Category: Media

Graeme Wood At The Atlantic-‘His Kampf: Richard Spencer Is A Troll And An Icon For White Supremacists. He Was Also My High-School Classmate’

On By chr1In Culture, Current Events, Free Speech, Journalism, Media, Modernism, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Public Debate, RadicalismLeave a comment

Full piece here. (Includes audio interview)

To be fair, I think Wood offers a decent piece of journalism (interviews, phone calls, research etc.); a well-written, longer-form work I find to be in shorter-supply these days.

In it, he highlights Spencer’s Nietzschean-influenced intellectual aspirations and populist ambitions to become a mouthpiece for alt-right advocacy (serious enough to get attention, unserious enough to be poseurish and pathetically fascistic..which means Spencer may not represent more than a vocal minority, even on the alt-right……feel free to send some data my way).

To be critical: What I think Wood misses, and what many anti-Trumpers and liberal ‘gentry’ miss (Trump is an opportunist if there ever was one), is that Richard Spencer (an opportunist if there ever was one) isn’t enjoying his moment in the sun alone.   The kind of black bloc, antifa radicalism which Spencer publicly addresses is clearly ok using violence on the way to radical and revolutionary freedom.

This leads to the most persuasive arguments I’ve heard criticizing modern liberalism:  It’s all too easy to ignore the true-believers, radicals, poseurs and nutbars (they’re our bastards) beneath one’s own platform, especially if they share some version of one’s own cherished beliefs and ideals.

Left and Left-liberal idealism prospers and is even institutionalized at places like Berkeley (no shortage of anti-racist, neo-Marxist, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist sentiment at Berkeley), which helps fuel radicals which help fuel the Richard Spencers.

Fascists and anti-fascists sure can come to resemble one another, trading tired power theories, hitting each other over the head, and trying to squeeze some meaning from similar principles while showboating through the nihilistic void.

Frankly, they deserve each other, and they deserve to be marginalized by the rest of us.

***I don’t think one need be a Nietzschean nor Nietzsche-inspired, nor a Nietzsche-reacting sort of Straussian (from H.L. Mencken to Leo Strauss to Camille Paglia to John Gray) to seriously question the modern liberal and secular human project, and help offer perspective.

But, it probably helps in understanding the fascist tendencies of Spencer and his enemies/allies..

Addition: I should make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have much truck with fascists, and that he diagnosed, from the depths of his own nihilism, a lot of the crises that would come to face Europe…as for folks like Spencer, they seem to get enough nihilism to carry around while looking for meaning/purpose/identity/belonging elsewhere (in fascist movements)

Repost-From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Nietzsche–Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?’

 Here’s Nietzsche scholar J.P. Stern on Nietzsche’s anti-Christian, anti-secular morality (Kant, utilitarians), anti-democratic, and anti-Greek (except the “heroic” Greek) biases

On this site, see also:

-Graeme Wood At The Atlantic: ‘The American Leader In The Islamic State’

Hitchens could be entertaining, especially on grounds I’m guessing he knew instinctively well as a former Trotskyite: Ideologies, while highlighting truths, promise a one-stop shop on truth, knowledge, how to be in the world, what to do and what the future will be.

People can kill for less, and when they adhere to such systems, then they can end-up killing more:

Via a reader.  Platonic idealism has advantages in restoring both idealism and realism into political debate, but also drawbacks.  It can be a bulwark against moral relativism, which is a modern soup in which Left and Right fascism can be found simmering.

A Podcast From Britain:  E30 | Dreaming The Future | Natalie Bennett, Phillip Blond, Roger Scruton

Related On This Site: -Repost: Various Products Of Radical Reason And Reactions To Them- John Gray At The New Statesman

-Some thoughts on Fukuyama and Leo Strauss: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Out of the Valley of modernism, post-modernism, and relativism…one path from Nietzsche’s nihilism is through Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom: Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’…Some Tuesday Quotations From Leo Strauss…

…Peter Singer discusses Hegel and Marx…From Philosophy And Polity: ‘Historicism In German Political Theory’

Jeffrey Herbst At The Newseum-‘Addressing The Real Crisis Of Free Expression On College Campuses’

On By chr1In Culture, Demographics, Empiricism, Free Speech, Humanities, Journalism, Language, Law, Media, Political Philosophy, Public DebateLeave a comment

Full essay here.

Is it something deeper than mere political correctness?

The attitude of students toward free expression is not simply a patchwork of
politically correct views, but something substantial and more worrying: An alternative understanding of free speech that is essentially “the right to non-offensive speech.” Overall, young adults tend not to believe that there is dissonance between being generally supportive of speech and regulating speech that is offensive to particular groups.’
This will likely increase the need for authority to step in and order the passions of others…a worrying sign.

