the alt-right

Wait hold on, Breitbart is core alt-right.

― Andrew Farrell, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:57 AM (twenty-eight seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they are johnny come latelies

it's really not. it jumped on the alt-right bandwagon thru Milo but he started as just an observer and tho the alt-right will pretty much accept any celebrity legitimacy they can get, he remains a controversial figure in the movement (bc he's gay and jewish). he wrote this around the time breitbart began embracing the alt-right: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/ - where you can see that he's interacting w/ them more as an anthropologist than a participant. xxp

didn't realise that Yiannopoulos had jewish heritage

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/203888/donald-trumps-little-boy

frogbs you've seen this? https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-alt-right-has-its-own-comedy-tv-show-on-a-time-warner-ne

― Mordy, Thursday, October 6, 2016 9:56 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess I never really followed the persona behind it too closely. I read a lot of that stuff as a parody of the alt-right, though I suppose at this point, what's the difference

goole you always amaze/scare me with your knowledge of this stuff

Dark Enlightenment feeds into this, right?

i guess my knowledge of this stuff is just unsurprising :p

dark enlightenment seems v tenuously related i don't think alt-righters are reading yudowsky or less wrong

k3v: yeah i still don't know what to think of it all

weirdly i can trace how i found this shit back to ilx! sort of. to simon reynolds, to marxist anglo music bloggers like k-punk, to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

xp it's bigger now that it used to be, lots of factions and true scotsman stuff, but i think "DE" is def part of it

this is the first ive heard of dark enlightenment

i want to know more but i aint googling it

cybernazis

Does Dark Enlightenment = neo-Reactionaries, i.e. people who are 'conservatives' in the 18th century sense (oppose democracy and egalitarianism, want to return to monarchy and aristocracy and explicit patriarchy)?

Because if so, that's actually kind of cool (as long as they don't gain any real power).

to the weird end of critical theory -- some of those people 'switched sides' politically, drove what ended up being called the "dark enlightenment"

who are these people?

yup

like i said about determinism, the 'enlightenment' part i guess is their justifications are scientific, not solely (or blended with) tradition and religion

xp ogmor: key guy is nick land

it's just a couple of angry media studies lecturers trying to blow minds with their edgy racism

Do any of them go so far as to fully embrace feudalism or do they still want to somehow preserve capitalism and the market?

re DE/NrX people

xxp the Spiked crew are part of that side of things, right?

this is a good thing from moldbug that goes into the DE ideology:
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

we discussed it a bit on the political philosophy thread maybe a year or so ago?

also these Slatestarcodex pieces are good:
(apparently the website is down but when it comes back up)

slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/

i feel like with a lot of the dark enlightenment stuff there are good critiques of contemporary liberal society but rather than follow them to a reasonable place of like participatory dissent they move into this insane territory of 'well if things aren't perfect today that means we should all become monarchists' which is pretty dumb. i also don't think it's v related to the alt-right i don't think your average white supremacist alt-right 4-chan do-it-for-the-lolz poster is thinking very deeply about the philosophical underpinnings of his ideas. like you might think that DE is giving intellectual cover for bigots but i don't think those bigots want or need that cover.

Goddamn, that Unqualified Reservations thing is long and I haven't got to an interesting point yet.

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here, but their basic beliefs about the world look identical to me. because of the internet there's a ton of crossover now i guess. the energy of an election season has run a lot of it together too.

an uhh illustrative example (and god forgive me, as many whacko blog posts i may have read, i don't know all the details) is a dude name mike anissimov, who worked for a transhumanist/AI think tank, then had some kind of scheme to set up a settlement in idaho to reestablish feudal hierachy after the US collapses, i think? so you have the tech nerd economy and D&D fantasy royalist stuff tied together with white power and antisemitism

At what point does he stop making dumbass red-state/blue-state stereotypes and generalizations and get to DE ideology?

xp

it's like 8 or 9 articles. i like when he talks about colonialism and the third world and the meaning of liberation/nationalism etc. there are productive contradictions embedded in left-wing post-cold war ideologies (like third world nationalism v. globalization secularism) of course you don't need moldbug to tell you that but he imo makes some provocative points. xxp

um - end of first letter beginning of second iirc? he spends a lot of time making spurious conclusions about crime in victorian england which is a bummer that scott addresses in his anti-reactionary faq.

goole: Wow

oh god *deep breath* yeah there are still some (how many?) throne and altar european right wingers out there. or weirdo catholic sedevecantist types. that all precedes and doesn't really relate to what we're talking about here,

i think like current poland + russia are aspirational models for some of these white americans

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

i haven't heard anything like that - seems crazy (not like mainstream DE isn't)

I dunno if Sam has any real political views besides "lol"

have u noticed a pattern wrt this claim

That moldbug guy makes a pretty terrible argument.

could swear that's in nick land somewhere but maybe it's just my own cult-of-moloch fanfic xxp

been a while since i went through nick land / moldbug and may have this wrong but there seems to be a strain in deep techbro dark enlightenment where we literally rebuild god (as inhuman synthetic intelligence born of global capitalism itself) so we can kneel properly? (to god, but also to his deserving priests?)

