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PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   25122 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I am a hlynkian right-wing progressive, and I don't recognize any of you as such.

Politically, my preferred outcome would be to exalt White bisexual antitheistic males above all others and make this identity the pass to being treated as aristocracy. I don't want meritocracy, equality of opportunity, judging the content of someone's character. I certainly don't want any retvrn. All I want is progressive stack with me at the top, laughing as I kick those below.

Aesthetically, I subscribe to everything my enemies love. Promiscuous girls with tattoos and one side of their head shaved make me go crazy. Some of my favorite sci-fi series are Ninefox Gambit and Gideon the Ninth (the same number in the title is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence — the author of that reference is hardly a tradcath himself). I adore skyscrapers and strive to spend as little time in nature as humanly possible.

Does this describe anybody else here? And if it doesn't, you are not progressives with a palette swap, as alleged. And does this describe anyone anywhere at all?

  • -55

Promiscuous girls with tattoos and one side of their head shaved make me go crazy.

Hit the nail on the head. I will never not be attracted this aesthetic, but have enough first hand experience to know where it leads. I think for a fair amount of guys who have had above average "success" with women (and who can review their experiences thoughtfully and with honesty), there comes a point where they decide to trade high variance and FUN for lower variance stability. In other words; never try to make a ho a housewife, but trade in the hos for a housewife. That's a little crass, but it's the most accurate reflection of what goes in a lot of guys 30s.

But I also think that's all downstream from a larger shift in mindset. At some point, an intelligent person is going to choose between pro-social behavior and libertine personal freedom so long as it doesn't "hurt others." We can quibble over direct vs indirect harm; that's the culture war thread. But if you choose the former (prosocial) you changes all over the place; how you vote, who you date, where you live, etc. Which brings me to the first thing you wrote;

Politically, my preferred outcome would be to exalt White bisexual antitheistic males above all others

Okay, that's a preference. Enjoy the endless Sam Altmans.

make this identity the pass to being treated as aristocracy. I don't want meritocracy, equality of opportunity, judging the content of someone's character [...] All I want is progressive stack with me at the top, laughing as I kick those below.

I don't see this as either prosocial or libertarian-libertine. I see this is a sort of hierarchical-authoritarianism. You even use the word "aristocracy" with a pretty loaded subtext. I see this a bad for everyone. Those on the bottom literally get kicked, those at the top are going to fall into hyper-paranoid behavior patterns to try to guarantee their positions and society will stagnate, rot, and collapse. It's the illusion of mastery over human nature when you're really just cultivating the worst parts of it.

It's the illusion of mastery over human nature when you're really just cultivating the worst parts of it.

I'm reminded of someone in this sphere once describing Francisco Franco versus typical fascist leaders in this (paraphrased) way: "Fascist leaders often saw themselves as the architect of the soul. Franco was just a cop."

I think all authoritarianism and elitism pretty much comes down to this core, that one can, with sufficient will-to-power and unquestionable primacy, have power over what is in a man's heart itself. By contrast, liberalism and progressivism fundamentally surrender that what others do or are is out of one's control, and the differences come down to how to handle that.

with sufficient will-to-power and unquestionable primacy, have power over what is in a man's heart itself.

I like, and agree, with this.

By contrast, liberalism and progressivism fundamentally surrender that what others do or are is out of one's control

Totally agree re: liberalism, but, in the case of progressivism I think the case is that while it does "surrender that what others do or are is out of control," it also makes hard right vs. wrong value judgments. Phrased differently, "I can't control what's in another person's heart, but I can damn sure tell (with authority) if it's good or bad and, therefore, if that person is good or bad."

And that's a massive, massive problem because, followed to its logical extreme, you get to genocide. No, I don't think that's hyperbolic. From some of the speech laws in the UK to BLM in the US, progressive movements move quickly down the path of "disagreement with us is a clear demonstration of evil." If something is truly, deeply "evil" you can easily deduce what the next logical step would be in "dealing" with it.

As an (aspiring) TradCath, I am actually very much okay with hard good vs. bad value judgement - but only in a transcendental sense. I have no problem thinking someone is evil but will wait for The Big Man Upstairs to mete out whatever punishments are warranted in the afterlife. Back on planet earth, I definitely do not want The State to be the high moral arbiter. That's insanely dangerous.

