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It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists". For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent yea

It is also ridiculous to smear Nick Land because he is "ebraced by white nationalists". For fucks sake, just read something Nick Land has written in recent years and let him smear himself. He literally argues for "hyper racism", composed of scientific racism and eugenics. He also has promoted Atomwaffen affiliated Order of Nine Angles. A literal neonazi terrorist network. A pathetic hit piece.

nyolfen 6y ago
citation? land has racist and extreme social-darwinist views but afaik he holds identitarian political movements in contempt, he is more of a nietzschean anti-human trying to usher in a machine god than anything like nazi politics
- tpush 6y ago
  Racism and extreme social-darwinistic views are pretty much the core of nazi thought.
  - NovaJehovah 6y ago
    Violent revolution and utopianism were core beliefs of both Nazism and Bolshevism. Individual rights are a core belief of both social democratic liberalism and anarcho-capitalism. The existence of Satan is a core belief of both Christians and Satanists. A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
    - parineum 6y ago
      You point stands but most Satanism actually doesn't actually believe in a literal Satan, they identify with him as an allegory. The largest sects, The Church of Satan (athiest) and the Satanic Temple (non-theist) don't have a belief in Satan as a deity. There is a subset that actually does though but they are a minority of a minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_Satanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_Satanism
      - NovaJehovah 6y ago
        Thanks for the correction. I didn't realize that!
  - nyolfen 6y ago
    white nationalism is the core of contemporary nazism; land has no sentimental attachment to the white race or even people in general, but rather sees intelligence (abstractly) acting via darwinian selection as the agent of history. this is not limited to human intelligence; he sees capitalism as an intelligent process, and inextricable from AI, which he expects to subsume humans.
whoooooo123 6y ago
I've never heard of Nick Land but this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die. Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  Yeah, I've got to know Nick Land from Mark Fisher, who was a student of his and jointly participated in the CCRU (Cybernetics Culture Research Unit). Mark Fisher was the one who later wrote his most well-known book "Capitalist Realism", which was my first thorough introduction to leftist politics. Fisher would later decry Land's neo-reactionary turn (perhaps most explicitly in his post "Terminator vs Avator: notes on accelerationism", https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/termina...), but he still acknowledged Land's accelerationist influence on him in the earlier years. Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Isn't that analogy backwards? It'd be Noam Chomsky citing Bin Laden in his writing. SSC linked to Nick Land, not the other way around.
twic 6y ago
I'm not an expert on this stuff, but taken at face value, hyper-racism is the idea that humanity will evolve into eloi and morlocks, and is explicitly not about "black people are inferior" or anything like that. What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]: > The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme. > Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. > The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status. > That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake. Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/10/hyper-racism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...
lasagnaphil 6y ago
Nick Land's probably the one of the most fascinating outliers among philosophers though. His philosophy career is very sharply divided in two parts: the first part involves leftist materialism + Deleuze-Guattarian schizoanalysis + cyberpunk + gothic/Lovecraftian horror + a whole lot of drugs. But his heavy amphetamine usage kinda "broke" him, and after that the second part involves dealing with drug withdrawal along with a heavy doze of right-wing libertarianism and hyperfascism. I really don't like the latter half for obvious reasons (but critiquing him more fundamentally, he seems to have an incredibly warped view on evolution which is making him fall back into outdated eugenics, and also he has a habit of viewing technological progress and capitalist progress as the same thing). I still read some of his earlier works though.

nyolfen 6y ago

citation? land has racist and extreme social-darwinist views but afaik he holds identitarian political movements in contempt, he is more of a nietzschean anti-human trying to usher in a machine god than anything like nazi politics

