Anger, Decorum, and the Pursuit of Truth

Let’s not mince words: last night, I was triggered. It’s not really my place to get angry on a personal level. It’s unbecoming of me as a reactionary, and dare I say, Anissimov-esque. I said last night that I believe in decorum, and I mean it. I think neoreaction as a movement should aspire to a higher level of behavior and decency. That doesn’t mean we can’t cut loose and have fun: Nick B. Steves can still go on the Daily Shoah and call people fags, I can still run TRD, Duck can be Duck. But if we are to be better than the modern world, we must ultimately hold ourselves to a higher standard of behavior than the modern world, primarily in our own spaces. It’s one thing to express moral indignation at a leftist pedophile. It’s another to publicly coax someone to suicide on a semi-intellectual blog. If I cannot exhibit a sense of restraint and formality in my own domain, then what good am I as a moral authority?

Anger is good. I’m not upset that I got angry. I’m actually proud of myself for getting angry. My anger comes from having a sense of right from wrong. I’m angry because I see a bad person doing bad things and barely anyone else being willing to step up and say “no, this is bad, you’re bad and need to be stopped.” My anger comes from my sanity.

I’m upset because I didn’t properly harness my anger. Letting my anger consume me and override my sense of decorum is not healthy. As reactionaries, we must remember that we are subservient to morality, a good much greater than us. As healthy as anger is, it’s petty and personal. Letting this anger override a commitment to public standards of behavior is inherently selfish. No one man is greater than the principles and values of neoreaction. Not Moldbug, not Nick B. Steves, and certainly not me.

This is not an apology. I have no one to apologize to. I have not hurt anyone but myself- through petty anger, I dishonored myself. This is an explanation, an honest reflection on my words and actions, and what they mean. I believe that honesty is the greatest moral good, and that Neoreaction is the fundamental pursuit of truth and a truth-based society. Thus, I must confront the truth of my own actions, and be honest about what I have done and what it means.

Thus, I submit this not as a submissive public confession, but a bold declaration. I will say with authority that I have done wrong to myself. This is the truth of the matter. I am not ashamed to say I have erred, and I will not dwell on it. I will not delete or hide my error, but leave it there for the world to see. I am not ashamed of my mistakes, I will only grow from them. I will move forward in pursuit of the truth and all that is good. I will grow and learn to harness my anger. I will not deny my faults, but work to overcome them.

Punishment is Vindication

Some days, I feel like the only neoreactionary who isn’t gifted in tech. I can barely code with HTML or java, god forbid I take on anything more daunting than that. Even bbcode is a hassle. I might be good at assembling computers, but I’m certainly no programmer, nor will I ever pretend to be. So as far as I know, Urbit is just Moldbug’s grandiose tech project that isn’t related to video games. As far as I know, it’s all magic. Despite my periodic insights on the culture and such (which doesn’t require understanding the nuance of code) I really don’t follow tech. For me, “Strangeloop” just makes me think of how I accidentally figured out how to break a computer in high school with infinite dialogue boxes when I just wanted to make a basic arithmetic calculator. Much to my surprise, it’s actually one of the bigger tech conferences in the US. Shows how much I know.

So when Curtis Yarvin, AKA, Mencius Moldbug, commonly recognized grandfather of neoreaction was listed as a speaker at Strangeloop, suddenly I decided I had to pay attention. After all, Moldbug is, in my opinion, the best politicial writer of the 21st century. Maybe he’d offer some new nuggets of wisdom for us. Maybe he’d explain Urbit in a way someone as primitive as me could understand. But beyond that, there was also the political ramification of Moldbug speaking. It’s not easy being a reactionary- all the white cis male privilige in the world doesn’t make up for the unwashed hordes of progressive lunatics who would gladly see you dead if it meant no one would ever think the way you do. That Moldbug could openly present his work at Strangeloop and participate in the tech community as an open reactionary is a glimmer of hope that we can’t be so easily excluded.

Or at least it was. As of now, Moldbug is no longer invited to speak about Urbit at Strangeloop. As always, militant communists and leftists raised quite the stink about a reactionary. In their mind, the most damning post possible was this one, a long defense of Thomas Carlyle where where he makes references to the idea that hey, maybe slavery isn’t that bad all things considered. Moldbug dresses up the point as politely and nicely as he can, and the progs still lost their mind. From the prog responses, you’d think that weev had snuck back in the US to give a talk. People were actually saying that Curtis Yarvin, a thirty-something computer nerd, was somehow a safety threat because of his political unorthodoxy. It’s mindblowing. Of all the figures in the alt-right, Moldbug is probably the least threatening person possible.

So what did Strangeloop’s organizers do? Probably the most morally and ethically deficent option possible. They quietly removed Yarvin’s page on his talk and sent him an e-mail rescinding his invitation due to the sheer number of complaints filed. Presumably, their goal was hoping that this would all go away, and they could have their conference in peace. However, they seem to have been missing what’s been going on for the past nine months with #GamerGate. We live in the era of the Streisand effect. Nothing just “goes away” anymore.  Within hours, the story blew up. Prolific neoreactionary figureheads Nick B. Steves and Duck Enlightenment were tweeting up a storm, and AnCap loose cannon Clarkhat was going even further in upping the pressure on Strangeloop. In what has to be a first, Moldbug’s work was noticed outside of the liberal hate brigade, as even Breitbart had picked up the story. This is Web 2.0. Stories don’t just “go away”. And if you want to try to make them go away? I suggest talking to Zoe Quinn to see how well that’s turned out for her.

And now, with everyone demanding answers, Strangeloop organizer Alex Miller finally publishes a brief explanation of what’s going on:

“Curtis Yarvin submitted a talk in the Strange Loop 2015 Call for Presentations. The talk went through the review process and was one of about 60 talks selected for the conference out of about 360. The subject of the talk was urbit (attached below). While we use a multi-stage review process, ultimately all final decisions are made by me.

Earlier this week we published the bulk of the 2015 Strange Loop session list, including Curtis’s talk. I quickly received feedback that Curtis also has an online persona under the name “Mencius Moldbug” where he has posted extensive political writings.

