8 ms·

"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding

"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. Even I find this particular turn against SpaceX somewhat weird. My internal model of the alt-right has largely been that they have one wing who are basically Nazi fanfiction, another who idolize the "throne and altar conservatism" of pre-Revolutionary France, and another who think they should build Warhammer 40K's Imperium of Man as a real-life society (they're very pop-culture influenced). Turning against a private space company seems to indicate that some factions (Nazis plus... someone else?) are throwing the "far-right futurism" faction overboard. (Again, these guys are really weird, but hey, it's all there on their blogs.) My big question is: where's Peter Thiel in all this? Just last year, he was the one trying to assure everyone that, oh don't worry, this was all about tearing down overbearing regulations and political correctness in favor of unbound innovation, that the Right weren't anti-science religious people anymore, etc. Turning against SpaceX isn't just throwing a faction of bloggers overboard, it's thrown Thiel overboard, and he was a major billionaire backer for all of this.

s_kilk 9y ago
> where's Peter Thiel in all this? The evidence seems to suggest Thiel has gotten in with the "throne and altar" crowd, the Neo-Reactionaries and self-described "Dark Enlightenment". https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein How that intersects with his techy leanings, I don't really know, it's very possible that he's being thrown overboard as you describe.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Bloody hell, I swear we're living in the pulpiest political-thriller novel I've ever fucking heard of.
  - api 9y ago
    My personal theory for a while has been that the world actually did end in 2000. We are living in a parody alternate dimension where the previous gods have been replaced by low-rent hacks. This timeline is like a show that's been renewed for one season too many.
    - rbanffy 9y ago
      > the previous gods have been replaced by low-rent hacks Do you have any idea how much an actual god costs?! This is the best we could manage. Be grateful this low-budget universe is still here.
  - pault 9y ago
    I don't want to go too far off topic, but every time I turn on the news lately I feel like I'm stuck in a dystopian cyberpunk thriller. Funny how we never got the flying cars and jetpacks from our 20th century utopian sci-fi, but the Phillip K Dicks and William Gibsons seem to be right on the money.
    - PeachPlum 9y ago
      The news, on TV. Where did you find that?
    - sgift 9y ago
      Cyberpunk promised us high tech and low life. Good job, we got at least one of these.
      - tankenmate 9y ago
        Low life is easier to distribute than high tech. The future is already here...
- supernumerary 9y ago
  I like to think of Thiel as someone who has access to Facebook, rather than a person. Besides - It's not clear how much of a person is left in the face of such a pool of legitimate signals. The tendency of the signals to reach a resonant frequency is another matter... Basically, follow Thiel, he wasn't wrong throwing down with Trump ... another way of saying it ... I don't think it was because of what he believes in.
exelius 9y ago
I'm not saying I agree with them, but a common theme I hear from the alt-right is "no gods no masters" (Game of Thrones reference, ding on the pop-culture). Now, nevermind that these guys are setting up as many gatekeeping functions as they tear down; they simply justify it as "protecting real hard-working Americans" through xenophobia. It's all built on the false nationalism of a flagging superpower, and if any of these people traveled in the least they would see that other countries are actually doing a lot of things better than we do here. We got arrogant, our politicians got greedy, and our voter base got complacent. It's only going to get worse too.
- kevinmchugh 9y ago
  > "no gods no masters" (Game of Thrones reference, ding on the pop-culture) that's not a game of thrones reference as far as I can tell. It's an old anarchist and socialist slogan. It'd be an odd fit for that part of the right. "No gods or kings, only man" is a Bioshock reference that pops up sometimes in those parts.
  - Freak_NL 9y ago
    > "No gods or kings, only man" is a Bioshock reference that pops up sometimes in those parts. Which in turn uses Ayn Rand's philosophy (Objectivism) as the basis of the fictional (failed) society in Bioshock. (Compare with this quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/207108-at-first-man-was-enslaved-by-the-gods-but-he https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/207108-at-first-man-was-ens... ) Ayn Rand and her philosophy are quite popular in right-wing circles (and incidentally, largely denounced in academic circles).
    - wmil 9y ago
      > and incidentally, largely denounced in academic circles Not surprising. A tenured professor getting government grants for research is a villain by Randian standards.
      - jandrese 9y ago
travmatt 9y ago
Conservative politics is much like French Revolution - built on successive purges of insufficiently ideologically committed members. The NeoCon / Old Bull wing of the Party was largely broken by the Tea Party’s rise and the deposition of longtime statesmen in the ‘10 elections, and has been increasingly replaced by ethnic and religious nationalist purity tests - the 2000’s era Republican Party competed for Spanish and Muslim votes, but those days have long since passed. Crucially, these populous factions are opposed to science, government, media, and academia. Looking through this lens, Peter Thiel found the same fate as Elon Musk, Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, and innumerable smaller republican operatives - all thought they would ride the wave and found themselves labeled as just another RINO for being insufficiently ideologically committed. Thiel was never a major backer of this ethnonationalism, he was just someone who recognized it early and hoped to play that advantage. The Mercer’s, Koch’s and Bannon are the drivers, and everyone else is expendable.
mannykannot 9y ago
With regard to Peter Thiel, I am not sure being thrown overboard is the right metaphor. He has chosen to ride the tiger, and may have trouble getting off, if he wants to.
- rhythmvs 9y ago
  That metaphor is deliberate? — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Ride_the_Tiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Ride_the_Tiger
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    It wasn't an intentional reference to Evola, if that's what you mean - I was unaware of the association until you pointed it out.
arethuza 9y ago
I've just finished reading "The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade", which is a pretty bleak and depressing book - I would guess the US Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (who the Neocons are basically cheerleaders for) would hate SpaceX as they are trying to undercut existing players and reduce the amount of pork - which is basically what makes the MICC run.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  At least it's not like Russia where they have almost all of mainstream government and media in favor of funding weapons operations for foreign human-rights abusing tyrants. It's not even always for foreign policy, but sometimes they even say on their national TV that killing more people is necessary because if they stop, defense jobs will be lost. Except that's us, right here in the US. It does not matter who wins office in that sense, both parties and mainstream media cheerlead the MIC, Wall St, etc, at the expense of human dignity: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-defense-contractors-will-lose-jobs-if-u-s-stops-arming-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
alexanderstears 9y ago
>"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". Hardly. Most nationalists (probably the LCD of dissident right movements) hate foreign entangelements. Trump saying Iraq was a waste of money is hardly an affirmation of the neocon platform of invasion. And it's an over-simplification to identify the 'anti corporate welfare' view with 'anti-spaceX'. They're anti-spaceX to the extent that spaceX is dependent on the government. I can't imagine these people are any more thrilled by Lockheed Martin or Boeing.
- smhenderson 9y ago
  >"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". I believe the original poster was trying to distinguish between the two groups, not state that they used to call themselves neocons but now call themselves the alt-right. Though both claim to be conservative each of them take political stances that are anathema to the other.
jbooth 9y ago
If you want to get conspiratorial about it, SpaceX is a huge threat to both the Russian space launch industry and to Boeing/Lockheed. More seriously, in the 2017 conservative pathology, the Russian government are 'good guys' and American businessmen who quit Trump's economic council are 'bad guys'.
- api 9y ago
  Putin is a neo-fascist and an admirer of Julius Evola.
cosmiccartel 9y ago
> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism. > They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. It's a smear campaign. Your statement is a perfect example. In your eyes, anyone on the right not engaging in Nazi fantasies is really just "hiding it". You're "unthinging" the views of the vast majority of them to pretend that they are uniform in ideology.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  >No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media. >This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. There are really three problems here. * The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state. * Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell really are far-right, in the sense that Ayn Rand is far to the libertarian right. * The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1] When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on? [1] -- https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police

