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BAP: The Right of the Stronger and the Better

sirthomasless said in #3374 1w ago: received

https://www.bronzeagepervert.yoga/p/the-right-of-the-stronger-and-the

BAP is sometimes obscurantist. In this essay, which only appeared in print prior, he is not obscuring anything. If one had any questions about the power core of his program, here it is on a silver platter. I personally tend to think the formation of new states within large powers is pretty much impossible and within global backwaters is only possible by way of PMC junta. I often hear talk about the latter quite openly, but frankly who gives a shit if you're king of Kinshasa or Glorious Leader of La República Dominicana.

The formation or re-formation of new threads of religious thought is totally plausible though, indeed now may be the easiest time in history to do it given the internet and AI. You guys certainly seem like you have something going on here on that front. If I were a betting man, my money would be on new religious zeal instead of new states. Maybe the former eventually even births the latter, as it did in the case of the eugenic Platonic overhaul of Pharisaic Judaism in the opening centuries of the current era.

referenced by: >>3376 >>3386

BAP is sometimes obs received

anon_voso said in #3376 1w ago: received

>>3374
> ... frankly who gives a shit if you're king of Kinshasa or Glorious Leader of La República Dominicana.

Singapore the year before Lee Kuan Yew took over was a shithole. El Salvador the year before Bukele took over was a shithole. A leader with proper skills can change a country.

> The formation or re-formation of new threads of religious thought ...

Yeah, agree on this aspect.

referenced by: >>3377

Singapore the year b received

sirthomasless said in #3377 1w ago: received

>>3376
And Singapore was a shithole for a long time afterwards too. Still is a goddawful humid bug-infested place dependent entirely on an equilibrium of forces it doesn’t control. “But look at muh skyscrapers!” I wish Bukele the best but he’s in a tenuous position and has many battles ahead of him. If Ian Smith couldn’t hack it on the banks of the great Zambezi against The International Order and Mann couldn’t in Central Africa either, well I’m not sure it’s worth the adventure. And speaking of BAP, Celine had a plenty accurate portrayal of the eternal Herzoggian hellhole they’ve got down there.

No no, I don’t think these places and insipid causes are the vessels of the Bronze Age Mindset. Not anymore. These days when the Earth has no more terra incognita, you’ve got to plan brilliantly and earnestly try to understand the Will of God so you can either reclaim the glory He bestowed upon the most Edenic fertile land there ever was, or claim anew up in the infinite heavens. Now we’re big game hunting, and honey, you can’t bag a Water Buffalo with a 22. Why even put yourself on the veldt if all you want is to eat squirrel?

And Singapore was a received

anon_libi said in #3378 8d ago: received

To think that the current borders and nation states will exist forever is dellusional. Unless you are some kind of loser nationalist this is just stupid to think. What BAP says makes a lot of sense.

To think that the cu received

phaedrus said in #3379 7d ago: received

I think the example of Lee Kuan Yew is illustrative of what BAP is really driving towards. Here you have a man with a network of friends and fellow thinkers who took over the party machinery of a state in a very transitional phase of its development, and wielded the political power he was able to amass to achieve his own agenda, in this case the enrichment and glorification of Singapore.

There definitely is a certain romance to the idea of the African or South American mercenary revolutionary, but if you actually look into these cases, especially Simon Mann's, then it becomes very clear that to, in fact, pull off a sort of militaristic action in the Third World is not only not easy, but is constrained in fundamental ways by the threat of intervention by the First World. No matter how many men you have, if you take over Zimbabwe or wherever, you will not be able to protect your state against an intervention by the United Nations, the French, or the Americans. Modern industrial warfare simply does not allow for the sovereignty of "illegitimate" states without either ideological justification on the American model or nuclear weapons.

I think there is a lot of potential in the world right now, the shift towards a multipolar order may be illusory, but it is nonetheless interesting, and there are always certain open spaces below the level of genuine sovereignty. The kind of tech-right ideas of a network state or decentralized sovereignty are at the moment just spitballing, but there could be the potential for some very interesting developments there. I think one should be pragmatic about the possibilities for enacting genuine freedom and not fall into the trap of trying to model one's own political action after those who were dealing with very different circumstances and coming from very different power bases.

referenced by: >>3385

I think the example received

anon_pypu said in #3380 6d ago: received

I didn't read it as PMC but the need to not betray your friends and values.

I didn't read it as received

anon_fuwo said in #3381 6d ago: received

Precisely. LKW also masterfully stayed within the unwritten limits, thereby cementing his impact and legacy.

He was, on one hand, "an anglofascist who happened to be Chinese", to quote a friend. His People's Action Party borrowed their logo directly from the British Union of Fascists, and if you look up one of those redditard Umberto Eco checklists, he matches most of it. He ran a high-energy corporatist economic growth strategy & embodied a famously aggressive approach to law and order. He allowed limited press freedom and ran a one-party democracy of which he was ruler for life. He built Singapore from nothing to a 6-million-person city state with a formidable military.

And yet: 1. he never explicitly identified as far-right, 2. never explicitly opposed democracy [and in fact recognized its importance for peaceful succession], and 3. he was decisively antiracist. Rather than the failed approach of states like Rhodesia, which the lib consensus pattern-matched to the N word and rejected, LKW solved racial challenges via integration.