A large number of current and former speakers and attendees contacted me to say that they found Curtis’s writings objectionable.I have not personally read them.

I am trying to create a conference where the focus is on the technology and the topics being presented. Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus. This would not serve the conference, the other speakers, the attendees, or even Curtis.

Thus, I chose to rescind Curtis’s invitation and remove him from the program. The email I sent to Curtis is included below for reference.”

Hilariously enough, said e-mail had already been leaked, so this hardly helps the case. But I want to highlight one particular part of that statement: “Ultimately, I decided that if Curtis was part of the program, his mere inclusion and/or presence would overshadow the content of his talk and become the focus.” So in other words, it’s not that he personally found Moldbug’s words objectionable, or that he’s even taking a side. Rather, he’s simply trying to avoid trouble at his conference. It seems innocent, until you realize what he’s saying: it doesn’t matter who Curtis Yarvin is- the feelings of the angry progressive lynch mob is more important than letting an independent software developer speak. It’s flat-out cowardice. It’s a refusal to take a stand and define your own values.

But all in all, I’m okay with this. Because while I might not understand tech, I DO understand SJW holy wars. And once again, we come back to the broken windows. I’ve blogged about broken windows so much that I’m expecting Paul Krugman will throw a brick through my own window with a note on how it’ll save the economy.  But in essence, the SJWs here are working right out of the broken window playbook. In their case, they call it “no platform”, and it’s rooted in British student unions. The idea is that if anyone deemed racist or fascist can be allowed to speak at the university or hold office in a student body, then it means those viewpoints are acceptable. Thus, it is in the interest of the greater good that these individuals are totally excluded from university life, as to prevent the students from thinking that racism or fascism is acceptable. What we’re seeing here is no platform in action. The SJWs know that if Moldbug can present Urbit freely, then it shows that being a reactionary is acceptable. Thus, in order to suppress reaction, Curtis Yarvin must not have a platform to speak on.

And yes, no platform is extended to the rest of the west as well. Why do you think that feminists are up in arms every time Christina Hoff Sommers gets to speak at a university? Why do SJWs of the SF/F community go berserk when they see that Vox Day is on a Hugo ballet? Why are gaming SJWs raining fire down on the Society of Professional Journalists for even trying to host a #GamerGate debate? Because in their mind, anything allowing these people, from the mild-mannered C.H. Sommers to someone as radical as Vox Day to participate grants those people and their views legitimacy. And they know that once a dangerous person gets their foot in the door, they’re VERY hard to get rid of.

The kicker here is that Moldbug knows all of this. It’s all a part of what he calls The Cathedral. (For more on that, I have a handy explanation here) It proves him right- that the progressive powers that be want to make sure that all information on tech and the development of technology is in the hands of progressives. Thus, progressive politics can continue their march to oblivion.Did Mencius Moldbug expect Curtis Yarvin to be shut down? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But either way, by working to exclude Curtis Yarvin from tech, Strangeloop has vindicated the work of Mencius Moldbug. Everything he’s said about progressives needing to control information is validated by them shutting him down.

That’s why, despite condemning the cowardice and moral failings of Alex Miller and Strangeloop, I’m still celebrating this as a victory. Another key component of neoreactionary thought has been proven right in practice. It’s often said that the comments section for any article on feminism proves the need for feminism. I could spend ages debunking that myth, but let me simply pose a theorem of my own- the responses taken to neoreaction only proves neoreaction to be right.

A Quick Guide to Entryists

Since I published A Beginner’s Guide to the Alternative Right, I’ve been worried that my work is encouraging entryists. But then I began to ask myself, “What is an entryist?” So I decided I’d jot down a few notes on what makes an entryist and why entryists are bad for neoreaction. By no means is this a complete list of entryist behaviors, merely a few obvious warning signs that I’ve come to recognize.

• Most entryists are not in neoreaction to learn or study, but rather to preach and spread their own personal agenda to as many people as possible. They are filled with narcissism and unwarranted self-importance. They have no interest in neoreaction as a whole, only what it can do for them and their image. They do not read NRx blogs or NRx books. They instead only care about their own output.

• Entryists have the annoyingly democratic obsession with how many people listen to them rather than who listens to them or what feedback they get. Instead of seeking out the opinions and input of more established NRx writers, they strive to get as many views and shares on their work as possible. Suddenly it ceases to become about quality work and more about who can get the most hits. Neoreaction will cease to be ideological and become as depressingly corporate as the GOP.

• Status signaling is another entryist habit: rather than produce original work, they parrot NRx ideas and slogans endlessly as to feel accepted in the movement. Rather than helping cultivate neoreaction as an intellectual school of thought, they turn it into an echo-chamber of unoriginal yes-men. Even worse is when their status signaling is to groups outside of neoreaction, thus slowly dissolving NRx by integrating it with outsiders.

• It is not uncommon for entryists to cling to other right-wing positions and try to connect them with neoreaction. National socialists are the prime offenders here, who see “NRx” as the new “NSDAP” and ignoring the many differences between the two movements. Neoreaction aims to avoid repeating the failures of twentieth century fascism and national socialism. Some entryists will even endorse the “manosphere” PUA scene, despite it being a degenerate institution that runs contrary to core NRx values.
• Entryists have the annoying tendency to promote democratic activism: rallies, leaflet campaigns, other sorts of mass-media NRx material. I may jokingly refer to neoreaction as the “counter-Illuminati” but the description still fits: we want to be a small, elite group rather than a raging mob. Not only that, but our esoteric nature is our strength- it is much harder for progressive institutions to counter us when they aren’t even aware of us.

• Many entryists have no understanding of social status at all: they simply barge in and treat established NRx writers as their equals. While communication and discussion are healthy, it requires a degree of respectful deference. Otherwise, neoreaction will descend into pure anarchy, as any hope of a core element will be eroded into nothingness.

