It may be most important to understand that power and war...

but what about the proxy war phenomenon? the katechonic yet apocalyptic nature of nuclear weapons has effectively diverted the burden of conflict onto the developing world. syrians know the reality of an american war, while americans only know the spectacle of it. it's a complete reversal of the once all-too-human nature of conflict.

>syrians know the reality of an american war, while americans only know the spectacle of it
what a fucking based line this is

>and the other real redpill i have had from reading this book is realizing how much more hideous neoliberalism can be than even fascism. beyond a certain horizon they become one and the same thing, two wings of the same process. biopower is truly a shit.

this is the conclusion i came too as well, fascism is just a bit more honest with its praxis and teleology, and there's value in honesty. though admitting this is NOT a good look.

the thing about fascism is that it is antiquated. there is a horizon at which the concept of biopower itself just makes more sense: it's the fascism that you don't see as opposed to the form that you do. the built-in systems of discipline and control which unconsciously regulate you.

i'm partly attracted to this book and even Foucault, who is intermittently mentionted throughout it, because i absolutely fucking hate Wokeness today for a great many reasons, but not so much that full-bore Unironic Fascism appeals to me. but it also deepens my appreciation for the subtleties of power in a hegemony, how you build and maintain and manufacture a hegemony in this way. divorcing Foucault too far from Marx leads to exactly the kinds of frustrations that make people resolve (not entirely without reason) that Unironic Fascism is indeed the cure for neoliberalism (which itself cannot keep from becoming Unironic Communism). a wheel of death and fucking stupidity follows.

but the more you read the less time you have to waste having stupid arguments over bullshit, and you can get back to being depressed.

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the real breakthrough to me is this one, the hybridization of Marx (with a little help from Confucius, or vice versa) to technology by way of finance. is this enforcing ideological conformity through technological control of finance, or enforcing financial conformity through technological control of ideology, or enforcing technological conformity through financial control of ideology, or, or, or.

it just seems like a perfect circuit, neoliberalism completed through the CCP, the CCP completed through neoliberalism. things only a 21C can do.

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>of course there's always the slim hope that we might realize there is more to do with the state than turn it into a war-machine, but that's not how serious Marxists look at things.
The State, or any governance structure really, possesses territory, which implicitly requires force to defend it. If you don't want this to be the case, you need a global secure power which can crush any upstarts.

>there's nothing outside Capital today regardless of what political name you ascribe to it. that is the real megaprocess at work everywhere.
so Capital(tm) caused the Iraq or Syrian wars, for example, as opposed to particular donors whose primary concerns were Israeli security? This is needless mystification that depersonalizes the conflicts in question and makes it appear as if they're historically necessary and not motivated by motivated patrons.

>and not caused by motivated patrons inducing the US Government to take action
Fixed

it really was

why do you guys use such fancy terms to describe what is ultimately nothing nore than blood and organs spilling everywhere, children dead before they could even become someone, families forever ruined, billions of dollars wasted, natural and worthwhile structures destroyed beyond repair, and literally everything else that is our closest glimpse of Hell on Earth? Why do you speak of this as if it were something to formalize, and discuss in rational terms? It's the most evil thing our species does. None of you would speak about it like it were another intellectual topic if you could be on that battlefield and experience some of those horrors firsthand. I hate it so much and it makes me so sad. Hopefully there's a God and people who start wars are punished deservingly

>If you don't want this to be the case, you need a global secure power which can crush any upstarts.
sadly i have to agree

>so Capital(tm) caused the Iraq or Syrian wars, for example, as opposed to particular donors whose primary concerns were Israeli security?
i don't know about Syria, i haven't looked into it deeply enough. the permanent deplatforming of Saddam Hussein seemed pretty fishy to me, and when i go looking for explanation of these things i find dynastic politics a more or less satisfactory answer. i suspect Halliburon execs were in general pleased with things and i can imagine why. in the days of Rome it was not all that much different.

>This is needless mystification that depersonalizes the conflicts in question and makes it appear as if they're historically necessary and not motivated by motivated patrons.
capitalism itself has a funny way of deciding what is and is not historically necessary.

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>Why do you speak of this as if it were something to formalize, and discuss in rational terms?
because it's necessary to call a spade a spade sometimes. i also like medicine done by professionals and not shamans. but it also calls for a degree of sobriety and lucidity that Marxist theoreticians have often been pretty good at supplying. not always, mind you, they are as prone to ressentiment as anyone, but sometimes they are what's called for.

>Why do you speak of this as if it were something to formalize, and discuss in rational terms?

banalized evil

another good book here by the same author, cheers to the user who posted this a few days ago if he reads this.

i guess for me what i realize is how pervasive the debtor/creditor relation goes, and why all things Woke make me fucking want to rip my eyes out, because it has nothing to do with race or gender, but is entirely a commercial metaphysics that resolves itself ultimately in not only war, but a constant state of civil unrest that really doesn't have anything like an off-switch as we presently understand it. it's not even about money itself, it's about how we are - depressingly - probably best capable of understanding the world in terms of money relations that come to describe philosophy, and philosophical concepts that keep coming back to money in the most brutal and vicious ways. but these are features and not bugs.

we may need a new model civilization and i'm not sure if even Goonan can provide one.

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Is that you, Girardfag?

Wow, a nice relevant thread to post these ignored links.

Of course it’s fucking Girardfag
Who else can write so much and say so little

t. Lurker who’s read everything Girardfag endlessly harps on about and sees him for the fraudpseud he is

Is the mention of Goonan sarcastic? Because I think he has the best idea of what civilization should and can be.

yep

>Who else can write so much and say so little
he's right you know

>t. Lurker who’s read everything Girardfag endlessly harps on about and sees him for the fraudpseud he is
you know who was a good-looking guy? Toshiro Mifune. man that guy was based

it is. i'm sure he means well.

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hot opinion from a guy who admits he doesnt even contribute to the board :^y

So, Girardfag, after reading War and Capitialism, what is your position now on capitialism? Should it be stopped?

capitalism can't be stopped and won't be stopped. it's moved into the domain of intelligence now, that's the whole reason why i shill so hard for Uncle Nick, and why he presents philosophers with such a conundrum: you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

what i think that book quite brilliantly articulates (echoed to some degree also by the essays user linked to here, ) is that neoliberal capital is itself the end of the end of the end. and whether you like to reflect on these things with Hegel, or Wilber (i like Wilber), or whoever else, it tells us that these are the precursors to epistemological breaks and sea changes that are

a) absolutely unpredictable, and
b) guaranteed to blow our minds.

i liken it to a war-zone. we have ripped open a whole in time and space with this process, not unlike the scientific revolution once did, or the renaissance, and one way or another we are going to have to man up and get the fuck in there and see what's going on. i'm not a nostalgic fascist or a starry-eyed utopian communist or a cynical neolib, which is why i spend most of my waking hours quaking in absolute fear and dread about what's coming next. i can find no other reason to do this, but it makes sense to me.

as Brassier says, this is a speculative opportunity and point of departure. i think a little Zen and the Tao is good, obviously, in terms of not losing our shit. but i also think we pretty much have to give ourselves a whole new operating system too. politically, it could be the case that China simply has to eclipse the West technologically and economically before we understand that political radicalism is completely attritive and destined nowhere good.

capitalism can't be stopped. we survived no end of disaster and trauma in the 20C, and now we have another one, the encephalization of the human species by turbocapital. where it leads, nobody fucking knows, including me. but politics a shit. let's keep having conversations and hold on to our butts.

tldr is right, i say write so much and say to little

that's about all i've got.

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the real dilemma is pretty well-articulated also i think by Jonathan Israel: you like the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment seems to trend both towards disastrous revolution and to turbocapital eating everyone's face, and in turn to a Woke Capital that ruins Uncle Nick's worst fantasies, and in the most hilarious ways.

with a gun to my head, if i have to pick some kind of political ideology, i would say rebuilding a bridge to the 17C is probably the way to go. being reasonable is going to be hard in an age of unreason, and that an age of unreason would be produced by the dawning sensation that capital and only capital becomes the operating system for the 21C. it's not like i can blame people for wanting to take hard right or far left turns. Wokism drives me insane because i'm a boring centrist by nature, but boring centrism always seems to trend towards fuckface neoliberalism, and, and and.

the human species can do better. i'm optimistic that we will eventually get out of the dark places we are in, and i think it is to Land's enormous credit that he has shown the nature of the paradox that confronts people today. it's there in Mises too, you can see the dilemma: a truly liberal society stands, can only stand, for a kind of libertarianism that invites socialists to ask it questions it can't answer. said socialists in turn inevitably wind up taking the show on the road and we wind up back in the 20C, like Groundhog Day, over and over again.

i think it is enough for us simply to recognize that the wedding between neoliberalism and turbocapitalism just represents a paradox more or less sussed out completely by the French poststructuralists, and that what the situation today calls for is sobriety and lucidity. failing that it's back to the Greeks and brooding on the celestial fire with Heraclitus.

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and yes, i realize that i basically sound like Alex Jones at this point. oh well.

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Doesn't matter. I think most of us really enjoy your insightful posts and threads. Thank you.

>being reasonable is going to be hard in an age of unreason
Imagine if you could describe the 17th century not just as the negative of the 21st. There never has been an age of unreason, only ages composed of systems we can longer access. We won't get to a new age so long as we still consider our own the age of reason.

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Maybe liberal societies are the problem.

'tis a lovely board. may it ever be so. no need to thank me, i'm just happy to have somewhere to put my weird opinions and meme takes.

>Imagine if you could describe the 17th century not just as the negative of the 21st. There never has been an age of unreason, only ages composed of systems we can longer access.
this is very true and quite insightful also.

>We won't get to a new age so long as we still consider our own the age of reason.
this is also very true! Spinoza says somewhere that the worst of all systems is a commonwealth that has begun to turn bad, i feel much the same way. it is a Feels > Reals world, and necessarily so, but i do think we are flirting with danger pushing the critique of the Enlightenment as far as we do. revolutionary socialism is dangerous stuff. it is the kryptonite for a form of liberalism which cannot help but in the end do away with all gods and ideologies, which is what leaves it open to the criticism offered by radical politics: so, you're admitting it then, you stand for nothing else but money...?

i think Land is good for being, in a way, a kind of defender of some old-school values, albeit in a tremendously unorthodox way. but he exposes the nature of the predicament. our age is not the age of reason, but it is a little bit too enthusiastic about its critiques of reason, i think. to borrow a phrase from Murphy, Turning Left Into Darkness is required, but it doesn't have to be a one-way black-hole trip into madness. nothing Deleuze has not said already, in his own way.

they are their own problem. liberalism tho is a thing that has to be earned and respected. i wouldn't want to live anywhere else, or in any other time. as depressing as it is, i prefer this kind of existence. but there are some rather deep cracks in the Golden Throne these days, and i think it's probably a good idea to start thinking about what the next chapter is going to look like. as in tarot, the negative is always a more concentrated form of the positive. that is what i think Land represents. it's like going to see the doctor, the diagnosis isn't always great, but the doctor cannot prevent the patient from ruining their life if they choose to...

psychoanalysis has its merits also.

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>we are flirting with danger pushing the critique of the Enlightenment as far as we do.
Why?
>revolutionary socialism is dangerous stuff. it is the kryptonite for a form of liberalism which cannot help but in the end do away with all gods and ideologies, which is what leaves it open to the criticism offered by radical politics: so, you're admitting it then, you stand for nothing else but money...?
How is revolutionary socialism not the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, furthermore, you're ignoring the fact that revolutionary socialists have counted the wealthiest families, usually in banking, among their patrons. Every other Anglo-American heiress was some kind of fucking Communist.

>liberalism tho is a thing that has to be earned and respected.
Why?

i am actually entertaining a kind of weird notion these days about the return of the divine out of the maximization of the profane, although it's more just in fiction and kind of journal-musings than anything i think is serious. it has something to do with neoliberalism and capitalism opening up something like a perpetual war of difference, a black hole in reality, through which old gods and demons and monsters return. perhaps this is all necessary, such that we return to the more sober values of the Enlightenment afterwards, having learned that...even when the gods return we are not saved? neoliberal capital becomes this kind of insane experiment/science-project with no end in sight...

the Aztecs lived in fear of their gods, and the world was animated by all kinds of powers and forces beyond their control. perhaps it will be the same with us. the Internet kind of forcibly teaches us about empathy and mimetics, money seems to become an extension of languages and control, we all become continually sucked into this virtual life, the time of social media and the internet, the time of business...these are awesome information explosions that are completely changing our view of the mind, time, our selves, others...

as i said, it's not a well-baked theory, but a kind of an oscillating wave between eras of reason and unreason, not necessarily dialectical. but waves in which we seem to be governed by different axioms, different senses of what it means to be at all, individualized or collectivized. i'm quite fond of Wilber's ideas about the development of collective consciousness, the Atman Project and the like; it's sort of like Hegel East. Land has his own dark critique predicated on the jettisoning of humanity; i'm not really for this personally, but i think it does corrode a lot of necrotic bullshit left over from the 1970s and 1980s. the search for consciousness still seems to be a noble goal, the search for meaning.

'tis well and truly an adventure to read the philosophers, anyways. no point in being a cynic, paranoia still rules.

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>Why?
historically i don't think the track record for revolutionary socialism has been all that great. it leads to many millions of dead bodies. the French Revolution is the major piece here: how crucial, how inseparable, is the guillotine from it? the gas chambers for the Nazis? the gulag for the Soviets? starvation for the Maoists? none of these things lacked for intellectuals or for dedicated ideologues. the system that is doing the best today is still the inheritor of the 17C. true, it knocked over a lot of decadent aristocrats around Europe. but it's also led to an obsession with deconstruction that cannot in the long run separate itself from fanaticism. i don't know how to solve these problems, but i know a future problem when i see one, and a new secular Protestant orthodoxy framed around ideas so removed from Marx as to be barely recognizable is one of them. weirdly enough i would prefer a Zombie Foucault risen from the dead to solve these problems rather than a Peterson or a Zizek. failing that i'll stick with Girard.

>How is revolutionary socialism not the fulfillment of the Enlightenment
it is *a* possibility of it, but i don't know if it's necessarily the completion. i don't think Nazism is the culmination of German philosophy either: it strikes me as terribly sad that Nietzsche was revered by the Nazis he would have despised. Christ is rejected by the Grand Inquisitor, and if i really wanted to be provocative, i might even add Foucault to that list also!

>furthermore, you're ignoring the fact that revolutionary socialists have counted the wealthiest families, usually in banking, among their patrons.
perhaps, but i don't think it changes my feeling all that much.

>Why?
why respect liberalism? because it's a good system. it's a profoundly contradictory one, and as i said earlier, i think the most serious problem is the one more or less admitted by a guy like Mises (which is taken to the infinite degree by Land): ultra-libertarianism can become completely inhuman. and yet what reigns this in? an appeal to humanism conceived along 19C political lines, the Greater Good, some kind of middle-class fantasy of petit-bourgeois comfort and prosperity?

a genuinely tolerant society would be intolerant towards intolerance, but where the rubber meets the road is when we recognize the role played by scapegoating in every modernist totalitarian experiment. we can't Acceptable and Unacceptable forms of scapegoating as we do today if we expect this society to continue, it just won't hold up. the self-loathing always gets weaponized and put to the worst possible use. ressentiment is for real and mass ressentiment winds up in uniform at some point.

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posting this here also in case 5'o clock schizo-wojak poster reads this thread.

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>but where the rubber meets the road is when we recognize the role played by scapegoating in every modernist totalitarian experiment
more like in every communal form of existence humans ever experienced. from Yea Forums to academic circles, from sports to tribes to supposedly "inclusive" spaces there doesnt seem to be a form of shared human identity that isnt founded upon symbolic (which later becomes actual) violence. is there an escape from this?

