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A very brief outline of the ideological fringes of the cultural battlefield today, here in the US and more broadly throughout the West. Though in this entry, I'll be talking specifically about how the culture war is playing out here in the USA. The ideologies I describe below are by no means the views of average people in the US, but rather the extremes that are each trying to assert their own respective forms of extremity into the general body politic.
CTRL-Left: What we see today with the so-called "regressive leftists" and Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who fancy their ever-morphing ideology as being "progressive." It's the Liberal paradigm in its decay stage, something that many on the newly-reinvigorated Right have labeled with epithets like "Cultural Marxism." In my view, it's just dying (Neo)Liberalism in panic mode and what we know quite well as "Political Correctness" is simply its primary method of cultural assault on anyone/anything that doesn't conform and obey its dictates which are becoming evermore irrational and authoritarian by the day.
The driving ethos of this decadent current is a combination of two primary concepts:
(1) Emancipatory Politics, i.e. the urge to "liberate" every individual from the constraints of every tradition-prescribed notion of morality, social roles, metaphysical orientation, ect.,
(2) Intersectional Identity Politics, i.e. the deification of the victim/oppressed archetype and the subsequentoppression olympics caste system "progressive stack" that emerges from this massively-skewed valuation schema.
Because contemporary Liberalism has run out of energy and new ideas, the ideology has hardened into a rigid set of dogmas and has become extremely hostile to any challenges, dissent or even slight amendments. Fast forward to the current-year and the Left is now almost wholly consumed by totalitarian ideology that ultimately serves the interests of the Global Crapitalist ruling elite. Basically ultra-wealthy "champagne socialist" elites like George Soros and various other billionaires have thrown lots of their money at NGOs which over the past several decades have infiltrated and co-opted various grassroots Leftist causes and have remade those causes in their own image. That image being, a wholesale focus on cultural wedge issues like feminism, abortion rights, subaltern-themed race baiting, faux-environmentalism, vanity-driven charity efforts, ect., all to the detriment of any serious look at economic issues.
So why are the economic issues so thoroughly ignored? Does anyone remember all the cries and wails about "the 1%"?? Those Occupy Wall St. chants now seem like a distant memory. Well, going by what I just laid out, it doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together. The CTRL-Left today is characterized by hordes of screeching millennial useful idiots, thoroughly brainwashed by their radical professors and propaganda-spewing mainstream media pundits. They are now a noxious culture force hellbent on denying any freedom of expression to anyone who doesn't publically share or validate their views. There will be more on this madness in subsequent entries.
ALT-Right: A nearly-incomprehensible jumble of derisive reactions to the decay of Liberalism I describe above. As usual, the way people end up battling one bad set of ideas is with another bad set of ideas.
When the term "Alt-Right" first entered mass cultural consciousness (at least on the internet) several years ago, it was an open grab-bag of various anti-establishment conservative, libertarian, and even Neo-reactionary positions. However, the particularist (those rejecting any notion of moral universalism or common humanity) far-right fringes thoroughly appropriated this label for themselves and not long after the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, the rest of the Dissident Right quickly dissociated from the Alt-Right label and left it to the aforementioned White Nationalist (they generally call themselves "identitarians") fringe led by fruitcake ass-clowns like Richard Spencer to claim for themselves. And then of course, endless petty infighting led to a further fracturing of this fringe.
The main crackpot idea promoted by this fringe is that the United States of America, in order to save its original/founding Anglo culture from the impending invasions of brown zombie hordes from the third world, needs to be transformed into an exclusively-white "Ethnostate." How they will manage to achieve that goal in a country that's clearly a smorgasbord of people hailing from different ethnic backgrounds, some of them non-white, is of course not described in much detail. But any non-braindead individual can use their imagination to figure that one out. Of course certain edgy corners of internet culture (I'm thinking of 4chan in particular) that has amplified this fringe, is simply promoting these ideas for the purposes of shock-value and irony -- it's what goths and "satanic" meta-heads were doing to their parents 20-30 years ago. Anyway, those who are unironic "true believers" in Alt-Right ideology are a tiny fringe and most of the Dissident Right today that opposes Neoliberal globalism does NOT sympathize with very many Alt-Right positions.
ESC-Center: This is any set of ideas or attitudes which firmly rejects both of the above and encourages an avoidance of any ideological veering too far in any particular direction. This orientation has gathered an ever-growing contingent of:
(1) Disaffected liberals, i.e. those disgusted by SJW insanity of intersectional identity politics, or simply anything reeking of inflexible ideological dogma, but otherwise still hold firmly onto a combination of Classical Liberal principles and the more toned-down aspects of Social Liberalism.
(2) Small-l Libertarians, i.e. Classical Liberal types who are opposed to big government but otherwise don't obsessively subscribe to spergy libertarian philosophies like Objectivism (Ayn Rand), Praxeology (Austrian Economics) and various right-wing anarchist doctrines that wholly reject both a metaphysical and socio-cultural understanding of human nature and thus resort to employing a mechanistic, darwinistic and deterministic theory of human action.
3) Those who are mildly or moderately socially conservative but otherwise against using institutional power (like government, mass media and academia) to forcefully impose their own beliefs and morality on everyone else.
(4) Largely-apolitical people who have now experienced politics being directly pushed onto them in one way or another and are not very happy about it.