The main point here is that an entryist is a parasite: he tries to benefit from neoreaction without actually helping or in some cases actually harming it. That is not to say entryists are malicious in nature: most are just stupid, with a few misguided neophytes scattered here and there. It is in the best interest of neoreaction that entryists are marginalized, ignored, and derided. The truly malignant element will be driven out, while the neophytes with genuine potential will hopefully be corrected in their faulty thinking. Neoreaction is not for everyone: it is an anti-democratic movement. We must understand and embrace this if we are to truly come into our own.

Is HP Lovecraft truly Neoreactionary?

It goes without saying that Lovecraft is undoubtedly the most right-leaning author in the sci-fi mainstream. To question his reactionary cred is almost heretical in itself. Nonetheless, even our most core elements deserve rigorous investigation. I’ll start by saying I’ve been a fan of Lovecraft’s work since I was about fifteen, back when I was a bleeding-heart liberal. Back then, I was enraptured by the idea of these freakish monsters and their godlike powers. Indeed, for my sophomore year research paper, I wrote about how Lovecraft’s life directly affected his fiction. Not a bad paper, but being a good little liberal, I failed to see his greater social messages and just dismissed it as archaic, regrettable racism. Having grown up and undergone rampancy, I can look at his work and truly understand his message.

The common sci-fi fan sees Lovecraft’s abominations merely as creative abominations. The more literate of them will assume that such monstrosities are a metaphor for social and cultural decay. However, only the most learned of Lovecraft fans will see that there is no metaphor- indeed, the true horror of Lovecraft’s work is the very real threat of degeneracy and entropy. In The Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu himself is not the threat to humanity. Indeed, it is never even stated that he is even aware of our existence before his awakening. The true danger is the effect his awakening will have. Mankind will return to his primordial nature: a miserable, primitive, savage existence. Likewise, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, it is not Dagon and his disciples we are supposed to be wary of, but of a degenerate, savage culture undermining traditional civilization. The Dunwich Horror is about rural decay, and how people will revert to backwards, savage beasts when kept away from culture. Indeed, the real evil in Lovecraft’s story is not the monsters, but is in fact the darker nature of mankind, the destructive side that the monsters simply help bring out. As cliché as the line has become, mankind is the true monster.

Lovecraft’s heroes are quite reactionary: intelligent, learned white men of a socially conservative outlook. They solve their problems through a combination of a carefully honed intellect and a firm sense of virtue. They are not heroic in the sense of being human, but rather in that they are underdogs, merely ordinary men going against impossible odds. Indeed, the fact that Lovecraft often makes a character’s curiosity and fascination with the world outside civilization into a fatal flaw would be unforgivable in modern sci-fi. What’s even more enthralling is how he not only is aware of class difference, but he celebrates it: His heroes are almost always of an upper class, while his villains are either deviant aristocrats or degenerate proles. Any heroic proles are good-natured spirits simply too inept to handle whatever evils are menacing them. And yet, in spite of all of this, Lovecraft’s work is still riddled with liberal ideology.

First and foremost, we need to understand Lovecraft’s background. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a son of New England. Yes, one of the most conservative authors of the twentieth century is from the home of contemporary liberalism. Lovecraft, however, was raised in a very puritan, conservative part of Rhode Island. This explains why, in spite of his strict belief in human biodiversity (he rejected Hitler and Nazi Germany because he deemed their science to be incorrect) and social tradition, he cannot help but embrace the liberal framework established by his ancestors in Plymouth Bay. Yes, for all of his reactionary posturing, Lovecraft was still part of the Cathedral. His work places a high value on education, especially at the University level. While Lovecraft was primarily interested in the sciences, a division not yet at the whims of progressives, he still never really understood the role that universities play in ongoing social decay. Instead, he buys into the mythology of his puritan ancestors: that the only hope for civilization lies in the enlightened minds of academia. Indeed, while Lovecraft understands the importance of oligarchy in guiding civilization, his taste in oligarchs is somewhat misguided.

There is also a disturbingly luddite trend in Lovecraft’s work. While stories like The Shunned House show mankind triumphing over monsters through science and ingenuity, the vast majority of his stories shun technological advancement. Lovecraft buys into the nonsensical idea that there are some truths mankind is better off not knowing, and some areas that we best left unexplored. In The Mountains Of Madness is essentially one large screed against the human desire to improve and grow. While Lovecraft recognizes the Hobbesian flaws in humanity, he still never really shows any hope that they can be corrected through study and exploration. While not all neoreactionaries share the sentiment that mankind can overcome its flaws, some of Lovecraft’s fiction strongly implies that striving to correct the human condition is a futile and pointless affair. Perhaps most damning of all is Herbert West: Re-Animator, a tale directly lifted from the highly progressive Enlightenment-era novel Frankenstein. The story directly criticizes men for trying to pursue power far beyond their reaches. It’s a very anti-western attitude, criticizing men for their advances in science and technology.

So in the end, can we truly call Lovecraft a neoreactionary? Not quite. While he touches on quite a few key themes and elements of reaction, Lovecraft’s work is still very much within the framework of liberalism. While we can nod our heads in how spot-on his predictions of cultural decay were, we still need to take a more critical viewpoint. His views are very coarse and unrefined in terms of intellectual rigor. They are mere observations and amateur theories rather than actual reactionary content. It would be foolish of me to say that Lovecraft’s work has no place in the alternative right, but we must not venerate him as high as we do the classics. Lovecraft is an entry-level writer, a means of awakening and encouraging individuals to explore the alt-right rather than actually educating already rampant individuals. His work, while entertaining, is hardly genuinely enlightening or interesting.

By no means should we stop reading Lovecraft. In fact, we should encourage people to read his work, and spread interest in it. Lovecraft’s fiction as well as his entire idea of social decay is wonderfully subversive. Stories like True Detective that treat human degeneracy as a disgusting evil are an important part of undermining the Cathedral and liberalism as a whole. As much as his work is hardly serious, high-level literature, it still deserves to stick around for a few more strange aeons, don’t you think?

Thoughts on Altgames, #GamerGate, and the alt-right.