I am not a squishy "live and let level" humanist moral relativist. I believe there is definitely right and wrong, good and evil. I think it's often plain to see which is which. But a political ideology shouldn't be the rubric for that judgement, and certainly not the enforcement executive for perceived transgressions. Progressivism doubles down on all of that by creating a kind of secular quasi-religion. It's a cult, and we're seeing it go through what all cults do; internal strife and self-destruction because of untenable internal contradictions.

By contrast, liberalism and progressivism fundamentally surrender that what others do or are is out of one's control, and the differences come down to how to handle that.

That created the loudest record scratch in my head I've heard in a while.

As far as I can tell this is precisely backwards. The entire point of progressivism is to remake human nature. What else do you call it's unrelenting obsession with equity, insistence that everything is a social construct, galaxy-brained ideas like having social workers fight crime? I've had progressives tell me point-blank that human nature does not exist. Even liberalism isn't free from this, though it's notably toned down.

To be sure there are right-wing equivalents of this. Fascism was a revolutionary ideology, so I can grant you the argument there - though I'd note that this is largely where Hlynka's alt-right progressive meme - but for more traditional forms of authoritarianism / elitism, their entire point is to respond to human nature, rather than acting like you can engineer it.

Thank you, I spent hours trying to come up with a "new soviet man was noble savage all along, is much surprise" joke.

So you're an old-school furry? Doesn't admitting that just make most real people dismiss you as politically irrelevant?

I don't want meritocracy, equality of opportunity, judging the content of someone's character.

Why not?

I think "left" and "right" are net-harmful concepts in that whatever minor useful explanatory value they have is more than counterweighed by the enormous confusion and thought-termination that they cause in political discussions. I have never seen a clear definition of either "left" or "right" that people in general can even vaguely agree on.

My politics depends on what mood I am in. I have a certain mood in which I am purely selfish in my politics and care only about whatever will bring me personally the most power. One advantage of this view of things is that unlike all political ideologies I know of, it is internally consistent.

However, I am not a sociopath and so there is another side of me in which I do favor certain politics for non-selfish reasons. In this other mood, I am a classical liberal who is an extreme liberal (in the pro-freedom sense, not the woke sense) when it comes to social issues like sexuality (I do not care in the least bit what people do in bed as long as it is consensual), a moderate liberal when it comes to economics (I do not think pure free markets are the optimal system, but I do think that regulated free markets are the best one anyone has come up with so far), and a libertarian when it comes to free speech.

I oppose the woke, the social conservatives, the alt-rightists, and the moderate political mainstream. Given that people who agree with my politics do not dominate American politics (since the four groups I mentioned in the previous sentence together make up the majority of politically-interested Americans), my political strategy is to play off other political groups against each other so that they expend their energies in futile fighting but without any single group ever gaining a dominant position over the others.

Wokism to me seems like a combination of ignorance about reality about various things like basic economics and HBD and willful refusal to engage with the reality of those things, plus I dislike wokism's censorious anti-meritocraticism and wannabe-authoritarianism. Social conservatism just seems bizarre, primitive, and distasteful to me, a modern relic of times when small groups of embattled villagers had to forge oppressive social structures and rely on traditions and religious nonsense in order to maintain stability in the midst of possible famines and foreign invasions. I view the alt-right as mostly made up of either whiny people with large victim complexes whose politics is mainly driven by sexual frustration, or white nationalists who would start fighting each other and denouncing each other as not white enough if they ever managed to establish a white ethnostate - and in any case, their anti-meritocratic and authoritarian views make them distasteful to me for the same reason as why I dislike wokism. And I view the moderate political mainstream as too contaminated by lies, corruption, censoriousness, "polite" taboos, and a desire for imperial world-spanning big government (no matter what it costs) to consider them allies.

filling the leviathan-shaped hole in the mod log

Bisexual atheistic male here. And I also don't want the list of buzzwords--meritocracy, equality, the rest--you list.

But your supposed vision (to the extent you describe it here) has no appeal to me. I want very simple things: clean, safe streets, limited crime, pretty buildings, parks, reliable infrastructure, consistent paycheck, good food, a nice glass of wine, friends, family. I really don't care who happens to rule over me, so long as I have those things and the rulers don't bother me too much aside from taking up to half my income and using it wisely. In a perfect world I'd never be asked to think about politics again; in the next-best world, I'd pay attention only so far as it meant participating in city politics to make sure the government does spend my income wisely. And I don't care about what hairstyle anyone chooses; I can like it or not, but beyond that it's meh. And I don't think democracy is itself better than any other system of government, but transitioning away from democracy to another one would almost certainly cause more chaos and suffering than it's worth.

