It has been a long day, the convo I recorded with ThoughtAgent
was alright though it seems we are both gonna be busier from now
on. We talked about how Eva 3+1 is trash and it is.
Given that I do most of my topical stuff on my YouTube channel,
I guess I will reserve this site to go full stream of
consciousness. Essentially nothing more than venting, I have
heard that this is what people used to use LiveJournal for once
upon a time. So although topical posts are better I just don't
have a single topic to talk about at length.
I just finished listening to AA's
Afghanistan Unpopular Opinion stream. Twas' alright though
it got repetitive at some point. The film All About Eve was
mentioned, where from AA poached his profile picture. I should
look at that film sometime and make a video about it.
ThoughtAgent has forgotten to watch Withnail and I. Maybe I
should record a video talking about it by myself to drum up some
interest so that others might watch it and I might have someone
to make a video with. Apparently Mrs. AA laughed at AA trying to
prepare himself, given that all he does is say "What do you
think Po?," half of the time. Mr. Dee laughed at AA because AA
claimed to be able to be spiritual but I don't think Mr. Dee is
that spiritual either, well not fanatical anyway. The only ones
who seem to be spiritual now, are certain "austere scholars," by
which I mean that they might believe in things which they could
not be able to believe without their faith. What I mean by that
is that everything that AA believes, he can believe by material
means without any recourse to spirituatlity.
At the end of the article I wrote on this site talking to a
Chinese nationalist in the comment section of some
youtube videos, I was surprised I had admitted that in the end I
was on the side of the West, and that in practice this meant
being on the side of the western liberal democracies because
there exists no West outside of them. Of course I had written
this almost a year ago, I wouldn't have phrased it as bluntly as
"when the chips go down, when push comes to shove, I am on the
side of the western liberal democracies" but now that I think of
it most people on the reactionary right, which is my side who
advocate for the destruction of the current western order, also
in effect still advocate for policies which would elongate the
survival of the current western order.Maybe this is just an
effect of self-interest, we do not want things to get worse
where we live, but it might also be on some subconscious level
that we still want to save this mess we call western
civillisation as it is, and do not really want to see it fail.
Mr. Dee is the best example of this on this stream, because he
is a Catholic and older maybe and so he is more tied to the
traditions of the West than AA and others might be.
The Academic Agent called people who opposed his vision of
Trumpton, a low-tech, trad-con, "English", multi-religious
village, to be just "Racist Libertarians." To that I say, "We
get it AA you're not racist." And I do not mean that he is not
racist because it is bad optics, but rather I just don't think
he has any strong racial preference. "There are more important
things," he might say, and he is right, but is that really the
mentality of someone outside of modernity? Nyet. Or in other
words it is easier for him, and us, to stop being libertarian
than to be racist even though if we actually look at the past as
a complete model that needs everything in itself to survive,
rather than something to pick from what is convenient to us,
then it would become immediately apparent that the racism was as
essential an element as the anti-libertarianism. I guess AA
might say that as long as you remove the libertarianism then the
pieces will fit together and the racial preference will
spontaneously arise if it is such an essential element. He
wouldn't be wrong of course, and perhaps he is right that up
till such an outcome is achieved it would be politically
expedient to ignore issues of creed and blood but the problem
with this is that when push comes to shove we ourselves will
refuse to have a racial preference because of this, and are just
expecting "racial preference" will arise spontaneously, probably
in others rather than in ourselves - probably in people less
intelligent than us who cannot see all the gears turning - but
those who cannot see it need to be led to drink the water, they
will not drink of it themselves, nor will they when they notice
we wouldn't drink of it ourselves. In many ways the lower orders
are just larping as the higher orders in any hierarchy. As sad
as it is to admit, most people act upon "monkey see, monkey do."
And we ourselves, of course, are as susceptible as them.
As AA said, we are all NPCs, that is including AA. The lesson,
I think, is that we cannot entirely betray who we are. AA is the
Eternal Daria who plays video games, listens to black music and
watches pro-wrestling. The Eternal Daria cries out "I am able to
be spiritual too, I am" as he strikes you. Mr. Dee finds the
carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geraniums, and he
likes modern Art like Andy Worhol too. I am a weeb, an otaku, or
whatever you might call it and you know who and what you are.
For who would we be if we betrayed who we are entirely? The
Taliban? Back in 2006, Peter Hitchens who writes for the Mail On
Sunday and not for The Daily Mail, visited
the Islamic University of Theoband, there he commented on
how they still used the Islamic calendar, according to which the
year was still 1427. It is a nice article, because unlike me he
can actually write, so I shall not try to summarise it. Proceeds
to summarise it: He compared this place to Oxford in 1427 and he
notes that by that year in the Gregorian calendar, the
unfliching belief proposed by those of this place of learning
had already started to become alien to the West. It was foreign
to Peter Hitchens.
This is the reason why I think AA turned to the Perennial
Traditionalism, an ostensibly secular 20th century movement that
tried to forge a new spiritual tradition by melding all existing
traditions into one and thus abolishing all aspects which make
various traditions different to each other. This is the bargain
AA made to save his vision of the world of nations without
empires. Why was he able to make this bargain? Why were these
Perenialists able to make this bargain? Because they and he too
had already lost their unflinching faith in their own tradition
- or rather they never had it because the tradition which they
claim was their own was not the one that had really molded them,
into what they really are. I am not saying that this Perenialist
vision of the world would be indistinguishable from globo-homo,
I am only implying it.
Rather than remove, we should add. This is the reason why I am
not going to walk back what I said at the end of the Talking With
Chinese Nationalists blog but I am going to twist it. I
suppose AA and all of us really, are trying to add back to
ourselves something old that is new to us but is rather old. But
we should not pretend that we are shedding anything in the
process. That would be an Epic Fail. This kind of Perennialism
is a minimalist bluff, and ought to be removed from what good
there is to take from Perenialism to be added to ourselves.
I am not saying that nothing will be shed to give space to the
new but if you look at it properly, this so-called Perenialism
is rather self-centred and stoic and "western", "I cannot save
the west, so I will save myself," revealed preferences my
friend, it is a kind of personal minimalism but true minimalism
comes from filling your time with more things so that the
superfluous necessarily floats to the surface and away. It is a
denial but it does not start nor end in denial. Overall I would
say AA has done a great job of adding rather than removing.
Somebody like Sargon of Akkad not so much, which is why his
content feels much more stilted than at the start - he has
naturally changed a lot but he has also abandoned too much of
the original impetus and ethos which pushed him to make his
content.
L the Fox, a discord fren of mine,
says that a deconstruction must be followed up by a
reconstruction. In a video
Morgoth's Review recently made he correctly criticised
Contrapoints for engaging in destructive decontruction by
pointing out the necessary consequences of such an act but I did
not feel he did much recontruction himself, it was just an
argument from consequences, as in "the consequences are bad so
don't do it." It's a good video, I am just hard to please. I
suppose Morgoth could argue that he has already done plenty of
reconstruction elsewhere, still it would be nice seeing it done
to this specific example. Morgoth claims that he takes no joy in
watching breadtubers like Contra, but I am not so sure about
Dave (The Distributist), he watches so much at some level he
must enjoy it.
And as always remember, the
internet is serious business.
By Otaking, or The Good Student