I’m about to do something that will be very, very shocking to my readers, especially the ones that know me: I’m going to endorse an idea of Zoe Quinn’s. Now don’t get me wrong, I still despise Zoe Quinn. She’s an abuser, an adulterer, a liar, and altogether and unpleasant person who doesn’t belong in gaming. But her recent post on the idea of “altgames” is 100% spot on. In it, Quinn describes Alt Games, a spinoff of indie games. Altgames could be defined as DIY games and games criticism made by amateur indie outsiders not as a commercial product to sell, but as a means of expression. In what I think is very spot-on, she compares it to punk rock.

I’ll admit, I’m not well-versed in punk. Most of the pretentious liberal bullshit doesn’t speak to me and makes me roll my eyes. But I do have a history with the genre. When I was an angry kid in my senior year of high school fighting mental illness, I found transgressive punk bands like Anal Cunt and GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. Those bands to me were punk: disaffected dudes who didn’t fit in with the world lashing out in frustration and discontent. It was the same thing that attracted me to black metal: a feeling of general discontent with the world. As I got into college, I forgot about punk. But when I dropped out and started working, I started listening to bands like Blood For Blood and Antiseen: artists who made music for low-class people talking about the lower-class lifestyle. I wasn’t from the white ghettos of Boston or the backwoods of South Carolina, but I was a working man trying to make my way in the world. I felt like an underdog, so I listened to underdog music. It’s helped me really find a sense of contentment with my existence as a prole. So while I’m not 100% punk, I get punk well enough to see what Quinn is going for here with altgames.

If we expand the definition of altgames to include games criticism, then I was altgames before altgames was even given a name. Make no mistake, as much as I’ll shill my gratipay, The Right Vidya (and now The Right Drama!) is a labor of love. It’s my desire to create games writing that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Putting up a new blog post is exhilarating. When Nick Land and Adrian Chmielarz shared my post on Hatred, my heart skipped a beat. To me, getting the attention of a blog like Xenosystems or a dev like Adrian Chmielarz was more valuable than any cash donation. I felt like what I was saying mattered and made a difference. I was helping introduce video games to the alt-right and the alt-right to video games. I was merging the two. I’d like to think that I still am, given how much traffic my posts on KotakuInAction get me.

This is why I’m throwing my support behind the idea of altgames. I get that a lot of people in the alt-right, especially neoreaction, look down on Rachel Haywire for her idea of a punk aesthetic for the right. For most of us, outside decadent skinheads, punk is seen as a degenerate liberal cesspit. I disagree. The key element to punk is that it’s subversive- a word that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past few weeks. As our alt-right critics will note, there’s a lot of LARPing going on in NRx: too many people talking about what the glorious neoreactionary future will look like and not enough people focusing on the here and now. What we should be doing is focusing on how we can subvert the Cathedral and undermine its reach. I think #GamerGate is a major breakthrough for us: we saw a bunch of young, unassuming enlightenment-friendly types openly challenge their progressive “betters” and manage to keep it going for over six, soon to be seven months so far. Part of the success of #GamerGate lies in the DIY culture that permeates it: you have tons of people making #GamerGate art, starting #GamerGate charity, hosting #GamerGate streams, and even making #GamerGate games. Hell, The Right Vidya was inspired by the DIY culture of #GamerGate. It’s their ability to produce content that has helped them keep going.

But we need to be better than that. What helped turn me on to the alternative right was the work of HP Lovecraft, telling the kind of stories about social decay that no one else told. It helped subvert what I was learning in high school at the time as I realized that Detroit and other urban centers confirmed the predictions in his work. It taught me to look outside the box and embrace esoteric political wisdom. Obviously it wasn’t the only factor: the transgressive punk and black metal that I mentioned before helped me really clarify my distaste for modernity. Neoreaction needs to get on that: we need more media out there that subverts the cathedral and undermines it. And that’s why we need to hop on the altgames train. We need to take advantage of a DIY-centric scene and use it as a means of subversion. Altgames are already pretty big, and they’re only going to get bigger. I think one of the smartest things the alt-right did was to embrace tech, because with the tech boom we grew and prospered. I think when it comes to altgames, this is a boom coming that we could use to our advantage.

As for my brothers and sisters in #GamerGate, the idea of altgames is important to us as well. We all know that the community in the game business is awful: the testimony of guys like Roguestar and the work of the ShortFatOtaku team tells us that much. It’s a closed little circlejerk of industry buddies all working to get each other over, even at the expense of everyone else. Altgames is about realizing that the circlejerk exists and using various platforms like itch.io, twine, Patreon and more to really help break it up. Imagine if the DIY spirit of #GamerGate met with the DIY attitude of altgames? We could build a new, better GDC, a better IGF and Indiecade. We could an alternative to the corrupt, broken industry and build a much better one. The nature of altgames is about trying to empower amateurs and beginners. It’s perfectly in touch with #SolutionSixMonths and #OpRebuild. It’s the perfect platform for #GamerGate to use to help expand our influence and get our message out. We are the real alternative, and we need to make ourselves known.

So in conclusion, I suppose you should think of this post as another call to action. It’s time we stop rolling our eyes at the DIY platforms and start using them to help build the newer, more improved gaming community, whatever that means to you. Now more than ever, it’s become easier to take control and choose where you want to guide a scene. This is perhaps the best chance you’ll get in a long time to make an impact. It’s time you take advantage of it.