tpush 6y ago
Racism and extreme social-darwinistic views are pretty much the core of nazi thought.
- NovaJehovah 6y ago
  Violent revolution and utopianism were core beliefs of both Nazism and Bolshevism. Individual rights are a core belief of both social democratic liberalism and anarcho-capitalism. The existence of Satan is a core belief of both Christians and Satanists. A and B sharing core beliefs does not mean A == B.
  - parineum 6y ago
    You point stands but most Satanism actually doesn't actually believe in a literal Satan, they identify with him as an allegory. The largest sects, The Church of Satan (athiest) and the Satanic Temple (non-theist) don't have a belief in Satan as a deity. There is a subset that actually does though but they are a minority of a minority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_Satanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_Satanism
    - NovaJehovah 6y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I didn't realize that!
- nyolfen 6y ago
  white nationalism is the core of contemporary nazism; land has no sentimental attachment to the white race or even people in general, but rather sees intelligence (abstractly) acting via darwinian selection as the agent of history. this is not limited to human intelligence; he sees capitalism as an intelligent process, and inextricable from AI, which he expects to subsume humans.

whoooooo123 6y ago

I've never heard of Nick Land but this 'person X is bad because nasty person Y likes him' smear tactic has got to die. Osama bin Laden cited Noam Chomsky in some of his anti-America diatribes, does this mean Noam Chomsky should be blamed in any way (even slightly) for the actions of Al Qaeda?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lasagnaphil 6y ago
Yeah, I've got to know Nick Land from Mark Fisher, who was a student of his and jointly participated in the CCRU (Cybernetics Culture Research Unit). Mark Fisher was the one who later wrote his most well-known book "Capitalist Realism", which was my first thorough introduction to leftist politics. Fisher would later decry Land's neo-reactionary turn (perhaps most explicitly in his post "Terminator vs Avator: notes on accelerationism", https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/terminator-vs-avatar-notes-on-accelerationism https://markfisherreblog.tumblr.com/post/32522465887/termina...), but he still acknowledged Land's accelerationist influence on him in the earlier years. Land's history is... very interesting. His earlier works (such as "Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest") shows his materialist roots, but over time he began to be influenced heavily by the CCRU (which cyberfeminist Sadie Plant created) and Deleuze and Guatarri's works on schizoanalysis, along with a heavy doze of amphetamines(!). In his most productive, drug-fueled form he wrote what he called "theory-fiction", Deleuzian theory combined with fiction (cyberpunk, horror), leading to writings such as "Circitries" and "Meltdown". Land might have been overappreciated in the creation of accelerationist philosophy, but I still think he was an incredible poet. Sadly, his overreliance on drugs literally "broke" him, and after some physical/mental health issues he moved to Shanghai and after that became the neo-reactionary we know today. I think it's a quite lame ending to his philosophy career, many of his collegues tried to persuade him to budge towards the left and failed, and Land himself says that he wants to leave behind his amphetamine-fueled past self.
xxpor 6y ago
Isn't that analogy backwards? It'd be Noam Chomsky citing Bin Laden in his writing. SSC linked to Nick Land, not the other way around.

twic 6y ago

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but taken at face value, hyper-racism is the idea that humanity will evolve into eloi and morlocks, and is explicitly not about "black people are inferior" or anything like that. What seem to me to be the key quotes [1]: > The most prominent model of such a filter is found in the theory of assortative mating. [...] It is assortative mating on the basis of [socio-economic status] that has lifted it to prominence, both because it seems unquestionably to be happening, and because the implications of its happening are extreme. > Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. > The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status. > That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake. Whilst it is clumsily reinventing ideas that have been done better a million times already in science fiction, it doesn't seem very neonazi. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/10/hyper-racism.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141007023855/http://alternativ...

lasagnaphil 6y ago

Nick Land's probably the one of the most fascinating outliers among philosophers though. His philosophy career is very sharply divided in two parts: the first part involves leftist materialism + Deleuze-Guattarian schizoanalysis + cyberpunk + gothic/Lovecraftian horror + a whole lot of drugs. But his heavy amphetamine usage kinda "broke" him, and after that the second part involves dealing with drug withdrawal along with a heavy doze of right-wing libertarianism and hyperfascism. I really don't like the latter half for obvious reasons (but critiquing him more fundamentally, he seems to have an incredibly warped view on evolution which is making him fall back into outdated eugenics, and also he has a habit of viewing technological progress and capitalist progress as the same thing). I still read some of his earlier works though.