rendakuenthusiast:

kontextmaschine:

In the early 2000s I encountered Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and the “juicebox mafia” through some random link, I was like “shit, these new millennial pundits are gonna be important, I need to pay attention to this” and turns out I was right

And through Yggy’s comments I found Steve Sailer and through him like Paul Kersey and Richard Spencer and this whole scene of New Internet Racists and I was like “shit, this is gonna be important, I need to pay attention to this” and turns out I was right

And then I noticed the rise of “feminist blogging” in the mid-late 2000s and I paid attention to that.

(Like DAE remember when Jezebel started with Moe Tkacik and Tracy “Slut Machine” Egan editing, and then it was a scandal when some “Thinking and Drinking” speaking series, that was an excuse for the girls-in-NYC-media guests and audience to let their wine mom out, invited them? And they showed up smashed and were like “yeah by your legalistic standards we’ve been ‘raped’ a dozen times since moving to New York but we have better shit to spend our time caring about, like getting drunk”)

But it’s not like I actually cared about what fucking Feministe or Feministing or Shakesville said, Amanda Marcotte made her name on insulting at a 7th-grade-boy level. I found Sady Doyle and Twisty “I Blame the Patriarchy” Faster through random links*

And through random links in the latter’s comments found Cathy “Bug” Brennan and the Twanzphobic blog, and they were like “we all need to prepare for this pushy new transgender movement” and I was like “this seems like it’s gonna be important”, and it was

* at some point in here I also noticed Rod Dreher and Freddie de Boer before they were things, but I forget how.

Wasn’t half a week after Trump came down that escalator that I was on the horn to everyone I know in the DC establishment that he was gonna be president.

Like, I could be wrong this time but you really want to bet against me?

How many things that you thought were important turned out not to matter?

Well in the late ‘90s I was very insistent that the next decade’s wars would rely on mercenaries, as a result of post-Cold War drawdowns, and honestly you could say the contractors of the sandbox wars and the “little green men” with Crimea

But honestly that wasn’t my vision, I was influenced more by the Hammer’s Slammers books (which were very post-Vietnam, it was like “What if mercenaries on post-colonial Africa stand-in planets? But also what if proper war, with artillery advanced to the point it fires AA and “smart” rounds, and tanks firing HEAT shells so hard they’re railguns? And also what if the gap between a romantic warrior spirit and war as an instrumental act of state keeps getting played up?)

@trickytalks said: how are you not just cherry-picking stuff you were right about?

Admittedly, I probably don’t remember shit I was wrong about as well. I mean I’ve been wrong in expecting things, but I’m blanking on shit I predicted, I preserve my reputation by not attaching it to shit I’m not sure about. Same kinda perfectionism by which I don’t hit on people I don’t already expect a positive response from, might not be the best.

But even that’s probably self flattering, so

I ANNOUNCE A CONTEST

Counting Chickens 2019

Read back through my archives, find the dumbest shit I’ve been wrong about, and send it to me by the end of September 2019 in an ask with [COUNTING CHICKENS]

(and like some sort of unique identifier, like [IMNOODLEMAN] or whatever if you want to send it anon but be recognized)

At the end of the month I’ll pick a winner and the first to send it in gets recognized as humbling me

This Tumblr Post About Extremism From Four Years Ago Goes Viral After Every Shooting. Its Creator Finally Explained It.

The oral history of this post:

, apparently by a 17-year-old inspired by @mynationalistpony

The activists are worked up! There’s a new civil rights movement coming! We! Will! Fight!

The veneration of the civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s, that makes people think that’s the only and inevitable way this can play out. Let’s set aside the way those gains eroded with time (same as the movement of the 1860s-70s, as Reconstruction gave way to Redemption). You know what I’m reminded of? The civil rights movement of the 1910s-20s.