Random, disjointed thoughts

Right now I’m looking at three half-finished essays on my desktop. One is hopefully going to be published in the lovely Rachel Haywire’s Trigger Warning magazine, the other two are going to show up here. There’s a fourth essay, a run-through of the Donovan Test on Moviebob that I’m going to scrap for a number of reasons. First, it’s a bit mean-spirited. Second, reading his stupid fucking book is giving me a killer headache. I highly regret even downloading it. So in the mean time, have some random, informal thoughts and observations I’ve had this week:

• The “manosphere” is thoroughly pwned, as Thuthmosis and Roosh’s meltdowns have shown. I’ve previously witnessed incidents like when /u/slutlord-fascist of /r/antiPOZi trolled /r/TheRedPill with some HBD truthbombs, and the wannabe-hardcore PUAs flipped their shit and immediately went into leftist signaling mode, worried that being seen as racist would impede their quest for pussy. Indeed, the “manosphere” is nothing more than a group of peacocks preening and trying to compete for status and attention. It’s embarrassing.
• The more I watch WWE self-destruct, the more I have my doubts in Justine Tunney and Mencius Moldbug’s ideas about a CEO as king of the country. All it takes is one senile old fool to undo decades of growth and development and possibly irreversibly damage his own company. Dave Meltzer has a great write-up in his Observer newsletter about how Vince is slowly killing his own company through poor booking and egomania.
• Playing Shovel Knight has really made me remember how much I love video games. It feels great to get angry at myself for fucking up rather than blaming the game. It’s a challenging, engaging experience and I feel like I was right to say it was one of the best things in 2014. I feel like a little kid again thanks to the game, but in all the right ways.
• Nick Land linked to my piece on Hatred! I don’t comment on Land that much since his work is way beyond my reading level, but it feels great to be noticed. Still, I think my thinkpiece isn’t THAT great. Even though I look at things realistically, I’m not really a fan of pessimism. As cold as I am, I can’t really entirely divorce myself from the human cost of social decay. I’d much rather my work that involves praising people who do things right get promoted instead. Sadly, that seems to be in short supply…
• Speaking of folks that are doing it right, #GamerGate has been kicking ass and taking names. Nearly any twitter hashtag created to mock #GamerGate has been hijacked and driven into the ground through a wide variety of funposting. The #GamerGate army is strong enough and loud enough to out-muscle even the most vocal of their opposition. Meanwhile, #GamerGate tags like #DontDateSJWs and #LetMarkSpeak will easily get trending worldwide thanks to #GamerGate’s strong willpower. Through the magic of mass-emailing, #GamerGate even cost one SJW writer her job for a poorly-researched hitpiece on 8chan. They might be a mutation in the Cathedral, but damned if I’m not proud of them anyways.
• Chuck C Johnson is an interesting case. For all intents and purposes, he should have gone rampant long ago in the face of the press and intelligentsia’s attacks. He seems to have a basic grasp of HBD and gender dynamics. However, he obviously is still pwned, parroting the same old conservakin talking points. I do eagerly await the day Johnson finally wakes up, as I feel like his mechanical, brutal investigation process would make him a powerful ally.
• TheRightStuff (no relation) has probably what’s one of the funniest, most informative podcasts out there with The Daily Shoah. I’d highly recommend you all give them a listen. Their latest guest, Common Filth of Common Filth Radio is also great, and I’d recommend you check out his work as well. It really makes me want to break into the podcast game, albeit that would be down the line.
• I’ve been working on building my own PC so I can finally join the PC Master Race where I belong. It’s a surprisingly fun project, researching parts and comparing them, plus asking friends for recommendations. I’d highly recommend it to any guy with a good $2,000 to burn.
• Yesterday I started watching Twin Peaks, and I’m already hooked. I’ve always thought David Lynch was onto something in Eraserhead, especially in terms of focusing on the evils of industrialism and modernity. Of course, Lynch could have just been trolling intellectuals much like Samuel Beckett was in Waiting For Godot, an equally noble cause.

So yeah, that’s a short write-up of what I’ve been up to. Sorry it’s so late, but I do hope to have some sort of new piece up next week. Maybe I’ll take my shit-talking the manosphere to the next level, or I’ll finish one of these pieces I already started. Either way, I’d just like to remind you all that my Gratipay is still open if you want to help fund my work!

Wrestle Kingdom IX: A Night to Remember

                Wrestling fans in the US will sing the praises of Madison Square Garden and Allstate Arena, but any true fan of the sport will tell you that the greatest wrestling venue known to man is the Tokyo Dome, located in the capital city of Japan. The Dome has housed some of the greatest pro wrestling matches of all time. The Dome has hosted a number of some of the greatest matches in wrestling history. New Japan Pro Wrestling has always made it a point to have their first show of the year at the Dome, the show being the NJPW version of Wrestlemania. This show, called Wrestle Kingdom, is known for showcasing some of the most talented wrestlers in the world today. This latest Wrestle Kingdom, Wrestle Kingdom IX, was no exception. It was not only a dazzling display of excellent wrestling, but a celebration of what it meant to be Japanese, with the traditional values of Japan on full display. So without further ado, let’s dive right in and break this show down match by match.

It’s Cool To Hate

Hatred, a game announced by the Polish developer Destructive Creations, is in my opinion the apex of art. The game is simple: it revolves around the player character slaughtering as many people as humanly possible. There is nothing light-hearted or ironic about Hatred: the violence is all sickeningly realistic, as is your victim’s pleas for mercy as you heartlessly execute them. The game makes no attempt at hiding the fact that you are not gunning down cartoonish caricatures, but rather real people with real lives. Everything is seen through a dismal, depressing grayscale, with only explosions, sirens, and muzzle flashes sticking out. Everything is rendered in the generic ugliness that only the Unreal Engine can provide. I’m actually very proud to say that the gameplay trailer made me genuinely uncomfortable. This is a game with no redeeming qualities.

One of the things that stood out to me is that one of the developers in the Destructive Creations photo is wearing a Black Witchery T-shirt. From what I’ve gathered, Black Witchery is a black metal band from Florida. Black metal as a genre has always been interesting to me. There’s a great documentary called Until the Light Takes Us which covers the origins of the genre and its eventual development. Most people will agree that the second wave of black metal began with the Norwegian band Mayhem. Mayhem was, from 1989 to 1995, the apex of cool in the same way I see Hatred as being. It was the brainchild of guitarist Euronymous, who, much like Destructive Creations is doing, set out to create a band with no redeeming qualities. He had been disgusted with how death metal had developed a sort of ironic acceptance and was no longer considered truly dangerous. Under Euronymous’s direction, Mayhem strove to reject all that was good and acceptable in the world. He deliberately strove for horrible, low-fi recording, poorly tuned instruments, and painfully harsh vocals.

