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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1635 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 2, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Seconded. Gurri's book is the book to understand modern populism.

I would also add Leo Strauss's What Is Political Philosophy (essay), Burnham's The Machiavellians, Nick Land's Xenosystems: Fragments (google for pdf), and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism. Consider Baudrillard as well. The first three will give you a good overview of the stages of political theory leading to the new right, and Fisher is the last leftist theorist of any intellectual note to gain real memetic reach (Zizek is not what you're looking for here lol).

Thanks for the recommendations, much appreciated.

Kind of you to say. Other suggestion to understand the modern Left: Foucault is critical, probably Discipline and Punish or History of Sexuality Volume 1. The thing to realize with Foucault is that his work was both a major tool for the leftist project of tearing down old structures of social power, and their blueprint for building their own mechanisms of social control.

I am generally not a fan of reading a lot of stuff about object-level politics, aside from this website, but if you would like magazines, I would say the Claremont Review of Books is the best place to get political theory from the modern intellectual Right. Charles Haywood's book reviews for the extremely online rightist perspective. Left is harder to find a single source, maybe relevant NYRB articles. The Economist or Foreign Policy for the Establishment view (it's easy to get sucked into just following the right/left wing conflict, but ultimately their respective conflicts with the establishment are more important than the beefs they have with each other).

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