s_kilk 9y ago

> where's Peter Thiel in all this? The evidence seems to suggest Thiel has gotten in with the "throne and altar" crowd, the Neo-Reactionaries and self-described "Dark Enlightenment". https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-moldbug-variations-pein How that intersects with his techy leanings, I don't really know, it's very possible that he's being thrown overboard as you describe.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Bloody hell, I swear we're living in the pulpiest political-thriller novel I've ever fucking heard of.
- api 9y ago
  My personal theory for a while has been that the world actually did end in 2000. We are living in a parody alternate dimension where the previous gods have been replaced by low-rent hacks. This timeline is like a show that's been renewed for one season too many.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    > the previous gods have been replaced by low-rent hacks Do you have any idea how much an actual god costs?! This is the best we could manage. Be grateful this low-budget universe is still here.
- pault 9y ago
  I don't want to go too far off topic, but every time I turn on the news lately I feel like I'm stuck in a dystopian cyberpunk thriller. Funny how we never got the flying cars and jetpacks from our 20th century utopian sci-fi, but the Phillip K Dicks and William Gibsons seem to be right on the money.
  - PeachPlum 9y ago
    The news, on TV. Where did you find that?
  - sgift 9y ago
    Cyberpunk promised us high tech and low life. Good job, we got at least one of these.
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      Low life is easier to distribute than high tech. The future is already here...
supernumerary 9y ago
I like to think of Thiel as someone who has access to Facebook, rather than a person. Besides - It's not clear how much of a person is left in the face of such a pool of legitimate signals. The tendency of the signals to reach a resonant frequency is another matter... Basically, follow Thiel, he wasn't wrong throwing down with Trump ... another way of saying it ... I don't think it was because of what he believes in.