You didn’t hear about that one? The founding of the NAACP, Garveyism, W.E.B. DuBois, black troops returning from European service in WWI, sharecroppers moving north to work the factories, pumped up to reclaim the promise of Reconstruction. Meanwhile, a countrywide surge in leftist radicalism, and new wave of immigrants asserting their claim on America. You don’t hear about it, because it didn’t win. The Palmer Raids, the First Red Scare, the Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Riot, the founding of the Second KKK.

Well, let them try, it won’t matter because trends suggest the, aah, “Coalition of the Ascendant” will gain overwhelming dominance in the intermediate future, right? Yeah, white Americans noticed that back then, too. That’s why they cut off immigration and started pushing eugenics.

Not convinced things’ll turn out like that this time around, but they could. Learn your history, kids, it keeps you from looking the fool.

kontextmaschine:

So as far as I’m told there are three ways left in which more than a handful of people can survive as workaday writers, they are

• Women’s blogs that cover supermarket checkout topics
• Algorithmic content, creating crappy 20 minute how-to listicles from and for the internet, forever
• Recapping television shows

(Technical writing is still okay if you have a security clearance, everything else is going to India)

Now as an American without a security clearance who is not yet a beloved Hollywood darling and might like to work by writing anyway, that sucks but it’s a lot of other posts.

What I want to raise here (and leave dangling, without much resolution) is that last point, TV recapping. It is now a thing! But I don’t really hear anyone thinking or talking *about* it. Maybe ‘cause it’s not one of those three. Maybe I read the wrong tumblrs.

But isn’t that weird?

That we’ve outsourced TV watching? Moreover that we’ve outsourced TV-watching-for-cultural-fluency-and-status? The business of sitting through an episode, and developing opinions about the action, and the characters, and the writing, and the performances, and rendering those opinions witty?

Maybe it’ll turn out like book reviews were from the ‘50s-'90s, half way for people to pretend to have consumed esteemed culture they hadn’t, half weird and nonobvious form where for economic reasons all the best essayists pitch all their best ideas pegged to tenuously related (b/h)ooks.

Like how modern blockbusters are stories pegged to tenuously related internationally bankable stars.

And another way to look at it is that just like medical care, or childcare, or cleaning, or sewing, or food preparation, or the ur-example, food production, television watching is a domestic activity we less and less find worthwhile to do ourselves - Baumol’s cost disease cheapening it minute-for-minute and pushing it under the respectable threshhold - yet still find worthwhile enough to Have Done.

And ISN’T THAT WEIRD.

I don’t even remember being on here in 2010

(12/12/2010)

kontextmaschine:

This is the best mainstreamish article I’ve seen on what I’ve been talking about for a while, the internet-based development of a white male consciousness.

I will say it’s a little myopic in its American focus. I put it as

the construction of a modern, international, English-speaking Australian-American-Polish-British-Scandanavian-Serbian-etc. white volk around a core of internet-native right-masculo-populism on the chans’ “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism” model

and the internationalism counts for something. Like I’ve said, because my sleep cycles leave me up on the internet late[/early] enough for the Strayans to show up, I now know the correct derogatory stereotypes about Aboriginal Australians, though I doubt one has ever even crossed into my physical field of vision.

And I guarantee you there are a lot of guys out there, around the world, who on hearing that Russia (or even a Danish/Finnish coalition) had invaded Sweden, would at least give a good “attaboy”, with hopes towards shifting Swedish domestic policy and culture, despite not being able to name two Swedish cities or politicians.

But really, an international bunch of alienated young male yahoos doing identitarian chest-thumping on social media, what could they really do anyway?

Well, why don’t you go ask ISIS?

8/2/15

kontextmaschine:

So the “Cultural Marxism” meme.

Which, for those of you that have the misfortune to follow this tumblr because you know me personally or like happy hardcore, is an idea lately growing in prominence though still largely confined to the rightist alt-media. It’s the idea that “political correctness”, the collapse of self-assured WASP cultural supremacy, the destabilization of gender roles, and so on and so on are actually continuous with the Marxist project of world revolution in general and the destruction of America in particular.

