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The close relationship between some nu-rationalists and the Alternative Right
By nu-rationalists I mean people who hang out at Less Wrong and associated sites.
By Alternative Right, I mean internet people who are too openly racist and sexist even to hang out with the other conservatives.
I keep finding nu-rationalists rubbing shoulders with AltRight people, as well as nerdy futurist AltRighters and it's just completely bizarre to me. When I see the founder of the Extreme Futurist Festival https://twitter.com/RachelHaywire retweeting MyNationalistPony(I swear I am not making this name up) and some AltRighter called Bulbasaur, the walls of reality seem to be breaking down. Or when Less Wrong is willing to go to bat for a crypto-fascist Star Wars fan named Mencius Moldbug http://lesswrong.com/lw/fh4/why_is_mencius_moldbug_so_popular_on_less_wrong/ everything just seems weirder.
I always thought transhumanism was for starry-eyed liberal rationalists and the AltRight was for aging patriarchs and PUA douchebags who are eternally bleakly pessimistic about the modern era. Seeing the two close together is weird.
I mean they are both really white, but in different ways.
Comments
Sounds like the eternally bleakly pessimistic about the modern era part makes them willing to chug transhumanist tripe. Instead of fantasizing about a past that never existed, these fuckers fantasize about a bullshit future where shit works out like a power fantasy for them.
Also, please tell me the cutie mark for MyNationalistPony is... I dunno, what's more 'Murrican, the statue of liberty holding machine guns and smoking a cigar, or a bald eagle wearing a bomber jacket breathing fire?
Trick question.
The most American thing ever is an obese anthropomorphic bald eagle in the Statue of Liberty's dress wearing Uncle Sam's hat that has another non-anthropomorphic bald eagle on one shoulder and a miniature American flag on the other and an iPod that cycles between Amazing Grace and every Beach Boys album ever
No man. We want an image that is a laconic representation of stereotypes, not a grab bag of humor from Tosh.0
Go with the Statue of Liberty.
http://askniggertron.tumblr.com/
http://prejudiceismagic.tumblr.com/
Challengers appear left, right and centre(of the political spectrum). Utopias are fiction, therefore, fiction is utopia. The more you are on the internet, the more lazy you become in the creative aspect, thus you plunder pop culture for your analogies.
>"Ask Lord Niggertron"
That is quite possibly the most puerile thing I have laughed at.
I talked to someone on twitter asking why there was a connection and they said "Both are Internet-centric, topics of interest overlap, reactionaries are natural trolls of rationalists. Rationalism raises questions vanilla/progressive NuRationalism shrinks away from and NuReaction loves. Personally I find NuReason and NuReaction both appallingly stupid. Nice Nihilists seem to have the clearest perspective."
the world of Internet philosophy blogs sounds like a barrel of laughs, I have to say.
As someone with a lot of sympathy for/interest in pessimistic ideas (even if I don't ultimately agree with them), it really disappoints me how often these simpering morons seem to latch onto philosophers or writers whom I find interesting. I guess it's the inner angsty teenager in them, like kids who read Nietzsche and think they "get it," but explaining the fact doesn't make it sting any less.
Also, as far as similarities go, both of them have utterly bass-ackwards economic views and a weird obsession with "Truth" as the philosophical ideal. Both are also born control freaks.
Existentialism and its derivatives are the only philosophical disciplines which aren't kept alive on machines, really.
@JHM Well by pessimistic in this case I meant less "life is dukkha" and more "Things are much worse than they were in my day, and they're just going to get worse because of those damn immigrants and queers. Maybe things will all blow up and it'll go back to the good days when people knew their place". One is an existential groan or at least pretends to be one, while the other is just middle-aged grousing.
Meanwhile Transhumanism seems more optimistic to me in a "things are just getting better, and everything's going faster and faster towards an awesome future, even if things sucked in the past" the two seem incompabtible and further more, even though transhumanists seem very naive and sheltered most of the time, I'd think they'd know better than to hang out with people with outright awful views on a lot of things.
Actually the problem with AltRight people is that as much as they try to pretend otherwise in their rhetoric, they always take the bus straight into crazytown. What they say is "honest inquiry into racial differences" turns into theorizing that the evil Jews control the media and the animalistic blacks need to be transported back to Africa on close inspection. What they say is "Realizing that men and women are different in many ways" turns into "all women that get beaten deserve it". They never actually are disillusioned people, they always have at least one and often many completely insane ass-backwards monstrously stupid views.
True, but the fact that a lot of them use the former as a front for the latter (or so it seems) is still irksome to me, and intellectually dishonest to whit. But I think that the former is certainly more than mere grousing: It is, as you rightfully imply, an appeal to authoritarianism. It tries to explain the nostalgic plaint that the world is in decline with an answer of "social entropy."
I hate reactionaries.
But yes, transhumanism is certainly an optimistic ideology in many senses, but again, there is a control freak attitude: The "mastering" of nature and the elimination of "undesirable traits." Again, the seeds of the fascist appeal to purity.
Tangentially related, but at this very moment I'm in the middle of an argument on a Serbian philosophy forum - it's me and an old hippy who only wants to catch fish all day versus some guy with a rampant superiority complex, a serious hard-on for Nietzsche and Ancient Greece and insane ideas about the rise of nihilism and mediocrity through the death of aristocracy and traditions.
It's really fun.
My best friend is a reacctionary, having an argument with him usually devolves into things were better in the middle-ages.
Not sure what you mean by this. Care to go into more detail?
The reason:
"Alt Right" people like to pretend they have some sort of hidden truth that everyone is too blinded by Political Correctness to see. (see "race realism", their term for what everyone else calls "racism")
"Less Wrongian" people are dedicated to searching for that exact sort of "hidden truth" and so are attracted like moths to a candle flame.
The fact that actually the AltRight stuff is exactly the opposite of rational and that everyone else's received wisdom is in fact perfectly correct only occurs to the people who are actually being rational, which is rather few of them. (Eliezer Yudkowsky actually enumerated the exact problem I have with Less Wrong once, only he was talking about Objectivists: "Let that be a lesson to all of us: Praising "rationality" counts for nothing. Even saying "You must justify your beliefs through Reason, not by agreeing with the Great Leader" just runs a little automatic program that takes whatever the Great Leader says and generates a justification that your fellow followers will view as Reason-able.")
Absolutist philosophy inevitably falls into dead ends, which had been ponited out for a very long time, ever since Diogenes. Although, it's not before existentialism that such beliefs were adopted by a significant amount of philosophers. Right now, the battle against post-modernism (which was inspired by existentialist legacy, among other things) appears outright desperate.
Also, holy shit, BlackHumor is here.
""Alt Right" people like to pretend they have some sort of hidden truth that everyone is too blinded by Political Correctness to see. (see "race realism", their term for what everyone else calls "racism")"
They changed that too, because people caught on. It is now "Human Biodiversity" or HBD. It remains unchanged, otherwise.
Human Biodiversity means racism, but how.
Pffft, I'd take phrenology over that any day. Totes retro.
Fun fact: googling "human biodiveristy" two of the links on the first page are people attacking the idea and pointing out that it's just racism.
There is hope for humanity yet.