Post: #26

(12-27-2015 11:50 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  And in today's YZ ideologues of the West, I see little taste for wholesale violence, and little ability to implement it if they had such a taste. For fairly deep ideological reasons, they are committed to operating through legal, academic, and political channels. I don't see too many Stalins or Maos in the crew.

I think you're too optimistic.

As I wrote in the relevant chapter (the first draft of the book is likely to be finished today), their taste for violence is increasing. We saw them become much more militaristic in 2015. They're drunk on the power they currently hold, and will be increasingly reckless with it.

Furthermore even without violence, they've been largely successful. That was the breakthrough of the Frankfurt School after the failure for Marx's pan-worker socialist revolution to materialize during World War I, as they realized that you need a culture of it, so they went the long march through the institutions route to accomplish their goals.

In that regard, the Frankfurt-inspired revolution has been the most successful in terms of achieving its goals in history. Say what you want about the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, but they were incredibly far-sighted.

Climate change is tangential. They're more concerned with the culture and social fabric of countries.

2016 is going to be a decisive year.

Post: #27

I'm interested to see when the concept of consent expands beyond sexual concepts. For example, a female vendor breaches a business contract. Will she claim that she is just withdrawing consent and so is immune to any penalties for that breach?

Maybe she wont' consent to that pedestrian using that crosswalk when she plowed him or her over with her car and be let off?

Post: #28

Libertas,

You don't realize how crucial the human hatred and nihilism that animates the "climate change" discourse is to contemporary Year Zero thinking. In the thread in which I introduced this concept to the RVF, I made clear that this is an absolutely central part of the Year Zero agenda. Your posts here show that you are not qualified to be writing a book on this subject, because you don't understand it. If you like, you can ask me questions in my Year Zero thread and I'll try to clarify your confusions and add to your knowledge of the subject.

I suspect that the reason you want to claim that climate change is "tangential" is that you are largely in agreement with YZ ideologues on this subject, as you have stated in previous posts on the forum (here and here, for example).

However, just because you share the YZ delusion on these matters does not mean that it is not a primary commitment for that movement. It is; and they threw all they had into that fight, and came up short. And the reason is just what I noted earlier: they came up against real hard resistance, and were unwilling and unable to overcome it with the wholesale violence that would be required.

Further. The YZ elites are not a conventional hard power elite, they are a soft power that thrives in the stale peace between major eruptions of hard power reality. They are the power of the academy, the media, and the sociology branch of the government. These people are not violent and, if anything, are strongly committed to the idea that violence is on its way out. Indeed, almost none of them dissent from Pinker's thesis in this book:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Pinker and his cadres realize that they have neither the will nor the ability to impose their ideas violently and, therefore, they declare that violence itself is on the way out, almost a vulgarity. It's an absurd idea, but it's the best they can do in the knowledge of their ultimate impotence and inability to go all the way.

The Pinker book is an important confession of the hard left YZ's utter inability to use violence to impose their will; the cadres love the book because their ideology exists only at the sufferance of stale peace and prosperity -- all of its chatter, its so-called "march through the institutions" is understood to be completely reversible at the moment real war obtains.

A real march through the institutions does not leave one whining about the Frankfurt School and the inability of conservatives to acquire tenure, rather it leaves one with baskets full of the heads of bespectacled academics and fellow travelers. Mao's Cultural Revolution was a true march through the institutions and left a flood of blood and gore in its wake. Don't confuse the two.

Post: #29

(12-27-2015 02:01 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  I suspect that the reason you want to claim that climate change is "tangential" is that you are largely in agreement with YZ ideologues on this subject, as you have stated in previous posts on the forum (here and here, for example).

Don't ascribe a position to me that I don't hold.

I said earlier I think we should take some steps to reduce carbon as a matter of prudence, but the means in which they're attempting to do this are retarded and will not do anything except make everyone's lives harder. I also never said it was as important as they're making it out to be (like when Bernie Sanders thinks climate change causes terrorism).

I said it's tangential in the sense that their goals are to create a world of perfect "equality," and therefore they add more emphasis on social dialectics, whereas climate change is an issue they abuse to assume more state/central control.

You can feel free to PM me your thoughts on why it's more meaningful to the central logic of the current Year Zero ideology, since it's too far off topic here.

Post: #30

(12-27-2015 11:50 AM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:  H1N1,

I agree with everything in your post, of course. There is no question that the thinking of today's legal elites is dominated by this kind of Year Zero ideology and that this is already having disastrous consequences -- especially, but not exclusively, when it comes to matters of "consent", the definition of "sexual assault", etc -- with very likely worse to come.

The question remains: how far will these people be allowed to go? My belief is: pretty far but not infinitely far. In particular, not so far that their evil lunacy begins to seriously undermine the most basic elements of contract law and the way society does business.