exelius 9y ago

I'm not saying I agree with them, but a common theme I hear from the alt-right is "no gods no masters" (Game of Thrones reference, ding on the pop-culture). Now, nevermind that these guys are setting up as many gatekeeping functions as they tear down; they simply justify it as "protecting real hard-working Americans" through xenophobia. It's all built on the false nationalism of a flagging superpower, and if any of these people traveled in the least they would see that other countries are actually doing a lot of things better than we do here. We got arrogant, our politicians got greedy, and our voter base got complacent. It's only going to get worse too.

kevinmchugh 9y ago
> "no gods no masters" (Game of Thrones reference, ding on the pop-culture) that's not a game of thrones reference as far as I can tell. It's an old anarchist and socialist slogan. It'd be an odd fit for that part of the right. "No gods or kings, only man" is a Bioshock reference that pops up sometimes in those parts.
- Freak_NL 9y ago
  > "No gods or kings, only man" is a Bioshock reference that pops up sometimes in those parts. Which in turn uses Ayn Rand's philosophy (Objectivism) as the basis of the fictional (failed) society in Bioshock. (Compare with this quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/207108-at-first-man-was-enslaved-by-the-gods-but-he https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/207108-at-first-man-was-ens... ) Ayn Rand and her philosophy are quite popular in right-wing circles (and incidentally, largely denounced in academic circles).
  - wmil 9y ago
    > and incidentally, largely denounced in academic circles Not surprising. A tenured professor getting government grants for research is a villain by Randian standards.
    - jandrese 9y ago

travmatt 9y ago

Conservative politics is much like French Revolution - built on successive purges of insufficiently ideologically committed members. The NeoCon / Old Bull wing of the Party was largely broken by the Tea Party’s rise and the deposition of longtime statesmen in the ‘10 elections, and has been increasingly replaced by ethnic and religious nationalist purity tests - the 2000’s era Republican Party competed for Spanish and Muslim votes, but those days have long since passed. Crucially, these populous factions are opposed to science, government, media, and academia. Looking through this lens, Peter Thiel found the same fate as Elon Musk, Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, and innumerable smaller republican operatives - all thought they would ride the wave and found themselves labeled as just another RINO for being insufficiently ideologically committed. Thiel was never a major backer of this ethnonationalism, he was just someone who recognized it early and hoped to play that advantage. The Mercer’s, Koch’s and Bannon are the drivers, and everyone else is expendable.

mannykannot 9y ago

With regard to Peter Thiel, I am not sure being thrown overboard is the right metaphor. He has chosen to ride the tiger, and may have trouble getting off, if he wants to.

rhythmvs 9y ago
That metaphor is deliberate? — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Ride_the_Tiger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Ride_the_Tiger
- mannykannot 9y ago
  It wasn't an intentional reference to Evola, if that's what you mean - I was unaware of the association until you pointed it out.

arethuza 9y ago

I've just finished reading "The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade", which is a pretty bleak and depressing book - I would guess the US Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (who the Neocons are basically cheerleaders for) would hate SpaceX as they are trying to undercut existing players and reduce the amount of pork - which is basically what makes the MICC run.

wallace_f 9y ago
At least it's not like Russia where they have almost all of mainstream government and media in favor of funding weapons operations for foreign human-rights abusing tyrants. It's not even always for foreign policy, but sometimes they even say on their national TV that killing more people is necessary because if they stop, defense jobs will be lost. Except that's us, right here in the US. It does not matter who wins office in that sense, both parties and mainstream media cheerlead the MIC, Wall St, etc, at the expense of human dignity: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-defense-contractors-will-lose-jobs-if-u-s-stops-arming-saudi-arabia/ https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...

alexanderstears 9y ago

>"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". Hardly. Most nationalists (probably the LCD of dissident right movements) hate foreign entangelements. Trump saying Iraq was a waste of money is hardly an affirmation of the neocon platform of invasion. And it's an over-simplification to identify the 'anti corporate welfare' view with 'anti-spaceX'. They're anti-spaceX to the extent that spaceX is dependent on the government. I can't imagine these people are any more thrilled by Lockheed Martin or Boeing.

smhenderson 9y ago
>"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". I believe the original poster was trying to distinguish between the two groups, not state that they used to call themselves neocons but now call themselves the alt-right. Though both claim to be conservative each of them take political stances that are anathema to the other.

jbooth 9y ago

If you want to get conspiratorial about it, SpaceX is a huge threat to both the Russian space launch industry and to Boeing/Lockheed. More seriously, in the 2017 conservative pathology, the Russian government are 'good guys' and American businessmen who quit Trump's economic council are 'bad guys'.

api 9y ago
Putin is a neo-fascist and an admirer of Julius Evola.

cosmiccartel 9y ago

> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism. > They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. It's a smear campaign. Your statement is a perfect example. In your eyes, anyone on the right not engaging in Nazi fantasies is really just "hiding it". You're "unthinging" the views of the vast majority of them to pretend that they are uniform in ideology.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
>No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media. >This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. There are really three problems here. * The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state. * Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell really are far-right, in the sense that Ayn Rand is far to the libertarian right. * The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1] When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on? [1] -- https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police