And that this is all traceable to a group of German Jewish refugee academics known as the Frankfurt School, who in the shadow of WWII took Marxism (which traditionally viewed itself as the science of history, and was most likely to be classified by outsiders as economics or political philosophy), married it to Freudian psychology and literary criticism, and birthed of that unholy union a revolutionary monster. (Actually more recently I see Frank Boas and cultural anthropology getting tossed in, though he’s a generation earlier - but still German Marxist Jewish.)

I see people wonder Where This All Came From All Of A Sudden, and there’s a simple answer, and it’s American Studies.

Andrew Brietbart, who did more than anyone to get the idea circulating, was American Studies at Tulane. William S. Lind, who basically originated the meme in the ‘90s at the Free Congress Foundation, was History - specifically American - at Dartmouth and then Princeton, but then I don’t think they give American Studies degrees at the corresponding levels. (I know when I was doing American Studies at Cornell, most of my classes were cross-listed history.)

And the thing about American Studies is - well, university departments are fiefdoms more than anything else. I’m not sure how it works in the STEM fields, but in the social sciences and humanities, just like nations are languages with an army, departments are canons with tenure lines. When you think about it that way all the departmental politics make more sense. The canonical example of stakes so low, but the thing is even in miniature, they’re still full-blown feudal succession crises, with usurpations and splits and takeovers attendant.

Boasians pretty much stole anthropology from the skull-measurers, economics departments are split into freshwater and saltwater, philosophy’s got continental/analytic (in America, mostly analytic). Sociology claims to be the study of society, and you’d think that would be covered by history, or anthropology, or hell maybe philosophy, but none of those disciplines worshipped statistics like they did in Chicago so.

Women’s Studies departments were formed to give feminist canon a home, then Gender Studies for queer theory canon, and recently there were a bunch of mergers between the two that got really hostile because even if they’d seem to cover the same topics THEY’RE DIFFERENT CANONS with different theoretical bases and policy biases and that’s what counts.

English departments in America were always struggling to put together a native canon, after WWII they kind of settled on Thoreau and Melville through to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and the theoretical approach of close reading. (That’s where secondary education last dipped into the well, which is why high school still has you sniffing out symbolism in an American literary tradition that ends in the ‘30s, plus maybe Amy Tan and Toni Morrison and The Crucible.)

Then the Canon Wars of the '70s blew that all away, and in the aftermath you ended up with English taking in refugees from canons too unhegemonic to get recognized as their own discipline. “Theory” was big for a while, and it was largely continental philosophy’s outpost in America, though I hear it’s been pushed back to redoubts in Cornell and Irvine. Elsewhere you’ve got visual studies and film studies and material culture and post-colonialism and I hear evo-psych’s preparing to storm a few.

But I digress. The thing is that the Frankfurt School is the canon that American Studies coalesced around, and so it’s unsurprising that people who came up in that tradition would hold them up as The Key To Understanding America, because in that tradition that’s exactly what they are. The right-blogosphere take on them isn’t even a mirror image of the American Studies view, it’s the very same view. Tenured academics would be much more positive (and jaded) about the long march through the institutions - obv - and the Scheming Jew subtext gets played as Cultured European instead, but the idea that the Frankfurt School represents a successful attempt to destabilize and revolutionize America’s understanding of itself, and successive cultural developments can be laid at their feet fundamentally IS the American Studies idea.

So I see “Okay not the ‘jew jew jew’ stuff but there’s something to ‘Cultural Marxism’” takes are finally in season, years after I wrote this on 3/11/2013

kontextmaschine:

War games are fun until somebody gets hurt

Pf. For my money, the correct moves for Putin in case of NATO-Russia conflict would be first, to to push the Syrian conflict into a regional war and fan the Arab Spring embers in the Maghreb, which would create a second(/third) theater for Europe that he didn’t have to supply himself and also create massive, destabilizing refugee flows - there’d be domestic pressure to keep naval assets that could go to the Black Sea at home in the Mediterranean for (take your pick) interdiction or humanitarian assistance, and it’d drive a wedge between the existing internationalist regimes and the continent’s right-nationalist challengers (any electoral victory by which would both weaken the NATO coalition and reinforce his domestic “let’s do WWII again” rhetoric of Russia as an anti-fascist counterweight).

