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Notes -
I’m having a body snatchers moment, ever since Dase jumped in angry in a ‘da juice’ discussion I was having with SS where I was just pointing out the imho postmodern trappings of his argument. I thought with all the bitching about wokes, the criticism of postmodernism was baked in, but it appears it’s a major fault line on the board. So how many of you are postmodernists?
Wokism is a classic Hegelian grand narrative. So are many forms of fascism, certainly in the more popular German incarnation thereof. The current progressive ideology doesn't descend, whatever MAGA QAnon types declare, from the "Frankfurt School". It descends much more linearly from the longstanding liberal-progressive tradition of grand narratives that brought you such hits as prohibition. It descends almost entirely from gentiles who were the key figures in enlightenment philosophy. Postmodernism was 'invented' by leftists but was widely derided, even initially by Orthodox Marxists as covertly reactionary. This is because postmodernism is a framework by which one could conclude, quite rationally, that the Marxist mission and the Marxist historical narrative (ie. dialectical materialism) were wrong or at least substantially irrelevant and/or not necessary.
All post-modern movements (that is to say, all major political movements that are either not explicitly Hegelian or which do not explicitly involve recreating or extending pre-modern ways of living, like the Amish) are deeply influenced by postmodern thought (including by the Frankfurt school). This includes the 'tradcath revival' that followed Vatican II and filtered into the modern FSSP/SSPX. It includes modern political Islamism as imagined by Bin Laden. It includes weird, esoteric online subculturalist politics. It includes the modern Anglophone 'dissident right'. These aren't entirely postmodern movements by any means, many rely on older ideologies (part of postmodernism is that it allows, unlike modernism/grand narrative room for many smaller premodern narratives, including traditional memes). One can acknowledge this or reject it, but in the end what the postmodernists (or those currently considered academically 'postmodernist') particularly the French like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault were able to provide was the framework for the cultural criticism of the progressive grand narrative in which the modern internet right engages, in which almost all of us engage. Moldbug and many other reactionaries have acknowledged this over time, as I said last week when we last had this discussion.
Dase's argument in that thread is relatively weak. There are plenty of things to be argued among 'power worshippers'; Western elites, as even Karlin has finally acknowledged, are broadly of a high quality even if they have adopted some low quality memes. Certainly there are very few historical societies people can point to that had universally higher quality elites (as I believe even Signals - or another ethnonationalist regular - noted a few weeks ago, the class of effete, educated, extremely classically well-informed sort of people who ruled Europe before 1914 fucked up big time themselves, in the end, and so many of their sons died for it). American elites rule over Silicon Valley. Even if they did nothing to create it (they did indeed do much, many American elites are Silicon Valley to the core) it is hard to call this incompetence, whatever the state of the homeless in San Francisco. It's also, if anything, something of an ahistorical notion to suggest that early America had particularly high quality elites compared both the present and to many other countries at the time, so I don't think this is merely residual quality now fading. I read an account of the final attempts at reform in China over the last decades of the Qing dynasty and was struck by how absurdly competent certain parts of the court were in that period - they really did try everything they could, but it was too late. Some would argue that the Russians in that post-Japanese war, pre-WW1 period attempted similar.
'Might makes right' is facile but it is also one of the major longstanding narratives in which the right engages, while it can just be discarded or even blatantly ignored when it becomes inconvenient, it is compelling and certain sectors of the dissident right do wash their hands of it a little too much on a case-by-case basis.
My argument is that these things are extraneous and I think your example shows this best. Karlin's new practice of LARPing as a postgenderist progressive freak on
steroidsHRT is entirely downstream of Russia's military humiliation. Could the «elite human capital» have convinced him of the potency of their memes without the demonstration of superior (to Russia) kinetic power it can compel? Clearly they have failed to do so over his years in the West, so he came to Russia to venerate Based Putin's symbolic cult of power (I admit I also like the fact that this… thing exists, The Statue notwithstanding). Could the Russians reconvince him of the validity of Russian Nationalism without taking Odessa at the least? He mocks their ideas openly after years of sympathetic writing. In fact, this suggests he doesn't understand either – he cannot recognize the nugget of moral truth in the progressive doctrine, only see its power and grovel at its feet. Progressives, on the other hand, are vindicated in having not deigned to debate his type: Javelins succeeded where words had proven useless. They will likewise prevail over this clown.I am not a power worshipper, so I can produce arguments beside Chad "who cares lmao my team can fuck up your team" (which is especially helpful when it can't). And I have a consistent set of beliefs that made me deplore the war in the beginning, when it seemed like Ukrainian defenses are being overwhelmed, and make me deplore it now (as a bonus, they allow me to better predict how wars will go), so I hold Karlin's judgement in contempt both then and now.
Link?
AK returned to his true self, his Russian phase was the LARP. For him, it never anything than play, nothing more than pixels on screen.
Imagine: long awaited and greatly hyped game is finally, after many delays, released.
You immediately download it and start playing - of course as Orc, because Orcs are cool. But when you spend few hours, in is not as cool as you expected. The game mechanics are crappy, the gameplay is unbalanced, the story line makes no sense, and Orcs and Orc land are just plain ugly, dirty, covered in filth and cockroaches everywhere.
What to do? No hard feelings, just delete your character and start again, this time as Elf (and then find it is the same, except Elves are all maximally up-your-face LGBTQ+ and everything is in most garish eye-hurting rainbow colors imaginable).
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It was one of the descriptive panels in an extraordinary just-opened exhibition at the British Museum that is on until October called China’s Hidden Century about China between 1850 and 1912. There is a whole section on failed Qing reforms; the exhibition itself is told through artifacts (including fascinating early manufactured Chinese goods that venerated late Qing political figures), many of which I believe have never been exhibited before. I will try to do a post on it. I know your interest in China, if there’s any way you make it to London before October I’d recommend it. It really is one of the best, most interesting museum exhibits I’ve ever seen.
I am unlikely to make it to the Old World in the next two years or so, thus would be interested in a detailed post.
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