In a word, I'm a hobbit.

And does this describe anyone anywhere at all?

Yeah, it describes you. You just said it did, and you obviously wouldn't lie on the internet as flamebait.

Ffs people, don't feed the trolls.

Seriously, this is the weirdest post I have ever seen on the Motte. I hope that this is some kind of elaborate joke of fellow Mottizens, that I don't understand. Especially since OP cannot respond, because he was just banned for trolling. Good night sweet angel.

Hlynka san senpai, notice me uwu. Private message me the address of your desert cult, I will initiate many dweebs into your musty yet inviting dungeon.

Hlynka’s framework doesn’t really mean anything, it’s nonsensical, internally contradictory and deliberately designed primarily to include literally all his political enemies.

The core grain of truth is captured much more effectively by Scott’s own ‘blue tribe’ designation, which includes for example neoreactionaries, much of the dissident right and many urbane conservatives of the more centrist persuasion.

On the dissident right, “racist libs” is a longstanding accusation toward eg. racists who supposedly aren’t sufficiently hostile towards feminism or gay rights. But there too it’s largely a form of in-group policing, much like SecureSignals’ exhortation that any reactionary who isn’t sufficiently hostile to Jews isn’t actually a “dissident rightist”.

to being treated as aristocracy

Because aristocracy is a hereditary status, I don’t think it’s possible to have one without women. And - at least depending on the test you propose to verify bisexuality (top or bottom?) - there are probably far too many eligible men to qualify.

And does this describe anyone anywhere at all?

I don’t think your ideology is wholly unusual. A milder version (sci-fi techno-futurist social liberalist anti-democracy) has its supporters in Silicon Valley. I suppose Peter Thiel is gay rather than bi, but he comes close.

Does this describe anybody else here?

All I want to do is to live in a civilized and functioning society. I have nothing against nativist sentiment (except in as much as it affects me) but do not demand that this place be peopled primarily by my co-ethnics (drawn broadly or narrowly), however I want it to be a safe, peaceful, well-managed place. Somewhere the weak are cared for but the strong are celebrated. Somewhere where the best have (many) more children than the worst. Somewhere people marry young and happily, and stay married. Somewhere where the streets are always clean, where the people are fit and healthy, where the buildings are beautiful, where crafts are celebrated. A beautiful society, full of beautiful people, who live well, who drink but not to excess, who spend lively evenings singing on the piazza, who prioritize friends and family above work, but who work hard. Who live in cities that are neither full of ugly glass towers or sprawling McMansion suburbs, but instead draw from Haussmann’s Paris and Regency stucco London; cities of boulevards and parks and six-story buildings built in traditional styles, symmetrical, with high ceilings and large windows. I abhor the mob above all else; among all modernity’s ugliness democracy is perhaps the most grating institution.

I have few views about other tribes, sexualities or identities except in so much as they may or may not make such a vision more difficult to achieve. I happily work and am friends with people of many identities from around the world.

Does this make me a conservative?

All I want to do is to live in a civilized and functioning society. ...

Your almost lyrical phrasing in this paragraph reminds me of Le Guin's description of Omelas. I can practically smell the drooz.

Does this make me a conservative?

It's a lovely vision, but to answer, I'd need to know: What would you be willing to do to make it real? How many mistakes and how much damage are you willing to tolerate along the way? And perhaps, what other qualities of this society would you be willing to sacrifice, to gain the ones you describe? (Universal suffrage, for example?)

It seems that you're in favor of progress in a particular direction, but that you happen to differ with the locally dominant group of progressives about what that direction should be. That rules out being a radical or reactionary. I tend to associate progressives as moving more quickly toward a destination, and conservatives as pulling back and slowing the rate of change to prevent mistakes. But I suppose there's no reason why a conservative couldn't have a positive vision of the future that they're working toward, just in a slow and cautious way.

I tend to associate progressives as moving more quickly toward a destination, and conservatives as pulling back and slowing the rate of change to prevent mistakes.

Couldn't agree more.

There is a basic, universe level quirk of math that, I think, does a great job of capturing the conservative mindset:

The relative loss-gain imbalance; If I have a 10% reduction in any starting quantity, what do I need to reclaim to get back to even? It isn't 10%, it's about 11% (roughly).