And second, to try and strike way behind the American lines by stirring up a civil war - people tend to interpret his moves to ratchet up “Christian traditionalist vs. gay atheist” tensions as a purely domestic thing and that’s a mistake. Dude came up through the KGB.

4/24/2014

(Merkel opened the borders 8/25/2015)

kontextmaschine:

A fascinating thing about Vladimir Putin is how he’s managed to get both the American/European center-right and -left aligned against him at the same time he’s got the extremes of both wings rooting for him, for different reasons:

winning the marginalized right and alienating the center-left with his repressive Christian traditionalist posturing; winning the marginal left and alienating the center-right (and to a degree winning the off-right) by opposing the NATO imperium (plus some off-left bonus from reviving the 20th century “anti-fascist” imaginary).

He’s got both the channels and the rhetoric to speak out of both sides of his mouth to different crowds - able to justify any given geopolitical move in both registers at the same times - and I’d be shocked if this wasn’t the plan all along; one of the strengths of the KGB he came up through was its ability to fracture coalitions and inspire internal conflict in the western bloc

Wouldn’t say I in any way trust his commitment to any cause beyond “Russia strong”, but I certainly respect his relentless competence at power politics. (Admittedly, the Chuck Norris masculinity charms me a little too.)

May 29, 2014

kontextmaschine:

selected John Herrman posts from The Awl

The New White Ethnic Media

These outlets [Paula Deen’s, Sarah Palin’s, Glenn Beck’s] share a basic form—online video network—and depend on relatively steep subscription fees (the comparison that always gets used is “more than Netflix”). They are fundamentally oppositional: to the mainstream media; to political correctness; to godlessness but also a very particular formulation of uptightness. They are nostalgic for a time when certain people could say certain things without worrying about controversy or shame—they feel like public speech is a minefield, so they’ve made theirs a little more private. Among friends, almost. They long for a wholesome past that they feel has been lost. They are not especially cynical. They are, in effect, a white ethnic media, writing and publishing and broadcasting and performing about the experience of American whiteness as understood by people who genuinely feel that whites are becoming a marginalized minority. Race is not addressed directly in these networks’ contents or containers—identity establishment is left to “urban”-style euphemisms and the projection of a sensibility that is neither explicitly nor assertively white, just inherently white, familiar to whites, deemed important or compelling or novel because it is no longer the norm elsewhere.

The New Identity Media Manifesto

[On the same, also Roosh’s Reaxxion:]

you could imagine Roosh-like mission statements for all of them: I aim to protect the interests of white Christian families, a category I’m in…

A gaming site for men is absurd and its potential is small; a culture empire for whiteness preservation is absurd and its potential is huge. But both behave in the same way: they respond to criticism by reflecting back victimhood, and adopting a received language of oppression. This was not their idea, they would suggest. It is what they believe the other people have been doing for years.

Everything Except Rap and Country

[On Taylor Swift’s 1989:]

[Swift’s] idea of pop music harks back to a period — themid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid.

And, in the same quarters, more overtly white!

That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.

Avoiding non-white “microtrends” isolates Taylor Swift from charges of appropriation, because they have no specific and recent non-white influence to refer to.

[In “Shake It Off”] she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.

Who, exactly, would interpret those signals as not “cool” but instead “regular?” Not everybody; specifically, somebody.

The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider.

You know who else suddenly feels culturally outside of the mainstream? (Besides, as always, anyone over the age of 30?) People who are skeptical of America’s demographic progress! Or who, at least, don’t feel comfortable thinking or talking about it. If Jon Caramanica is right, the promotional theory and marketing conversations around 1989, and an overarching influence on its music, can be summed up as: Intentional, Performed Whiteness. It’s an artistic manifestation of the old adolescent conversation:

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Everything. Except rap and country.”

relevant: 1, 2

kontextmaschine:

Something I like to remind people of to highlight the fluidity of history is that well into the 20th century major Anglophone associations with Islam were “decadent sexual deviance, cosmopolitan tolerance, particularly queer-positive”.

