10 Comments

"AR2 is very deliberately not focused on ideology so much as temperament and character."

In a sense, you're describing Burkean conservatism. Scruton noted that conservatism isn't an ideology but rather an attitude. Thus, its contents vary across societies. In contrast, the politics of the left is object-oriented. Left-wing politics is directed towards achieving a particular end in every given society (stateless and classless society, national liberation, pick your favorite left-wing cause), whereas conservatism is a politics without purpose. Conservatism conceives of politics as we normally conceive of friendship, that is, something necessary whose function adapts to the context. For this reason, AR1 was psychologically rather left-wing in that it was singularly aimed at utopia (ethnostate) without regard for constitutional or national realities. However, if we conceive of AR1 (in its respectable form) and AR2 as a single intellectual development, it's all in a sense basic bitch conservatism because it's responding adaptively to the challenges facing specifically American society in a democratic context by generating mythic ideas to shape metapolitical discourse. So, I suppose you might be more temperamentally conservative than you suggest...

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this is a galaxy brained take, love it

Want to come on my pod?

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I'd love to!

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The ol’ “we have work to do” at the end of his article made me laugh. There is like a spectrum going on here, where there exist two extremes of “politically impossible.”

You’ve got one side that can’t take itself seriously if it tried, with memes and trolling and juvenile garbage (maybe Fuentes?) and then another extreme that takes itself TOO seriously, by standing aside these long-dead modalities of severe traditionalism, strict National Socialism, etc. Neither of these extremes is actually real. You can hit keys on a keyboard and/or worship a historical regime that is impossible to reconcile with the modern condition— both of these modalities are caricatures that prevent wealth-holding Elites from taking any of it seriously.

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One good idea, a way of differentiating from Alt Right 1.0 and everything that came before it, is to explicitly disavow eliminationism. That is, racial/ethnic cleansing is a bad idea and it’s not going to happen. Non-whites and Jews living legally in America, Europe and Australia can stay. There’s not going to be a white ethnostate, unless it’s really really tiny. Whites are going to learn to live and prosper as minorities, when necessary. There needs to be a pro-white politics that acknowledges all these facts.

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Again, another really fascinating article.

I’m doing an IRL meet-up with friends today, and I’m going to tell them about your work.

It was interesting how you showed a picture of Apu. He wasn’t around in 2016, but I feel he’s an improvement on Pepe because the way he’s drawn far more represents the underdog, the traditional protagonist in Western storytelling. I connect with the character of Apu/Helper in a way I didn’t with Pepe.

I think classic Pepe has declined because of the copyright issue, but the two ‘sides’ of Pepe are personified in Apu and Groyper. The Groypers are basically the ‘chudification’ of the online right, his obesity and smugness kind of personifying this. Whereas Apu represents the identifiable hero.

I think we should use Apu for our faction like Groyper is for Fuentes’ movement.

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Alt Right 2.0 will fail because you can’t recreate spontaneity. It’s like trying to bring back disco.

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How does your project relate to whatever the people around Palladium, Red Scare, Passage, the BAPists, Urbit, etc, are doing? They seem pretty well aligned on the liberal character, high openness kind of thing, and they actually have fun and make art.

Also, you should obviously engage with LessWrong / the EA movement

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I might be going on the Motte podcast to talk to TracingWoodgrains

Interested in talking to Anna K for sure but not a fan of BAPism

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Why not a fan BAPism

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