The Fumigation Begins

Nick plans to fumigate his comments. Some observations:

1. The ZOG question. The problem with this is it’s a conversation killer. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, but it attracts a conspiratorial element, which is something that could be counterproductive.

2. There is the concern that NRx is losing focus and or quality has declined. Quantity has to some degree declined, but quality more or less is intact. The problem with writing is inertia. Unless you write every day, inertia sets in and it becomes progressively harder to resume, which is sometimes why there may be month-long gaps between posts. Let’s say it takes 1 ‘unit’ of mental energy to write a post. If you skip a day or two, to resume will require 1.5 units, etc. Writing is not something humans were designed to do; evolutionarily speaking, it a low-priority skill, which is why it gets jettisoned as dead weight when unused. Chomsky argues humans have an innate ability to acquire language, but does not make a distinction between speech and writing. But spoken language and written language are like night and day. Writing requires much more precision and specificity than speech, and thus is more mentally taxing. But also, the NRx corpus/canon is nearly complete–at some point, everything that will have to needed be said, will have been said.

3. There is a lot of negativity. Leftism succeeds because it has few generals and lots of soldiers, and thus there is cohesion; the far-right has too many generals. But disagreement and debate, provided it’s in good faith, should not be discouraged too much. For example, I don’t agree with Jordan Peterson completely about the Jungian ‘shadow’, or Person’s critique of postmodernism, but I agree with him about SJWs, gender pronouns, and the need for self-improvement. NRx, being that it’s a form of political philosophy, is open to some degree of interpretation, like all philosophies.

4. I disagree that the alt-right is bad for NRx. The rise of the alt-right means more people are going to be interested in far-right politics in general, which means more interest in NRx, too. It’s like a filter process: the alt-lite is the first filter; maybe 20% of alt-lite people will graduate to the alt-right, and then 5-10% of those will progress to NRx. If the alt-right was siphoning influence from NRx, we would expect traffic to NRx sites to fall, but that is not the case. Traffic to this blog, for example, has grown steadily since early 2016, paralleling the growth of the alt-right. It’s not a zero-sum game.

The alt-right is focused more on activism and action: “save Europe” “end immigration”

The primary focus of NRx is social theory and political philosophy (obv. there is more, but those are the core subjects). Such understanding provides a deeper insight as to how liberalism arises and how to fix it, than just addressing the superficial symptoms instead of the underlying problem. With NRx you also see the synthesis of science with sociology and theology, which you don’t see as often with the alt-right. Science and math concepts can be seen as analogs for the social world, but also the use of scientific rigor and the scientific method as applicable to social problems and the construction of social theory. By science-like, I don’t mean only STEM, but rather the creation of theory.

5. Tech-comm needs to go (at least according to some; this does not reflect my own view). There is a misunderstanding that Nick Land’s accelerationism is an endorsement of thereof. Nick is an accelerationist–not in the spirit of Julian Simon–but in order to accelerate the collapse of civilization, which he believes has been corrupted by capitalism. This is a Marxian critique. What I like about tech-comm is that in terms of implementation it’s pragmatic, meaning it’s something an individual can do, and also because it relates to HBD (regarding wealth of nations). It’s much easier to create a company or buy a tech stock than it is to change a culture or create a new form of politics.