Recovering from a mistake or loss takes more effort than the magnitude of the loss itself. Therefore, massive changes happening quickly in any direction are a bad thing. I am some (rare) times empathetic to progressive policy intended outcomes but their proposed policy functions are simply too large, too fast and, therefore, the risk of a fuck-up is so large that I think, in many cases, it represents a society level threat.

Yeah. From some non-political fields, I can tell that my heart is progressive, but through bitter experience my head is conservative, if I stop to use it. It's very who-whom.

When I'm the one pushing for the changes, I've thought enough about them (of course I have!) that I feel confident that they'll be a net benefit. But I can't see what everyone else's life is like, and for any long term project, I need widespread buy-in from all sectors. If I overturn their world, I won't get that. And then, of course, if it's someone else trying to push their (poorly thought out, most likely) changes on me that I haven't had time to fully examine the consequences of, well, that of course is a problem. :-)

What would you be willing to do to make it real? How many mistakes and how much damage are you willing to tolerate along the way.

"About as much as our current society is tolerating" seems like a reasonable answer. Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes, but a cursory glance at the current state of affairs will tell you l that you could regularly ruin the lives of tens of thousands of people, and still come out on top relative to today.

And perhaps, what other qualities of this society would you be willing to sacrifice, to gain the ones you describe? (Universal suffrage, for example?)

While 2rafa fancies herself an aristocrat, I'm a pleb and proud of it, and I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.

The whole democratic system is deliberately designed to minimize any chance the common people will have any kind of impact on policy, while insisting it is absolutely essential that they participate. At least spare me the humiliation of having to pretend I'm a part if the decision making process.

Your questions seems to assume the current system is making some sort of effort to avoid mistakes

No, I'm being completely straightforward here, simply asking what 2rafa would prefer. (It's a shame that that's hard to get across, in text.)

Personally, I think the dominant progressive element in America is running amuck, and making changes that sound to them like good ideas, without any clue about whether those changes will be implemented effectively or have the desired results. By my own criteria, I'm much more conservative than they are, and that's not even considering that my ideal world is probably closer to 2rafa's than the woke ideal.

I'd take that deal Ina heartbeat.

So would I. I was going to originally put in something about Heinlein-style restriction of voting to veterans. I'd also be in favor of instituting Singaporean caning instead of imprisonment or fines, at least for minor crimes.

Does this make me a conservative?

Yes it does! Specifically, the vision you describe appears to be one of boring stagnation and endless, cozy mediocrity (it's also so stereotypically European). I would much prefer the world to be like the SF Bay Area that despite (there are enough arguments that this is actually "because of") its many flaws, produces amazing things like Google, Nvidia, SpaceX, OpenAI, and the general research output of Stanford and UC Berkeley. The average person would definitely be much worse off, but the greatness it produces would be worth it, both for making the future nicer and for making society feel like it has an actual soul.

This part in particular:

who prioritize friends and family above work, but who work hard

would grind technological and scientific progress to a halt since it dramatically underestimates how much hard work and obsession is needed to make breakthroughs. The architectural preferences also suggest an aversion to experimentation which, while it can produce a lot of short term ugliness, is necessary in the long run to avoid boring homogeneity and settling for not-so-great local optima.

I don't know how properly to argue that my preference is better than yours---your vision is extremely cozy and comfortable. I would start with a worry that your world would collapse through not being able to progress enough to keep up with population growth, resource depletion, or unexpected disasters. You're settling for the good that we have right now instead of taking the risks necessary to either improve it or protect it in the future.

The architectural preferences also suggest an aversion to experimentation which, while it can produce a lot of short term ugliness, is necessary in the long run to avoid boring homogeneity and settling for not-so-great local optima.

I realize that a lot of this is down to personal views on what constitutes short-term and local optima, but I don't buy that there is significant experimentation or perceivable progress going on. AFAICT, humanity has been stuck in glass, steel and concrete + mildly-to-weirdly-deformed geometric shape architecture for prestige buildings since roundabout the end of WWII. How many more of these are needed before we can move on? For more practical housing we went from stuff like this to this in the suburbs or from this to this in the urban core.