Something similar is that if you go back to early 20th century America, stereotypes of Black manhood get a little off. You still see “bestial brute” but you also get dopey, cringing, lackadasical, henpecked, can’t get or keep a woman. (The unifying theme is lack of self-mastery) Like, a cuck. Remember, like, The Blues? And how they’re about how your woman left you, or doesn’t stay true to you, or won’t accept your love? One of the central contentions of the infamous Moynihan Report was that the reason the mid-60s black American community was unhealthy even after the 1950s civil rights movement was that repression had prevented black men from establishing *dominion* - hadn’t been able to earn a breadwinning wage, could by honest toil have less earning power than a sex worker, couldn’t offer black women enough to discipline them by threat of its withdrawal - in short, had prevented them from establishing a healthy, stable patriarchy and reaping its benefits. And one of its central recommendations was to promote this patriarchy.

A lot of 60s-70s black activism invokes “masculinity” in a way that seems incongruous to moderns because it was experienced as not only a valued but long-denied reward but a valuable resource to be deployed in service of the cause.

(Which means that the pre-X Malcolm Little strutting around Harlem in a zoot suit and a guy in a suit and a sandwich board reading “I Am A Man” and Richard Roundtree posing with a leather jacket and a gun while the soundtrack called him a sex machine to all the chicks [Shaft!] were going in on the same political project. The same one as Eldridge Cleaver reclaiming “rapist”. And, I mean, it worked. When’s the last time you associated “black man” and “harmless cuck”? [When’s the last time you did “white man”?])

In a world where Trump was competent rather than a holy fool of a d100 that got nominated because sometimes it came up “America was legitimate even before the ‘60s”, he’d take advantage of this and redo Reagan’s trick of defining himself against the “welfare queen”, updating it to be an overweight 36-something with a government/NPO social service iron triangle job she got by taking community college all through the terminal postgrad level and a sense that men are dismissably wrong for not living up to her.

(The flip side of that is the “woke bro”, the new worthy object of ridicule who tries to define his total identity, including social and sexual capital, around racism-awareness… was already comprehensively roasted 25 years ago in A Different World and School Daze, treatments of pretentious Black yuppie larva)

Of course even within whiteness this stuff’s never been as stable as either the eternal-order conservatives or the ultimate-revolution whigs would have you think. If you’ve ever harkened to the authentic masculinity of the 1950s, or Teddy Roosevelt’s kettlebell strongmen-and-Muscular Christianity, or the ruggedness of Victorian explorers, know that a lot of that stuff was considered self-conscious and borderline pretentious artifice at the time, part not of an organic maleness but deliberate initiatives to promote and assert masculine force in the face of a threateningly feminizing, white-collar, peaceful, touchy-feely world.

kontextmaschine:

You know what would be a great masculo-reactionary slogan?

“They Killed Your Wife”

Wasn’t thinking of that angle but ok

kontextmaschine:

March 11: The Tiger has shown himself at Gap. The Troops are advancing on all sides to arrest his progress. He will conclude his miserable adventure by becoming a wanderer among the mountains.

I honestly think Trump has the best chance of being the next POTUS. (I peg him at 35%, Hillary at 30%, Jeb at 20%)

It’d be a realignment election that pivots the Republicans to a nativist welfarism, which is a realignment they’ll have to make sooner or later - it’s where their base is at already. If he can pull it off - “it” basically being the Sailer Strategy - and swing the Rust Belt red that’d give the GOP an electoral lock until and unless Texas flips (and the threatened Republicans’ inevitable divisionist gambit fails) and/or the next realignment comes. You’d cede bankers, blacks, and professionals with postgraduate degrees, but if you’ll recall so did the New Deal coalition.