Mayhem’s stage act was beyond unacceptable, thanks to the work of mentally deranged frontmen who would perform grotesque acts of ritual self-mutilation. People were used to seeing this from punk stars like Iggy Pop and GG Allin, but those had become acceptable under the guise of random chaos. The self-harm that Maniac and his more famous successor Dead brought to the table were deliberate and thus far more messy. To add onto the mix, they would surround the stage in barbed wire to prevent fan interaction and mount severed animal heads fresh from the slaughterhouse onto the mic stands. It was a grotesque, repulsive display. And yet, unlike the punks of England and America, Mayhem was entirely sincere in their transgressions. Indeed, Euronymous reveled in the blatant immorality of Mayhem. He celebrated the burning of churches, and when Dead fatally shot himself, Euronymous took pictures and sent pieces of his skull and brains to other bands he deemed worthy. Before Euronymous’s murder in 1993, Mayhem was easily the most evil band in the world, considered so foul that no media outlet would reach out to them.

This made Mayhem cool. It was cutting-edge, LITERALLY. There was nothing like it at the time. It was the most extreme, most insane band in existence. If you wanted to be the most hardcore metalhead, you listened to Mayhem. It didn’t even matter if you liked the music, liking the spectacle was enough. It was aggressive and transgressive, and it showed that you were willing to put up with what others couldn’t.

I see the same thing in Hatred. It’s a vile, disgusting game that does nothing but celebrate the very real murder of innocents. The developers even outright say that Hatred is a rebuttal to the modern, safe, consumer-friendly indie games. It’s a direct assault on the intelligentsia as much as it is an assault on consumerism. And that’s what makes it genuinely cool. To endorse Hatred with sincerity is to brand yourself a supporter of sincere violence, especially violence against women and minorities. It’s a rejection of all that is good in our culture.

Certainly to the average reactionary, Hatred would seem to be a degenerate sort of game that contributes nothing to a healthy society. And yet, that is why it should be endorsed. See, in Until the Light Takes Us, Varg Vikernes says that his peers were less excited about death and destruction that would come with a possible third world war and more about what would come afterwards: the rebuilding of Nordic society this time based on the old, pre-Christian Nordic ways. However, that meant celebrating the collapse of civilization and the sort of destruction that came with it. In that sense, I would argue that Vikernes is right on the money for neoreaction. Our goal, as Moldbug even reminds us in his Gentle Introduction, is to let things take their course and then step in when democracy, Americanism and the modern world ultimately fails. Thus, much like Mayhem was before us, Hatred is the next step towards the inevitable collapse of the modern world. It is intensely nihlist, rejecting all the modern world has to offer. Indeed, the growing popularity of it despite it being public enemy number one for sites like Polygon, is a sign of growing disenfranchisement with the modern world. At present, the game has already been greenlit by Steam users, and will likely be a best-seller (by indie standards).

And certainly, raising dissent is a noble goal- this piece from Henry Dampier on Socialmatter regarding the recent “Black Brunch” protests summarizes what I’m trying to say. The more people are upset, hurt, and miserable, the more that they will begin to feel disenfranchised and frustrated with the modern world. And of course, as I’ve said before, this will push them into the “despair” phase of rampancy. The worse the world gets, the more and more people will realize that progressivism does not work. Even if they endorse classical liberalism or some other alternative to neoreaction, it still undermines the overall social control of the cathedral. The Chinese mandate of heaven makes it very clear that the consent of the people is derived from their happiness. When we take away that happiness, the consent of the people and thus the legitimacy of their ruler vanishes. Certainly, real-world violence is unacceptable. Yet despair? Outrage? Frustration? Those are all important to spread.

Therefore, we can do nothing but praise Hatred, for further rejecting the modern world. While the game most definitely rejects us, what difference does it make? It is only another step to oblivion for our broken, miserable society. It’s certainly a step in the right direction.

Oliver Cromwell and the Patriots

I know, I know, the title reads like a stupid hipster punk rock band. But this essay right here is going to be a hell of a lot more subversive than anything you can buy in a San Francisco record store. See, I’m going to prove to you what plenty of people on /v/ and in #GamerGate have said for years: Kojima was right. The Patriots sort of exist, and they all but run the entire modern world. But of course, in all honesty Kojima was even more right than you’d think. Buckle up kiddies, you’re about to find out that truth is much stranger than fiction.

But let’s start with fiction. Let’s start with the Patriots. All this work is sourced from the Metal Gear Wiki⁽¹⁾, which at the time of this writing covers the entire timeline from Metal Gear Solid 3 to Metal Gear Rising. At the time of this essay, Metal Gear Solid 5 is not yet released, so my chronology here may be subject to change via retcon.

The Patriots have their roots in the Philosophers, a group of the wealthiest, smartest individuals in the US, Russia, and China, who pooled their resources after the First World War to prevent another catastrophic war from happening. This group, the Wisemen’s Committee, operated in secret, murdering the father of the girl who would grow up to be The Boss for disclosing their existence to her. By 1930, the last founding member of the Committee had passed away, and the group had slipped out of control. Soon, the various Philosophers jockeyed for power, taking control of their own governments through espionage and subversion. When World War II broke out, the Philosophers pooled their resources, over 100 billion dollars, into what would be known as “The Philosophers’ Legacy”. This helped fund the new, monumental changes in warfare and helped the Philosophers crush the Axis for daring to threaten their grip on the world.

By the war’s end, the Philosophers themselves had splintered, with the Americans on one side and the Soviets and Chinese on the other. The Philosophers’ Legacy itself was stolen by one Boris Volgin and hidden across the globe. All the information on the money was stored on one microfilm, which his son “inherited” via murdering him. His son, Colonel Volgin, used some of the money to fund his operations which set the plot of Metal Gear Solid 3 in motion. At the end of MGS3, Naked Snake successfully eliminates Volgin and obtains the Philosophers’ Legacy for America. The Legacy is then stolen by Revolver Ocelot, who along with Major Zero and Naked Snake (now called Big Boss) use it to form the Patriots.