The emerging thought leaders of this grouping on the internet has come to be known as "The Intellectual Dark Web." See: thinkers and alt. media personalities like: Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Sargon of Akkad, Styxhexenhammer666, The Amazing Atheist, ect.
***
I'll be expanding more on these concepts in subsequent entries.
CTRL-Left: What we see today with the so-called "regressive leftists" and Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) who fancy their ever-morphing ideology as being "progressive." It's the Liberal paradigm in its decay stage, something that many on the newly-reinvigorated Right have labeled with epithets like "Cultural Marxism." In my view, it's just dying (Neo)Liberalism in panic mode and what we know quite well as "Political Correctness" is simply its primary method of cultural assault on anyone/anything that doesn't conform and obey its dictates which are becoming evermore irrational and authoritarian by the day.
The driving ethos of this decadent current is a combination of two primary concepts:
(1) Emancipatory Politics, i.e. the urge to "liberate" every individual from the constraints of every tradition-prescribed notion of morality, social roles, metaphysical orientation, ect.,
(2) Intersectional Identity Politics, i.e. the deification of the victim/oppressed archetype and the subsequent
Because contemporary Liberalism has run out of energy and new ideas, the ideology has hardened into a rigid set of dogmas and has become extremely hostile to any challenges, dissent or even slight amendments. Fast forward to the current-year and the Left is now almost wholly consumed by totalitarian ideology that ultimately serves the interests of the Global Crapitalist ruling elite. Basically ultra-wealthy "champagne socialist" elites like George Soros and various other billionaires have thrown lots of their money at NGOs which over the past several decades have infiltrated and co-opted various grassroots Leftist causes and have remade those causes in their own image. That image being, a wholesale focus on cultural wedge issues like feminism, abortion rights, subaltern-themed race baiting, faux-environmentalism, vanity-driven charity efforts, ect., all to the detriment of any serious look at economic issues.
So why are the economic issues so thoroughly ignored? Does anyone remember all the cries and wails about "the 1%"?? Those Occupy Wall St. chants now seem like a distant memory. Well, going by what I just laid out, it doesn't take a genius to put 2 and 2 together. The CTRL-Left today is characterized by hordes of screeching millennial useful idiots, thoroughly brainwashed by their radical professors and propaganda-spewing mainstream media pundits. They are now a noxious culture force hellbent on denying any freedom of expression to anyone who doesn't publically share or validate their views. There will be more on this madness in subsequent entries.
ALT-Right: A nearly-incomprehensible jumble of derisive reactions to the decay of Liberalism I describe above. As usual, the way people end up battling one bad set of ideas is with another bad set of ideas.
When the term "Alt-Right" first entered mass cultural consciousness (at least on the internet) several years ago, it was an open grab-bag of various anti-establishment conservative, libertarian, and even Neo-reactionary positions. However, the particularist (those rejecting any notion of moral universalism or common humanity) far-right fringes thoroughly appropriated this label for themselves and not long after the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, the rest of the Dissident Right quickly dissociated from the Alt-Right label and left it to the aforementioned White Nationalist (they generally call themselves "identitarians") fringe led by fruitcake ass-clowns like Richard Spencer to claim for themselves. And then of course, endless petty infighting led to a further fracturing of this fringe.
The main crackpot idea promoted by this fringe is that the United States of America, in order to save its original/founding Anglo culture from the impending invasions of brown zombie hordes from the third world, needs to be transformed into an exclusively-white "Ethnostate." How they will manage to achieve that goal in a country that's clearly a smorgasbord of people hailing from different ethnic backgrounds, some of them non-white, is of course not described in much detail. But any non-braindead individual can use their imagination to figure that one out. Of course certain edgy corners of internet culture (I'm thinking of 4chan in particular) that has amplified this fringe, is simply promoting these ideas for the purposes of shock-value and irony -- it's what goths and "satanic" meta-heads were doing to their parents 20-30 years ago. Anyway, those who are unironic "true believers" in Alt-Right ideology are a tiny fringe and most of the Dissident Right today that opposes Neoliberal globalism does NOT sympathize with very many Alt-Right positions.
ESC-Center: This is any set of ideas or attitudes which firmly rejects both of the above and encourages an avoidance of any ideological veering too far in any particular direction. This orientation has gathered an ever-growing contingent of:
(1) Disaffected liberals, i.e. those disgusted by SJW insanity of intersectional identity politics, or simply anything reeking of inflexible ideological dogma, but otherwise still hold firmly onto a combination of Classical Liberal principles and the more toned-down aspects of Social Liberalism.
(2) Small-l Libertarians, i.e. Classical Liberal types who are opposed to big government but otherwise don't obsessively subscribe to spergy libertarian philosophies like Objectivism (Ayn Rand), Praxeology (Austrian Economics) and various right-wing anarchist doctrines that wholly reject both a metaphysical and socio-cultural understanding of human nature and thus resort to employing a mechanistic, darwinistic and deterministic theory of human action.
3) Those who are mildly or moderately socially conservative but otherwise against using institutional power (like government, mass media and academia) to forcefully impose their own beliefs and morality on everyone else.
(4) Largely-apolitical people who have now experienced politics being directly pushed onto them in one way or another and are not very happy about it.
The emerging thought leaders of this grouping on the internet has come to be known as "The Intellectual Dark Web." See: thinkers and alt. media personalities like: Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Dave Rubin, Sargon of Akkad, Styxhexenhammer666, The Amazing Atheist, ect.
***
I'll be expanding more on these concepts in subsequent entries.