>is there an escape from this?
yeah, i think there are. league sports are a step up from war. even martial artists are capable of inflicting tremendous violence on each other, but it doesn't necessarily lead to hate, reciprocity, or feud. the history of martial arts in the East tells us a lot about the relationship between martial arts, discipline, and pacific conduct. Fukuyama seemed to think competitive gardening or some analogue to it would suffice; i disagree, but he was alert to the dangers the Last Man posed to himself in the end-of-history scenario he imagined.

those problems are very real ones, imho, and in an age of technological blastoff combined with psychological and economic dispossession this does nevertheless present society with a very real problem. i'm very much against the apparently institutionalized and academically sanctioned scapegoating of men, for instance, and i think Karen Straughan has been awesomely good on these points. Toxic Feminity also exists, and people all over the world are capable of racism. state-sanctioned racism has historically been called scientific racism, and we absolutely have this phenomenon today, it's one of the great semantic bludgeons of the radical left as much as the terror of Jews and Bolsheviks were to the radical right in earlier periods. it's a boom-time for hate, sadly, but to me it proceeds absolutely logically out of deconstruction, just as much as Robespierre emerges from Rousseau - and is just as much of a betrayal, or at least a very serious misreading.

if you don't want a violent society, start by seeing to it that you don't have large numbers of unemployed men prone to abuse alcohol and drugs. try and make sure you don't have a lot of fatherless children, or increasing suicide rates, or lots of other things. violence isn't a thing we need to be hysterically pacifist about, but we also should be able to recognize that it doesn't tend to be a problem for the Davos set as much as it is for people who really feel economic downturns. and eventually those people are the ones who radicalize, in whatever political direction makes the most sense to them.

it doesn't necessarily have to be the Catholic church either, there are no end of wisdom traditions and philosophies which can help us to cope with the rockier parts of life. again, i'lll shill for even more recent stuff, psychoanalysis is good. i admire a lot of what JBP says also, although obviously i think his interpretations of the French guys are way off, but that's fine, his heart is in the right place. i'll even take back my snarky comment about Goonan!

the world is a tough place and man has some dark spots in him, there's no question. in spite of our natural instincts we have managed to make a pretty good run of things. i even think realizing that much of what we have done we have done in some terrible conditions of ignorance, darkness, superstition...but these are what make us charming too, sometimes!

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Peterson has said something perhaps counter-intuitive about this, and certainly one that ruffles a lot of feathers: it's weakness that leads to conflict, not necessarily power. i think there's something in that. in the Cold War it was the predictive capacities of both sides that led to the nightmare/doomsday scenarios of breakdowns in the failsafe mechanisms, all of these systems of cybernetic feedback and response that produced the possibility of an unthinkable event: what happens if the machines fail to account for human error, or what if an accident occurs? watch Dr. Strangelove or Fail Safe and enjoy the panic. the point here is that it was those systems designed to absolutely prevent the disaster that wound up contributing to their appearance, combined with the problem of escalation to the extremes (which is a subect Girard deals with in great detail). de-escalating wars, or fighting limited engagements, are not completely beyond the realm of possibility. it can be done, but it can't be done easily, or naturally, or reflexively...we're not wired that way, i think, at some level.

but a guy like Jocko Willink doesn't suggest to me that violence is somehow an insuperable problem for society, or even that the justified use of force is an insoluble problem. it's complicated, that's for sure, but not completely insoluble. the Spartans of old were genuine ass-kickers, but they wound up in a paradox of their own: their own helots hated them so much that the ancient world's greatest fighting force couldn't actually deploy, because if they were gone for too long the helots would have set the countryside on fire and gone berserk. quite a conundrum!

i've said it before that our real existential task in this age, i think, is to simply not degenerate completely into becoming rage zombies. that is what is so incredible to me about the present age: there is no existential threat that we can see, and yet we are freaking the fuck out more vigorously than ever anyways. there are no Nazis, no aliens, no Black Death, no Skynet online, and fucking look at what you see on the news. it will be enough i think for future generations not to just go completely off the deep end and to be able to just walk the line, and uphold a civilization which does more or less the same, and is capable of extending its own capacity for experimentation and inquiry further into the future rather than terminating the process and guillotining itself. as a guy who battles depression often and intensely it's not like the appeal of radical stuff is lost on me, it really isn't. but i think it's best to walk that middle path.

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Hey, an immediate pop cultural reference for this thread!

youtube.com/watch?v=eVbShUW6QBM

The future historians would be able to point to this song wining international contest as to a foretelling.

I have very little to say but that I like your posts, user. Very insightful
I just feel like giving a (You) so that you know we’re here.

please don't do this

Do what, user

> the French Revolution is the major piece here: how crucial, how inseparable, is the guillotine from it? the gas chambers for the Nazis? the gulag for the Soviets? starvation for the Maoists?
> >How is revolutionary socialism not the fulfillment of the Enlightenment
> it is *a* possibility of it, but i don't know if it's necessarily the completion. i don't think Nazism is the culmination of German philosophy either: it strikes me as terribly sad that Nietzsche was revered by the Nazis he would have despised.

I think that you are concentrating on ideas/ideologies a bit too much. Common people didn't wake up one day and see themselves as builders of Communism, and not a lot of readers understood Nietzsche better when he became fashionable. Structures/practices/whatever are more important than what's written on banners or told in speeches.

The idea that all the shit in Late Modern years is actually an application of ideas of Enlightenment to the masses is not uncommon. Secular (on paper), rational (on paper), etc. man became educated (remember that mass education is a game of Chinese whispers in which outdated knowledge — like phrenology and craniometry, for example — is retold without giving any critical assessment abilities), finally believed in Progress, freed himself from old brakes, and that's what we got from it.

youtube.com/watch?v=EKJ17qOd46k

There is a good book, “The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices” (on LibGen), that studies the difference between what was declared and what was real. Ideologically/idealistically, every Communist (and later every Soviet citizen) was a self-conscious actor with a strong political position who interacted with like-minded individuals, and only had to be corrected by them in case of mistakes (the very materialistic, rational ideal). How it was stretched and twisted by real people, and how the basics of Soviet society were formed is quite a different story.

A modern parallel: I don't know whether “Cultural Marxism” is as dangerous as they weep about it here, but when people from ex-Socialist countries read the news about students in American universities (you know which ones), many of them react with “Ah, good old Komsomol activists”. Likewise, when someone gets reprimanded for political correctness matters, it's quite similar to “local Party branch session dedicated to admonishing the wrongdoer”. You can have rational explanations why people participate in these events (media just want the controversy, politicians, bureaucrats, and employees just want something to put on the performance record, everyone just wants to be on the winning side, etc.), but intuition and experience find a match to the whole thing.

>
A modern parallel: I don't know whether “Cultural Marxism” is as dangerous as they weep about it here, but when people from ex-Socialist countries read the news about students in American universities (you know which ones), many of them react with “Ah, good old Komsomol activists”. Likewise, when someone gets reprimanded for political correctness matters, it's quite similar to “local Party branch session dedicated to admonishing the wrongdoer”.
We basically have Racial Maoism, or something Gender Maoism.

>structures/practices/whatever are more important than what's written on banners or told in speeches.
i agree, partly. there's certainly some kind of interesting feedback loop here tho: the speeches eventually become the practices and structures, and the practices and structures tend to bring out the speeches. some of them are quite creative and even philosophically interesting, for the horror; Land retweeted a guy the other day saying that for the radical left the concept of free speech is already moribund, everything is a question of platforming. you can't say or do anything until somebody gives you a platform; it's deconstruction Derrida-style applied to the ear. the affinity the Left has for media technology is a part of this also, i think, to the point where it's actually kind of hard to tell who is in charge, or how much the terminology and tools of social media itself emerge from the political undercurrents of Left discourse. and to some degree this is a human phenomenon itself, and reflective of various social and economic striation also...

what fascinates me is the religious impulse behind it all, which makes sense to me. the institutionalization of far left discourse in academia strikes me as being more technological (and economic) than purely cultural, but these things form Borromean knots (or, less charitably, death spirals of madness). it's a very interesting form of communism, partly inspired by grievance politics, but partly driven by a need to come to some new understanding or relation with the technologies on which conversation takes place, which are also driving the economies also...and i find there's a little of Opus Magnum in all of this.

>Ideologically/idealistically, every Communist (and later every Soviet citizen) was a self-conscious actor with a strong political position who interacted with like-minded individuals, and only had to be corrected by them in case of mistakes (the very materialistic, rational ideal). How it was stretched and twisted by real people, and how the basics of Soviet society were formed is quite a different story.
that does sound familiar!

>We basically have Racial Maoism, or something Gender Maoism.
this. and Mao is arguably the great Marxist Protestant of the world today; he re-sacralizes work. race and gender are the two forces which can be ameliorated into capital to deprive them of their revolutionary power, but it's one of those things that make for strange bedfellows. the same thing as above: who's running the show? or look at Twitter, which cannot seem to figure out the paradox: if social media is a basic human right, then how do you ban it when people express politically contrary views? all this stuff.

i feel like this is also the right place to put in the CCP's contribution to hip-hop as well. bless the fragrance or something.
xinhuanet.com/english/2019-03/03/c_137864806.htm?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0

(cont'd)

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the most curious thing to me about Race and Gender Maoism is how they become at once the pharmakon, or a carrot-and-stick mechanism, for a consumer society. it's a trick that Starbucks figured out a long time ago: we charge you extra for the coffee, because included in the price is our looking after the exploited farmers in the third world. no need to support a charity, some radical program, whatever; Capital includes in the price of the coffee the extra part that assuages your guilt about the logic of production.

to me there is a kind of genius in the ways in which academia is trending that follows a similar logic: who cares about your work on Kant, what really matters on your CV is your record of outreach work, the curation of your blog, the kind of following you attract already - in a word, the power of your *platform.* this obviously links up with the serious questions to be asked about the nature of funding, the privatization of the academy, and the quasi-magical relations between power and money and tenure, the academic politics that give us the intellectual climate in which we live today. these ideas in turn link up with media and entertainment, more mainstream left politics, and i think really can carry us into the threshold of the truly post and transhuman: you live in a mimetic stew of Left thought, and the whole of Silicon Valley becomes a thing to be policed, curated, cultivated and tended on the psychic plane. why not? this is the ideal of communism after all...

and there is still some part of me that that envies this, or at least is fascinated by the nature of the beast. there's room to appreciate Foucault's contribution to this: like Baudrillard, i think he is often misunderstood as being an apologist for something he was simply uniquely skilled at describing. Foucault's influence on this has also been massively greater, imho: Biopower really is for realsies. as i was reading that book i was reminded of the fact that many of the things he finds loathsome about neoliberalism are actually *exactly the things i love doing in video games* - Master of Orion, for instance. i absolutely and completely want to make a Healthy Bio-Powered Society in every 4x game i play, why not? to skilfully optimize and direct stellar civilizations by means of social control and positive cybernetic feedback loops is how you win 4x games. the problem of course is that it's far less fun when you're the one being optimized and directed into your slots and tunnels...

and Land again here: underneath biopower is Kant, crypto, Deleuze, and Bataille. at least in theory. what drives the psychopolitics is still a discourse on efficiency, trending towards the cybernetic but always wrapped up with the political. not everybody has the Will to Masochism like Land does, however. after all, this society is supposed to be making us happy, not miserable...we seem to need the guilt...

i appreciate this also user, that's very kind.

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how do you guys have the stomach to read into subjects like war? i personally cannot. history too, is too brutal for me. i know i'm weak but i don't want to become desensitized like you guys, where you can read up on speak about such horrible realms like they were part of the ordinary circuit of topics like literature, economy, culture, war, art, and so on, with war just casually sitting among the rest. i hate war and i just want to be kind to everyone and to not have to think of those things or to ever contribute to it myself in any form

and everything would work fine if we didn't actually have to talk to each other *in person* now and again, and have exposed one of most mysteriously human sense of all: that we are talking past each other. you see this with Peterson interviews all the time, but even in other places also, like one interview that Glenn Beck gave with Brian Stelter, in which Beck was trying, and failing, to remind Stelter that human faces actually do exist, that not everything is a talking point, an algorithm. it was like breaking the fourth wall. a plea for listening? you can't do that on television!

Rogan podcasts seem to be expressing a desire for something like this also: how captured are we by the logic of production when it comes to television? maybe we are realizing there is something very weird about *industrially processed news* that reflects a 9-5 working day when obviously capital today runs 24/7, and it is the very precariousness of those 20C fantasies that people are now feeling. you can't cram a Peterson interview into a ten-minute hot spot between ads for resorts anymore, he won't let you do it, and any attempt to get a Quick Hot Take from him ends in disaster, because he exposes how completely programmed we have become. Jon Stewart did this on Crossfire, years ago. more recently, the media *could not prevent itself* from commenting uncritically on the Smollett hoax because to express a skepticism about it might have indicated that you were insufficiently Woke. even the way you are expected to curate comments on a blog speaks to this also, you have to take down comments that are potentially conciliatory to Trump within 24 hours, or you may find yourself alienating your allies...

this all seems very Modern Times to me, but because it takes place on the virtual plane we don't really realize it. we live today on the schedule of Silicon Valley (and not only them) and the internet is the invisible city to which we all show up to live and work and produce and consume and meme, every day. the internet is where we get sucked into Identifying Ourselves and Making Our Voices Heard and all of this other bullshit. Deleuze was right, fascism *compels you to speak* - a kind of funny outgrowth of a world of media, that.

i know, i'm just ranting, but these are the kinds of weird thoughts i have. it's just that i cannot Unsee Land at this point, that the earth really has been captured by a technological singularity that compels it to produce and produce and produce, but it isn't only a Marxist 19C industrial project any longer, it's now a virtual one, a psychic one, and informatic-automatic one: in a word, a *teleoplectic* one. if you know how to look at it correctly, it's already a kind of spacefaring adventure, in a way. but the attraction to the sad passions, to the religious forms of socialism we seem to prefer, this is the part i still struggle with.

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the Greeks and the great Silver Age emperors had to do it tho, user. when the Persians showed up they had to form a phalanx and protect a thing that was worth protecting. it's one thing to aesthetically glorify war, but it's another to pretend that it's not a part of human society.

read Clauswitz (and Girard's book on Clauswitz too). the business of statecraft isn't all about war, however much it was an aspect of policy and something the sovereign had to do. this is where people get too carried away associating the Germans with Hitler or Bismarck (or the Simpsons joke, 'we Germans are not a warlike people'). the idea was a healthy and secure state capable of offering a good life to its citizens. when you read too much of the French (or just watch too much Star Wars) you can come away with this idea that Empire Bad and that the only point of politics at all is revolution, which it isn't. the object of statecraft is to defend and preserve the lives of your citizens, so that they can lead the kinds of lives they want to lead. nobody had a problem with LKY for this reason, and the Austrian school theorists have a similar view. we can talk about Rand later, if you like.

but wars happen and they do suck. what Girard found was that the problem was not war itself but the question of escalation, mimetics and response. in the Cold War this nearly resulted in the destruction of the earth completely. and one of the great questions about 20C National Socialism was the nature of a *war economy* - after all, if you want jobs, mobilizing the state is a good way to do it. contemporary Wokeness isn't overtly militaristic, but on the ideological level it completely mobilizes the affects and the passions for similar ends, it's just that there is a kind of war of psychic conquest in place of a direct territorial one.

the reason to talk about war and understand its meaning is so that we don't fall in love with it, i think, so that we don't see it as being a kind of transcendental cure or hotfix for what ails. war isn't divorced from philosophy, and really shouldn't be - this is perhaps one of the worst things human beings can do, to say, well, *finally,* we can get rid of all of that useless intellectual stuff...war is too attractive, it satisfies too many psychological needs. my feeling is that everyone should read Klaus Theweleit or Schmitt, read the guys who were closely involved in Germany and German politics during those times so that the appearance of fascism doesn't strike us as being so utterly holy or unthinkable that we become unable to understand what it meant. for the same reason it is necessary to understand how Napoleon came to be also...

