So, according to this theres two reasons why liberals could take authority: 1) The ancien regime didnt fight back soon enough 2) Their criticism of the priests was convenient for the nobility. I dont see why this makes you optimistic for trying the same, since reactionaries have neither. Retire All Government Employees was invented to be something like 2), in exactly the way an economist would come up with, but you disagree with that in another thread here.
Its also not like this hasnt been tried. Anyone acculturated to the mainstream will try argument as the first line of attack (at least until the last decade or so), and at least initially wont use BS arguments that they dont fall for themselves. In fact, even people who already explictly believe that this doesnt work, often continue to do it, because someone is Wrong On The Internet (or the news, or the family dinner, etc). The right had figures like youre calling for. Not as many as the left, but enough, if its more than a pure numbers game, and sure they werent reactionaries exactly, but they agreed on many points, and didnt exactly win on those either. And the exact reactionary ideas were around also, if with fewer defenders. Moldbug had some new ideas, but not in the realm of object-level things to convince people of. Im not even sure there are fewer reactionaries playing for authority today, in an absolute sense.
I don't recall disagreeing with RAGE in that thread; I disagreed with the idea of "breaking things stupidly", which I took to mean "without any attempt to be thorough about it or to set up a viable alternative". In terms of analogy with 1789: don't slap the king, nobility and priests around just enough to convince them that you are a threat and then do nothing, but root them out and replace them as well.
To say that I am calling for more argument of the kind that goes on interminably on the internet is also a misunderstanding. UR wasn't about arguing with every shitlib delusion (I have enough experience with bona fide delusionals to know that this is counterproductive), it was about figuring out a way to abolish the administrative class and special-rights kakistocracy and run things a lot better afterwards. Had this project been continued along the lines suggested by Moldbug (Revipedia, Antiversity, etc.) and improved upon by correction of his errors, instead of regressing into Renaissance Fayre larping and then into alt-right populist slop, we would have a lot more to offer those in high places now looking to us for practical ideas.
>Government employees won't resign even if you pay them to leave, that's how obsessed they are with their jobs.
>>I don't agree with Moldbug's nicey-nicey approach to the governing class (though it would certainly be prudent to buy some of them off, most are going to experience the restoration as a disaster)
...isnt a disagreement on all points, but if "most will experience the restoration as a disaster", then youre not the more convenient option for them.
>calling for more argument of the kind that goes on interminably on the internet
This is just an example of the more general willingness. Point taken about the "figuring out" though.
I thought Nigel Carlsbad and Jack Vien were doing a good job correcting some neoreactionary errors and setting a high intellectual standard. Then the one decided to vanish from the internet just after the publication of ROPS Vol.1, and the other seems to have followed suit after realizing that his work was not gaining much traction (tbh I know exactly how he feels, though I'm not out of hopium yet).
The link to that NonZionism post perhaps requires some explanation, since I dare say it just looks like a load of e-drama. NZ did a long video with Dave Greene in which he tried to put the case for internal quality control and error correction among dissidents, only for Greene to poo-poo the idea (literally saying he didn't have time) while his commenters treated it as an outright enemy attack. I thought this was a big mistake, but decided to make positive suggestions rather than add to the drama, which is what inspired my post on taking authority (and this one as well, since it's just a belated extension of the argument.)
Without going into details, I've seen NZ around online before and have a fairly good idea of how he ended up in his present disillusioned state. It lines up with what he says about himself on podcasts etc., so for what it's worth, I don't view him as hostile or deceptive.
One respect in which I can see where Dave is coming from is that the person saying "ackshually you're wrong" is always going to be seen as an irritant at best and a concern troll at worst. The point he misses is that this is a structural weakness of our medium, in that we are all independents who don't have editors to correct our bloopers without risking bad blood or drama. If there's one idea that could change this game, it's the "Dissident Wikipedia" mentioned in my other post, and I think it will become all the more necessary as search engines decline and LLMs are programmed against hatefacts (I would go ahead and do it myself, but I live in a more repressive jurisdiction than most, and my poetic project is much more time-consuming than my posting frequency might suggest).
Things have been quiet around here lately, but rest assured that I'm not giving up, and will stay the course until I've said what I have to say. Thanks for your kind words about my work and for sharing it with others.
This comment smells to me of the very sort of warrior-worship that I criticized in the post.
The only point that I can make much sense of is that not all societies have placed 'priests' above 'warriors' (using these terms in a wide, non-literal sense, to denote all authority-wielding and power-wielding classes respectively). Obviously this is true and I concede it; my statement on the traditional position of 'priests' (edited for clarity) was based on medieval Europe and the usual Indo-European pattern before it, but of course there have been deviations from this pattern. Yet these did not abolish the social force of authority; just look at the position of rhapsodes and sophists in ancient Greece, or that of seiðr practitioners in Norse society. Going further afield, it's telling that both China and Japan show examples of warrior classes evolving (or degenerating, as you might say) into scholarly elites.
