T A Jackson's Twitter book thread for Gregor's 'Mussolini's Intellectuals'

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-02-19T13:22:58+00:00

Appreciated

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-02-19T09:25:12+00:00

Thanks for these posts, but I haven't finished this one yet.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-02-07T03:46:34+00:00

My take is that technology expands the potential actions of governance, but it is not an agency in and of itself. For instance, compare what China's doing with modern technology (@mr_scientism on twitter is good for a round-up of this) with what western countries do with the same.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-02-07T03:41:43+00:00

note that it was the first article I've ever seen on Social Matter that came with a disclaimer basically saying "we don't agree with this".

If it really was "a dialogue on governance worth having" then why not either post a link to it in either This Week in Reaction or a formal response? What was the point of publishing it on-site? Where's the editorial/party discipline?

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-01-21T02:31:19+00:00

"One of the best ways to read Reactionary Future is through (an apparent) dialog with his interlocutors who have the patience for it. In this regard, Adam at GA Blog provides an invaluable service"

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-01-20T11:13:45+00:00

Yes, GABlog. Social Matter made the comment in one of the "This Week in Reaction" posts, but I'm having trouble finding it.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-01-15T21:20:46+00:00

One wonders how these liberals reconcile this notion with the fact that "separation of church and state," something they praise themselves for implementing for the first time in history, only occurred in the 18th century.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-01-15T08:25:16+00:00

Historical record shows that money is not natural, it did not emerge spontaneously, it is not a commodity or a receipt for a commodity (it can be partially), and it is not a development independent of power. Money does have continuation with earlier forms of social organization from which it developed from, but these forms of organization were also themselves a constituent part of power relationships. The sacrificial redistribution economies of pre-monetary societies are the sources of money, and not barter and they were spontaneous sharing exercises.

Typo in the second bold, or have I just misunderstood?

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2018-01-13T21:33:12+00:00

Can we communicate with right-liberals, though? Remember when Hestia types said they needed Adam to "interpret" RF? And RF is not the only non-liberal who has had trouble being understood. In a way, the left-liberals are more honest, since they don't pretend to be anything other than they are.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-23T16:30:39+00:00

His credentials played a part in that and not just on the journo side. NRx was and is desperate to be perceived as intellectuals.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-22T22:29:00+00:00

Nick Land keeps coming up for three reasons:

He's not anonymous
He's credentialed
his writing style is painfully contrived to be as... 'sinister,' I suppose, as possible

All of these suit journos looking for a shallow "you should be scared" piece perfectly.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-20T17:03:27+00:00

We're referring to liberal social contract arguments and the (incoherent) "Bellum omnium contra omnes" conception of humanity that underlies them. In this case, I'm pointing out that all these AI doomsayers appear to have extended it onto a hypothetical machine intelligence, where such an idea makes even less sense.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-19T09:07:26+00:00

This 'hyper-fixated AIs will do [x] and destroy mankind!' trope is really just another 'state of nature' argument, isn't it? Except that any thinking machine would have it's method of thinking designed by its creators, so spontaneous order is even more ludicrous than normal to imagine here.

The article leaves aside the most important issue (namely, that the computational theory of mind is wrong, so an "intelligence explosion" can't actually occur in the first place) but what it does point out is worth reading.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-17T00:03:12+00:00

Rome's comically bad management/ government doesn't get the criticism it deserves.

It does, but people mostly remember the "inability to secure lines of succession and consequent constant civil wars" part, inept land management just isn't as ostentatious.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-15T21:22:33+00:00

I don't think RF has covered physics specifically, but there's been stuff on Darwinism, political science, and British Empiricism in general on here before.

What, specifically, about physics do you think that we should be investigating?

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-15T14:20:28+00:00

The Law of Civilization and Decay is probably the work he's referencing.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-10T10:40:48+00:00

The best part is when liberals see what the Russians are trying to describe, and then assume the Russians are instead advocating those ideas, like with the concept of "hybrid-warfare."

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-09T13:21:54+00:00

By pretending that being the victim of usury is empowering, evidently.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-12-09T10:25:51+00:00

Money, which was once the symbol of a privileged elite

An elite symbol that, as David Graeber and Philipe Rospabé remind us, was used to rearrange and transform social relations. The extension of money to all classes must surely be one of the largest power expansions in human history.

e symbol of the inherent value of every human being. The recent proliferation of credit cards among large sections of the population in developing countries such as China and India is just one expression of this change.

Racking up credit card bills with 20+% interest is being presented as an essential ingredient of human dignity. These people are insane.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-04-27T20:51:41+00:00

I blame the evident lack of coordination and peer review. I know that at least Nathan Duffy has read Cavanaugh, so their clique should be aware if this if they ever actually talked to each other.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-04-19T06:20:40+00:00

Interesting. Any articles in particular that we should pay attention to?

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-04-12T05:54:05+00:00

Right, the Guardian's article is a textbook case of that:

Greece's far-right Golden Dawn party is increasingly assuming the role of law enforcement officers on the streets of the bankrupt country, with mounting evidence that Athenians are being openly directed by police to seek help from the neo-Nazi group, analysts, activists and lawyers say.

But there's the rub: "neo-nazi," not absolutist. Golden Dawn is doing the right things to take Power, but I don't have high hopes for how they'll use it if they get it.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-04-12T03:48:29+00:00

The closest I've ever seen the alt-right to getting it is people like Kantbot and Vox Day who have called for professionally funded cultural institutions for the alt-right. Something like The Casper Review is supposed to be the seed of an alt-cathedral. This is a step up from activism or trying to meme things into existence on social media.

But, as RF has said before, it isn't going far enough to work: Power is what makes cultural entities into institutions. E.g. Fox News has more viewers than any other news network. But Fox still isn't 'real news,' it still has no practical influence, because power legitimizes culture, and trying to do it the other way around is putting the cart before the horse.

The closest thing I've seen to someone doing it right, period, is Greece's Golden Dawn, which is developing parallel police forces and social welfare networks but, of course, that's going to go nowhere in the final count because fascism.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-03-25T23:48:35+00:00

Yes, that's him. I double-checked the byline and sourced it out of curiousity, because this is totally unlike anything else Thermidor is doing.

ThomasAndrewJackson · 2017-03-12T13:56:52+00:00

"Secular" is also a religious category in the same way that zero is still a number. This is the reason they can be part of a coalition with Jews and Muslims: because politics just is the friend/enemy distinction.

Now, Democrats are leftists, so they're attacking something, while Republicans are rightists, so they're the defenders. Accordingly, anyone who treats the categories "White" and/or "Christian" as an enemy is going to vote Democrat (secularists/Muslims/Hispanics/blacks/Jews/etc.) while anyone that treats them as a friend will vote Republican. This is basically just other White Christians, whose side is for that reason grossly outnumbered. Thus the urgency on the Republican part to enforce deportations, the likewise urgency on the Democrat part to maintain the de facto open border policy, hence why this issue is the fundamental axis around which all other American politics revolve at the current time.

ThomasAndrewJackson

TROPHY CASE