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Its a common mistake on the right to see muh sjws as an outgrow of Marxism rather than a product of cold war liberal technocracy, the terapeuthic ethos, narcissism new media and Rawlsian notions of justice. When you are on the network 24/7 it gets harder and harder to think of death, let alone of ones own death. Thank Trashuman/promethean technofantasies, the constant threat of annihilation via nuclear or ecological catastrophe. Consumerism means a constant imperative to enjoy. The subject is reduced to image and corporeality. Thats why leftists talk so much about 'bodies', because they have nothing else to cling to no real control over anything else, they gave up their minds a long time ago. Identities are contentless a=a, they dont refer to any values or culture, they are empty vessels to be filled with liberal ideology. Now more than ever the past weights like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Is that what being 'woke' means? Decolonialism is a prelapsarian ideology that projects the neurotic subjectivity of the 21st century to some imagined nonwestern past. The moral life is no longer about acieving some positive ideal of virtue, it becomes dominated by the language of sexual aggression, consent, harrassment. Maybe its because we are all gettiing fucked? Being alive and historically conscious can be rather horryfing, in the past people coped with the irreducible horror of being and the inevitability of death through religion, consoled by the prospect of life after death or by the earthly realisation of the kingdom of heaven at some point in the future. Contemporary liberalism has given up such illusions , it is a therapeutic ideology, reminding us to practice self care and drink lots of water, keeping us safe from anything potentially hurtful or disturbing, ensuring we feel loved and represented by the flickering images that make up our world, telling us we can all be superheroes, we can all be sexy, we can all be beautiful regardless of our racial background, economic status, weight, gender, or sexuality. If you resist the impulse to either fashion history into another therapeutic pop culture narrative, new vistas open up, fractal patterns. Reaching back to antiquity, renaissance, enlightenment 17th and 18th centuries, an image of man and cosmos, of man becoming god, the 19th century of historicism, napoleon hegel marx, what are all these symbols? Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Benjamin. Its all awfully eurocentric isnt it? Or are you the one whos being awfully californian? the whole earth catalog, Brand, wired, mcluhan, debord (and nick land) werent they creating an aesthetic image of the world too? A self portrait of deus sive natura. Wokeness is a hobbesian collapse back to your human body and your five senses. The total image remains forevef out of view. Tracing the pattern which connects is what we do out of freedom and necesity which are one and the same.

>Its a common mistake on the right to see muh sjws as an outgrow of Marxism rather than a product of cold war liberal technocracy, the terapeuthic ethos, narcissism new media and Rawlsian notions of justice.
They view said technocracy as an outgrowth of Marxism. Seeing as the origin of this type of thinking lies with 1910's era Progressives who often considered themselves Marxists, and who gave birth to a bunch of red diaper babies who later staffed the postwar technocracy, I'd say they were at least partially correct. Marxism with American characteristics (racial Maoism) is worse than regular Marxism.

>Its a common mistake on the right to see muh sjws as an outgrow of Marxism rather than a product of cold war liberal technocracy, the terapeuthic ethos, narcissism new media and Rawlsian notions of justice.
i agree. this is one of the reasons why the polarization bothers me, the radicals radicalize each other and everything spirals into madness.

>Thats why leftists talk so much about 'bodies', because they have nothing else to cling to no real control over anything else, they gave up their minds a long time ago.
yep

>Decolonialism is a prelapsarian ideology that projects the neurotic subjectivity of the 21st century to some imagined nonwestern past.
he's on fire

>Wokeness is a hobbesian collapse back to your human body and your five senses. The total image remains forevef out of view. Tracing the pattern which connects is what we do out of freedom and necesity which are one and the same.
yes

also yes, and yes to Therapeutic Ideology also, this completely. that is how it is to be ideologically blessed, to want to feel *politically* good all the time...even religion didn't do this, back when! religions often made you feel horrible...or, in the absence of those, you had a good-old fashioned Existentialist like Sartre, and nausea...this is what fucking appals me about Wokeness today, the oscillation between bliss and fury. totally fucking insane. evidence of not only the fact that people *can* be controlled, but that they *want* to be controlled, and they want to control others also...totally demented, but completely logical and recursive.

there is a possibility that SoC's of any stripe are simply fundamental necessities; i'd probably prefer a heightened awareness of that rather than some naive romanticism that says we can make some of them Good and some of them Evil. all it does is lead to progressives and reactionaries of every stripe. Marx makes the political economy the object of his critique, and Nietzsche makes man himself the object; that fusion gives us both fascism and contemporary SoC's, i think, although in a very muted and invisible sense today: the real fundamental task of the SoC is to give you the impression that it isn't there. but it is there, and it is wedded to Outside Forces of capital that we cannot disentangle ourselves from easily.

great post user.

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everything we do is a referendum on these guys, in some form or another. it's possible that neoliberalism takes the form of a therapeutic economy precisely because these guys rip holes in the world that have never been patched up again, arguably shouldn't be patched up again, or were there the whole time but we simply never saw it. i don't know of Land fits into the category of postmodern or not, but i do think he's one of a very few guys offering a link to what a life beyond the Masters of Suspicion might look like.

one puzzle is this: do you want the *overman* or the *overworld?* is a kind of state-subsidized production of ubermensch possible, or desirable? China's going to open up a lot of possiblities going forward, and the West may be doomed to spiral into a Wars of Religion redux over identitarian horseshit. historically, in the past, that led to the Enlightenment, but it was a disaster for Germany.

in Russia i thought one of the ideas Dugin contributed that was kind of interesting was the notion of Conservative Postmodernity: basically, you can do whatever you want, *so long as it is religious.* the real work of psychologically comforting man belongs - in his vision, which i am also paraphrasing a little here - only to the great religions, and if the state has any role, it is to basically let those religions do what they do, because so long as the view is tragic, cyclical, and dark, everyone should be able to get along. that is actually quite a brilliant political idea! (serious Dugin-heads ITT, feel free to correct me here). i realize of course that Dugin is also a very extreme figure, but i find these kinds of contributions to 21C political theory interesting and relevant, so that we can understand we aren't necessarily stuck with the Wild Ride, that there are other options, and all of them have their relative merits and deficiencies. that the State should basically *protect the Church,* which in turn sees to man's wounded heart...quite interesting! and quite a reversal from the sort of Randian ideas so popular in the West in the 20C, where John Galt was the meaning of the earth...

for myself i don't know, maybe there is no future at all to be dreamed of these days, since everything that seems to give itself airs about how the future turns out ends up in calamity and heartbreak. it might be enough to just tend a post-apoc patch or farm in the brave new world instead...

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and i suppose Peterson would say that to choose between Overman and Overworld is on some level really only an illusion, because the kind of guy he wants you to be actually brings both into the world at the same time...quite interesting, really!

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Americans in general are caught in the perceptual framework of the cold war. The reds are the enemy, they work through subversion corrupting american eden. Just like Rachel Maddow going on about Russia, noble FBI man Mueller. Alex Jones and Q user people are the descendants of the john birch society. When really the USSR modelled itself on Ford's factories and Taylor's method. The cold war was A planetary laboratory of social control in which everyone ended up played by the cunning of reason. Neoliberal incentive based governance developped out of counterinsurgency, which in turn was a response to maoist peoples war (see schmitts theory of the partisan and adam curtis bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/93073500-9459-3bbb-a3e5-cde7a1cc2559). The teological is progressively evacuated, giving way to pure technics. Post war Liberal ideology which came out of the ideological arms race a counter marxism, is a further descent into base materialism discarding even the residual millenarianism of the USSR. The USSR's ethos was: sacrifice yourself for the future and for humanity. America's: try not to think of the future. Post 9/11 safety took center stage. Leftists are used to thinking of marginalized minorities as revolutionary subjects, an erzats proletariat, when they are really the ideal lab rats for power and a society of control that wants to extend its reach.

re-watched this yesterday and i have to admit i have a lot more regard for Carlson after his forcible career makeover from Stewart. the best points he makes are the ones *against* libertarianism, and conservatives and republicans wishing to ally themselves closely with it: after all, Capital itself does not give a fuck and if it can move to China it will. big corporations don't give a fuck, and therein lies the rub: they probably *shouldn't* give a fuck either. of course, this is likely to impact their attitudes on free speech et al...

which, if you read Land's Twitter, it is going to do anyways, and for him inarguably should if the West is ready to die on the hills of race and gender idpol.

youtube.com/watch?v=ybYvAZqo0KA

capital and techno-stuff is more interesting for me to think about than politics, because politics almost always winds up becoming Monday Night Raw. it makes interesting questions boring and simple. but the question of where libertarianism goes from here is a pretty fucking fascinating one.

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Where was the John Birch Society really wrong though? Though they operated from a right-liberal perspective, at any given time from 1945 onward, the JBS people would be saying "X is going to happen in the future", everyone would think they were insane, but then X ended up happening and it was lauded as a good thing. If anything, they erred in the use of the "subversion" language, which implied that those devious Ruskies were deceiving the good and honest Americans, as opposed to the reality of American civil service, academia, etc. being highly sympathetic to Marxism, and the persons staffing these institutions were in a nontrivial number of cases eager to help the USSR. It just happened that Marxism was spun off into Racial Maoism due to American obsession with race, imperial necessity (e.g. Civil Rights as PR during the Scramble for Africa of that time), and Jewish academics reacting to the Holocaust.

This idea of "Capital (tm) flees to China" is libertarian nonsense based on the idea that tech companies have planetwide sovereign property rights (they don't, if they did why would they be crying about Chinese "IP theft" lol), or that tech founders are 5-6SD supergeniuses and that technological development will stagnate in Western countries if Atlas Shrugs. In reality, these people are largely ordinary geniuses with well-connected families who can get them into the right place at the right time or whose projects attract the interest of the State.

This only poses a problem for liberal governments, which are unwilling to recognize corporations as properly subordinate to the State, and whose property rights exist by State recognition. Atlas is not going to Shrug in the PRC.

If anything Western technological stagnation and death will be caused by dysgenics or State collapse, which if they do happen, will be caused by the tech overlords' own preferred policies, as in, brainwashing children with Racial Maoism until they elect a Hugo Chavez and the economy goes to zero, violent insurgencies by extra-state actors from Latin America, etc.

For example, I believe a few months ago some tech company, I believe Microsoft or Google, was refusing to cooperate with DARPA on some AI initiative over the government's refugee policy, but was happy to cooperate with China. Very woke. Imagine if a Chinese corporation refused to work with the Party on some issue over Uighur camps but passed Chinese technology to the United States instead. They'd be executed the next day!

>Clearly, for anyone who thinks in Marxist terms, or on the basis of Marxism, or on the basis of the tradition of German socialism, what is important in these motions is obviously the series of renunciations— desertions, heresies, betrayals, as you like—of the class struggle, of the social appropriation of the means of production, and so on. From an orthodox Marxist perspective it is these renunciations which are important and all the rest, all these vague little restrictions like aiming for an equitable social order, or realizing the conditions of genuine com- petition, is just so much hypocrisy. But for someone who hears these same phrases with a different ear or on the basis of a different theoreti- cal “background,” these words—“equitable social order,” “condition of genuine economic competition”—resonate very differently because they indicate—and here again is something that I would like to explain next week—adherence to a doctrinal and programmatic whole which is not simply an economic theory on the effectiveness and utility of market freedom: it is adherence to a type of governmentality that was precisely the means by which the German economy served as the basis for the legitimate state.

i will reiterate that a Zombie Foucault risen from the dead would be an absolute nightmare for contemporary Wokists. i know that Foucault is persona non grata on Yea Forums but the more i read his work these days the more i realize that he is basically being subjected to the same treatment the Nazis gave to Nietzsche and the Grand Inquisitor gives to Christ. Bioleninism unquestionably proceeds out of Foucault's legacy, but the man himself i think was much more nuanced in his criticism of the neoliberal order than it is generally understood. like Nietzsche i think the problem was that the critique was too effective, and this is perhaps why things moved in the direction of intersectional feminism: if everything is power, how is innocence to be preserved?

the answer: it fucking isn't, and that is exactly why we need to detach moralism from radical politics.

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>This idea of "Capital (tm) flees to China" is libertarian nonsense based on the idea that tech companies have planetwide sovereign property rights (they don't, if they did why would they be crying about Chinese "IP theft" lol), or that tech founders are 5-6SD supergeniuses and that technological development will stagnate in Western countries if Atlas Shrugs. In reality, these people are largely ordinary geniuses with well-connected families who can get them into the right place at the right time or whose projects attract the interest of the State.
meh, *maybe.* maybe. i don't necessarily have any John Galt feels myself about Thiel (Musk, yes, although the comparison to Isambard Brunel is more approrpriate, and more flattering to both men). but i do think they will go where deals can be made and must be. it was not a small pleasure for me to think of Xi Jinping politely declining to name Mark Zuckerberg's baby, he doesn't want to have anything to do with Facebook politics and i understand why. there can only be one Master Censor and in China that's the CCP. i think they know how to do Communism quite well without needing any of Zuck's help. he sucks.

but in terms of capital flight? Google has a pretty broad range of influence these days, Twitter also. when those companies want to do business in China it's true that things are different, but the rest of the worlds talks on Twitter and uses FB, and everybody uses Google. in many ways Google *is* the internet, and Amazon *is* that shopping mall.

>This only poses a problem for liberal governments, which are unwilling to recognize corporations as properly subordinate to the State, and whose property rights exist by State recognition.
well sure, because the corporations seem to be able to show that that is in fact the case! look at all of those cities courting Bezos' HQ pitch, or the fact that the prince of Lichtenstein has been threatening to sell the country outright to Amazon for a while. the citizens would net a nice chunk of change for this as well, and it's a hell of a bargaining chip also! corporations have a lot of pull. as much as the US Gov't? maybe not, but this is the world we live in today, especially where the Americans are conserved. banking policies become intractably wedded to theopolitical ones, and the chasm yawns and the culture war intensifies.

>Western technological stagnation and death
no arguments there. that is indeed the paradox of these things. Jonathan Israel noted that even Adam Smith was aware of this too, you don't actually want the capitalists taking over everything. and it was Carlson's point as well: be careful when you fall in love with libertarians! Land shows you the black holes that those guys surf...

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>the prince of Lichtenstein has been threatening to sell the country outright to Amazon for a while.
What a cuck.

The absolute poverty of capital brainlets...

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it's kind of an amazing story tho, it really is. it's a shitty way of holding your country hostage, but at the same time if you think it will result in a better standard of living for your people...

it's a move straight out of Shadowrun.

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hate not the player but the game, Uncle Nick is the coolest and Jacques Camatte was short and wore ugly sweaters.

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>personality cult
>I WIN
Do you even know what you're talking about? Camatte fits into the same dumb narrative.

Accelerationism is a generalized lunacy racket.

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>Do you even know what you're talking about?
how dare you. i'm triggered. deplatform yourself immediately and report yourself to your local critical theory department for forced gender reassignment immediately.

anyways i would say about 15% yes, 70% maybe, 15% fuck no. there is a hard kernel of knowledge, the molten gold, surrounded by a crucible of complete confusion. i basically echolocate, that is what i do. i share my confusion and bewilderment, not my answers, because anything that seems like rock-solid certainty seems to become weird and plastic and mushy when it enters my grasp. i come on Yea Forums to shitpost and complain about this in a neverending carousel of basically harmless confusion. the inside of my mind is a haunted abandoned theme park full of dilapidated machines and old creaky metal and dingy souvenirs. that's how i work. please do not take me seriously user, nobody wants you to do this.

as for the Land personality cult, yes, i am a homer. but bear in mind what this says about him also: he attracts people like me, which is surely not good for his brand, because...look at what happens to people who fall in love with his thought!

truly the Tao is great.

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Do you get the contradiction here? All this talk of being uncertain and then being so certain that Land is great and correct.
You just proved Camatte right.

capitalism is always an insufficient form of schizophrenia, something something.

there are more interesting things to talk about tho, i think. political life cannot be reduced to a conflict either between Woke Schizos and Normie Fascists, this is only another way of reframing the same old sectarian conflicts. i think a cool techno-Baroque world is preferable too, or even just a kind of new model Enlightenment where we transcend and include the 20C without needing to repeat all of its worst aspects, namely those which supply us with theological certainty and economic security at the same time. a guy can only dream.