The Patriots were an attempt to return to the Wisemen’s Committee’s original goal of guiding humanity to a world of peace and order. With their resources, they had total control over the entire United States, selecting who would become senator or president. However, soon a major ideological split took place: Big Boss began to question Zero’s goals. He felt that the Patriots should follow the Boss’s dying wish and help keep the peace and keep soldiers from becoming puppets of their governments, and nothing more. Zero, on the other hand, wanted to unite the world under one will, ending all war and conflict.

When Zero had Big Boss cloned without his consent, Big Boss left the Patriots, forming the Militaires Sans Frontieres, a Private Military Company who would give a home to any soldier needing one. Through the events of Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker and most likely Metal Gear Solid 5, the MSF would eventually become Outer Heaven, an entire country that would act as a PMC. The Patriots, now calling themselves Cipher, consistently tried to either win Big Boss back to their side, or have him killed. Big Boss tried twice to usurp Zero, only to be seemingly killed by his own clone, Solid Snake.

Upset with Boss’s betrayal, Zero created the Patriot AIs who could control the country and eventually the world long after his death. Indeed, while Zero eventually decayed into a vegetative state, the AI discretely consolidated all their power over the country, and soon were building Arsenal Gear, a massive submarine designed to secretly manipulate and censor the flow of information over the internet, television, and print to gain total control over humanity. The idea behind Arsenal Gear is that rather than try to control the world via brute force, they could simply manipulate the information fed to the public in order to trick the masses into obedience. They were, to quote Noam Chomsky, “manufacturing consent” via memetic eugenics. Arsenal Gear was intended to select which cultural memes (viral ideas, not stupid internet jokes) were to be disseminated and which were to be crushed.

Even though Arsenal Gear was destroyed, the Patriots learned that they could effectively gaslight humanity on a large scale, creating a functional “war economy” which they controlled using nanomachines (Yes, the plot of MGS4 was stupid, bear with me) which created a grand chaos which they were subtly manipulating for the purpose of creating a full-blown new world order. Ultimately, thanks to Solid Snake and the FOXALIVE virus, these AIs were dismantled and the war economy began to crumble as the world stabilized itself. However, the memes that the Patriots created lived on long after their destruction, to the point where Senator Steven Armstrong attempted to revive the war economy for the express purpose of demolishing said memes.

So there you have it, a highly abridged version of the Patriots. What can you take away from it? Primarily you want to think about the idea of control via “manufactured consent” and memetic eugenics. I think we can all agree that a group of AIs controlling the world is pretty silly, along with any other sort of Infowars-style conspiracy nonsense. Still, think about the idea of controlling information to help shape the attitudes of people. It’s large scale social engineering, and it’s very, VERY real.

This next part all comes from one Curtis Yarvin, or as he’s more commonly known, Mencius Moldbug who ran a blog called “Unqualified Reservations”. This is just a synopsis from his “Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”⁽²⁾ which can take an entire day to read. If you think I’m long-winded, Moldbug’s going to kill you with sheer verbosity.

Okay, so this time the story starts with the Middle Ages. The supreme authority back then is the pope. All education and government is run through the Catholic Church. The monarchs answered to the pope. If you got excommunicated, you could expect to get easily conquered by all the other kings, because you were then fair game. This goes on for some time until the Reformation, where kings start to tell the pope to sod off en masse and raise their own Protestant spaces.

Anyway, let’s zoom in on England, early 1500s, where Henry VIII tells the pope to get lost because he wants a new wife. So this establishes England as a religious battleground, where all sorts of Protestant sects are fighting for control. Now let’s fast forward to the 1600’s, where Puritanism, an offshoot of Calvinism, itself a form of Protestantism springs up. Now I’ll skip over the details, but Puritans and the English government didn’t mesh well after Oliver Cromwell died and the Great Restoration sprung up. Cromwell just happened to be a godawful leader who everyone hated and also happened to be a Puritan. A couple smart Puritans decided that they needed to get the hell out of dodge. They packed their bags and hopped aboard the Mayflower and set up the Plymouth colony.

So now let’s look at Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock was a very unique setup. A lot of people like to claim that the Puritans built a theocracy. Of course, that’s not true. Iran runs a theocracy, because the supreme governing authority is a religious one as well. With Plymouth, that was never the case. Unlike England, Plymouth set the colony up as a crude representative democracy. However, this was an obvious sham. The Puritans believed that a good democracy is an educated democracy. So if you wanted to have a say, you had to be educated. Of course, that the church ran the school system. So the first real American democracy was in fact a giant goddamn scam. The church told people how to think, so voting hardly made a difference in actual policy. That’s why we supposedly have separation of church and state in America, because if the church controls the schools, they control the vote. Imagine if every school was a catholic school, do you think abortion or gay marriage would be hot-button issues?

Eventually these schools and universities did break away from the church, but the entire system still stands to this day: the schools educate the voters, who vote based on the values that the schools impart on them. It’s not an obvious factor, but it’s a subconscious one, a memetic one. Remember memes? The Patriots really should have focused on controlling academia: every major, influential figure in the world at some point has to go through public schooling or academia in some form. You need a degree to get a job, especially now more than ever. To play a part in society, you have to accept the memes that education forces upon you.

And while the schools broke away from the church, they just replaced it with a new religion: Progressive Egalitarianism. See, the various memes of the Age of Enlightenment such as populist government, gender equality, human biological uniformity, pacifism and secularism all became a part of the new curriculum, where they remain to this day. These memes are the foundation of nearly all modern political ideologies and political parties throughout western history, even communism and fascism. And it is in academia where these memes grow and evolve and mutate.

And the thing is, this mentality dominates the planet. At first it was confined to the northern United States: the south was founded by capitalists and operated on a non-ideological, economic form of democracy. This lasted until the Civil War, where the south decided they wanted nothing to do with the Puritan progressives of the north and tried to secede, only to get completely destroyed by the north and forced to comply with the Puritan style of running things. Reconstruction was simply the north trying to reshape the south in its image. Of course, it didn’t entirely work out, as evidenced by the existence of the Republican party today. Still, the Republicans and the American right are still fairly powerless, being only capable of slowing down progressivism instead of stopping it entirely. Indeed, the GOP still roots themselves in the various core memes of the enlightenment.