Broad liberties mean specific responsibilities in upholding those liberties, with a lot of helpful guidance from our founding documents.

The young usually take what is most meaningful in their lives from how adults in their lives behave (parents, relatives, (older) friends, teachers, mentors, bosses, people with any authority/influence…interpreting for themselves over time and through experience what ought to be most important and honored, respected and doubted, ignored and gotten beyond, etc):

I suspect a main message for many young people nowadays is how to extend freedom to ever more individuals and groups, and be sensitive to these individual and group needs and wants.

But what kind of authority might this require, if it is in fact a correct interpretation?

As previously posted:

Brendan O’Neill At Spiked: ‘Why We Must Fight For Free Speech For People We Loathe:‘

‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech’.

Eugene Volokh Via Reason Via Youtube: ‘Free Speech On Campus’

Hmmm…let’s hope this ain’t happening:

Quote found here——Kraut, Richard.  The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York, NY:  Cambridge University Press, 1992.

“The Peloponennisian War created the sorts of tension in Athens that would appear to support Thucydides’ analysis.  Obligations to the community required greater sacrifice and presented a clearer conflict with the self-seeking “Homeric” pursuit of one’s status, power and pleasure.  In political terms, people had to decide whether or not to plot against the democracy to bring off an Olgarchic coup.  In moral terms they had to decide whether or not to ignore the demands of the community, summed up in the requirements of “justice,” in favor of their own honor, status, power, and in general their perceived interest.  Plato was familiar with people who preferred self-interest over other-regarding obligation; his own relatives, Critias and Charmides, made these choices when they joined the Thirty Tyrants.

Arguments from natural philosophy did not restrain people like Critias and Charmides.  Democritus argues unconvincingly that the requirements of justice and the demands of nature, as understood by Atomism, can be expected to coincide. Protogoras rejects the view that moral beliefs are true and well grounded only if they correspond to some reality independent of believers; admittedly they are matters of convention, but so are all other beliefs about the world.  This line or argument removes any ground for preferring nature over convention, but at the same time seems to remove any rational ground for preferring one convention over another.”

Right or Righteous? A Few Paragraphs On The ‘Media Landscape’

On By chr1In Media, Political Philosophy, Politics, Public DebateLeave a comment

From where I sit, liberal publications invested more heavily in the activist model of organization and identity politics are now reaping what they’ve sown during Obama’s two terms; many not likely soon emerging from a more advanced righteous state of mind against perceived enemies (Trump, Trump, Trump!).

Righteousness is not uncommon in human affairs, especially in defeat, where the emotions often travel in search of reasons; loyalists uniting against enemies in order to reinforce shared commitments, beliefs, and policy goals to combat the sting of loss.

In my humble experience, many voices promoting change always had radical sympathies (not all change is bad, not all tradition is good…as I see things, but which changes, and how?).  Now that there’s less apparent shared national identity, less social and political consensus, I’m not too surprised at the vagaries of the Trump carnival.

This is why I tend favor a smaller government, respect for process, and to keep many people who want power from getting it, and to watch the ones who do.  Find me decent people.

Or let’s at least maintain decent incentives.

One simple request:  Spare me the bullshit of impartiality, will ya, while in the throes of righteousness?

A Few Thoughts On NPR And Current Liberal Establishment Thinking Under Obama…Hate Is A Strong Word-Some Links On The BBC, The CBC, & NPR

-(addition) Via a reader:  Eugene Volokh argues freedom of the press ain’t about saving the buggy whip industry:

‘I’ve often argued that the freedom of the press was seen near the time of the Framing (and near the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment, as well as in between and largely since) as protecting the right to use the press as technology — everyone’s right to use the printing press and its modern technological heirs. It was not seen as protecting a right of the press as industry, which would have been a right limited to people who printed or wrote for newspapers, magazines and the like .‘

At least with the Weekly World News, you got up-front, outlandish bullshit:

batboy.gif

No!

Robert Zubrin At The New Atlantis-‘Colonizing Mars: A Critique Of The SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System’

On By chr1In Media, Nature, Public Debate, Science, TechnologyLeave a comment

Full piece here.

Strengths and weaknesses:

‘The duration of the journey would of course depend on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits; the shortest one-way trip would be around 80 days, according to Musk’s presentation, and the longest would be around 150 days. (Musk stated that he thinks the architecture could be improved to reduce the trip to 60 or even 30 days.)’

Via Youtube: ‘Curiosity’s First Year On Mars’

So many doomsayers in the prediction racket:

From Youtube Via Reason: ‘Robert Zubrin: Radical Environmentalists And Other Merchants Of Despair’

 

John O’Sullivan On The French Elections

On By chr1In Conservatism, Current Events, Foreign Policy, Media, Political Philosophy, Politics, Public Debate, Radicalism, RationalismLeave a comment

Full piece here.