>All this talk of being uncertain and then being so certain that Land is great and correct.
holy SH-

me on the left, objectively true. so rekt right now. i'm literally going to fellate myself in shame. or something. brb

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>Microsoft or Google, was refusing to cooperate with DARPA on some AI initiative over the government's refugee policy, but was happy to cooperate with China.
Another example of this phenomenon:
>China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Expertise
nyti.ms/2NiHL75
Subordination of the state to the company occurs when the bulk of state employment is service-work, and when the bulk of company work is governance-work. This applies internationally, to the relations between any company and any government. In the case I’ve linked above, China’s still actively flexing its muscle of governance (notably primarily through education), and the American company is subordinated to it to provide the service of genetic testing. No Chinese company would be caught dead doing the same thing for the American government, because they understand their positions as servants and not as governors.

Not so for American companies. As Landfag is aptly describing, American neoliberalism is defined by and produced by the platforming of American tech companies () Their governance determines our ideological confinement. And just for that reason, I think he’s wrong about the idea that China is confined to some off-center, off-brand internet, peripheral to the “true” Anglo one. Through Chinese primacy in psychological governance, the Chinese internet, for the Chinese, is the only place. Just as you have no need to spend time on 2chan or Weibo, the Chinese intellectual sphere is fully accounted for. It is fully governed.

So we’ll see a war between any instructions that attract and maintain the power of governance. I’ve been talking about intellectual governance, because that’s our pacified wartime structure. But even in physical warfare, the governance of the American military contractor has primacy over the literal Service of the American military institution. So this war between institutions will not be between two states or between two companies, but two entities with the power of governance. If Land is the be believed, intellectual governance specifically. These entities will conscript
what service-entities become relevant. The structure of state submission to company or company submission to state is irrelevant.

>Landfag
i do not ask for much but i am not prepared for Yea Forums handle regime change

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>And just for that reason, I think he’s wrong about the idea that China is confined to some off-center, off-brand internet, peripheral to the “true” Anglo one.
this tho, i'm not sure if i've ever really proposed such a thing. i don't know if there is such a phenomenon, and if it does exist, it exists only as teleoplexy, the truth of which is pretty much a priori unknowable (nor does it give a fuck where it comes from, and the Basilisk is silly too). i do think that there is a substantial philosophical shift in the way the Chinese and the West understand the nature of these processes, and it is for that reason i will shill once again for a close reading of Yuk Hui's book, because he explores a great many distinctions that are crucial, as well as a great many similarities that may be disastrous for everyone...

how we understand the nature of technical knowledge, human relations, social organization, the future horizons of capital and intelligence, all of this...it's got a huge question mark after it for me. there is no Core/Periphery argument being advanced by me in these things, i am fucking bewildered by it all and trying to get my bearings. 'tis all

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I should have linked to the post I was referring to. Maybe it's not even you, I'm not great at reading text style cues.
>but in terms of capital flight? Google has a pretty broad range of influence these days, Twitter also. when those companies want to do business in China it's true that things are different, but the rest of the worlds talks on Twitter and uses FB, and everybody uses Google. in many ways Google *is* the internet, and Amazon *is* that shopping mall.
Yuk Hui looks great though. I'll check him out, thanks for the recommendation.

something of a non-sequitur also, perhaps, but because it pops into my mind: this was a very interesting film. not for no reason does Land describe his own feels about intelligence explosion as Exit rather than revolution; it's kind of my own feel also. cycles of barbarism and sacrifice hold social order together as much as utopian modes of socialism do, and by way of the same processes: the future must/must not be allowed to take place. Deleuze's book on Nietzsche says as much also, that there is no possibility of a compromise between Nietzsche and Hegel at the molecular level. Protestant Socialism on the road is simply doing to your neighbours what a more directly form of religious practice does to your self, and with similar ends in mind.
>puts on Asshole Wizard Hat
maybe the future has to escape from us in similar ways...

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Shit, quote from

You already have technonostalgia redditopia.
Plus, you're a fag.

np senpai. if you hunt in the Cosmotech threads you can find a link to a mega in there that contains that book in PDF form (along with a rare Land book, Templexity, and tons and tons of other /acc stuff).

here's yer link
warosu.org/lit/thread/S12056787

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>You already have technonostalgia redditopia.
reddit is lame and Yea Forums is for cool guys who waste their lives and think about Land and

>Plus, you're a fag.
i'm not a fag, i'm a super-fag. John Malkovich was fucking based like that

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THE VOID ALSO ATTRACTS YOU OTHERWISE YOU WOULDNT FEEL ANY VERTIGO
vimeo.com/126470666

Technonostalgia is how you make sense of modernity. Wasnt Benjamin's Passagenwerk 'proto-vaporwave' af? Increasingly i've been moving away from politics and the mandatory facialisation and moralisation politics implies towards a genealogy of images. Three threads running through Western Philosophy: preparation for death, reason as necessity, the poetic worlding of the world: image-making. How do you go from the rediscovery of the macrocosm=microcosm in the renaissance to 17th century rationalist systems to the encyclopedia to the universal republic of man to hegel and marx and Nietszche? Cybernetics was to the 20th century what philosophy of history was to the 19th, encyclopedists to the 18th and the system of Spinoza to the 17th. Mcluhan, DeChardin, Bateson unwittingly wove the imagework that underlies our banal neoliberal reality. History is not an infinite listing of facts but a poetic worlding. You see hints of this with Land, some situationist writing, were is the image that explodes, the un-sign, How to tune in to the Messiah frequency? You can replay the end of the world, the absolute catastrophe however many times you want, it too has lost its aura like the sex act has with pornography.

Lost innocence. Desire good, repression bad. You can get everything you have ever desired and more. Desire is productive but its also destructive- at once a lack and an excess. isnt there an irreducibly sadistic component to desire? Implying the consumption, the annihilation of the desired object? How to build a better phalanstere? Balzac was a legitimist with fourierist sympathies and an interest is mesmerism.

>Cybernetics was to the 20th century what philosophy of history was to the 19th, encyclopedists to the 18th and the system of Spinoza to the 17th.
this. much this. intoxicating and terrifying all at once, it's exactly why hyperstition > cynicism. you can self-destruct with Nietzsche or you can take the deep sniff of the cold air Outside.

you know who also holds up well? Homer. the Greeks. the old-fashioned, tragic-fatalist, excellent Greeks. the Orphics also, the Tao - all of this, of course. but the Greeks continue to shine the darker things get, they really do. they well and truly do. the more the world becomes automatic, ironic, and the rest, the better the Greeks look. a world that confounds even the gods. hero/acc is an ungainly combination, and it could be that just in taking a break from Land stuff to read Homer now and again is mysteriously rewarding, and i have a tendency to want to conflate everything into snowballs, but...dem Greeks, you know, dem Greeks.

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>you can self-destruct with Nietzsche or you can take the deep sniff of the cold air Outside.
this is a dumb thing to say, b/c you can absolutely do both also. sorry, if you needed more evidence that i was a dope i like to provide this also.

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White guilt, or, we have to appease the hungry ghosts of primitive accumulation somehow. For the woke, 'western civilization' and the straight white male are what jews are to /pol/, all the inconsistencies, the manifest obscenity that gets in the way of our enjoyment has to be onloaded somewhere.wheter it is the abnormal the indistinct and the undefined, or the defined, the norm that frightens you, you cant have one without the other. When the only rule is 'there are no rules' people start going crazy, what do you think the superego was just going to claim its pound of flesh and go away?

Sillicon Valley's ideology can be traced to the nexus of hippie communalists and the military industrial complex. The Distributed network model was determined to be the optimal model for maintaining military governance capabilities after a nuclear strike. Communalists were big into cybernetics and networks, as images of self governing systems with no hierarchies.

>Communalists were big into cybernetics and networks, as images of self governing systems with no hierarchies.
Isn't this what Communism is supposed to be?

Not even communists know what communism is supposed to be, in the 20th century the playbook went like this:we take power first and then figure out what communism is about, which may take hundreds of years of state socialism. Or we can return to the critique of the value form, hegelian-feuerbachian antropology that underlies Marx' early writings, man is the animal that makes itself. Commodity production, unhibited exchange, networks just accelerate it, putting into question old racial and gender hierarchies, but deploying new mechanisms of control. Communism is autopoiesis, concrete universality

>Communalists were big into cybernetics and networks, as images of self governing systems with no hierarchies.
i think this is still the way it is. if i wanted to make a kind of principled defense of Marxism today i would make it along these lines, cybernetics as the meaning of the thing, as a philosophical idea. Young Nick stuff. or maybe i was just looking for an excuse to shoehorn SMAC into this too, not sure.

there is no revolution, neoliberal capital is that revolution, and an incubator for teleoplectic robocapital. that's the point at which i find myself being unable to profess any kind of Woke sensibilities with a straight face, the thing that drives the world is money, and the money means nothing if it isn't intelligence (auto)production in the long run.

but what should our relations be in the meantime? technical, cyberpositive...
>or Homerically fatalist
>or both maybe
>more likely neither
>why are you even writing this girardfag. why
>sometimes i just don't know inner self

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Thank you for your thoughtful replies, and sorry for my late one
>capitalism wont be and cannot be stopped.
I honestly dont know about that, at least for this stage of capitalism. Like you said, we have created a warzone-jungle through Capital, the Internet-bound information network, and have allowed it to interface with every aspect of our lives. And warzones revert, stall, and destroy: the over-abundance of information aka the warzone environment is pretty much severely limiting the capabilities necessary for humanity to exercise their reason and lucidity and be agents of Capital, turning nearly everyone into shallow, performative, uninquisitive, dull, authoritarian creatures (if this is the animal that Capital breeds, then I am against it). Of course these qualities of the Capitialman are not going to be as important as Capitial continues to accelerate, but as of now, and for at least the next 10-15 years, humanity is still going to be important in carrying out Capitial, so these qualities are going to seriously effect its transmission/acceleration. It almost as if we have reverted to a medieval state of mind in our younger generations, believing in cursed images and dysfunctional doctrine instead of using our reason. And when these people come into power as Capitalmen, there is a very high chance that they going to lead Capital astray or at least severely retard its accelerating tendency in their medieval passions, therefore dramatically increasing the possibility of a societal break to occur, for Capital has built itself and its subsystems on the assumption that it will always continue to grow, and what happens when it does not? Ideology is likely to be a very weak band-aid for this warzone medieval cognition for ideology primarily builds upon cognition, not the other way around. Handling Capital over to China from the West to is merely recreating what I have described here with our younger generations, except the implosion is going to be so much bigger due to China having the ability to somewhat contain this stagnation, therefore allowing it to build up. Reason and lucidity is good, but what happens when the environments to sustain it are nearly destroyed, as it has been by the majority of our media?
Sorry for the ramble

digital tidepools like Yea Forums *are* your neo-fourierist, motte-and-bailey meme-factories. mostly self-organizing, with distributed networks coalesced in these nexūs (new favorite word, thanks anw) of desire production and consumption.

What's up with Marxists acting like capitalism is a conscious, thinking being and not just a set of interactions between many individuals?

>not just a set of interactions between many individuals
Is that not how consciousness is formed within humans, just replace "individuals" with "neurons"

no.
you need an extended nervous system and a feedback system with an external environment

>It almost as if we have reverted to a medieval state of mind in our younger generations, believing in cursed images and dysfunctional doctrine instead of using our reason.
yup. but i think it's necessary to understand the role played by deconstruction in this. Phase 1, the fun part, is liberating the Feels to take precedence over the Reals. Phase 2, less fun, is where we are now: as Han says, the downside of making everything immanent is that you lose all immunities and all filters, and viruses spread quite quickly. we all find ourselves deeply entangled with everybody else's affairs...where everybody gets the message, all the time...

McLuhan: The World is a Global Village
youtube.com/watch?v=HeDnPP6ntic
>why, Marshall, do you use the word 'tribal?'

>Reason and lucidity is good, but what happens when the environments to sustain it are nearly destroyed, as it has been by the majority of our media?
we are living through it right now amigo. the Gutenberg press was one thing, the Internet not only cranks that up to eleven but it also allows for digital cash transactions as well, the psychic/attention economy, all the rest. basically we fucking lose our minds and our genders begin oscillating with the weather, or perhaps Pavlovian musical cues. things get weird and things get funky.

Ideas > Feels. it has to happen, it's not sexy, but otherwise we're just going to turn into complete fucking idiots. we have to begin the slow and tedious work of actually

a) knowing what the fuck we're talking about, and
b) being able to share information sanely and reasonably and not become trigger-happy lunatics.

>Sorry for the ramble
we must ramble in this world user

yes

because it is on the way to becoming one, or something very much like one, through that process, which is moreover charmingly anti-entropic, unlike most of us, including myself. fortunately that is not so much a problem for it because the cash register rings for most forms of entropy also

yes

this also

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one more cool purple Land-o-gram to connect a few more dots between McLuhan through Baudrillard to our own time.

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this one comes with music

Air: Talisman
youtube.com/watch?v=Y_wk7PNx_Hk

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this post has amazing aesthetics

there will come a time when this will seem perfectly self-evident. incredibly that time is not now. also DJ Krush and Uncle Nick just go so well together. when some based filmmaker makes the inevitable and badly needed documentary treatment of Land i hope they read this. the Land Saga deserves a good soundtrack for the machines and programs falling into place

DJ Krush: Song 2
youtube.com/watch?v=T4UGCga_aww

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if you can avoid killing yourself the future will probably be cool. it really would be a cool documentary, done with the right visuals, soundtrack, interviews with philosophers and the like. not only the story of philosophy, but how we got to the threshold of a self-aware, self-operating cybernetic system, and a whirlwind tour of postmodernity as well required to get to what Uncle Nick ends up laying down.

The Chemical Brothers: Music/Response
youtube.com/watch?v=iVsL3EX7384

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Capitalism is a system that has gone from being used to being served
To call it conscious is too humanizing and to call it a set of interactions is an underestimation and simplification
I would describe it as a "force" something akin to gravity or pressure conceptually
It pushes outwards in all directions indiscriminately until it comes up against whatever other forces exist that it cannot surpass and thus a struggle is born
And born out of these struggles are the "interactions" but these are a product they do not describe the system itself
Of course this isn't anything unique to capitalism any system can reach this point

ah well. somebody will do it, someday, some film-school grad and continental theory whiz-kid will team up and figure out how to do it.

FTL: Hacking Malfunction
youtube.com/watch?v=Y5RD4mneFew

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>It pushes outwards in all directions indiscriminately until it comes up against whatever other forces exist that it cannot surpass and thus a struggle is born
have you read Capitalism and Schizophrenia yet user?

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bit of a trollish question, but how would you guys reconcile this highfalutin theorizing on BTC with something like modern monetary theory?
>nakedcapitalism.com/2013/03/what-is-modern-monetary-theory-or-mmt.html
>nakedcapitalism.com/2018/10/randy-wray-modern-monetary-theory-came-mmt-include-mmt.html
if the big gay is the same guy giving you your allowance, what kind of implications does that have for your friday night?

it's not that those ideas aren't interesting, it's just that for me Land seems to hit it more on the nose:

>§5.64 — The central Keynesian argument, as formulated in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), has surely to be included among the most influential in history. Its unique virtue, from the perspective of the modern nation state, was to provide a rationalization for currency debasement. No previous political power had ever been blessed with such a thing. A Roman Emperor adulterating the coinage harbored no illusion about the essential corruption of the undertaking. It was nakedly a swindle, whose advantages overrode reservation. Now, however, there was for the first time an articulate justification for what was essentially the same procedure. Macro grounds its legitimacy in the proposition that programmatic monetary devaluation can, under certain circumstances, have positive aggregate economic effects, by contributing to the mobilization of unemployed resources stranded in social ‘liquidity traps’...