The reason for this is that there is simply no precedent for that kind of thoroughgoing YZ (my shorthand for Year Zero) change being implemented without the backing of wholesale violence. When you look at YZ movements of the past that were able to (temporarily) impose their will on society, they only accomplished this using both the threat and the reality of mass slaughter. And this is unsurprising, because while normal people will take a lot and tolerate a lot, they will not tolerate their entire life being turned upside down without some very serious incentives to go along with the program. This is especially true when it comes to people who have serious money and power, successful businessmen, industrial moguls etc. They will not simply acquiesce without a fight unless their life is threatened in a real way.

And in today's YZ ideologues of the West, I see little taste for wholesale violence, and little ability to implement it if they had such a taste. For fairly deep ideological reasons, they are committed to operating through legal, academic, and political channels. I don't see too many Stalins or Maos in the crew.

And while they have certainly had a great deal of success operating in this way, and are likely to have more, I believe that this can only go so far and they will start running up against serious resistance once there is real money involved. In fact, there is no need to speculate about this, because we have already seen it play out in the whole struggle over "climate change" and the efforts to reach an agreement that will reduce the world's "carbon footprint" by severely limiting the use of fossil fuels.

It's important to note that, although it does not get as much coverage on the forum which is (understandably) focused on other issues, the "climate change" idea is an essential and primary part of YZ ideology; in many ways, it's their single most fanatical commitment. Furthermore, YZ thinking about "climate change" is perhaps even more dominant among the legal, academic, and political elites than YZ thinking about "feminism"; it is an absolute dogma. Ask any YZ ideologue what is the single most important problem facing the world today, and 9 out of 10 will say it's "climate change".

And with all that, the YZ struggle to achieve any meaningful change in getting countries to reduce their fossil fuel consumption has been a laughable failure. The recently signed Paris agreement is a joke; it is completely non-binding and lacks even the most minimal enforcement mechanisms. It's really little more than a piece of paper that allows politicians to go home and declare victory. None of the countries that matter -- India, China, etc -- have the least intention of slowing down their development or harming their economies for the sake of this YZ fetish. There will be some self-imposed reductions in the West, but even these will fall well short of any serious YZ goals and will mostly be achieved through greater efficiency etc.

In short, the single most important YZ project -- the imposition of draconian changes in society in the name of "saving the planet from climate change" -- has been a laughable fiasco. Why? For the simple reason that implementing the kinds of lunatic changes that would result in "meaningful reductions" and alter the planet's temperature trajectory (according to the worthless predictions of their pseudoscience) would cost real money and hurt the economy in real ways and people with actual money and power simply did not let it happen. There is no Mao in charge of things who can tell every peasant to literally melt all agricultural tools at his disposal for the greater cause of producing steel; and without a Mao, such lunacies just don't get done.

Moreover, the smart YZ cadres know this; they know they lost on "climate change". In fact, they've known it since Copenhagen in 2009: that was their only chance at something like a binding accord and they failed to get it done. Indeed, part of the reason for their ferocious doubling down on feminism, "consent" and "sexual assault" laws, "rape culture" etc etc is that this is the main direction in which they are able to make real progress. You could see it a few years ago if you followed certain progressive blogs and boards -- the very same cadres that had previously devoted much of their attention to climate issues diverted their attention and resources to feminism and allied causes, in implicit recognition of their loss in the struggle that mattered most to them.

Note that there was no ideological concession; they are still as fanatically committed to climate-related YZ ideas as before, indeed, these ideas are more dominant than ever despite the laughable failure of the climate models, no warming for almost two decades etc. But on a practical level, they conceded because they ran up against the hard resistance of real money and had no willingness or ability to use overwhelming violence to overcome it.

Now, when it comes to the feminist agenda, there is still a long way they can go in making our lives worse and more unpleasant before they start coming up against serious economic impacts and the associated hard resistance. And I fully expect them to go as far as they can and to be very successful in that direction for quite a while to come. But in the absence of the backing of serious and sustained violence, I believe that there are hard limits to what this YZ movement can achieve, and sooner or later they will come up against these limits and retreat, just as they have already done in the climate fight where those limits were more immediately apparent.

Lizard,

This was a fascinating and thought-provoking post. I suspect you are right when you say they cannot go infinitely far in their subversion of the rule of law. I suspect you are also correct when you suggest that they have little appetite for violence themselves. I would however be very interested to know your thoughts on the viability of Strong AI, given your deep understanding of science, as it seems to me that should some of the work currently being done by the M.I.C. turn out to be viable, we might not be terribly far away from machines being capable of committing violence on behalf of those who recognise their own short-comings in that arena. Since my own impression of many of the leftist ideologues to whom I've been exposed is that they tend (with some honourable exceptions) to have an inherent nastiness, often the result of acute insecurity, I have always harboured an uneasy feeling that, just as technology ameliorates their inadequacy and allows them to be productive, so technology might also provide them in time with the means to be destructive, despite their apparent lack of fortitude.

Post: #31

H1N1, I summarized my thoughts on "strong AI" and related matters in this post which I would refer you to.

In general, one ought to do the bulk of one's reasoning without excessive extrapolation. It's best to start with what we know to be the case and proceed from that; the facts on the ground are sufficient to supply us with about as much complexity as we can handle.