Powers which have won great struggles or at least defeated their enemies are usually boasting about their victory, search for historical justification or try to get recognized as legitimate successors of established heroes inside their respected narratives.
This is not the case in our time. Left wing hegemony never refers to itself as hegemonial or describes itself as the winner of a particular struggle.
The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression. The storm of the Capitol was the incident they needed to perform this task and in all honesty one can ask, if either Trump or his fans who made that move should not have been a bit more clever than that, to fall into that obvious trap.
But that's water under the bridge. If this hadn't happened something else would have. The fact that the left has won, by doing grass roots activity for decades, by establishing a very effective de-centralised network of communication, which has no obvious leadership, no identifiable centre operates strictly on, what far right intellectuals in Europe call metapolitics. Or in Gramscian terms: taking over politics by winning the wars about culture.
Right wing politics, or whatever you may call it was always shitty in terms of intellectual distribution of discourse, but this intellectual distribution is the basis, why the left has won. So, maybe in the spirit of Curtis Yarvin, right minded people should be more enthusiastic about going to the library, doing the work and come back with an intellectually well grounded knowledge of how things should be done. It takes time to build a stable network of communication, which does the trick and it will alter the political landscape entirely.
The really annoying thing about all this is not, that the left has won, that's just a historic pendulum which has gone one direction lately, but the fact that they have won and don't admit it, and prefer instead to mock and belittle you. The ancients who lost battles and wars were prepared for death, even the fate of getting tortured to death was acceptable, it was part of the game. But they would have never accepted public humiliation as a punishment for having lost. They wanted to die in honour. Or at least to get remembered as people of honour.
The left is powerful and they did this by their own wisdom and intelligence. They outsmarted their enemies, but they are also pretentious little pricks who think that one who is an enemy must be laughed at, belittled and humiliated. They don't want to kill you (yet), but they have to devalue and diminish your existence and become a totally depraved one. The ancients would have rather chosen death and even torture, before being treated this way. The permanent mockery and belittling evokes this cartoon from 1935, "Pluto's Judgement Day".
Not only is authority and power merciless, licentious and unfair, it also mocks you, humiliates you and tries to make you being complicit in your own humiliation, permanent struggle session, an enduring trial of enforced, purposefully wrong confessions. They don't even try to hide it, but make it part of their mockery and your humiliation. It is unbearable.
Anger and hatred are not good advisors. Violence is something that should be avoided, not at all costs, but at costs that hurt and represent a viable trade-off. One nevertheless can try to restore some dignity and pride by refusing to give in to these show trial attitudes. Defend your positions, don't abandon your posts, stand your ground, stand up for yourself. You can lose, but you can at least die in honour.
But we are not there yet. Instead of dying: Get to the books, read and study history. The path is a long one.
> the effects of helping people, or trying to help, can be only so nasty
Insert something about "Omnipotent moral busy-bodies" here.
Fun Fact (one MM is aware of, I mean, he spent much of this post invoking two cases of it): most of the death in the 20th century was caused by people who were only trying to help humanity. They meant well! Perhaps that's why their arms never tired of flogging the targets of their helpful ministrations.
"[T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
>> You would think no grownup could take this shit seriously.
As far as I can tell, in my lifetime, no Western school has actually taught history. It's mythology with a pipe and a mortarboard. (Cannot speak for the rest of the world.)
>> I offer Noah, and his work here, as a representative sample of today’s market for cruelty.
[Man just inside entrance of Rick's Café Américain]: "Are you buying or selling, sailor?"
You have to see a high resolution version of the bayonet image to really appreciate the pathos of these common community organizers' faces as they are subjugated by Army regulars.
Getty helpfully describes the photo: "Three men from the mob around Little Rock's Central High School are driven from the area at bayonet-point by these soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division September 25th. The presence of the troops permitted the nine black students to enter the school with only minor background incidents."
By framing this as an insurrection, President Eisenhower got away with using the Insurrection Act to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy the 101st.
Helps explain why the mostly peaceful party at the Capitol was framed as "insurrection."
1. Yarvin is very confident in his powers of modalization. I.e., he thinks that he knows what would have happened if something else had happened (e.g., if Trump had been murdered, the NYT would have gravely intoned, "this is what happens to fascists..." or whatever). I'm not nearly as sure of my powers of modalization, though for what it's worth, I tend to have the same judgments that Yarvain does.
2. Yarvin believes that history has a telos: Cthulu always lurches left, as he used to say. If you deny that history has a telos, and *really* believe it -- I think few people deny that history has a telos -- then you can't be so confident that the left will win and the right will lose.