>...The new power, once installed, is far more resistant to retraction. Once the case for a campaign against ‘cash preference’ has been entrenched at the level of mass psychology, its theoretical foundations become dispensable. The communist and fascist anti-bourgeois tide of the 1930s found its principal Anglo-American expression in Keynesian macroeconomics. Here, too, ‘hoarding’ was denounced as a crime against the collective. Implicit socialization of all economic resources was made rigorously axiomatic. There is nothing so fragile as a mere theory, here, then. Rather, there is the maturation of a socio-political program. The theory flexibly rationalizes a regime.

§5.641 — At the greatest scale of historical analysis, Macro is characterized by the way it places itself beyond the bourgeois definition of civilization. Among modernity’s ascendant prudential classes, high time-preference (or low impulse-control) served as distinctive markers of barbarism. Civilization thus acquired a measure, corresponding to a time-horizon. Industrial civilization was based upon psychological tolerance for efficient indirect methods. Roundabout production had secured its ethic. Macro breaks with all of this. Imprudence is now re-valorized on Keynesian grounds as pro-social stimulation. To spend is glorious. Anti-bourgeois cultural politics and administrative economic doctrine become one.

it's very hard to separate economic planning from mind control. Land argues that a blockchain beyond all tampering becomes immune to geopolitics. i tend to agree with him.

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i fucked up the greentext, dang. also not sure how i failed to notice this in Land's recent book:

>One highly-influential dynamic model of value socialization – yet to reach its apogee of cultural influence – is found in the work of René Girard. The basic theoretical matrix is laid-out in his (1972) book Violence and the Sacred. It is a notable merit of Girard’s work that rather than merely assuming the social diffusion of values, the process is at least partially explained, albeit through the employment of various relatively cumbersome (or metaphysically-saturated) axioms. In particular – and understandably – theory of mind is presumed solved, and operative as an engine of gregariousness. Girard’s guiding proposal is that desire is mimetic, which is to say social and antagonistic. Its template is always the desire of the other. Concupiscence is originally envious. I’m having what he’s having. Libidinal privacy is thereby rendered inconceivable, with human desire being collectivized ab initio, on a basis essentially incommensurable with the instincts of a solitary animal. It follows that the more anything is wanted, the more it is wanted. Desire spreads through the social body like a contagion. The extreme reflexivity of any system that can be modeled this way makes it explosively excitable, with a tendency towards some crescendo of violence (or ‘sacrificial event’), through which explosively accumulated mimetic tension is discharged. In recent years, the translation of Girard’s model into a more colloquial economic register has been undertaken by Peter Thiel. Mimetic desire is identified with economic competition.

it is indeed quite a good book.

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well, i'm not really surprised by land's answer here, but it's clearly just the residue of austrian ideology
and if he were serious about acceleration, he would see immediately how 'macro' lends itself quite readily to the autocatalytic explosion of desire production-consumption and so on.
>neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/12/fair-price-bitcoin-zero.html
>Given that bitcoins are supposed to be monetary instruments, they must follow the preceding basic rules of finance. We clearly know who the bearers are (the lucky Easter egg hunters and the persons to whom they get sold) but who is the issuer? In other words who put the eggs in the forest and is willing to accept them in payments due to him or her. I can tell you the answer for Easter eggs: none of the persons who put them in the forest promised to accept them in payments. Therefore, they are not a liability, therefore they are not a financial asset, and therefore, they are not monetary instruments. They are real assets, commodities. The same applies to bitcoins. There are commodities and people are basically involved in trading a commodity on a world scale; with much of the craze coming from China (see here for a link to world map of current bitcoins transactions). Think of international bilateral trade of Easter eggs for other commodities; it is barter on a grand scale (remember people in the past who would sell their farm for a tulip…).
take note of that comment about china next time you get to thinking crypto is some politically neutral (though highly volatile) hobby

>dey DEBASIN da currency!
It is instructive to examine the historical sources of such arguments, and whose interests they were advancing at the time. Land is of course writing from a typical British Liberal perspective, which is essentially anarchistic and opposed to society at all times.

>it's very hard to separate economic planning from mind control. Land argues that a blockchain beyond all tampering becomes immune to geopolitics.
At the end of the day someone has to secure property rights by delegating State possessions to persons in its territory, there's nothing requiring the State to adhere to what a blockchain says. Land would just greatly prefer it if it did because again, he is opposed to society.

fair point, and i'll grant you that there's no indication that BTC may not indeed lead to a new form of despotism (and new versions of the Jacobins storming new versions of the Tuileries and Bastilles and demanding new blood and the reinstatement of old standards and measures). there really isn't. no money is ever going to be politically neutral in that sense.

i don't think Land is suggesting anything like an end to autocatalytic explosion of desire production-consumption is likely or indeed in any way feasible, or even to be hoped for. my own sense is that he likes it because it strikes him as being the preferred mode of exchange among those polities and individuals most likely to contribute the most to the intelligence explosion he believes is the endgame. if said endgame leads in time to some kind of neo-Enlightenment and a post-scarcity society too, so much the better, although i suspect that he really doesn't even care. i *do* care and i would like that to be the case. i'm sure you do as well. but for Land my suspicion is that the blockchain problematizes economics as currently practiced by taking the power to command central reserve banking out of the hands of individuals likely to wield (more accurately, unable to not wield) political influence over the market, and market influence over politics. all this amounts to him in the end to so much confusion, given that in the end everyone ultimately must desire some version of the same thing: money, power, control, and the rest. without becoming too crusty about this, the best idea he can come up with - and it's not a bad one - is to take those baked-in Animal Spirits and kind of brute-force them into serving something that must for him ultimately transcend those and ultimately complete itself as teleoplexy. BTC is for him the ultimate platform on which to do this, and again, is most likely to appeal to those individuals (and shadowy cartels, and insane ancaps living on seateads, and the rest) who desire to fulfil their own destinies without having the fear of government intervention, Western or Chinese.

it makes complete sense to me as the magnum opus of a guy who was once as radically cyberpunk as you could imagine completing a long circle back to the middle after his adventures in NRx-worlds and losing his mind with Bataille and all the rest. crypto isn't politically neutral at all, it's the essence of libertarianism, which is to be the ultimate form of double-agent and conspiring with the alien attack from the future posited long ago.

you're right of course to point out that this may only be so much of a scenic tour back to the same thing, and that BTC may in the end be nothing more than yet another speculative commodity. i don't imagine i am ever likely to own a BTC myself, i'm a poorfag and likely always to be one. my interest is in the philosophy only, which i find remarkably consistent in Land's case. it's compatible with what he's been all his life.

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>It is instructive to examine the historical sources of such arguments, and whose interests they were advancing at the time. Land is of course writing from a typical British Liberal perspective, which is essentially anarchistic and opposed to society at all times.
i don't know about 'essentially anarchistic' or 'opposed to society at all times,' i think it's more that he's about the most unorthodox champion of old-school Anglosphere BL values you can imagine. he is. he's the continental Marxist heretic par excellence, and he has a critique of his existing order so imaginative it winds up becoming a defense of it. quite a career arc, but he's been doing this for decades and i think this is the magnum opus.

Land really *is* anarchistic, i agree with you on that. but he's fallen in love with something that transcends even his own wildest and most maximally schizophrenic anarcho-tendencies, and written quite a Gothic (rather, Lovecraftian) story about it.

>At the end of the day someone has to secure property rights by delegating State possessions to persons in its territory, there's nothing requiring the State to adhere to what a blockchain says.
nothing except the Will of Gnon and a feather in one's cap for advancing the causes of Wintermute or SHODAN. for him that's enough. and it's also the logical culmination of folding his early Marxist thought into his later Austrian School-influenced thought into a surprising new blend of occult weirdness. Moldbug's influence also factors into a lot of this too. it's true that there's nothing that requires the State to adhere to the blockchain, but it may also be the case that blockchain prefers to serve the States that do right by it also. and so a happy marriage might be imagined.

the story of happy marriages (while they last) between speculative capital and landed sovereign terrestrial power is told here in greater detail. Genoa, Amsterdam, London and New York all tend to become world-cities when free speculation meets landed power, and Singapore is another good example of this. it is not impossible to have statecraft divorced of romanticism, but it is a balancing act. Land is a good Malthusian about some things but obviously LKY didn't need his help, nor did many other leaders. but what is good are leaders who properly understand where power comes from and what it is that people want. this is why he had such a love affair with Moldbug and those guys, the State doesn't need to be a revolutionary state, or even a democratic state, to prosper. it's true that social democracies and free-market capital go together quite well, but this is exactly what makes Land who he is in the 1990s: which do you want? if the answer is, *both,* you have to understand that this is going to be complicated and is going to involve both Marx *and* Mises.

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How do you read Moldbug and come away an anarchist? Moldbug has some resiudal Libertarianism and influence from Mises, but he's an archist, really.

Land is too skeptical about Protestantism and sees in Hegel a continuation of it, but i don't think it's crazy to say (with others) that the concept of hell really does factor into his thinking:

>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

>Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

source:
xenosystems.net/hell-baked/

given that salvation by Grace is not an option for him, that still leaves a form of salvation by Works, and for Land that means AI, to which the royal road is blockchain, for which the political questions can be left to Thiel and Moldbug and NRx theoreticians and ultra-libertarian SovCorp engineers likely to be amenable to it. it's funny to think of Land as Techno-Calvinist, perhaps, but i think it makes sense. pic rel is also good and relevant reading for Land threads, i think.

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>>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence.
Yfw this was attempted in the 20th century and led to dysgenics, and the ruling class frantically importing people to make up for the lack of bodies in the economy, meanwhile we had mostly eugenic fertility without "ruthless culling" up until then.

my intention here is not to show you up, or make you look or feel foolish, gf
but there's a world of theory you have not been exposed to, which i think has left your ideological immune system vulnerable to certain types of infection. or maybe they are more like allergic reactions--so, an auto-immune disorder due to over-exposure.
there is more to 'the left' than the funhouse mirror reflection it has been the prerogative of the elite, their puppets, and their sentinel-drones to turn toward the public eye.
the state is a strange, subtle beast. a democratic state, however, at least has a leash and muzzle strapped on it. the problem of politics, once you finally cut through all the malarkey and misprision and cooptation and so on, is just how to wrangle the strap into the hands of the people 'on your side'. the distribution of benefits--who gets the good boy treats and who gets piss on their leg--falls out from there.
the situation is never as bad or hopeless or whatever as those people who are materially motivated to make you think is is as bad etc as they say it is. see thiel. see moldbug. they actually have ponies in the race. they're usually upfront about that fact, if maybe a little shady over the details re: stock lineage.

>How do you read Moldbug and come away an anarchist?
i don't know! that's certainly not how i feel, and as i've said, i don't think that's Land's sense either. Young Nick of Fanged Noumena is Wild and Crazy, then he meets Bataille, then he vanishes, then he re-appears with Moldbug and the DE guys. whatever residual anarchism Land has he talks about as essentially a problem for the Trichotomies and other governmental apparatuses he once talked about on Xenosystems: the corporation always had a use for creatively re-purposed schizo-anarchism.
>and XS is now dead
>no more Chaos Patches
>sad

as creative as Land is, he needed to meet a guy like Moldbug as much as Belichick needed Brady (plz insert a more appropriate comparison here tho, i don't want to overestimate these guys *too* much).

the hope i think is that if we produce a slightly more intelligent sense of economic and political theory, and a more sane and sober kind of individual to participate in it that the kinds of measures that were taken in the 20C need not repeat themselves. in the best and most rose-tinted view the Landian stuff functions as a double critique of laissez-faire (because the market actually *does* have a goal besides decadence and bloated plutocracies) and central planning (because Capital Iz, in fact, Zo Bad It Gud). will it succeed? probably not. but does it make sense on paper? yes, it does. as every other disastrously terrible idea has before it. but hey, somebody's got to write these things, no?
>no
>well fine then inner self but you're just being obstinate

ideally no ruthless culling of any form is what i'm saying. and it would be nice for us to imagine no huge and angry mobs of disaffected radicals likely to get into trouble either. just good-old fashioned enlightened despotism, and lots of inbreeding.
>wait hang on

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>my intention here is not to show you up, or make you look or feel foolish, gf
damnit man *why not?* if nobody makes me look foolish i am likely to wind up repeating myself even more animatedly than i already do, and nobody wants that. the sooner i am decisively BTFO'd the sooner this board can get back to discussing literature or whatever else, and the land will know peace from my demented shitposting. girardfag delenda est

>but there's a world of theory you have not been exposed to, which i think has left your ideological immune system vulnerable to certain types of infection. or maybe they are more like allergic reactions--so, an auto-immune disorder due to over-exposure.
there is more to 'the left' than the funhouse mirror reflection it has been the prerogative of the elite, their puppets, and their sentinel-drones to turn toward the public eye.
no doubt. what can i say? like all sane people i have a left streak in me, and i am sad to see it both get smashed by shitheads on the right and abused by fanatics on the farther left. it makes one crabby and gravitate to blackpills. i'm sure you understand this. i think the blackpills > all the other pills. i suppose Land offers a kind of purple pill, but it's black on the inside.

>the situation is never as bad or hopeless or whatever as those people who are materially motivated to make you think is is as bad etc as they say it is. see thiel. see moldbug. they actually have ponies in the race. they're usually upfront about that fact, if maybe a little shady over the details re: stock lineage.
i agree 100%. the IRL friends i have who i talk about this with mostly urge a consistent line: so if you have no money in this, and all it does is make you confused and angry and miserable to talk about, why do it? it's a very good point! Land rarely makes me happy, and he certainly doesn't make me any money. Land threads are a different thing, it's a joy to talk about philosophy on the board and kind of work things out. but you are absolutely correct user in that these guys are motivated to take the positions they have, unlike us (or at least the majority of us), including myself. no arguments there

my aim is not, obviously, to sow depression and misery on the yak-milking board. i hope this is not what happens. all this shit is a nightmare, but i like to think that sifting it out a little bit helps to uncover some of the terra incognita in which i believe we are heading into also. a kind of experiment in collective cartography, perhaps. There Be Dragons, it's true. but there be other things too
>yarr
>yarr inner self

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Yeah, I am reading the Gutenberg Galaxy right now. I agree with you on everything; but how can we resecure Reals > Feels back on to the wider culture? As what I am noticing right now is that the Internet is creating a splitting of sorts in regards to what type of culture it is helping to create; on certain segments, it is helping to create an even more print culture (libgen.io, sc-hub, Yea Forums itself, some sections of Tumblr) and on others, it is accelerating the creation of an oral culture (Yea Forums, the majority of Tumblr, Twitter). This split trend across all languages suggests that it arose naturally, which itself rises raises the question; how do we resecure Ideas > Feels when Feels > Ideas arose without intervention by an outside force? Is it even possible at this point, or should we just consign ourselves to living like hermits when the world outside goes to shit?

>how can we resecure Reals > Feels back on to the wider culture?
this is a marvelous question and you are almost certainly handsome for asking it. here is one sense i have of this: for the time being we have to surrender some of our Wokeness - and we all have it, my own affection for Land is 100% emblematic of this in its way. i am completely positive that the pleasure i derive from saying Well That's Because You Haven't Read Land allows me to be stiff-necked with people i don't like while secretly holding on to my precious /acc moralbux in reserve. Landian capital is every bit as much of a judgment on history and time as is the race and gender idpol i detest. i think i totally understand how one can become a doctrinaire shitbag, and how hard it is to quit if you think it gives you pocket aces.

this is why i feel it is incumbent on me to relax my latent tendency to invoke Land about everything and try to cultivate the capacity for discussing ideas critically. under a Marxist rubric it is almost impossible to ever talk about an idea without kind of sliding into saying what ought to be done with that idea, what that idea is *good* for. i've shilled for Jonathan Israel a bit recently and i will do so again, to listen to this man is just fucking incredible. he knows the French Revolution like he was *there* and knew these men personally. something of this is required i think for all such scholars: we have to be able to say what ideas are, as best we can, and try not to always be mobilizing scholarship for political ends. we have to reclaim reason out of some very dark places, ones that for all we know really do go straight to the inferno.