‘So the next five years could well see a series of social crises in which two versions of young France — a multicultural one swollen by migration and a native-nationalist one fed by the arrival of a post-guilt generation — will find themselves on opposite sides of a worsening political divide.’
The fundamental instability of both current French politics and the EU are worrying, to say the least.

 

As previously posted:

Interview sent in by a reader with Hollebecq on his ‘Soumission,’ which, in his fictional world, imagines a soon-to-be Muslim candidate defeating a French nationalist candidate, followed by an ultimate submission of French society to Islamic law and political leadership.

Interesting discussion at the link (including a deflation of (R)acism as critical theory).

‘But now you’re asking words to mean something they don’t. Racism is simply when you don’t like somebody because he belongs to another race, because he hasn’t got the same color skin that you do, or the same features, et cetera. You can’t stretch the word to give it some higher meaning.’

On some of Hollebecq’s thinking behind the creative work:

‘Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear. ‘

Whoa, at least he’s relatively up front about that.

Isn’t it possible to reject Hollebecq’s modernity-is-dead worldview AND also put the universal claims of progressive, collectivist, ideological, postmodern, multicultural feminist discontents into their proper perspective…without suggesting the end of the modern world and some presumed next stage to be reached?

And as for discussions of art:  Is the book worth a read?

======================

From the comments:

‘Those of you regarding e.g. feminism as somehow an antidote to the patriarchal impulses in enlightenment thinking or Islam, or in broader terms postmodern political and social movements as offering a ‘third way’, something totally new and immune from this dynamic of competitive decay and decline, forget the fact that these movements are themselves the most recent outgrowths of the emancipative instinct, one of the core features deeply rooted in Western thought ever since the renaissance, as Barzun described. As an Asian living in the West myself, I have to tell you that this instinct is simply not present as a core element in other civilisations, and is indeed distinctive about the West. That Japan and Korea, and for that matter every non-western nation, modernised without a countercultural ‘values’ rebellion is indicative in this regard. The west is going to be without allies as it goes with a whimper.

Under such a depressing worldview, hope is provided for by religion and mysticism, a return to medievalism. It is sad, because the West will truly die as it numbs its own most deeply embedded instincts in the process of conversion, but the mysticism is a form of hope for the masses, who never particularly cared for high ideals anyway.

Houellebecq seems to channel Spengler, who hardly anybody reads nowadays. But that such an interesting thinker is hardly glanced at today is an indictment of us, not of him.’

Also, from the comments.  Hubristic, but there’s something to the grandiosity and deflated nihilism:

‘This is why I love French writers and thinkers. Fascinating to read even if they are always wrong.’

Modern Distress-Poverty Chic

On By chr1In Aesthetics, Architecture, Art, Beauty, Culture, Current Events, Economics, Free Markets, Media, Modernism, Postmodernism, Public DebateLeave a comment

Modern to postmodern objets d’art (you can already imagine the blurbs) and mass-produced market items have been dovetailing recently, two once separate activities increasingly becoming one.

Yes, you too can pay hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes that merely appear to be old and worn.

Frankly, I’m too ignorant to offer much insight, dear reader, but maybe one can trace a line from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to the current fad of ‘distressed’ items.

Everyone’s a Self, you see, and every Self deeply wants fame and recognition, or at least to be fresh, new and ahead of the curve in the marketplace.

Or do you?

Here you are, just a chump watching another more famous chump eating some Burger King.  It’s important and it isn’t. Give it the meaning you think it deserves.  You’ll get your 15 minutes one day.  Or not.

Don’t set your sights too high, this pickled basketball seems to be saying, for your aspirations, too, may be empty as the liquid void in which this Spalding hovers.  Gaze upon your hoop dreams within the silence of the ideal… hallowed as you temporarily are within this modern secular temple called…MoMA.

The marketplace delivers us that which we want, enriching our lives and fulfilling our desires but that’s not really what we want, is it?

Or it is.  Ho-hum.

We all know clothes decay while trends come and go. Beauty fades, and people live in houses built with real materials which fall apart.

Ah, well. Buy some music, celebrate Art and be a Self.

Addition-Let’s say that both modern art and the market may be done a disservice, here:

Related On This Site:   A museum industrial complex…more complexes…who are the people museums should be serving? James Panero At The New Criterion: ‘Time to Free NY’s Museums: The Met Responds’

From Bloggingheads: Shakespeare and The Second Law Of Thermodynamics…Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’,,

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

See the comments Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’

Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus.  A very good Goya page here.

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct‘

The end of the ‘greatness’ model?: From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story