Your Journey to the Alt-Right.

[Mr. Tea]

I can see how that post might look like an endorsement of the alt-right worldview, although I hope it's clear I don't subscribe to that. What I meant was more or less what poetix said, but without the necessity of it being reactionary. So "cucked" can be taken to indicate a position based on belief or even wish-fulfillment, and a strong element of consensus and in-group belonging, of being part of an ideological and cultural tribe. "Based" is then a pragmatic, evidence-based (whence the term?) approach, especially if it puts you in conflict with the prevailing opinion.

So in this formulation, if your family, your social circle and your work contacts are all Fox viewers who are convinced covid-19 was made in China in a lab funded by Bill Gates and George Soros, the based position would be to reject that.

Note that it's a very asymmetry axis, since very few people would consider themselves cucked, and most of us consider ourselves based, regardless of what ideology we actually subscribe to.

 

[poetix]

The neurotic based, now I think about it, are likewise those who are unable fully to abide by the libidinal contract of their position - so they see themselves as playing with the adversarial, conspiratorial language of the far right, cheekily or naughtily deploying its memes, keywords, dogwhistles and so on, without being accountably committed to its worldview. Many people's journey to the far right is a journey from a neurotic-based position (tee-hee, we're going to tweak the noses of the mindless sheeple who think scientific racism is baaad!) to a paranoid-based position. There's a certain inevitability about it.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The neurotic based, now I think about it, are likewise those who are unable fully to abide by the libidinal contract of their position - so they see themselves as playing with the adversarial, conspiratorial language of the far right, cheekily or naughtily deploying its memes, keywords, dogwhistles and so on, without being accountably committed to its worldview. Many people's journey to the far right is a journey from a neurotic-based position (tee-hee, we're going to tweak the noses of the mindless sheeple who think scientific racism is baaad!) to a paranoid-based position. There's a certain inevitability about it.

Who do you see as making up this constituency? The 'dirtbag left'? Tankies? Anti-idpol socialism-bro's?

 

[catalog]

Is based a bit like woke but for right wing?

 

[luka]

Yeah, but they stole it off lil b which I think is an act of violence and sacrilege which should be avenged if there truly is a based god

 

[poetix]

I mean the example who comes most immediately to mind is Justin Murphy, but he's a bit singular and I'm not sure I could make a case for his being representative of a constituency. The main feature would be accepting, as an initial premise, the based/cucked distinction, and then talking jokily about the Cathedral (or some other reactionary term of art) as a name for the conformist or unthinking tendencies within left moral culture, which then leads you towards seeing the flouting of that culture's norms as the kind of transgression which opens a path towards the real.

 

[catalog]

I always thought I should really like lil b but I really don't, never been able to get into him.

So this based/cucked paranoid/neurotic quadrant, it's a fallacy anyway you say? A right wing fantasy? Cos it presupposes a real, which we can never have?

I've never read lacan, only a couple of short zizeks

 

[poetix]

I'm not trying to make the argument that the (mostly social and discursive) norms of left moral culture are intrinsically good in themselves, or that they should never be flouted, or that anyone who does flout them is on a slippery slope to fascism; it's acceptance of the background premise that adherence to that culture is cucked, a state of delusion from which one should seek to free oneself by becoming redpilled, that I think is characteristic of the position.

 

[catalog]

So there's a correct way to transgress the norms of the culture?

 

[poetix]

I do think we can - and actually all do, all the time - engage with the real. The fantasy is that some people - perhaps the majority - are sheeple whose access to the real has been stolen from them by powerful ideological forces, whereas we, the special few, have seen through all that.

 

[catalog]

Yeah I think there's some truth in that deffo, most people are sophisticated thinkers and hardly anyone is a sheeple, but you get cheap thrills in thinking you are cleverer than everyone else. Hubris I suppose, big issue made bigger cos of the net

 

[catalog]

I think the challenge is what version said the other day, the left isn't sexy and attempts to make it sexy piss people off who otherwise would get on board

 

[poetix]

I mean "cucked" as a term belongs to the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that Jewish elites are promoting race-mixing to undermine the cohesion and moral integrity of white culture, so that they can promote their own interests by maintaining a captive demographic of grateful minorities...

 

[catalog]

I'm going foraging now thanks this has been interesting

 

[luka]

But also more generally that all cultural groupings have been fighting for their own narrow group interests except the noble whites whose misguided notions of universality and fairness have been used against them by inferior races who can't believe their good luck. They've left the door unlocked! And all the family silver just lying around

 

[luka]

Overplaying the anti Semitic angle leaves you having to perform some sleight of hand or other to explain why such a large proportion of the alt right is Jewish.

perhaps it is possible to talk of a kind of mirror image of intersectionality here where groups are united by the privileges they value and want to hang onto.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Overplaying the anti Semitic angle leaves you having to perform some sleight of hand or other to explain why such a large proportion of the alt right is Jewish.

perhaps it is possible to talk of a kind of mirror image of intersectionality here where groups are united by the privileges they value and want to hang onto.

Is it that big a percentage, though? I can think of Milo Yiannananopouloulous, who else?

 

[luka]

Ben Shapiro springs to mind

 

[luka]

Establishment figures like Stephen Miller. I feel bit weird counting Jews though. Feels like I'm auditing for a holocaust

 

[Mr. Tea]

Establishment figures like Stephen Miller.

I had no idea he was Jewish or even right-wing. I thought he was mainly known as the space cowboy and the gangster of love.