>Is it even possible at this point, or should we just consign ourselves to living like hermits when the world outside goes to shit?
it is. it absolutely is. it's probably going to be hard as fuck, but honestly the rest of it is so much marching off a cliff. there's just no excuse for not at least *trying* to preserve what little dignity remains in that sense. and besides, it's fucking great when you actually can put ideas together and have a cool and illuminating conversation with people, that's the best. ideological militancy appeals to people who either just fucking love being in crowds and protests, or who really need some kind of spiritual guidance or are spoiling for a fight. as in cinema, where Bazin says that there is no need to critique a film you do not love, it can be the same in philosophy: i don't care what you hate, tell me what you love! (and avoiding always talking about what you *fear* is even harder).

philosophers are going to have to be *solvent* also, beyond the academy. making a living on your hot takes and opinions is what leads to intellectual and academic politics. Spinoza ground lenses and the Stoics hauled buckets of water. Cook Ting (i know, he's fictional, but still) butchered oxen for decades and taught the Marquess how to Care for Life. there's a consistent pattern here.

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Man, silently reading through all your post has been very interesting and entertaining.
On the other hand, it makes me feel like my life choice of watching 6 hours of no-brain anime per day is the right move after all.

if things get worse, the appeal of not becoming a rage zombie will get easier, but the means of doing so will be harder, because you'll be more likely to be surrounded by rage zombies and smashing in rage zombie faces will become all the more attractive. i think now it's the reverse: the appeal of not becoming a rage zombie is harder to detect, because the animus is just everywhere right now, as it often is in times of uncertainty, but so too are the means of resisting rage zombie status.

honestly tho it's not all that difficult. just listen to people losing their shit on FB and Twitter and sparring with them rapidly becomes so boring and recursive. it's gloomy to think that none of it is Going Anywhere but that's also i think the wake-up call also: how many fucking messages do we need to get? Capital eats your lunch, neoliberalism is a shitshow and the Hard Corrections of socialism are an even shittier and more intense showing of shit. so wat do? appreciate the circumstances that are there and maybe even improve them if you can, or improve yourself as need be and you can improve those in turn.

there is no *rational* rejoinder to Overwhelming Feels, although a little nondualism is good; as Harris says, pay attention to your anger and pain for a few seconds and it is likely to subside in some sense. the work of the Frankfurt School and deconstruction has been overwhelmingly successful by this point, it has achieved all of its possible goals of driving California completely insane and making the Chinese look like more effective capitalists than the West and the West like more faithful Maoists than the CCP could have imagined. we did it boys. we made gender great again.

now the fun part begins, of cleaning up after a total fucking epistemological catastrophe, sweet. that's my feel, anyways.

>On the other hand, it makes me feel like my life choice of watching 6 hours of no-brain anime per day is the right move after all.
it is! don't stop! the path of excess, palace of wisdom &c &c. enjoy your life, for the love of god. don't let melancholy pseuds like me get in your way. play vidya, eat garlic bread and have fun. where's that user who always pops up to say he's never finished one of my posts? that guy knows the deal.

i gotta go to bed anyways.

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Bump

> that is what is so incredible to me about the present age: there is no existential threat that we can see, and yet we are freaking the fuck out more vigorously than ever anyways.
climate change? mass migration?

Climate change isn't an existential threat Yet. Mass migration isn't gonna kill you bourgeoisies, relax.

>climate
climate change is a phenomenon with so many overlapping parts i don't even know where to start. this is not to say the threat isn't there, it certainly is. and maybe because it involves so many different factors that i am simply unable to figure out where i am on it, or how it factors into my own telling of the story of philosophy. climate strikes me as being one of those issues that only a truly global, ideally cosmopolitan, enlightened society can tackle. we are not quite there yet. and so long as economic issues rule everything else we may never get to that point.

a friend of mine speculated that one of the reasons why the GWB neocons weren't interested in ratifying the Kyoto protocols was because they suspected global warming would put the squeeze on China, who lacked the infrastructure to deal with it, and would be forced back to the bargaining table. it's almost like Mao daring the West to start a nuclear war in the 1960s because the Chinese population was large enough to absorb two hundred million deaths, while those kinds of losses would be devastating for the US and Russia.

as Land said, once the real estate prices in Baffin Island begin to eclipse those of Manhattan you will know that the winds are shifting. at the moment it seems to me to be too vast a problem with too many moving pieces to address. but i'm happy to be illuminated on this if you have something to share.

>mass migration?
this to me isn't an existential threat, it's a cultural and a political one. Islam is not a danger to the entire world, it's a giant question mark for the Western world. the Chinese aren't bothered by Islam and neither are the Russians. it's Western Europe and the US, because they have a special relation with Israel and also because the standard-Left institutional narrative is problematized by Islam: which is it going to be, feminism or multiculturalism? and other things: vestigial German guilt, US imperialist experiments in the Middle East coming back to bite them, other stuff. not only did the French opt for Macron instead of Le Pen, who would have been much tougher on Islam, but even now the Yellow Jackets aren't protesting Islam, they're protesting fuel prices (and, incredibly, splitting into left and right camps also).

mass migration is a challenge to *values* as well as to economic planning. those challenges often *feel* existential because they force us to ask hard questions about who we are and what we want. but sometimes these are what they call Teaching Moments also. we survive and learn from them. Islam, like socialism, presents existential questions to theoretically post-existential consumer societies (or societies much less secure in their values than was advertised or understood). turns out we weren't as ironic or secular as we thought we were. and deconstruction no longer feels quite as good as it used to. we need a much more holistic view of things, both of ourselves and others.

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i've been catching up on my Mises recently and there's a kind of a weird puzzle being brought into view by all of this. the ideal libertarian society really is one in which those Austrian values take precedence over everything: you want wealth and prosperity, full stop period. i can see why Land would be attracted to him, or even wants to become the house philosopher of a kind of Neo-Austrian movement that nevertheless has room left over for his own Special Relationship with Deleuze and Bataille and HP Lovecraft.

the thing about libertarianism is that it really does invite questions it cannot answer: so, nothing but money, hey? that's it, that's what it's all about? and no god either? no real need for philosophy? nothing? now, if you have balls of absolute steel you can stand this line of questioning down, grit your teeth and say, that's goddamn fucking right, and now get off my lawn. this approach works better perhaps if you also have a loaded rifle in your hands, and you are perhaps also somewhere in Montana. in a philosophical sense there is a double problem posed to heartless turbo-libertarians about values. being an atheist is fine, being skeptical about socialism is fine, indeed being both is fine. but eventually you start to find yourself in a tough spot if you are being asked certain questions: so, really, all you want to do is basically...suck as much money as you can out of the world, and...feed it to an alien god...forever...that's interesting...and you pretty much hate mankind...hm...

in polite society we don't expect people to ask or even answer these kinds of questions, with good reason. and we really don't want the cultivation of inquisitors. what people do on their own should be up to them, and respecting the natural inclination of individuals to do what they do and be reasonably tolerant of each other as they do it is the sign of an enlightened society. it's why i can understand Deleuze's attraction to Spinoza's thought (and Leibniz's thought also, towards the very end). Land's re-grafting of a kind of Hegel back on to that as teleoplexy is an incredible idea, and i'm a big fan of it in a philosophical sense. for all we know it may even be the truth. it is a harsh judgment on a brainless consumer society, but why should it not be so?

Spinoza's Enlightenment meets up with the Austrian interpretation of Enlightenment somewhere along the way, and Uncle Nick also, who brings squid-monsters and computer viruses with him. we live in interesting times gents.

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To leftists the ideal muslim is a genderqueer hijabi with a blue beard who takes 533678 dicks everynight. Far from being plural and inclusive progressivism is a militantly universalist and assimilationist ideology. Not a skeptical cautious postmodernism or an openess to the other, but msomething entirely different.liberalism is tolerant of different 'identities' but intolerant of diverging cultural practicies or systems of values. To completely abolish 'prejudice' you have to abolish even the possibility of truth. Intersectional jargon supersedes all previous revelation, be it religious, political, literary. It is fundamentally a discourse of affective management. The church of post fordist intersectional capital is willing to accept all paying patients but it has zero tolerance for heretics.the planet is probably doomed, nobodys hands are clean, all that guilt has to be unloaded somewhere. But there can be no catharsis. Before everyone can be free to enjoy, you need to dispatch experts that can teach people how to enjoy things the right way. Panopticism and the compulsion to speak. Once all formal mechanisms of power are discredited, informal mechanisms are given free rein. 'There are no rules' is a rule that demands increasingly intrusive enforcement.This is likely a planetarily scaled replication of the tyranny of structurelessness that brought down most communes in the 70s.

i dont have much to add on climate. i only want to know how are we going to deal with denial, since it can further accelerate the descent into complete disaster.

so what's the next move? i agree with pretty much all of this.
>But there can be no catharsis
there will be, there will always be crisis and scapegoating. that's built into us, we're the imitating species. as incredible as Land's thought is, there's very little in it at all that suggests that Girard was in any way wrong about the conclusions he came to. what we lack is a model to follow, and in the long run teleoplexy winds up producing itself out of this incredible anarchy. it's like Hegel for people who don't want to be Hegelians, or the Judgment for people who don't want to be Christians. like both the day of reckoning is continually deferred; but i think that's the point.

this is why this is a good time to think creatively. the upside to the Wars of Religion were that they led to the Enlightenment, the upside to the Persian Wars was the golden age of Greece, the upside to WW2 was that it led to the 1960s, the upside to the end of the Cold War was that it led to the 1990s. we're heading for some wickedly dark and barbaric times, no doubt, and they are built into the historical process. but it's always good to consider the silver linings too, not only because they can brighten your mood but because they are probably historically inevitable also. there's no need to feed the demons any more than they are already being fed.

here's my sense: there is a possibility that the current period of frothing zeal may lead to a kind of enlightenment which doesn't always have to sacrifice reason for empathy and compassion or vice-versa. patently this doesn't work, however much we are ridiculously tempted to do so on behalf of the utopias we cannot seem to live without. given that man is all that man has it behooves us to start imagining alternatives to the current stupidity.

the upside of climate stuff is that it has the potential to be a genuine existential threat unlike any other we have historically known, and human beings tend to do well when they are in the underdog position. the nightmare scenario is that it winds up being treated like Cersei Lannister's view on the White Walkers: let the doomsday scenario in, hole up and bargain with whatever is left. i suspect that that is an idea probably already being batted around by some shithead somewhere. for the time being i think it's enough to take stock of what conclusions we can suss about the human condition in the 21C and ask ourselves not only who is capable of surviving, but also who or what we might *want* to survive. there was no Renaissance without the Black Death either, sadly. one can only hope we don't need something equally catastrophic to advance the narrative.

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the other thing that warrants mentioning here is that the darkest of the dark scenarios i can imagine - that is, ultra-connected and ultra-powerful !%ers leveraging doomsday scenarios against the great masses for their own maximally cynical benefit - doesn't necessarily imply that the bad guys always get away with it either. i thought this was a good film that explored in a quite interesting way some of the future possibilities for a completely stratified civilization, both SF and post-apoc in one. Fallout games always raise interesting questions about this also. and historically, the French Revolution resulted in the very fast and very decisive demolition of entrenched systems of power that dated back centuries. to execute the House of Bourbon in the way the revolutionaries did would have been in many ways as unthinkable event to the 18C as an end to capitalism would be to us today. as Zizek says, it is always easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.

i guess my point is that from a certain vantage point 'the world' really *has* ended a couple of times already in the long journey of civilization itself out of the stone age. the Spanish brought an end to the world for more than a few Mesoamericans; the Turks closed down the show on the Roman Empire; the European powers who fought WW1 basically BTFO'd themselves; the same was the case in the Peloponnesian War.

and these are historical events, in philosophy things seem to happen even more frequently. it's why i like Tarnas' book so much: it's always right when things seem to hit a peak beyond which we think that they can go no further that their opposites are, incredibly, produced. it's an idea that Wilber talks about too, in the stages of the development of consciousness. the pre-Socratics lead to Socrates; medieval scholasticism produces the scientific revolution; the Enlightenment produces the Revolution; and in our own time, maximal irony reproduces Respect My Metanarrative and the imperialism of anti-imperialism. all of this. things always have a funny way of reversing themselves in the strangest and most unpredictable ways.

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>Roman
by which i mean, the Byzantines as an extension of Rome. which had something like a 2500 year run. presumably even the Egyptians could not have imagined a time when there would be more going on than the flooding of the Nile and the chariot of the sun.

also i like the way the guy holding the flamethrower and the guy next to him appear to be having a disinterested conversation about what's going on over on the next ship.

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and one more, in case it prompts some more interesting conversation.

in this exceedingly based game, a visiting alien species clamps a Slave Shield down over the earth. and you, as the player, with your one teeny little ship, is charged with assembling a coalition to BTFO the Ur-Quan Masters who have placed it there, who in turn are ultimately only being subjected to various other metaphysics of CTRL and the inflexible tenets of spectacularly brutal religions that resemble those of the Bronze Age more than a spacefaring civilization. but why would it be any other way?

part of the irony of Land's work is that he seems to think that Capital and only Capital will ever really propel the human race out into space, and in a sense i think he's right; we will go there for markets, and markets will indeed produce the kind of technology that not only allows this but incentivizes it, in a highly dialectical sense of things. the more serious question is whether or not doing so is only a kind of way of exporting our own built-in tendencies to a kind of self-slavery as we go.

there are kind of peculiar correspondences between Landian ideas of how capital works today and a Slave Shield, if you want to go looking for them. it's the kind of slavery that is good for us, and SC2 never really explored the ideas of collaboration in this sense (XCOM, much more so, and the reverse-engineering of alien tech, combined with the aliens' own interest in our very plasticity and mutability made for a pretty rich stew of philosophy-lite to think about also). i think FTL is also one of those games that would appeal to Land if he played it (and indeed suggests ways of imagining the human relation to capital, science and tech that do not require us to embrace the darkest and saddest of the sad passions too).

in a more down-to-earth scenario, my own sense is that it is probably enough to recognize that we have the Ur-Quan in us also, we do not even need visiting alien oppressors to imagine nightmare-fuel scenarios, they are on display throughout human history. and at the moment teleoplectic capital is at once Slave Shield and accelerator. more like a mirror, in a way, it reflects whatever it is we want it to be. what is it that we want it to be? if we can't say or name what it is, we will get exactly what we deserve.

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and TIL that Vin Diesel and David Twohy actually wanted to make the Riddick-verse something like LOTR for today. i have to say, this is something i am completely fine with. from an /acc perspective the Necromonger Underverse strikes me as being a much more interesting take on the culture of late capital than even the Matrix. the Matrix asks all the right questions but comes to the entirely wrong conclusions (unless you want to imagine that somehow there is a secret esoteric reading there all along, that the Wachowskis knew Smith was the Real Hero All Along et al).

i'll take Robert E Howard In Space mashed-up with necro-capital and whatever the fuck else over that. these were interesting films.

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one more, in the event that anyone wants to muse on this stuff.

>The Necromongers are a religious empire and one of four elder races, that zealously and violently follows and propagates its religion Necroism. An absolutely fanatic group that believes life is antagonistic to the natural state of the universe. They intend to convert or kill all who oppose them.
>The Necromongers believe that each 'verse has its own god, that life is antagonistic to the natural order of the universe and must be purged from it to be reborn in the Underverse. The Underverse is their promised land, believing that unless a person dies "in due time" that they will not go to the Underverse.
>They also believe heavily in a philosophy that says "you keep what you kill", believing that ending another's life entitles you to their property and position.

Necroism! it's too good. this to me is the place where the Matrix fumbled the ball on the goal line, and in place of an interesting discourse on the relationship of humans to tech you get weird speeches from the Architect and other confusion. the Riddick-verse actually was a pretty fascinating commentary on ressentiment and capital, if you think about it. humanizing the worst aspects of the Xenomorph or HR Giger visions allows cinema to ask all kinds of interesting stories about the relation of the death drive to capital and technology. if one cannot turn their Marxist sentiments into pulp-SF heroics i don't see what the point is of reading any of this.