Trump and Sanders are both burning up the floor and giving their party establishments heartburn pitching Scando-German native-producerist welfarism to a white audience, whoever can grab that ring first hoo boy. And as that recent Netroots Nation demonstrated, I think any pivot attempt’s going to face more resistance from the Dem base.

(If you look at the aftermath, you realize a lot of white progressives didn’t realize it would even be a pivot, they thought that’s where they’ve been since FDR and don’t seem to have recognized the Great Society/New Democrat thing as a realignment in the first place, largely because it didn’t work for them. Remember, “we will build an invincible coalition by adding minorities, feminists, the young, and the well-educated to our established lock on white producerists” was the Democratic plan in the 1970s. Admittedly, the numbers are better now on the left side of the formula, but the right… and I don’t think anyone has a coalition lined up right to win the actual shooting war they’d have to in order to make a realignment where no one was repping whiteness-as-such.)

Historically, there are two forces in American politics that can only be matched by each other - big capital and nationalism. Nationalism being white nationalism, as “white” is the national identity America constructed to legitimate and unify itself, much as “French” was deployed as France centralized in the early modern period.

The Republicans were doing pretty well since the 1970s because they managed to get both on the same side, but the Democrats have managed to sneak a lot of capital out from under them - notice all the religious freedom opposition, all the Wall Street money, Schumer and Cuomo basically being Rockefeller Democrats.

And some of the most well-known and respected Presidents have come to power in realignments that basically mobilized (white) nationalism against money power - Jackson, Lincoln*, and both Roosevelts. (Money usually comes back through steadier erosion and cooption.)

Everyone realizes that the subtext of Obama’s 2008 electoral appeal was that his victory would represent the integration of black and white as political subjects and finally after all this time relegate racial divides to the history books. And man, isn’t that fucking ironic.

Honestly, I think he tried, I don’t at all see him coming in with the plan for racial rabble-rousing the more ridiculous rightists attribute to him. I think early in his presidency he did the minimum lip service (and little more) necessary to service his coalition and hold it together, and the stuff after the ’14 midterms was him realizing it wasn’t going to work and doing what he could to leave the forces he actually had in the best position going forward.

And if he couldn’t make it work, fuck, man. Fuck.

(What it would really take is a culture hero figure like him coming in just in time to face and triumph over a massive external force - total war, basically - that would essentially allow them to refound the nation on a new mythos.)

* Abraham Lincoln, agent of white nationalism? Yep. Remember first that plantation agriculture was the economic engine of America - slaveholders were Big Business; and second that while people today remember the Republican anti-slavery coalition as driven by New England moralists, a huge component of it was actually midwestern (remember, Lincoln was from Illinois) smallholders (read: petit bourgeois) and mechanics (read: skilled industrial workers) following a “Free Soil/Free Labor” ideology, who hated slavery in the same sense and for the same reasons as their heirs hate illegal immigration.

July 31, 2015

how have I not reblogged this til now?

told you

7/21/15

Some days I suspect Obama’s legacy will mirror the 19th century Whigs: “he did what he could to keep the civil war from starting on his watch”.

2/17/2015

zerofarad:

plain-dealing-villain:

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

Yo people talk about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment more and more these days but the real sleeping time bomb in the U.S. Constitution is Amendment 14 Section 3

like, it allows a bare congressional majority (or perhaps just the absence of a bicameral vetoproof majority against, that doesn’t trigger Section 5) to purge the entire federal government

I don’t think it does, at all. A bare vote is allowed to let an oathbreaker in, but to keep people out it’s just “The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

Which does not imply they could kick out everyone by declaring them oathbreakers spuriously.

I don’t get it at all. Here’s the text of Amendment XIV Section 3 as given on Wikipedia:

• Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

It seems to require a two-thirds vote to do anything under this section. Maybe the claim is it only takes a bare majority to declare the rest of the government to be providing aid and comfort to the enemy? But I don’t see that here.

kontextmaschine:

kontextmaschine:

“Donald Trump: Because Charlie Sheen Isn’t Running”

Honestly I think the dude’s got a chance, not even just in the primary but the general. He’s an attention whore but an experienced one, knows how to wield it. (And I wouldn’t be much of a d'Annunzian to dismiss the potential of that.)