3. There's almost certainly a reason that the intellectual class is always and everywhere left-wing ("always and everywhere" is probably too strong, but I don't know of any place where the intellectual class is mostly right-wing. That said, I don't know much about history). My guess: the psychological traits that make one interested in ideas ("openness to experience", maybe?) tend to also make one take the left-wing side of things. I realize that's a shitty theory, though: you'd think people who were open to experience wouldn't lunge headfirst into dogma and demand everyone jump in with them. Regardless, if it's true that conservatives tend to be ... let's say, "practical", and liberals "idealistic", then there's not really anything intellectual conservatives can do to change this state of affairs, short of coercive eugenics or outbreeding the lefties.
4. I'd like Yarvin to explain more why he thinks everyone went woke all of a sudden.
5. If it's true that the left is utterly dominant, then how come the Democratic party doesn't have, as part of its platform, the plank it's illegal for private individuals to own productive capital? I'm not as sure as so many people on the right seem to be that, at least in the economic realm, leftism has gone from strength to strength. If anything, we're less economically left-wing than we were in the 60s.
Children indeed, at this moment most Deplored of Les Deplorables are brushed out of sight, so our elites do not need to see us, or smell us (8 hour shifts rolling past 24). We need not be seen until riot, or who knows what rushes the Gated Community of Capitol Hill.
Sure, snub and piss off the sleepless help standing between you and the void.
The Rough Beast could use some coffee too, cold out there...
The G.E (lol) could walk in here now and ....
Some rough beast is gonna slouch into Jerusalem, and no Noah your hour has not come at last. Barely tolerable in Liberal Democracy are roaches crushed underfoot in competent authoritarianism.
I’ve met the competent authoritarians, nasty sneering children need not apply.
By the by, Noah Smith isn't O'Brien - Stanley Fish took that role and ran with it ("Boutique Multiculturalism" is O'Brien at his best, even advising arbitrary use of their power aka "ad hockery"). Noah Smith isn't ben Parsons (Yglesias has that role locked down).
Noah smith is just a flowchart lib. His opinion on any subject is easy to predict, and his reasoning is also quite easy to predict.
Don't get me wrong, you smacking him was worth it and I got plenty of good chuckles out of this piece.
But let's not pretend that you aren't punching down here.
he's not gonna stop, is he
Powers which have won great struggles or at least defeated their enemies are usually boasting about their victory, search for historical justification or try to get recognized as legitimate successors of established heroes inside their respected narratives.
This is not the case in our time. Left wing hegemony never refers to itself as hegemonial or describes itself as the winner of a particular struggle.
The powers that make the left today or whatever one likes to call it, refuse constantly to admit they have won, but prefer instead to speak in the name of the oppressed and that their particular victory was fought against an evil aggression. The storm of the Capitol was the incident they needed to perform this task and in all honesty one can ask, if either Trump or his fans who made that move should not have been a bit more clever than that, to fall into that obvious trap.
But that's water under the bridge. If this hadn't happened something else would have. The fact that the left has won, by doing grass roots activity for decades, by establishing a very effective de-centralised network of communication, which has no obvious leadership, no identifiable centre operates strictly on, what far right intellectuals in Europe call metapolitics. Or in Gramscian terms: taking over politics by winning the wars about culture.
Right wing politics, or whatever you may call it was always shitty in terms of intellectual distribution of discourse, but this intellectual distribution is the basis, why the left has won. So, maybe in the spirit of Curtis Yarvin, right minded people should be more enthusiastic about going to the library, doing the work and come back with an intellectually well grounded knowledge of how things should be done. It takes time to build a stable network of communication, which does the trick and it will alter the political landscape entirely.
The really annoying thing about all this is not, that the left has won, that's just a historic pendulum which has gone one direction lately, but the fact that they have won and don't admit it, and prefer instead to mock and belittle you. The ancients who lost battles and wars were prepared for death, even the fate of getting tortured to death was acceptable, it was part of the game. But they would have never accepted public humiliation as a punishment for having lost. They wanted to die in honour. Or at least to get remembered as people of honour.
The left is powerful and they did this by their own wisdom and intelligence. They outsmarted their enemies, but they are also pretentious little pricks who think that one who is an enemy must be laughed at, belittled and humiliated. They don't want to kill you (yet), but they have to devalue and diminish your existence and become a totally depraved one. The ancients would have rather chosen death and even torture, before being treated this way. The permanent mockery and belittling evokes this cartoon from 1935, "Pluto's Judgement Day".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUT0PYEeH6o
Not only is authority and power merciless, licentious and unfair, it also mocks you, humiliates you and tries to make you being complicit in your own humiliation, permanent struggle session, an enduring trial of enforced, purposefully wrong confessions. They don't even try to hide it, but make it part of their mockery and your humiliation. It is unbearable.
Anger and hatred are not good advisors. Violence is something that should be avoided, not at all costs, but at costs that hurt and represent a viable trade-off. One nevertheless can try to restore some dignity and pride by refusing to give in to these show trial attitudes. Defend your positions, don't abandon your posts, stand your ground, stand up for yourself. You can lose, but you can at least die in honour.