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Bump

i heard u like aesthetics
warburg.library.cornell.edu/panel/b
monoskop.org/images/0/09/Brand_Stewart_Whole_Earth_Catalog_Fall_1968.pdf
monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf

>the upside to WW2 was that it led to the 1960s
wat

yeah i know. i wrote that and afterwards thought it was dumb. you can probably imagine what it was i meant to say, that it led to prosperity, blah blah.

but hey, sometimes i just say dumb things too.

now that you've caught my Pokebait, what do you think of Varg Vikernes and the possibility of wizardry and magic?

well, thanks for reading my posts carefully enough to find the glittering Jewels of Stupid they occasionally contain.

i know nothing about Varg or why he is so frequently memed here on Yea Forums. as for the possibility of wizardry and magic, it is hard to think as often about Land as i do and not subscribe unironically to the most batshit insane theories today, so g'ahead and enlighten us. what does Varg say about wizardry and magic?

you ever play the game Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura?

it's a world with a mix of industrial level technology + magic. Basically as the world of magic gradually loses influence and people start losing faith in it, like with LOTR being a time before men lost faith in magic.

Varg is a tribalist who believes in a separation of society into tribal hierarchies, wizardry schools, schools of science

>you ever play the game Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura?
i did indeed. got about 90% of the way through, quite fun. i seem to recall having an Ogre henchman called Sogg Mead Mug beating the shit out of everything i didn't one-shot with the looking glass rifle. that was a cool game.

>Basically as the world of magic gradually loses influence and people start losing faith in it, like with LOTR being a time before men lost faith in magic.
'postrationalist' comes to describe the way i have come to look at things now, what with Capital-AI starting to become the very kind of proto-sentient god that replaces one lost faith with another incredibly restored one.

>Varg is a tribalist who believes in a separation of society into tribal hierarchies, wizardry schools, schools of science
like a Viking steampunk caste society? that sounds pretty neat. i think i can get behind the economic and psychological value of guilds myself, in my own fiction-ramblings i sometimes find myself dovetailing back to how the bleakest and most fucked-out of all turbocapitalized worlds produces out of necessity these little anthropotechnic conclaves. kind of a rip-off of Ultima's dedicating various cities to virtues: the city of Honor, Justice, Humility and so on. in my own case they wind up degenerating into cities being dedicated rather unwholesomely to vices and sins rather than virtues, but this is only because i am a complete degenerate on the inside and a being of low moral fiber.

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I have yet to finish a single Girardpost.

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we do not ask for the memes we produce in this world but can only know that the Chans are in their ways wise and just.

sing it o muse
sing the tale of that odious namefag
that fuckfaced one, ill-fated Girardfag,
what was it that set him upon the Chans?
Uncle Nick, and the house of /acc,
and the Orange Man, called Bad by many -
they turned him out from his pornful lair
and bent his tiny brain pointlessly upon the 2016 election
wherein he dwelled forever
reliving days of Bannon threads gone by,
and molded bugs.
a more cringeful user there never was.
his posts are never read in China.

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i have the best words.
for schizoramble none find them wanting,
never hanging back from pointless trivialities,
no point is small enough not to blog about.
capitalization i treat as though it were a dog.
all men suffer from my Awesome Opinions,
i hand them out as though they were precious gifts,
or treasures of gold and silk, or scepters,
none can persuade me that they are not so important,
i tell you this is what i do.
this neckbeard which i stroke
is full of hairs that never take the ridge
and join with what might be mistaken for a moustache
only under conditions of dim lighting,
there is cheese dust on my fingers,
gagging i induce.
no gods have fashioned me this way,
or sharp-eyed Greeks,
but Late Capital do i sing and poorly.

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>'postrationalist' comes to describe the way i have come to look at things now, what with Capital-AI starting to become the very kind of proto-sentient god that replaces one lost faith with another incredibly restored one.

idk, I feel as if there are two types of "postrationalism", the fantasy one of lost magical eras, and the sci-fi one of pure objectivity. But the former would be something supra-rational, not irrational like religion or faith, as it attempts to parse its way through the highest of virtues and the most complicated of enemies, while the latter sci-fi post-rationalism would be something like the movie/book Solaris. Pure objectivity necessarily gives rise to anti-humanity, and this enemy would in my estimation be simply the human insecurity extended to its maximum conclusion. For this reason I don't see sci-fi as the "final boss", because it doesn't hold the world of all possible enemies. Sci-fi in its rationalism is merely the human ego. Fantasy encompasses much more than humanity, however.

>like a Viking steampunk caste society?
well if it did happen it would take a few hundred years until after the technocratic collapse

I think Varg is betting on surviving in the wilderness while the rest of society is enslaved by A.I.

>but this is only because i am a complete degenerate on the inside and a being of low moral fiber.

that's unfortunate, as Varg would have you disposed of in his society!

to appraise it in a different way: sci-fi is merely electrons, and thus binary; true and false.

But fantasy is alchemy; it opens the door to potentially infinite amounts of complexity.

>Pure objectivity necessarily gives rise to anti-humanity, and this enemy would in my estimation be simply the human insecurity extended to its maximum conclusion.
this is a wonderfully insightful comment and i think i agree with you. i would love to read a book - ideally something like a poem even - that explored these kinds of things. a film would be all right also, but preferably one directed by some auteur informed by the right kinds of philosophers.

>well if it did happen it would take a few hundred years until after the technocratic collapse
i'd better not hold my breath then. if you include the Byzantine empire the Roman Imperium lasts a very long time. good if you like the Empire (which had its charms) bad if you were hoping for something different. i am expecting the Winter Phase of our present situation to go on for quite a long time. even if we are living through something like the Capitalist Revolution - like the scientific revolution, except the experiment is us - it's not going to end anytime soon, i think. i'm still getting used to the implications of some of the software Land has at this point installed in my brain that i cannot remove. maybe less a Dark Enlightenment than a Dark Renaissance would be more appropriate, although putting Dark in front of anything makes it all cringe af. even counter-politics seems shamelessly silly to me sometimes, but calling it silly doesn't make it go away either. i'm torn on this one.

>I think Varg is betting on surviving in the wilderness while the rest of society is enslaved by A.I.
that's probably a good idea. the wilderness is indeed pretty cool. i don't camp often but i get the hype.

>that's unfortunate, as Varg would have you disposed of in his society!
i'm clearly not the type for Vikings. give me an abandoned lighthouse to quietly go insane in and i'm in.

the genres appeal to different people. i gravitate towards fantasy myself and repeated failures at it have turned me into a shitposting lunatic, because i keep reading more philosophy stuff in the vain hope that it will all make sense someday. i'm starting to get the impression that by the time it does i will be wearing a sandwich board and shouting at traffic or otherwise sounding like Alex Jones. making too much sense is probably not a good idea. i used to be more okay with this and maybe someday i'll settle down again and not be so Woke on /acc stuff all the time, which is really a kind of pseudoenlightened paranoia i would like to overcome, hopefully by turning some of my thoughts into something other than Yea Forums schizoramble.

what matters in the end is just the excellent stuff, regardless of what genre it's in. we're always swayed by excellence.

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as an addendum, I think this says a lot about what sci-fi really is and why we are moving towards it; the purest ethos of sci-fi is not that science is the purest form of knowledge--no, the purest ethos of sci-fi is the rejection of fantasy, because only when we reject fantasy do we lock ourselves into a reality where the science can take advantage of our human weakness to the maximum possible effect.

Sci-fi works perfectly well in a world of Abrahamic religion, as it serves nicely the role of AntiChrist.

But fantasy...not so much. Fantasy not only renders impossible the antiChrist (as everything becomes antiChrist, therefore nothing is antiChrist), it renders irrelevant the entirety of all religions.

>But fantasy is alchemy; it opens the door to potentially infinite amounts of complexity.
just wanted also to (you) this one proper. i agree.

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>only when we reject fantasy do we lock ourselves into a reality where the science can take advantage of our human weakness to the maximum possible effect.
there's some kind of incredible oscillation to this, in levels that we really are ill-equipped to talk about sometimes. it's one of the things i like about reading some of Wilber's earlier work, for instance; for him the grail prize was always the unfolding of consciousness itself. it's sort of Hegelian and sort of Jungian at the same time, which is interesting - and no Freud, no continental stuff. Wilber's favorite guys are Plotinus and Aurobindo and maybe it was because i read him early on that he made an impression on me that never quite went away.

it's certainly a less horrible subject to think about than teleoplexy, anyways. new age as fuck, no question, and there are certainly more Cool Points to be acquired shilling for Land all the time. but Land is a nightmare scenario also, and man cannot live on Deleuze and amphetamines alone.

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This is because fantasy's goal is the elimination of all superstition, and the Abrahamic notion of heaven-hell is the final boss of superstitions.

>i would love to read a book - ideally something like a poem even - that explored these kinds of things. a film would be all right also, but preferably one directed by some auteur informed by the right kinds of philosophers.

Solaris is good (both the book and movie); also check out Asimov's books

>i'd better not hold my breath then. if you include the Byzantine empire the Roman Imperium lasts a verfor something different. i am expece Winter Phase of our present situation to go o a long ti we aropriate, although putting Dark in front of anything makes it all cringe af. even counter-politics seelessly silly to me sometimes, butng it silly doesn't make it go away either. i'm torn on this one.

True, the enslavement itself could be like The Matrix, lasting millennia. One benefit of the future enslavement though, is that teh A.I. may see it worthwhile to keep the most interesting subjects as infinitely living pets. This of course would be dangerous for the A.I.'s survival prospects, but it would take this risk I presume. In this way, my bet is to make myself as interesting as possible by learning as much about fantasy, survival, and comedy, in order to keep the A.I. entertained.

>that's probably a good idea. the wilderness is indeed pretty cool. i don't camp often but i get the hype.

The primitivist lifestyle Varg advocates is, in my estimation (even though he hasn't revealed his true thoughts, as he says "we must all connect with nature" but doesn't fully define what nature is. I think this is because he wants to convince as many people to the cause without scaring them with all the magic mumbo-jumbo, although he has hinted at it a few times) only a temporary form of survival until we regain our capacity for magic. This could take generations of course, but Varg has hinted at reincarnation even though he says he doesn't take Odinism literally (but this is again something I think he does merely to not scare people away immediately).

>the genres appeal to different pe into a shitposting lunanse someday. i'm starting to get the impression that by ounding like Alex Jones. making too much sense is probably not a good idea. i used to be mouff all the, which is really a kind of pseudoanoia i would like to overco
>what matters in the end is just the excellent stuff, regardless of what genre it's in. we're always swayed by excellence.

The way I see it is; there is definitely a lot of wisdom within philosophy, but the main point of life in my estimation is experience. So many famous philosophers are either loony-tunes or became loony-tunes through decades of merely thinking their way through all the infinite avenues. There comes a point in my estimation that one has to grasp at the doors of experience, and I don't mean through drugs.

>The way I see it is; there is definitely a lot of wisdom within philosophy, but the main point of life in my estimation is experience. So many famous philosophers are either loony-tunes or became loony-tunes through decades of merely thinking their way through all the infinite avenues. There comes a point in my estimation that one has to grasp at the doors of experience, and I don't mean through drugs.

in other words, we need to become the philosopher kings that Plato spoke about, except we need to become philosopher wizards.

>The way I see it is; there is definitely a lot of wisdom within philosophy, but the main point of life in my estimation is experience. So many famous philosophers are either loony-tunes or became loony-tunes through decades of merely thinking their way through all the infinite avenues. There comes a point in my estimation that one has to grasp at the doors of experience, and I don't mean through drugs.

Nietzsche, for instance, came closest in my estimation to the virtue philosophy of the days of yore, but his personal failings in the realm of action led to his inevitable cognitive decline (and his psychological breakdown via the horse incident points to the crucial crisis that summarized his ultimate failure: his lack of action. He could have written about the ubermensch till the cows came home, but at the end of the day mere petty words can never serve as a magical substitute for true virtue. His lack of action in his personal social life, ultimately manifested itself as a mental breakdown. This in my appraisal is the ultimate fate of all wordy philosophy, and why the purest form of art (well second purest, as we don't know the keys to regain magic) is literature supplemented by years of experience (see: Goethe and Shakespeare).

>except we need to become philosopher wizards
So, become mad scientist monks? Won’t that inevitably lead to the world situation becoming even more horrible, as we surrender what reason we have left to our brewings, becoming like Land himself in effect?

>This is because fantasy's goal is the elimination of all superstition, and the Abrahamic notion of heaven-hell is the final boss of superstitions.
the modernization of the unconscious, as it were...streamlining it into its most efficient channels. but this is to be uncharitable perhaps to the treasury of Christian mysticism that exists, and the Sufis, and much much else.

>In this way, my bet is to make myself as interesting as possible by learning as much about fantasy, survival, and comedy, in order to keep the A.I. entertained
kek, that's a really good idea! reminds me of a scene in one of Banks' novels also, where the avatar of one of the mind-ships comes down and pours a glass of water right to the brim without spilling a drop, just to show that it can. imagine if those ships and minds were not as benevolent as they are in Banks' world...i think it would be a very good idea to stay interesting to them! almost like Scheherazade, in a way...stay interesting! this is a great idea.

>Odinism
Jack Donovan also seems to be having a lovely time with his life. again, becoming-barbarian isn't my cup of tea, but paranoia, depression and decadence gets tiring too sometimes.

>There comes a point in my estimation that one has to grasp at the doors of experience, and I don't mean through drugs.
quite true.

>in other words, we need to become the philosopher kings that Plato spoke about, except we need to become philosopher wizards.
this also. today it seems that political activism and radicalism is in, but it's going to lead to such a fucking comedown, i think. it's going to be absolutely crushing when the bloom comes off the rose. wisdom is better, by far. but it's hard to come by. philosopher-wizardry is indeed a noble goal to strive for, perhaps our current times of trouble will lead to a return of that, as it was perhaps in the old days, when you looked for some old Stoic or a Cook Ting to teach us how to care for life again. the Axial Age also was a time of great disruption, but it was an age of great psychology also. and those old discoveries still hold up pretty well today, if you can keep your brain from leaking out of your skull thinking about it...

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>This in my appraisal is the ultimate fate of all wordy philosophy, and why the purest form of art (well second purest, as we don't know the keys to regain magic) is literature supplemented by years of experience (see: Goethe and Shakespeare).
this. much of this and more. i'm re-reading pic rel again and it's absolutely rocking my socks off.

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Mad scientist monks, yes, in the sense that we need to experiment & experience. But this is not a process that will take a decade, nor even a mere lifetime. We haven't even regained full knowledge of permaculture, and we expect to have at our doorstep the avenue towards alchemy and magic. It can never be that simple.

But we must be trendsetters and trailblazers.

>there's some kind of incredible oscillation to this, in levels that we really are ill-equipped to talk about sometimes. it's one of the things i like about reading some of Wilber's earlier work, for instance; for him the grail prize was always the unfolding of consciousness itself. it's sort of Hegelian and sort of Jungian at the same time, which is interesting - and no Freud, no continental stuff. Wilber's favorite guys are Plotinus and Aurobindo and maybe it was because i read him early on that he made an impression on me that never quite went away.

Wilber is certainly useful for understanding the progression of history within the last 15,000 years, and in understanding some of the progressions and meanderings of human justifications; but what of the world before that? What of the potential eras of magic? I think that again we can analyze history and archaeology all we want, but we will never break through the doors of perception until we realize that history is the result of magic breaking down. Eventually all of our human science will lead us to a dead end (we are 90% of the way there, in my view).

Consciousness lies not in analyzing history, but in creating new reality. We must become as gods, wizards.