And honestly, a realignment around welfarist (white) nationalism has a lot of potential for the GOP - that was the FDR/New Deal brand that worked so well so long for the Democrats, and it could really scramble the electoral map, put PA, the upper Midwest, even OR in play at the risk of what? (correction from SC:) NC and AZ, accepting that VA’s gone, higher margins places they were never going to get? Then lock that in until and unless TX flips.

The barrier’s always been pols not wanting to risk their reputations or fundraising access among the donor class, but a billionaire narcissist’s a silver bullet for that.

welp

Well Milo landed on his feet, I knew he would, he made alt-lite a hot brand and there’s no substitute for the original. $12 million to be producer-san of an alt-right celebrity factory and touring infrastructure.

Wouldn’t put too much emphasis on the “for-profit” thing, there might be a niche to be wedged open with Milo’s boldness and a Rolodex of reliable venues, security, lawyers, PR. More likely an ideological payload, the right’s been itching to rerun the ‘60s as the sexy youthful liberated bad boys for a while (anyone remember the libertarian culture jamming site Bureaucrash?) and the hottest thing on the right right now, anti-antifa, did grow out of his tour, after all.

All the funniest, smartest, most interesting young YouTubers and all the rest of them who hate feminism, who hate political correctness. This generation that’s coming up, it’s about 13, 14, 15, now have very different politics than most other generations. They love us.

kontextmaschine:

Lot of attention lately to the Dark Enlightenment that is mostly about Moldbug. The brown menace, she rides again.

As I’ve said before, his one innovation, “neocameralism”, is just a rewording of the Divine Right of Kings in corporate shareholder idiom, a legitimating myth for an order that hasn’t established itself yet. It is significant that that’s exactly the idiom native to the SF tech/VC complex - if shit kicks off in America, dollars to donuts it starts in the Bay Area, which I’ll maybe go into in another post, but suffice it to say I expect the particular details of his program to be pretty much irrelevant to anything.

I will say what intrigues me more, and what could really be a prime mover in that sector, is the construction of a modern, international, English-speaking Australian-American-Polish-British-Scandanavian-Serbian-etc. white volk around a core of internet-native right-masculo-populism on the chans’ “waifus, warhammer, and white nationalism” model

things like Polandball’s (and SatW’s) western-centric resurrection of the concept of national personification, heavy metal culture and the associated Vikingism, feelsguy’s translinguistic sense of selfhood, /pol/’s kebab removal… well, just /pol/’s /pol/ness, really

Now this sounds ridiculous. I know this sounds ridiculous. This is me pointing to cultural trends particularly prominent in the dork niche circles I notice and ascribing to them world-shifting importance. I know it is.

Sure, heavy metal is not the actual historic musical tradition of any people. Sure, Norse neopaganism is not the actual historic religious tradition of any people. Sure, Tolkien-by-way-of-D&D aesthetics are not the actual historic mythology of any people.

Unless, of course, you count “2008” as being a part of history, or those then alive as counting as a people. Or, say, 1978. Or, you know, the 19th century, and the conscious, successful Wagnerian construction of Germanic identity from which these are all lineally descended.

To Golda Meir is attributed the line that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, by which was meant that the identity didn’t predate the establishment of the state of Israel. True, true. Neither was there such a thing as an Israeli. But then the state of Israel was established.


Plus okay, the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is Paradox games is a niche thing, not quite mainstream popular culture

but how about the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is the Canadian/Irish/American “Vikings” series?

how about the celebration of western, particularly north european feudal great man realpolitik that is Game of Thrones?

*de Benoist voice* metapolitics

May 29, 2014

Halfway between Cassandra and that line from Juno, y'know, “I try really hard, actually.”

Oh I just remembered how in the late 90s/early 2000s I called nü metal “some college rock”, I should take credit for that