Here in Berlin, old buildings command significant rent premiums and the districts which feature coherent blocks of old architecture untouched by the bombs or post-war city planners are by far the most popular. I realize it would be bad and boring if we tiled the universe with brownstones or Parisian boulevards, but it doesn't seem to me like modernity has really been much more dynamic and creatively vibrant than the past in terms of architecture, instead we just have a different kind of monotony, albeit one that many people, me included, perceive as aesthetically inferior.

That Antwerp Port House looks like it wants to be a spaceship or something. I think the Japanese are onto something with all their fictional city-ships (e.g. Macross, Xylem), and that this is a sign of how weird modern architecture can be redeemed.

Porque no los dos? It seems like most of the pre-war innovators lived in a world closer to the Family Values and Functional Civilization world than the San Francisco Bay world, sometimes in their own libertine bubbles, sometimes in structures within the more conservative ambience.

It'd be great if we could have both of these things, with the ability for them to coexist without one trying to punish the other for their different values.

Nevertheless, I wonder if, even granting the world where Familyland and Siliconland weren't at each other's throats, I'd have to wonder if braindrain wouldn't lead to the same imbalance we see today. Species can niche partition, but can civilization?

What is internally contradictory about Hlynka's thought, at least in the sense that it is significantly more internally contradictory than all other political ideologies? (All political ideologies except pure selfishness are internally contradictory to some extent). I'm not very familiar with his ideas, but from what I've seen out of his opinions the one that is most controversial here is that the alt-right is a form of progressivism, and while to me that seems like it's going too far, the milder version - that the alt-right and the woke are very similar - seems obviously true to me.

Both alt-rightists and wokists are people who see themselves as victimized minorities that are oppressed by an evil hegemony and are fighting a righteous political conflict against it. Both are obsessed with race, gender, and sexuality. Both primarily care about culture war issues and do not have much to say about more engineering-esque aspects of policy like, say, energy infrastructure. Both despise the liberal/moderate-conservative mainstream. Both are suspicious of voting and attracted to more direct kinds of political action. Both are attracted to various kinds of socialism, communitarianism, and redistributionism - wokes generally favor economic socialism for non-whites and non-males, whereas alt-rightists prefer economic socialism for "real Americans" (generally meaning "hard-working" middle-class white people). Alt-rightists often favor some sort of sexual socialism on top of that, they dislike the sexual free market as much as wokes dislike the economic one.

Does this make me a conservative?

Yes, and also a brazen elitist, but I imagine you knew that.

Does this make me a conservative?

Yes.

There’s very little here I disagree with. Are you eligible to vote on July 4th? Would be curious which of the parties you think is most aligned to this value system.

I do believe there is something of a who/whom division where which groups you favor the most, or not, or how even handed you try to be, does relate with left vs right. Centrism also has connotations and is associated with being moderate and even handed, which is why I have a big problem with what kind of positions and factions are labeled as centrists since they fail to be even handed.

Hlynka was usually attacking people more right wing than him on the issues he had the biggest problem with their views as being progressive in a manner that was rather inaccurate. The guy supported a Christianity that accepted gay marriage and wasn't that greatly conservative, but he probably had some conservative areas but the fight was mainly about issues he was fighting from the left towards those to his right. Well, he also conflicted with actual progressives sometimes, but I am talking about the rightists he characterized as progressive. Or non right wingers who he had a problem with their HBD views that fit more within the right. Beyond just Hlynka and his view, in general that way of defining people as progressive was an attempt to erase non progressive viewpoints by calling them progressive and promote as the only right wing option what was an establishment right that compromised with the left and carries the banner of figures like MLK as the default.

The establishment right does identity politics and has been complicit with leftist identity politics in particular. Especially those famed to be moderates who as in Bush administration promoted some version of affirmative action, and people like Romney supported BLM in 2020. So, this idea that conservatives are somehow people without identity politics is false on both sides. Both those who compromise with leftism, both through action and inaction, which makes their conservative credentials more questionable and others who don't and identify as conservative, and are motivated by their conservative ideology. In practice, even many right wing figures who push against the leftist identity politics in certain ways tend to pander to the main American ethnic groups, and tend to be fine with say black identity politics to a point. See Trump/Tucker Carlson.

Anyway, there is this understanding that being more far right relates to being more extreme in favor of groups like whites or Christians, although this breaks down when examining other societies. It is also used very expansively without consideration if the views labeled as far right are actually correct, measured, consistent, even handed. But there are definitely views like yours which are brazenly "favor mine, screw others" that can fit, provided you choose the correct demographics to favor. So, I would reject this framing that supporting a caste system that is different than the progressive stack is a progressive view.