But we are not there yet. Instead of dying: Get to the books, read and study history. The path is a long one.
Just got a Qdrop telling me that no one has ever seen Curtis Yarvin and Noah Smith in the same place. The grift is on.
> the effects of helping people, or trying to help, can be only so nasty
Insert something about "Omnipotent moral busy-bodies" here.
Fun Fact (one MM is aware of, I mean, he spent much of this post invoking two cases of it): most of the death in the 20th century was caused by people who were only trying to help humanity. They meant well! Perhaps that's why their arms never tired of flogging the targets of their helpful ministrations.
"[T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
He's going full Socrates. It's been an honor.
>> You would think no grownup could take this shit seriously.
As far as I can tell, in my lifetime, no Western school has actually taught history. It's mythology with a pipe and a mortarboard. (Cannot speak for the rest of the world.)
>> I offer Noah, and his work here, as a representative sample of today’s market for cruelty.
[Man just inside entrance of Rick's Café Américain]: "Are you buying or selling, sailor?"
You have to see a high resolution version of the bayonet image to really appreciate the pathos of these common community organizers' faces as they are subjugated by Army regulars.
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/three-men-from-the-mob-around-little-rocks-central-high-school-are-picture-id514880574?s=2048x2048
Getty helpfully describes the photo: "Three men from the mob around Little Rock's Central High School are driven from the area at bayonet-point by these soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division September 25th. The presence of the troops permitted the nine black students to enter the school with only minor background incidents."
By framing this as an insurrection, President Eisenhower got away with using the Insurrection Act to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act and deploy the 101st.
Helps explain why the mostly peaceful party at the Capitol was framed as "insurrection."
Curtis, Talk to Eric Weinstein. He was just speaking about Monarchy on the Realignment podcast. You are my 2 favorite Jedi Masters!
https://youtu.be/Nak11yXkvqo
A few observations:
1. Yarvin is very confident in his powers of modalization. I.e., he thinks that he knows what would have happened if something else had happened (e.g., if Trump had been murdered, the NYT would have gravely intoned, "this is what happens to fascists..." or whatever). I'm not nearly as sure of my powers of modalization, though for what it's worth, I tend to have the same judgments that Yarvain does.
2. Yarvin believes that history has a telos: Cthulu always lurches left, as he used to say. If you deny that history has a telos, and *really* believe it -- I think few people deny that history has a telos -- then you can't be so confident that the left will win and the right will lose.
3. There's almost certainly a reason that the intellectual class is always and everywhere left-wing ("always and everywhere" is probably too strong, but I don't know of any place where the intellectual class is mostly right-wing. That said, I don't know much about history). My guess: the psychological traits that make one interested in ideas ("openness to experience", maybe?) tend to also make one take the left-wing side of things. I realize that's a shitty theory, though: you'd think people who were open to experience wouldn't lunge headfirst into dogma and demand everyone jump in with them. Regardless, if it's true that conservatives tend to be ... let's say, "practical", and liberals "idealistic", then there's not really anything intellectual conservatives can do to change this state of affairs, short of coercive eugenics or outbreeding the lefties.
4. I'd like Yarvin to explain more why he thinks everyone went woke all of a sudden.
5. If it's true that the left is utterly dominant, then how come the Democratic party doesn't have, as part of its platform, the plank it's illegal for private individuals to own productive capital? I'm not as sure as so many people on the right seem to be that, at least in the economic realm, leftism has gone from strength to strength. If anything, we're less economically left-wing than we were in the 60s.
That was a super fun read
I'm selling popcorn futures: ~rignet-bicteg
everything the left does is projection.
and are incapable of empathizing with sincerity, Carlyle's main heroic virtue
Responding to these people is both cringe and low status
Children indeed, at this moment most Deplored of Les Deplorables are brushed out of sight, so our elites do not need to see us, or smell us (8 hour shifts rolling past 24). We need not be seen until riot, or who knows what rushes the Gated Community of Capitol Hill.
Sure, snub and piss off the sleepless help standing between you and the void.
The Rough Beast could use some coffee too, cold out there...
The G.E (lol) could walk in here now and ....
Some rough beast is gonna slouch into Jerusalem, and no Noah your hour has not come at last. Barely tolerable in Liberal Democracy are roaches crushed underfoot in competent authoritarianism.
I’ve met the competent authoritarians, nasty sneering children need not apply.
By the by, Noah Smith isn't O'Brien - Stanley Fish took that role and ran with it ("Boutique Multiculturalism" is O'Brien at his best, even advising arbitrary use of their power aka "ad hockery"). Noah Smith isn't ben Parsons (Yglesias has that role locked down).