In any case, dissidents do not have the luxury of arguing over priests and warriors as if selecting character stats for a videogame. Through no choice of their own, they find themselves in a position that grants them many opportunities to take authority, and almost no chance at all of taking power. Yet in a manner queerly reminiscent of gender dysphorics, they choose to despise what is within their reach and obsessively identify with what they cannot become, ending up not as self-made warriors but as botched and delusional 'priests'. (In any case I propose to drop the non-literal usage of 'priests', and replace it with 'knowers' or 'teachers' or something; it gets too confusing, especially since we haven't even begun to talk about the spiritual restoration that is our only real hope in the long run.)
P.S. Don't think I don't know that the real literary reference for the right, unacknowledged because it's so dweebish and cringe, is not J.R.R. Tolkien but Robert E. Howard.
Even if that statement could be proven true, there's no need to lie about it, still less to give up on telling the truth. First, because it's insane to concentrate on an artificial metric like GDP when fertility is crashing, our countries are being handed over to strangers, burdensome and destructive government officials and client groups are multiplying, etc.; it's like trying to fatten the cow when its flesh is cankered. Second, because we can afford to admit the virtues of a net-vicious system once we break loose from shallow oppositional polemics.
I can't see any good in erratic, 'idiotic' actions committed without the guidance of wisdom; all they can accomplish is to convince people that the devil they know is better than any alternative. If that turns out to be the end result of Trump 2.0, then we shall have to add another loss to the ledger in the democratist casino.
Well, while Biden and Harris were "messing with the fat supply" as you put it, US GDP was still growing according to the official data. One of the reasons why Trump is in office right now is that people trusted their experience and perception over this artificial and inadequate metric – as some of the mass media belatedly admitted:
I don't agree with Moldbug's nicey-nicey approach to the governing class (though it would certainly be prudent to buy some of them off, most are going to experience the restoration as a disaster), but when the idiotic breaking by the right extends to society as a whole then it can only profit the left. Since it's usually the left that breaks, and the right that enables it by putting back together, a more effective 'Machiavellian' approach to that – if a painful one – would be to leave the left in power breaking things while the right concentrates on taking authority. That way there's no confusion about where the responsibility lies.
So, according to this theres two reasons why liberals could take authority: 1) The ancien regime didnt fight back soon enough 2) Their criticism of the priests was convenient for the nobility. I dont see why this makes you optimistic for trying the same, since reactionaries have neither. Retire All Government Employees was invented to be something like 2), in exactly the way an economist would come up with, but you disagree with that in another thread here.
Its also not like this hasnt been tried. Anyone acculturated to the mainstream will try argument as the first line of attack (at least until the last decade or so), and at least initially wont use BS arguments that they dont fall for themselves. In fact, even people who already explictly believe that this doesnt work, often continue to do it, because someone is Wrong On The Internet (or the news, or the family dinner, etc). The right had figures like youre calling for. Not as many as the left, but enough, if its more than a pure numbers game, and sure they werent reactionaries exactly, but they agreed on many points, and didnt exactly win on those either. And the exact reactionary ideas were around also, if with fewer defenders. Moldbug had some new ideas, but not in the realm of object-level things to convince people of. Im not even sure there are fewer reactionaries playing for authority today, in an absolute sense.
I don't recall disagreeing with RAGE in that thread; I disagreed with the idea of "breaking things stupidly", which I took to mean "without any attempt to be thorough about it or to set up a viable alternative". In terms of analogy with 1789: don't slap the king, nobility and priests around just enough to convince them that you are a threat and then do nothing, but root them out and replace them as well.
To say that I am calling for more argument of the kind that goes on interminably on the internet is also a misunderstanding. UR wasn't about arguing with every shitlib delusion (I have enough experience with bona fide delusionals to know that this is counterproductive), it was about figuring out a way to abolish the administrative class and special-rights kakistocracy and run things a lot better afterwards. Had this project been continued along the lines suggested by Moldbug (Revipedia, Antiversity, etc.) and improved upon by correction of his errors, instead of regressing into Renaissance Fayre larping and then into alt-right populist slop, we would have a lot more to offer those in high places now looking to us for practical ideas.
>Government employees won't resign even if you pay them to leave, that's how obsessed they are with their jobs.
>>I don't agree with Moldbug's nicey-nicey approach to the governing class (though it would certainly be prudent to buy some of them off, most are going to experience the restoration as a disaster)
...isnt a disagreement on all points, but if "most will experience the restoration as a disaster", then youre not the more convenient option for them.
>calling for more argument of the kind that goes on interminably on the internet
This is just an example of the more general willingness. Point taken about the "figuring out" though.