Where would a white christian straight male, a bisexual black antitheist, bisexual white and non white women, etc be in your own version of the "progressive" stack? What about pro LGBTQ white liberals and then non white liberals?

You haven't given us enough here. It seems, you probably have some both progressive and non progressive ideas and don't fit in either space exactly. Jut putting white men as being a part of the group you favor being higher caste and kicking those bellow them, does cost you important progressive points. So, I wouldn't call you a progressive, right wing progressive, or right wing just yet with only what you have given us.

I do think that being direct about wanting a caste system rather than indirect and not admitting it, does give you some right wing points too. Leftists who want the progressive stack tend to be much more unwilling to state it openly and directly in that manner as a caste system, even if that is what they want and are pushing towards.

and tend to be fine with say black identity politics to a point.

Black Americans have been here longer than the ancestors of most white Americans(who are mostly Ellis Islanders) and are here to stay. For better or worse, a place for them has to exist in a USA unwilling to resort to genocide, and a reasonable amount of identity politics is a reasonable way to assure that.

I don't object of course to "reasonable" black identity politics, although American society tends to allow too much, since excessive black identity politics will be harmful towards non blacks. Black people are one of the most ethnocentric demographics who rate other races more negatively. So, I do think that zero identity politics allowed would be unfair for them, and is an oppressive demand, but they should be pressured to consider the rights of others more and to compromise more in that direction, at least when it comes to blaming for example white people for black overepresentation in various negative statistics. But I don't think it is wrong for them to have a sense of black people being their ethnic community and care for its well being. In a multiethnic country the historical demographics need to both have identity politics and some level of compromise.

If a reasonable amount of black identity politics are fine because the alternative is them not having a place and genocide, and there isn't a case of black people being protected by a system that doesn't allow a reasonable amount of identity politics for them, then this implies that a reasonable amount of white identity politics has to exist as well. And if that isn't the case, we end up with the same progressive stack and double standards.

In any case, the expectation that the right doesn't do identity politics is simply false. Much of the American establishment right promotes identity politics in its appeal for non white groups, including ones that came mainly in late 19th and 20th and 21st century, while not doing the same for white Americans. For some politician there is an implicit but not open advocacy, to an extend such as Trump who also tried to appeal to black Americans with legislation. Others, go further than that in the progressive direction. Obviously much of the American right promotes Jewish identity politics pretty strongly. Others including people of more moderate perspective and of more edgy ones, are willing to promote white identity politics.

Black Americans have been here longer than the ancestors of most white Americans(who are mostly Ellis Islanders)

Really? Aren't most white Americans made up of non Ellis Islanders still? Such as both Anglos, but also 19th century migrants including a decent share of Germans and others.

A lot of the Germans are Ellis islanders, and AADOS were here before the 48ers anyways, or the potato famine refugees. Slave imports fell off a cliff in 1809 and very few whites outside of pure southerners lack post 1809 immigrant ancestry.

It’s completely reasonable for non-black groups to engage in identity politics. Historically- including pretty recently- you saw this mostly on religious lines. It’s in se reasonable for white groups to do so on explicitly racial lines the same as blacks do, but I would caveat that white Americans are much less of a coherent ethnic group than African Americans. Instead I think white southerners should engage in ethnic identity politics that grow to encompass the broader red tribe, and let the damn Yankees get eaten alive.

Slave imports fell off a cliff in 1809

1808, surely? Or was there a year or two of significant smuggling in between the de jure and the de facto end of the slave imports?

A sufficiently dope person doesn't need an even playing field to be successful. They certainly don't need the deck stacked in their favor. They just need a fighting chance. There is always luck involved but you can usually get back up again.

'People like me' are already winners. At most we need help from friends should we get a bad run of variance. And of course we need to not get outcompeted by AI-enhanced God Emperor caste. But in any society similar to this one we will always be stars and have dope lives.

"Im a star, how could I not shine" was my status on a bunch of forums 10+ years ago when we had forums with statuses. And in fact despite a pretty bad starting conditions I ended up quite successful. And I did it mostly by being smarter than anyone else. I didn't simp, didn't get a normal job, didn't work hard. If you give a star a fighting chance they will shine. I don't identify with the losers who need a fair game to win.

