Redpill Right?

[Wombaticus Rex]

[Remember the 'Dark Enlightenment'? This sounds like a similar crowd trying out a more casual jacket.

Nailed it in one. Same demographic, same websites, same erudite psychosis.

[jingofever]

Is it possible to take seriously people who are making a reference to "The Matrix"?

[Jerky]

If y'all care to search function Dark Enlightenment, I've posted some (I think) important links on that subject a year or two ago. I'm also in the process of putting together a collection of Dark Enlightenment "foundation documents" for a potential book project that I'm working on for Feral House. Not that I'm particularly sympathetic to their point of view (and not at all to their policy goals), but I do find their discourse (occasionally) fascinating. The "cream" of that crop certainly aren't made up of MRAs or PUAs, and some of them have pretty sharp minds and hard-to-argue-against positions. I think we're seeing a newborning ideology that might come to hold sway in certain pockets once the Long Emergency takes hold, and I think that their paradigm, regardless of my reservations, might be preferable to other potential paradigms that will no doubt arise in the wake of civilizational collapse (which will happen at some point, pretty much guaranteed).

YOPJerky

[Wombaticus Rex]

The "cream" of that crop certainly aren't made up of MRAs or PUAs, and some of them have pretty sharp minds and hard-to-argue-against positions.

Quite so; I am still working through Moldbug and find it quite enjoyable. (Easy to do, being a white man.)

It should probably be said, though, that many of their positions are only "hard-to-argue-against" because the are so gleefully fucking obscure. When critics actually do engage NRx talking points, though, they tend to evaporate rather quickly -- Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex has utterly demolished a number of 'em.

[Elvis]

Still haven't seen The Matrix.

[Sounder]

Good for you Elvis, (I'm serious), one can never know just what agenda is being promoted. I try to avoid them in general, but did see that one.

jakell wrote...

I can sort of see the direction AD is heading with all his Far Right and Mysticism business (which intersects somewhat with the present topic).

Yes, well it would be neat if AD walk the path with others in preference to alone and by proxy.

There is a not unpopular notion that the 'bad thing', a rough emotional impression that tends to often be identified in this era by the snarl word 'Fascism', is quite strongly associated with the irrational, eg mysticism, religion, spirituality and in general stuff from the past.

“not unpopular’, that’s good, this is where the bulk of big house PR firms money goes. And the no doubt well compensated author here serves as a fine example. (So no, I did not read the agitprop article.)

The 'good thing' is represented by atheism, rationalty, science and technology (etc), and that if we imitate the good thing then things will turn out alright for us all. (except it's not that clear why)

People are driven to declare and act as if the polarity is between the categories, frankly because they are insecure and it’s a good excuse and rational to kill people. And because I’m really against that sort of thing, and not just talking, my life is dedicated to providing a cure* for insecurity.

The big money boys adopted Darwin’s model with relish, and they sincerely believe that survival is proof of fitness. This is not an especially compassionate stance towards ones fellow man. We see every day a willingness to kill in order for this ‘rational’ system of governance to be maintained.

I use the fuzzy terms good/bad thing, because underneath it all is an assumption, an article of faith, a belief. This belief system goes under a slightly more familar name... 'The religion of Progress'

I do wish more folk were involved with the R.I. book club. The first selection, introduced by brekin, is by Peter Kingsley and titled; In the Dark Places of the Spirit.

Peter Kingsley tries to show how and why Plato killed the father. Reason took over from logic. We silenced the goddess with intellect.

Learning is easy, it’s the unlearning that is hard.

* Liminal space will be filled, and it must be preferable to fill it with understanding rather than chaos.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It should probably be said, though, that many of their positions are only "hard-to-argue-against" because the are so gleefully fucking obscure. When critics actually do engage NRx talking points, though, they tend to evaporate rather quickly -- Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex has utterly demolished a number of 'em.

He also puts it better than I could, the bastard....

Via: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/13/proving-too-much/

The fallacy of Proving Too Much is when you challenge an argument because, in addition to proving its intended conclusion, it also proves obviously false conclusions. For example, if someone says “You can’t be an atheist, because it’s impossible to disprove the existence of God”, you can answer “That argument proves too much. If we accept it, we must also accept that you can’t disbelieve in Bigfoot, since it’s impossible to disprove his existence as well.”

I love this tactic so much. I only learned it had a name quite recently, but it’s been my default style of argument for years. It neatly cuts through complicated issues that might otherwise be totally irresolvable.

Because here is a fundamental principle of the Dark Arts – you don’t need an argument that can’t be disproven, only an argument that can’t be disproven in the amount of time your opponent has available.

NRx = "white folks with abundant free time."

[Luther Blissett]

The redpill right just exists as a cultural artifact in contrast to their ideological purist relatives in the dark enlightenment. It addresses fairly widespread western cultural- and gender-specific ailments with, for lack of a better term, "mean" solutions (at the very best). At the worst end of the spectrum is Elliott Rodger.