I thought Nigel Carlsbad and Jack Vien were doing a good job correcting some neoreactionary errors and setting a high intellectual standard. Then the one decided to vanish from the internet just after the publication of ROPS Vol.1, and the other seems to have followed suit after realizing that his work was not gaining much traction (tbh I know exactly how he feels, though I'm not out of hopium yet).
The link to that NonZionism post perhaps requires some explanation, since I dare say it just looks like a load of e-drama. NZ did a long video with Dave Greene in which he tried to put the case for internal quality control and error correction among dissidents, only for Greene to poo-poo the idea (literally saying he didn't have time) while his commenters treated it as an outright enemy attack. I thought this was a big mistake, but decided to make positive suggestions rather than add to the drama, which is what inspired my post on taking authority (and this one as well, since it's just a belated extension of the argument.)
Without going into details, I've seen NZ around online before and have a fairly good idea of how he ended up in his present disillusioned state. It lines up with what he says about himself on podcasts etc., so for what it's worth, I don't view him as hostile or deceptive.
One respect in which I can see where Dave is coming from is that the person saying "ackshually you're wrong" is always going to be seen as an irritant at best and a concern troll at worst. The point he misses is that this is a structural weakness of our medium, in that we are all independents who don't have editors to correct our bloopers without risking bad blood or drama. If there's one idea that could change this game, it's the "Dissident Wikipedia" mentioned in my other post, and I think it will become all the more necessary as search engines decline and LLMs are programmed against hatefacts (I would go ahead and do it myself, but I live in a more repressive jurisdiction than most, and my poetic project is much more time-consuming than my posting frequency might suggest).
Things have been quiet around here lately, but rest assured that I'm not giving up, and will stay the course until I've said what I have to say. Thanks for your kind words about my work and for sharing it with others.
This comment smells to me of the very sort of warrior-worship that I criticized in the post.
The only point that I can make much sense of is that not all societies have placed 'priests' above 'warriors' (using these terms in a wide, non-literal sense, to denote all authority-wielding and power-wielding classes respectively). Obviously this is true and I concede it; my statement on the traditional position of 'priests' (edited for clarity) was based on medieval Europe and the usual Indo-European pattern before it, but of course there have been deviations from this pattern. Yet these did not abolish the social force of authority; just look at the position of rhapsodes and sophists in ancient Greece, or that of seiðr practitioners in Norse society. Going further afield, it's telling that both China and Japan show examples of warrior classes evolving (or degenerating, as you might say) into scholarly elites.
In any case, dissidents do not have the luxury of arguing over priests and warriors as if selecting character stats for a videogame. Through no choice of their own, they find themselves in a position that grants them many opportunities to take authority, and almost no chance at all of taking power. Yet in a manner queerly reminiscent of gender dysphorics, they choose to despise what is within their reach and obsessively identify with what they cannot become, ending up not as self-made warriors but as botched and delusional 'priests'. (In any case I propose to drop the non-literal usage of 'priests', and replace it with 'knowers' or 'teachers' or something; it gets too confusing, especially since we haven't even begun to talk about the spiritual restoration that is our only real hope in the long run.)
P.S. Don't think I don't know that the real literary reference for the right, unacknowledged because it's so dweebish and cringe, is not J.R.R. Tolkien but Robert E. Howard.
Even if that statement could be proven true, there's no need to lie about it, still less to give up on telling the truth. First, because it's insane to concentrate on an artificial metric like GDP when fertility is crashing, our countries are being handed over to strangers, burdensome and destructive government officials and client groups are multiplying, etc.; it's like trying to fatten the cow when its flesh is cankered. Second, because we can afford to admit the virtues of a net-vicious system once we break loose from shallow oppositional polemics.
I can't see any good in erratic, 'idiotic' actions committed without the guidance of wisdom; all they can accomplish is to convince people that the devil they know is better than any alternative. If that turns out to be the end result of Trump 2.0, then we shall have to add another loss to the ledger in the democratist casino.
Well, while Biden and Harris were "messing with the fat supply" as you put it, US GDP was still growing according to the official data. One of the reasons why Trump is in office right now is that people trusted their experience and perception over this artificial and inadequate metric – as some of the mass media belatedly admitted:
http://web.archive.org/web/20250328103327/https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464
I don't agree with Moldbug's nicey-nicey approach to the governing class (though it would certainly be prudent to buy some of them off, most are going to experience the restoration as a disaster), but when the idiotic breaking by the right extends to society as a whole then it can only profit the left. Since it's usually the left that breaks, and the right that enables it by putting back together, a more effective 'Machiavellian' approach to that – if a painful one – would be to leave the left in power breaking things while the right concentrates on taking authority. That way there's no confusion about where the responsibility lies.