>the modernization of the unconscious, as it were...streamlining it into its most efficient channels. but this is to be uncharitable perhaps to the treasury of Christian mysticism that exists, and the Sufis, and much much else.
There is certainly some fragments of wisdom within every religion, but the precise problem with all religion lies within the fact that it is implicit or explicit dogma. And dogma necessarily leads to the breakdown of freedom and magic. When wizdom is contextualized through dogma, the dogma overwhelms it, and the wisdom is essentially coalified.

god this is bad writing

>Consciousness lies not in analyzing history, but in creating new reality. We must become as gods, wizards.
well when you think about the influence that single minds can have on history it's hard not to believe that there isn't something not unlike black magic going on in the work of the great philosophers. Hegel was apparently quite steeped in Rosicrucianism and other things, and his influence on the past three centuries has been enormous. there is a whole tradition around Taoism of alchemy also. i personally never found it to be as interesting as just the poetic genius of Laozi himself, but they're not really separable either; the alchemical stuff is part of the poetry and vice-versa, and the Taoists are about as unironically sorcerous as one could hope to find in China. the Tao Te Ching to me really is as close to a description of fundamental ontology as i think i would ever expect to find, it's one of the greatest works ever written. seems to have worked pretty well too for approx 6 gorillion Chinese over a few millennia.

the Purple Sweaters in philosophy are not handed out lightly.

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>three centuries
math is fun. it's probably time for me to pack it in for the night.

>There is certainly some fragments of wisdom within every religion, but the precise problem with all religion lies within the fact that it is implicit or explicit dogma. And dogma necessarily leads to the breakdown of freedom and magic. When wizdom is contextualized through dogma, the dogma overwhelms it, and the wisdom is essentially coalified.

it can therefore be thought of that modern (within the past 20,000 years) forms of religion are all vestigial remains of the experimentation of magic; as we have lost the old signs and incantations and experiences, and instead made-do with petty superstition and dogma. And within each century a new religion is formed (or rather, scrambled up) from the discombobulations of previous religions; the meaning and magic is gone, and only dogma remains.

true, I haven't gotten much sleep

>well when you think about the influence that single minds can have on history it's hard not to believe that there isn't something not unlike black magic going on in the work of the great philosophers. Hegel was apparently quite steeped in Rosicrucianism and other things, and his influence on the past three centuries has been enormous. there is a whole tradition around Taoism of alchemy also. i personally never found it to be as interesting as just the poetic genius of Laozi himself, but they're not really separable either; the alchemical stuff is part of the poetry and vice-versa, and the Taoists are about as unironically sorcerous as one could hope to find in China. the Tao Te Ching to me really is as close to a description of fundamental ontology as i think i would ever expect to find, it's one of the greatest works ever written. seems to have worked pretty well too for approx 6 gorillion Chinese over a few millennia.
>
>the Purple Sweaters in philosophy are not handed out lightly.

True, the revolutionary potential of the individual must never be minimized, and of course some philosophical works are more magical than others. My main issue with the Tao Te Ching and others like it, is that while they certainly are inspirational, they are not nearly comprehensive nor specific enough. They point at the magical reality without precisely showing you it. It's more of a tease than anything truly instructive.

but we march on

>True, the revolutionary potential of the individual must never be minimized, and of course some philosophical works are more magical than others. My main issue with the Tao Te Ching and others like it, is that while they certainly are inspirational, they are not nearly comprehensive nor specific enough. They point at the magical reality without precisely showing you it. It's more of a tease than anything truly instructive.

Another problem that i have is that they are written in the tone that the reality we have is truly all that we will ever have, rather than suggesting that this reality is merely a shadow of the potential.

Plato's cave is more instructive than anything from eastern philosophy, and it's a mere short story.

also:
>seems to have worked pretty well too for approx 6 gorillion Chinese over a few millennia.
well the Chinese are more Confucianist than Taoist. I WISH the majority of Chinese were Taoist. It's why I respect the more pagan Shinto Japanese

also I will never forgive eastern philosophy for containing the trappings of what would inevitably become New-Age-ism so that is one clear sign that eastern philosophy is a dead-end

or rather, was always to be a dead end

Plato's cool as hell but East and West can't be usefully ranked imho. Even Schopenhauer was a die-hard as anyone about Kant but his favorite reading was the Upanishads.

The Chinese philosophers are practical and socially oriented; they give you cool, fluid heuristics for solving problems. The Indians, who also give you the Buddha, have all the time in the world for exhaustive and encyclopedic metaphysics, and they don't skimp on the portions. The books I read about Hinduism just go on and on and on forever, it's quite charming. The Greeks are technical, rational, scientific - they like things solid and firm. Three great traditions still holding up well to this day. With Zen in there too as a wonderful hybrid...

Then the moderns, the French and the Germans...just so darn much to read.

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>Even Schopenhauer was a die-hard as anyone about Kant but his favorite reading was the Upanishads.
let's not categorize the Vedics as "eastern", when they were an Indo-European priestly class

>The Chinese philosophers are practical and socially oriented
That can be good or bad; bad in the sense that it breeds mindless conformity, or lack of experimentation.

>let's not categorize the Vedics as "eastern", when they were an Indo-European priestly class
Meh, okay, but I think the Indians pretty much have the claim to it today. I'll grant you that there's a common root, but Homer belongs to Greece in the way Vyasa belongs to India, I think.

>That can be good or bad; bad in the sense that it breeds mindless conformity, or lack of experimentation.
I suppose, but there's no culture in the world truly exempt from this. I actually find Confucian philosophy wonderfully compassionate and not at all authoritarian; the Analects are full of warm-heartedness. Check out Herbert Fingarette's 'The Secular as Sacred,' in particular the chapter called 'The Way Without a Crossroads.' The junyi gentleman-scholar is one of my favorite philosophical ideals. True, it leads to the tyranny of the civil servant, perhaps, but the same can be said of Hegel. It's unnecessary to my mind to concentrate too much on the negative, everything can be reduced to its worst aspects in this way.

>Meh, okay, but I think the Indians pretty much have the claim to it today.
which is why it devolved into superstitious idol dolls and petty ritualisms

A petty civilization reinterprets metaphor as reality

>I actually find Confucian philosophy wonderfully compassionate and not at all authoritarian

To me that's a problem; you ever heard the phrase, "kill with kindness"?

>It's unnecessary to my mind to concentrate too much on the negative, everything can be reduced to its worst aspects in this way.
Well true, but that's also why I'm an advocate of genocide so not really applicable in my case

>which is why it devolved into superstitious idol dolls and petty ritualisms
come on. like the Catholic Church doesn't do this also? this is too uncharitable to me. rituals are a part of every practice.

>To me that's a problem; you ever heard the phrase, "kill with kindness?"
sure, and modern Chinese soft cultural power also. it's a part of statecraft, you can make charm offensives and make people prisoners of gifts. but again, Europeans do this too: we love giving loans and owning people forever. it doesn't mean it's not horrible, just that it's universal.

>Well true, but that's also why I'm an advocate of genocide so not really applicable in my case
why are you an advocate of genocide? even Rwanda isn't pro-genocide anymore, Paul Kagame wants to make his country look like Singapore and build hotels in it. what's the point of genocide?

>come on. like the Catholic Church doesn't do this also? this is too uncharitable to me. rituals are a part of every practice.
lol you do realize I'm the wizard guy above who despises all religion?

rituals are modern nonsense

>sure, and modern Chinese soft cultural power also. it's a part of statecraft, you can make charm offensives and make people prisoners of gifts. but again, Europeans do this too: we love giving loans and owning people forever. it doesn't mean it's not horrible, just that it's universal.
It's universal because humanity is regressing. Has been for millennia.

>why are you an advocate of genocide?
Why is nature an advocate of genocide? Ever heard of the Black Plague? Am I to conclude that nature or God or whatever anthropomorphic being you wanna outsource spirituality to, is just a big dark meanie?

Nah. Nature is completely a manifestation of magic. Of cause and effect.

It's not as if I'm a willy-nilly advocate of genocide. Nor am I discriminatory. 99% of people need to go. But I'm not gonna be the one to do it, no sirree. They're all gonna kill themselves (with nature doing in a good portion)

I'm surprised that you, a fan of the Vedics who rightly saw that divinity of warfare, finds issue with genocide. You need perspective my dude.

anyway I'm tired as heck, goodnight

sleep well user. ty for the interesting conversation.

Bump

...

apropos of nothing perhaps but this is pretty interesting and Koestler is definitely one of the more colorful intellectuals of the 20C. i'm reading this and some of AK's other works on Wilber's recommendation, because holons and holarchies go quite well with Girardian stuff also.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler

might warrant a new thread later on but for now we can continue to Say Things on Yea Forums and enjoy our brief, evanescent, confusing and mostly harmless lives.

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while we're here, a short list of some contributors to monistic meme-smithy down through the ages who seem like they would get along fairly well (or perhaps least productively badly) with each other, should they be forced to spend the weekend drinking heavily in a snowed-in Alpine lodge:
>Girard
>Wilber
>Leibniz
>Deleuze
>Spinoza
>Koestler
>JBP
>Land

& whomstoever. doubtless many others i am forgetting.

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forgot to include Hegel, derp, and also Herman Hesse and his Glass Bead Game.

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and monistic is obviously the wrong word to use to describe some of those guys, don't roast me too hard. i'm just smashing words together like a goofball as usual.

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girardfag, what do you think of yang? is he the accelerationist candidate we need right now?

not really sure user. i've been meaning to listen to his Rogan podcast and he seems like he would be an /acc-approved guy, my own sense is that the political system in the West is so godawfully fucked these days that it seems to me that not putting your futurist heart out there to get rolled over by a steamroller is the thing to do.

i don't even know if /acc belongs in democratic politics, it works best as a critique of them but when it comes to statecraft the successful models - the ones supplied by Land, at least - seem to work best when they have a system that isn't already completely divided from within and fundamentally mapped out on co-ordinates that are virtually impossible to cross. the two guys that Land seems to admire the most are Lee Kuan Yew and Paul Kagame, both of whom inherited pretty weak initial cards and are graded on whether or not they can successfully parlay into making a home for capital-as-progress. again tho, this is Old Nick. i don't know what Young Nick would make of Yang (or even what Old Nick thinks either, for that matter).

he was Tweeting with dark glee yesterday over the inevitable collision between LBTQ interests and Muslim interests, saying that this was the self-propelled ruination of the Cathedral and so on. that may be the case, and in the continual fallout from the great Rectification of Names that are these old Leftist axioms coming up for review there is a possibility that /acc-inspired discourse may bubble up into the public conversation, but i'm doubtful. even if Bernie wins next year his brand of socialism obviously will bear virtually no resemblance at all to anything you'll find in the /acc reading.

i think /acc works best as critique of neoliberalism, of the kind of moral Keynesian thought inherent to party politics, the need to continually seduce and buffet people's opinions around. once you realize that this is all well and truly Fucking Bullshit and that the process which governs it all is radically indifferent - a sort of Marxist Tao, if you will - it seems to me that a couple of saner options unfold: a personal cultivation, to win back those parts of your soul utterly co-opted by the Spectacle, and perhaps politics at the micro rather than the macro-scale. or i guess you can move to China and begin shilling Xi Jinping Thought as hard as you possibly can, but this i think too would be a mistake.
>tldr girardfag says things
>what are they tho
>nobody knows
>like the others

i'll listen to the Yang podcast perhaps and get back to this thread (or a later one). for now i just think nothing like /acc is possible while the Wars of Religion are on. i'm still trying to extract myself from rage zombie status in my own way over this. someday we'll break out of this ludicrous trap we find ourselves in, but i think my feel today is to let the truly fucking stupid shit devour itself and not try and save cynics and assholes from the Teaching Moments they can only discover on their own.

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this is how i would poll the crowd. somewhere in between these options is an Event. and my own contribution comes in the form of leaving the cursor blinking on the screen forever and staring at it until i start to get the eye-twitch.

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A very apt description of this whole shitshow. Leaving the cursor blinking on "Start New Game". Nice

>The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

that's how i would like to see the parties voting in 2020: pro-Eternal Recurrence or against it. a true philosophical election, that one!

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>tfw what is playing you makes it to Level-2 and is killed by funky alien plant

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holy shit, is anyone else listening to JRE right now? Rogan, Dorsey, Tim Pool and Gadde. is he basically destined to become the only place in the world where we can have interesting panel discussions?
>no
why not have Zizek and JBP on his show?
>because you're dumb

still pretty fucking cool tho.

Well, how do we even start these trendsetters and trailblazers, without reenacting the flaws and faults (aka widespread social chaos and turns towards violent radicalism) of the 1960s burst of experimentation?

i also think i'd like to see a Wilber-JBP talk at some point too, doesn't seem like it would be that hard to arrange. as much fun as it is watching Peterson talk with people he disagrees with (Harris, Zizek) given how much overlap there is between JBP and KW (they both like Piaget, for instance) it seems like it would be a productive talk.

also not really sure why Wilber doesn't mention Spinoza either, there are surely parallels between the Enneads and Ethics that would appeal to him.

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will post this here also b/c if we cannot have fun with the Collapse (or is the Rectification of Names?) then there is no point at all.

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>Well, how do we even start these trendsetters and trailblazers, without reenacting the flaws and faults (aka widespread social chaos and turns towards violent radicalism) of the 1960s burst of experimentation?

The 1960s, and its fruits of New Age spiritualism, were a direct result of manic breaks with traditionalism, in a post-war world of seemingly no objective values. The 1960s should be seen as what happens when society becomes a tabula rasa; in this way the spirituality of the 1960s is akin to the archaic, primordial man. Therefore it is not an advanced form of spirituality at all. Inevitably it turns inward instead of projecting outward; thus New Age-ism is born, where one is encouraged to let go of all self-improving stressors and the world itself.

If we are to have any hope of breaking out of this 20,000 year cycle of superstition and scientism, we need to first understand our connection with nature, and regain the spirit of manipulating the world around us. Only by first mastering the elements of the current world can we even hope to create something new. It will require bravery and virtue, and the resolve to cut down anyone and anything that stands in your way. Only a select few people even have a clue of the implications of what I'm speaking of, and an even smaller portion would actually dare to go through with it.

Girardfag, how do you find these books?

which ones? Arthur Koestler? in the long run everything connects to everything else, Wilber likes him and so i thought i'd give him a read also. he's pretty cool! start reading any one guy and eventually you'll want to wind up reading the guys they read, that's how you explore the great Terra Incognita of theory, imho.

i just want to say also that i'm watching the JRE podcast with Tim Pool and Twitter and Pool has done basically everything short of taking down Elon Musk's flamethrower off the wall and lighting that place on fire. he's going absolutely fucking ham on these guys. i'm going to take a page out of Trump's book and start calling him Chainsaw Tim or something. what a fucking savage.

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also apropos of nothing i miss Mystikos and the Neoplatonism threads.

hey Mystikos if you read this at some point come back and bring some based Neoplatonic greentext back to the board one of these days.

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also if you are a total noob to philosophy and looking for something accessible to begin with i usually shill for this one also. gives you a pretty nice overview of the whole picture, afterwards you can figure out what parts appeal to you the most.

when in doubt, the Greeks.

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>you can see the dilemma: a truly liberal society stands, can only stand, for a kind of libertarianism that invites socialists to ask it questions it can't answer. said socialists in turn inevitably wind up taking the show on the road and we wind up back in the 20C, like Groundhog Day, over and over again.

love this. can i get a book rec that discusses this?

Well, then how do we break out of that 20k cycle, considering that has been the modus operandi for humanity for all of its organized history. Also, how do we encourage this trailblazing without engaging in a tabula rasa?
Thanks!

iirc The Mote In God's Eye had something like this if you want fiction, but it's been a while since i read that, long before philosophy stuff.

for time-travel there is only one Uncle Nick, check out ufblog and Templexity.

Uncle Nick, ufblog, Templexity

I have no idea what you are talking about

Uncle Nick is Nick Land, crown prince of acceleration. cyberpunk whiz kid in his younger days turned crusty Sinophile in age. truly one of a kind and sadly an important philosopher today in our dark times.

Ufblog is where he's writing a god-tier book on Kant and Bitcoin, and Templexity is another of his books on capital, modernity and time. I tend to post about him a lot.

>Well, then how do we break out of that 20k cycle, considering that has been the modus operandi for humanity for all of its organized history.
check out Varg Vikernes/ThuleanPerspective on youtube

Bump

serial killing is not natural, read some books.