I see this discourse all over the internet, and based on their "field reports" it seems as though group-premeditated serial rape tips, violence against women, oppression and emotional abuse all spill off of the internet and into real life too.

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2015/11/27/red-pi ... r-seu.html

If Dr. Seuss wrote about “Men's Rights Advocates,“ it'd look like this: “Red Pill, Blue Pill”




Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky roast the Red Pill men's rights movement in a scathing, scintillating, rhyming Dr Seuss parody that features such gems as: "They’re in the friendzone!/What a pity/Stuck in the orbit/Of a girl that’s pretty."

Females can be sad or glad
But females are all very bad
Why are they all sad, glad, bad?
Human nature. Ask your dad.

Some are thin
And some are fat
Neg them all
They asked for that


“Red Pill, Blue Pill”: A Tale For MRA Children [Jaya Saxena and Matt Lubchansky/The Toast]

[slomo]

I reject the notion that this is a homogeneous phenomenon.

There is a huge difference between people focused on specific policy issues around family court system, due process in sexual assault cases, the negative image of men in the media, etc., and the true misogynists of TheRedPill and (as WR put it) the erudite psychotics of the Dark Enlightenment. They are not the same people, even if they all are concerned about the roles and value of men.

However, do keep talking about them as if they were all the same people: you'll push all of them further to the right.

[American Dream]

They want you to lift the veil pulled over your eyes by the progressives who secretly control society. Like Neo escaping the Matrix, your choice is to wake up and see how the world really is, discarding religion, subjectivity, and feminist indoctrination. Conspiracy theorists, Men’s Rights Activists, Pick-Up Artists, GamerGate, even the Neoreaction: all of these communities share a common creed, tech-fluent and superficially self-aware. To outsiders, it's distinctly conservative. But they don’t see themselves as conservatives at all.

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/a-begi ... e-red.html

[slomo]

They want you to lift the veil pulled over your eyes by the progressives who secretly control society. Like Neo escaping the Matrix, your choice is to wake up and see how the world really is, discarding religion, subjectivity, and feminist indoctrination. Conspiracy theorists, Men’s Rights Activists, Pick-Up Artists, GamerGate, even the Neoreaction: all of these communities share a common creed, tech-fluent and superficially self-aware. To outsiders, it's distinctly conservative. But they don’t see themselves as conservatives at all.

http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/a-begi ... e-red.html

Patently false. This article (if you can call it that) is written from a profoundly biased perspective. I'll grant that any perspective on this subject is going to have some inherent bias, but this particular article doesn't even make the pretense of serving as anything other than a polemic against positions with which its author disagrees.

For starters, you can look at the subreddits that correspond to each of these communities. r/theRedPill will not link to r/mensrights in its sidebar, and its position seems to be that the members of r/mensrights are a bunch of feminists, whiners, and pussies. On the other hand, r/mensrights will not link to the r/theRedPill, and its position is that r/theRedPill is "toxic" (a position with which I most definitely agree). However, I will certainly agree that the top posts in r/mensrights are often just rants and complaints (mostly because there are few other places where men feel comfortable enough to rant about what's bothering them). On the other hand, GamerGate (r/KotakuInAction) is focused on a specific set of issues related to online gaming, although they branch out into issues that overlap with r/mensrights; while you might reject the GamerGate nerdboys as maladjusted adolescents, the fact is that a very large number of young men use online gaming platforms to socialize because all other meaningful avenues of male socialization have been dismantled.

By lumping all these groups together, you are dismissing legitimate social and legal issues that, regardless of your position on them, deserve to be discussed. As such, you represent a perfect specimen of the tone-deaf left, which undermines any claim it has to be working for "justice", by systematically refusing to see the injustices that are inflicted upon the groups it has decided to love to hate. And that is why the left, as it is currently configured, is doomed to failure.

[American Dream]

While you do seem to know some of these reactionary tendencies well, I think that one could talk about a diversity of tendencies that are all generally "leftist" and yet differ greatly on specific issues. Same principle would hold true for movements that can be grouped under banners such as "the Right", "the far Right", etc.

Aren't the movements you are endorsing generally much, much more anti-feminist than pro-feminist, by far?

[slomo]

Of course the left is diverse, but nobody here (or pretty much anywhere else) is copypasta'ing poorly researched articles that lump everybody on the left together.

For the record, I am not endorsing all of the movements you joyfully lump together. I am endorsing a position that feminism, in 2015, in the West, has overshot. It is largely concerned with policing opinions and protecting the right of upper-middle-class women to feel a certain way, all the while ignoring the harsh economic issues faced by men and also working-class women.

[American Dream]

Are you broadly anti-Feminism then?

If not, what sorts of feminist organizing currently underway do you support?