― florence foster wallace (difficult listening hour), Thursday, October 6, 2016 10:53 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbh i would read the shit out of a novel about this

it sounds close to the concept of this Dilbert cartoon from 1996:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CQqnskzW8AAfFzo.jpg

It is a terrible article, in a terrible tone - intentionally rather than accidentally Donald Sutherland when he's just playing with you, before he turns steely.

weird soap opera detail: nick land is jeremy greenspan's (junior boys) brother in law

i am wrong in notable ways. from this thing about him by robin mackay:

Digital technology, according to Land, unveiled a side of numbers that subtracted them completely from the power-structures of meaning and signification that made language a prison-house for thought; it even removed numbers from the stratified realms of mathematics, into a pure, flat plane of immanent materiality inhabited only by ‘tics.’ Accelerating ‘in-silico’ Capital’s planetary experiment of ‘tacking’ human culture onto these tic-numbers so as to tear it apart, Land believed, would allow him to complete what deconstruction could only gesture at in its endless cycles of philosophical titillation: It would dismantle the power institutionalized in language and sense, and open up a reliable communication line with something unknown – a pure material dispersion not preprocessed by models derived from the past.

...

For Land, such theoretical propositions were also machines for excitation, devices to meld with and accelerate the planetary intensification that would finally allow the ‘body without organs’ to shed its human skin. If Philosophy thereby becomes a species of hype (or ‘hyperstition,’ according to the CCRU’s neologism) then are Land’s detractors (now, as then) right to say that his outlook is ultimately indistinguishable from a passive acceptance of a ‘neoconservative’ agenda – that his theoretical advocacy of the ‘acceleration’ of the capitalist process, in practice, simply endorses the maintenance of capitalist power structures rather than their dismantling (whether revolutionary or ameliorative)?

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[...]

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level 2?

so the way i described the human hierarchy in such a world is tres old-world. humans and humanity are shed. in this piece land's potential "neoconservativism" afaict relies on this divine birth/radical deconstruction not happening -- or at least not happening yet? i might think that chasing such an apotheosis of capital is going to create a prison-world even if it's successful tho? idk?

(second quote block there -- "nothing human makes it out" etc -- is land not mackay)

yeah afaict land's thing is we (or 'intelligence') have to escape this planet, and we can't do that if democracy doesn't fall, because it makes people stupid and gives power to the wrong ones. basically the singularity and a return to 19th century heroic/intellectual/colonial values are by nature the same. or something

funny he was such a cheney-ist pro war kind of guy when bush was in office. which makes his turn away from neoconservatism and towards austrian economics, the old right and racism look pretty cynical after all that fell apart -- after obama, after the housing crash.

xp and if you wanna read land tie the capitalist-genetic singularity fetish thing in with just reams and reams of hot takes on trayvon martin and john darbyshire (+ with moldbug's aesthetic stroke of subbing in the evocative word Cathedral anyplace nixon would have said Establishment) here u go

hah i didn't know that website existed

Probably not a good idea to stare directly at the Moldbug

ilx policy is actually to ban anyone who talks about moldbug in order to prevent the possibility of bringing him into being

hey so goole/dlh --- since you guys seem to make the occasional foray onto these guys' home turf: do you ever get the sense that they're out there reading the equivalent lefty literature/writing? maybe this is just too much time on ilx, but i do get the sense that a lot of ppl here actually go out there and read the horrible primary sources of the right, whereas i've never really thought that the right does likewise

Probably some of them are reading left-accelerationist material so they can argue against it?

I don't get the impression that they're reading left wing media like counterpunch or jacobin but yes NYT WPost as emblematic of "liberalism" - they are opposed to mainstream liberalism not to far left radicalism which is only on their radar insofar as they conflate it w the mainstream.

well we are all totally immersed in the ridiculous lie that is the progressive worldview, the virus that ate america when jefferson's continent-of-monticellos didn't happen, so they would prob say that they are exposed to the equivalent just by going to school/talking to anyone. but no they prob don't read jacobin or whatever? xp hah yeah what mordy said.

xpost There were definitely racists and fascists (inc. Ron himself) and probably even Nazis, but who among them was hired *after* publicly, explicitly professing those beliefs?

Anyway, you might not be surprised, but Hasan was:

Mehdi Hasan‬ ✧@mehdirha✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬ To all those asking in the replies, why do this show and isn't it just platforming hate, fair questions. I struggled with it. I also didn't realize just how extreme these 20 would be (!)

But also, I guess folks should know this is what we're up against and this is what the country contains now.

Did the alt right win?

https://bsky.app/profile/jaredlholt.bsky.social/post/3lwogw2zh3c23

Lost this one btw

https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/billboard-for-proud-boys-hate-group-removed-in-southern-illinois-after-public-pressure/

Good piece on several notorious sites shutting down now that the ideology they espoused is firmly mainstream right instead of alt-

https://www.ms.now/opinion/alex-jones-infowars-maga-trump-sandy-hook

lolololololololol
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/may/24/candace-owens-tour-cancelled-australia-no-ticket-refunds-ntwnfb

snake grifting its own tail

Just looking at the thread title made me realize how completely the "alt-right" has disappeared by effectively becoming the dominant wing of conservative US politics.