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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist. So far, mixed feelings. I have found his attempt to dissolve assumptions of racial difference very humanizing, and of practical merit. On the other hand, while he sounds perfectly innocent when discussing race with other minorities, when prodded far enough it always seems to come back to "whiteness" in the end. In fairness, Kendi's take on white individuals is fairly nuanced.
Paper I'm reading: Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Finally went through BAM, very straussian, but a real core there underneath the baby talk and performative offensiveness. Probably doesn't speak much to the average, but I wonder what Kulak thinks of the exhortation for men to form piratical bands of mercenaries, biker gangs etc. Prince and Prigozhin would seem to be the models, and the recent abortive coup in Russia would seem to provide support for the BAP-ian worldview.
Interested in his footsie with christianity, how he squares that particular circle, because it's a glaring problem with his philosophy.
I think this is just, like, politics as aesthetics totally divorced from practice? Biker gangs and pirates never really stopped existing, they just stopped being effective. People defend BAP by saying there's a lot of irony and aesthetics mixed with deep truth, but after interacting with many people who love his stuff - either BAP is very wrong, or all of his followers are failing to parse the Straussianisms.
I've generally been very ... confused ... by the last three years of the new right/dissident right. Moldbug's dream of a new elite that is just visibly better and more correct than the existing elite just didn't happen. Almost all of the big personalities in the new right are now visibly less scientifically literate than good vox writers.
Given the (very effective!) private military company couldn't even make progress in russia, what chances do a much smaller operation have in the much more stable and hostile environment that is the west! Again, it's not like BAP invented the idea of a junta or a coup. And Russia isn't just weak because of the ukraine war. Like, a lot of Bellingcat's exposes come from the fact that you can buy cell phone data on the black market and use them to expose Russian spies.
Actually, could you elaborate on how that supports the BAP worldview? I'm having trouble parsing that. How is a coups by an army run by a single person in an unstable state surprising to a liberal but not surprising to a bap? "Russia: no democracy, poor economy, political instability and coups".
Russia has the world's second most powerful military, but even they are largely reliant on a private army to provide their most skilled and motivated soldiers. So much so that the leader of such a force has the apparent ability to reach Moscow from Ukraine to express his displeasure, defy the government and even if he's assassinated tomorrow, live to tell the tale.
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