Inhuman meaning what? "The life" by which I imagine you mean the general state of society over the past several centuries was certainly created by humans, what exactly makes it inhuman? Is it just a personal distaste for it?
When Ted complains that the world is crushing the freedom and actualization of the individual, you can decide to call this right wing and oppose this slander of the industrial system because it's not fair on abstract power structures.
I oppose it because I think talk of freedom and actualization is mostly gobbledygook, like the aforementioned honor and equality and tolerance and glory. What Kaczynski is saying when you strip it all away is just "I don't like industrial society because it makes me upset" which is fine, but it doesn't make me upset, so we've reached an impasse, because I can't imagine any argument which would cause me to privilege what makes Ted Ted Kaczynski upset/not upset over what makes me upset/not upset.
Vico is right. And people who dismiss his insight are behaving like creationists who cling to specific dismissals, attempt to refute specifics individually without considering the whole or grasp at epistemological traps to refuse to acknowledge the plain truth because the big picture shatters their own personal intuitions.
Well I've never read Vico and didn't know who he was before you told me. The "Course of Nations" section of The New Science on internet archive is only about fifty pages; can I get away with reading that or do I have to read the whole thing? What specific insights did he have that have yet to be disproven?
To_Mandalay
1yr ago
The conditions of life in say, tsarist Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries to give one example are pretty well recorded, and they were not vastly changed from those in the 18th or 17th centuries. The vanishing of the traditional agricultural lifestyle is quite recent in historical terms, and it still persists to some extent today in certain countries. So we actually do have a pretty good picture of what pre-industrial life was like.
We have actual histories, songs and stories from people a few centuries ago, and even from many centuries ago. They do not demonstrate a life-experience of unending hell-misery, but rather an existence very like our own.
Naturally, they didn't know anything else. If you lock a kid in the basement from infancy and beat him five times every day of the week and only once on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend is gonna look pretty awesome to him, but most people who weren't raised in a basement wouldn't find being locked in a basement and being beaten once a day on weekends very fun.
Their concerns were similar to ours. Their joy and suffering was similar to ours. Nothing fundamental about human nature or the human experience has changed in any way since at least the invention of writing.
You severely underrate how alien these people were. There's pretty good evidence they were practically incapable of abstract thought or logical exercises that would be easy for a small child in the modern United States (this being in reference to the great mass of common people, obviously, not a very small educated elite). You may be familiar with A.M Luria's study of Uzbek peasants as late as the 1920s and 30s as it's made the rounds in rationalist and rationalist adjacent circles. This was not because of any genetic inferiority, but because their world was so founded in the immediate and concrete that a basic "if A then B" syllogism was beyond their grasp. They were also shockingly violent. Besides their regular wanton cruelty to animals for practical reasons as well as for amusement, they were basically always ready to fight and kill each other over the mildest of slights. Sicilian immigrants to the US as late as the 20s, coming from one of the most backwards and least industrialized regions in Europe, had an astronomical murder rate because stabbing somebody in the throat for cheating at cards or hitting on your sister was just totally normal to them.
Yes, our ancestors were "like us" insofar as they loved their friends and families, liked to tell and hear stories, enjoyed food and sex, and feared death, but that's a pretty sparse overlap in my opinion. Outside of a tiny handful of intellectuals and philosophers, you probably wouldn't be able to hold any kind of real or meaningful conversation with a 16th century German even if you could speak his language perfectly, and you wouldn't want to anyway because he might crush your skull.
Invasions are violent, and you generally repel them by killing invaders. If referring to Charlie Kirk as a Nazi is encouragement to kill him, then referring to illegal immigrants as invaders is encouragement to kill them
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