Politically, my preferred outcome would be to exalt White bisexual antitheistic males above all others and make this identity the pass to being treated as aristocracy.

Yeah, that'd be cool, though I'm not fully bisexual. I expect anyone I fuck to at least put on a wig and some makeup.

I don't want meritocracy, equality of opportunity, judging the content of someone's character. I certainly don't want any retvrn.

We differ here - I want these because I'm smarter, stronger faster, and nicer than almost everyone else. I've already optimized for these things so I want society to conform to me instead of the other way around.

Promiscuous girls with tattoos and one side of their head shaved make me go crazy.

I can't say the shaved head aesthetic has migrated from prog spaces to my sexual preferences, but I dig tats. Do I count as progressive?

Gideon the Ninth tons of fun but Horrow was so bad. Nona is on the shelf... I hope Tamsyn Muir got good feed back on Horrow.

Gideon had a rather straightforward plot, happening in meat space. I could summarize it okay from memory.

Harrow had a plot where most of the action was neither straightforward nor happening in meat space, apart from Harrow's culinary achievements (which I enjoyed). Most action happened on a mesa-narrative plane or the river of souls. I would be hard-pressed to give up a plot summary. On the plus side, I found the mesa-narrative thing kind of novel and fun -- the book was basically trying to gaslight me about what had happened in Gideon.

Nona felt more down-to-earth, low stakes, with the action taking place planetside on a planet with an actual human civilization on it (I was beginning to wonder if they existed). Personally I found it the least engaging of the three books so far, but YMMV.

I guess spoilers I guessed what was going on with the gaslighting part way through and was not happy about it. It made the majority of the book a waist of time for me.

mesa-narrative

Mesa-narrative? Is that when KSR uses the word 'escarpment' forty times in Red Mars?

It might simply be a typo of meta-narrative, but if it's the intended word, then 'mesa' is sometimes used as the opposite of 'meta' (cf. here). So that would be, I think, the process of creation of stories inside the fiction - for example, a propagandist spinning events for consumption by in-universe peers or underlings, where we as a reader have a more complete view of the actual events being referenced and know what is being left out and what is being exaggerated.

Trotskyite neocon larper, many such cases. Sad!

Neocons were Jewish guys who liked LARPing Ralph Lauren Style as WASPs and basically believed in mid century capitalist American meritocracy and some kind of globalist civic nationalism with America at its center. I’d say that’s pretty different to OP.

I didn't call him a neocon, I called him a Trotskyite larping as one. Big difference! Brown on the outside, red on the inside.

Isn't that infinite recursion? I thought all neocons were Trotskyites larping as conservatives...

Imagine a train of the gayest and most horrendously ghoulish degenerates, thrusting upon each other's anuses in a human centipede chain. Politics can create beings of which devour their own tails, having no beginning or end. The point is, just because you're self-aware that you're the devil's agent doesn't make you any better. Being right wing and being progressive is like being a clever retard. My definition is flawed but succintly describes what the hell is going on here.

The mention of Gideon the Ninth (which I loved) and Ninefox Gambit (which I thought was just alright) got me to stop lurking for a minute, but I have a question.

What part of anything that you're saying is right-wing?

It's pretty clearly left-authoritarian, just a little more naked about the authoritarian part.

Edit. The original post is left-authoritarian. Not Gideon the Ninth of which I have no knowledge or opinion.

I don't see it. First, I don't see any strong societal world-building in the first place. The necromancer's seem to be organized as feudal lords and rule over an empire, but I don't think this was meant as an utopia which present-day Earth should strive to emulate any more than the Empire in Warhammer 40k.

The two principal protagonists are female (and possibly queer?), which is certainly helpful with the woke market (and awards), but they are exceptional, not downtrodden. Their gender is not (in my opinion) central to the plot, and if they have a skin color or race or role in a colonial past or something that completely went over my head.

If anything, the world seems to be shades of grey. Neither side in the conflict (Empire, Commander Wake?) is constantly engaging in the sort of evil which would brand them as the bad guys.

If the books were meant to transport an urgent message about the politics in the Western world in the 2020s, that again went completely over my head.

Left how? You’re pretty trad in many respects socially, if not economically.

It appears that my response was confusing.

I am saying @epohon is left authoritarian.

I don't know what Gideon the Ninth is, so no opinion there.

Me personally I'm right libertarian(ish) and trad-pilled.

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