Our schools, media, government, and even our religions at this point all exist to protect these memes and help them slowly conquer the world. This forms a government-media-academia complex that Moldbug and other neoreactionaries refer to as “The Cathedral”. Much like the fictional Wisemen’s Committee, Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans created a massive complex that eventually grew to control nearly the entire world.

So how does the Cathedral compare to Kojima’s Patriots? For starters, Kojima gets one thing wrong: The world is not controlled by people manipulating memes, but rather the memes themselves manipulating people. At the head of the Patriots are various AIs, at the head of the Cathedral are abstract ideas. You cannot destroy an idea with a computer virus or nuclear weapon. The Cathedral is, for the most part, invincible. While we see movements that periodically try to challenge it like #GamerGate, these movements inevitably fall in line with the same core memes controlling the Cathedral, thus neutralizing any threat to those memes. Instead of overthrowing the Cathedral, they simply adjust the implementation of those ideas.

Of course, much like the Patriots, the Cathedral, while possibly founded to help create a better world, actually has no such interest in doing so. Nearly every problem in the modern world can be traced back to some variant of the Cathedral’s core memes. Indeed, the horrors of Vietnam and Korea were a direct result of internal friction within the Cathedral. Atrocities like Columbine and Sandy Hook are the end result of the increasingly nihilist world the Cathedral is creating. For more evidence that these memes are inherently destructive and harmful to mankind, I advise you attempt to make it through Moldbug’s “How Dawkins got Pwned”⁽³⁾ (Good luck, I still haven’t finished it).

So what can we take away from all this? Consider yourself officially on the path to rampancy, dear reader. Unless you’re already a neoreactionary, you are now aware that your entire worldview and everything you know has been fed to you by the Cathedral. The choice is yours: do you accept these memes and their control over the world? Or do you seek true freedom, independence from the lines drawn by the modern world? Do you submit to the real-life Patriots, or do you cast them off to make your own choices as a human being? To quote Solid Snake himself from the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: “Find something to believe in, and find it for yourself. When you do, pass it on to the future.”⁽⁴⁾

(1) The Metal Gear Wiki

(2) A Complete Collection of Moldbug’s Gentle Introduction

(3) A Complete Collection of Moldbug’s “How Dawkins Got Pwned”

(4) “Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty” on IMDB

A Followup to “#GamerGate Viewed from the Right”

John Glanton of the wonderful site SocialMatter.com has written this lovely piece about #GamerGate, the online movement that I’ve been involved in. Of course, as a #GamerGate stormtrooper and general loudmouth, I can’t help but add my thoughts to it.

In context, Glanton notes that the enemies of #GamerGate have labeled us as right-wing. And at a glance, they would seem correct. Several prominent, respected right-wing individuals and outlets like Justine Tunney⁽¹⁾, Vox Day⁽²⁾, and of course Breitbart.com⁽³⁾ have thrown their full support behind the movement. And of course, the left-wing media no doubt has tried their hardest to smear #GamerGate as an evil right wing movement⁽⁴⁾. Obviously, as most rough studies show, this is hardly the case⁽⁵⁾. For the most part, #GamerGate identifies as left-leaning liberals. There are open feminists in #GamerGate’s ranks, such as Christina H. Sommers.

For this reason, I do not see #GamerGate as a direct challenge to the cathedral. Rather, it is instead simply the evolution of the cathedral. See, Glanton gets a lot of stuff right- he points out that #GamerGate uses the terms and ideology of the cathedral. However, I don’t think he sees his point through to its conclusion: #GamerGate is the next evolution of progressive ideology. Mencius Moldbug uses the “Minotaur” analogy in his celebrated essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” (A delightful yet intellectually challenging piece that I’m still struggling to make it all the way through) to describe how the cathedral evolves: Minotaur 42 attacks Minotaur 41 and takes it over. M.42, now dominant, keeps M.41 around as a sparring partner, to beat on until M.43 arrives presumably to conquer M.42⁽⁶⁾. I suspect that #GamerGate is the first sign that M.43 has arrived.

See, the rise of the Dark Enlightenment was easily aided and abetted by M.42, the cathedral as we know it today. The hyper-sensitive, vicious, sociopathic “Social Justice Warriors” were not subtle at all with their agenda of total ideological world conquest. Indeed, the most effective recruiting poster for conservatism or even neoreaction is simply to show someone how outright insane these SJWs are. They make no effort to hide that the radical progressive left is the modern establishment, and that you better toe the line or else. M.42’s greatest flaw was its overzealous nature. The cathedral never does well when it is out in the open, because people will reject it on instinct. Its success lies on its covert nature, focusing on subverting its opposition instead of crushing them with brute force.

And so, M.43 will be different. The feminists and progressives inside #GamerGate will take control as the new establishment, using positive reinforcement and “weaponized nice” to continue the conquest of the world. And trust me; they will do a much better job than M.42 ever did.

So all that aside, why am I, a self-proclaimed neoreactionary, supporting M.43? Because in my mind, M.43 is actually weaker than M.42. See, M.42 actively looked for people like me to systematically purge and eradicate. M.43 will not do that. They will obviously passively pick me apart and challenge me, but they have too much human decency to directly attack me. And of course, in not doing that, they allow people like myself to continue to deconstruct and pick apart the cathedral as an institution. Indeed, M.43 wants to go back to the Age of Enlightenment, with free speech and open forums for discussion. And I say let them: it will only give us more of a platform to continue growing and growing. We hardly need to even adapt for M.43. We can just keep doing what we’re doing, and keep on winning people over.

1. “For ten years, social justice warriors have been waging culture war on social media. #GamerGate is the FIRST concerted effort to fight them.”– Justine Tunney
2. “We Can Do That”– Vox Day
3. “Feminist Bullies Tearing Video Game Industry Apart”– Milo Yiannopoulous
4. “Gamergate’s vicious right-wing swell means there can be no neutral stance”– Jon Stone
5. “Gamergate Attitude Polls”– Grimachu
6. “How Dawkins Got Pwned”– Mencius Moldbug