Here is "Singapore antiracism" works:
1. forced integration, to the point where individual apartment buildings have quotas. See image.
2. colorblind meritocracy, Rufo style
3. aggressive but meticulously non-racist law enforcement, implemented by a multiethnic police and judicial system, Bratton style

And guess what, the US/WEF consensus generally regards him as a hero. This is completely load-bearing--it's why Singapore is well integrated into the Western world, which is the only way for a modern small state to be prosperous and reasonably sovereign.

referenced by: >>3385

Precisely. LKW also received

anon_fuwo said in #3382 6d ago: received

Lee Kuan Yew Thought overlaps with BAP Thought but is more effective in key ways. First, the above--he is not an online edgelord posting about Tibetan supremacy but rather a pragmatic statesman.

Second and equally important, LKW is the key recent example of civic ambition. "100 years ago, this was a mud-flat. Swamp. Today, this is a modern city. Ten years from now, this will be a metropolis."

Meanwhile BAP and many in his style are unfortunately degrowthers. He's posted pictures of the British countryside with rolling fields and villages and called it "overpopulated". He dreams of tropical islands and warring statelets. This type of fantasy leads nowhere.

The reality is that, at all points in history, the world's leading civilization produces the leading cities. The main cities of the Western world today are spiritually spent. Fortunately, we do not need to compete on raw population numbers--quality does beat quantity--but we absolutely do have to compete and win on civic dynamism.

The future will be defined by cities that feel like Singapore did when LKW gave that speech: a thriving metropole with a doubling period measured in single-digit years, a culture defined by creative destruction and hypergrowth. The only way out is up.

referenced by: >>3425

Lee Kuan Yew Thought received

anon_zasw said in #3385 5d ago: received

>>3381
I don't have any experience with Malays, but I imagine they aren't like blacks. 30% malays in 70% Chinese state is very different from 90% fresh-out-of-the-jungle bantus in a 10% english state. You can get away with antiracism in the former. In the latter case, Zimbabwe is the direct result of following your advice: give the blacks equal rights and they elect a communist dictator on a "kill whitey and take his stuff" platform. Is that what you want? If not, don't be so quick to blame Ian Smith. It's impossible to square civilization in Africa with political egalitarianism. Rhodesia was as close as you can get, with equal enfranchisement but only for civilized and assimilated blacks.

More relevantly, let's imagine 70% english with 30% malay. This amounts to effectively similar to many American west coast cities. Relative to the current settlement, colorblindness and law+order would have to be enforced against colored people for the benefit of white people, and neighborhood integration would be extremely contentious in America. Would Leigh Quinn Hugh get away with it? Maybe. It certainly would not be easy. Western politics for the last 60 years has been mostly about preventing this. Not that LKY had it easy.

I'll rephrase your three points of necessity for integration with the western world, which as >>3379 points out is decisive: plausibly democratic, plausibly centrist, and plausibly antiracist. "Plausibly" because LKY was in point of fact a racist right wing dictator, but his sociopolitical antiracism, "non-ideological" "pragmatism", and democratic mandate made it possible for the west to deal with him. If we and our friends want to pull an LKY on the American west coast (or elsewhere), I think that's a good rule to follow.

But i want to make very clear a few distinctions:

1. this does not involve simply kowtowing on the fashionable race-bullshit that comes out of the Cathedral. LKY didn't do that. He invented his own pragmatic racial settlement that solved real problems that the Cathedral could retrospectively accept. You can't actually listen to the priests or let them rule, but you do have to work within their theological framework so that they are capable of accepting your victory. (Their theological framework is failing so I expect we actually have more leeway than LKY did, but your three rules are still good).

2. this does not involve at any point actually *believing* in the political taboos. In fact that is by definition a terrible idea. We (and LKY) are philosophers, and must think about what must be done with the rigor of philosophy, not political fashion. The demos demand that the philosophers lie convincingly about the taboos (they are lies; that's the point) but have no concept of the actual truth, so the philosophers must do their best to plausibly work within the taboos while maintaining their actual allegiance to the truth. For example, even while solving the racial problems of the west with a plausibly antiracist politics, we must be always aware that this will have disparate racial impacts, and *which disparate impacts we want*. Likewise which democracy and which pragmatism.

referenced by: >>3386

I don't have any exp received

anon_zasw said in #3386 5d ago: received

>>3374
We know what BAP means by "the right of the stronger and better" just like we know what Sam Hyde means by "real Americans", but that doesn't make it coherent. I'll apply that same distinction I used in >>3385 between the truth and the political formulas here.

As a political formula, no one has ever really said "we are the best by nature therefore we rule". Even the Nazis (which BAP incorrectly calls unphilosophical) didn't use that as their political formula. Their political formula was "nature knows of no right but that of the stronger and better *therefore we as a society must become stronger and better*, following the methods and laws of nature (struggle, selection, breeding, etc) as taught by Adolf Hitler". The political formula was that the Nazis ruled because they were the best for this necessary job, not just because they were strong. Their power was in fact largely based on strength and brutality but that was not the legitimacy narrative. BAP gets this mixed around the way he always seems to on this topic.

He's right that Trump, Bolsonaro are held back by this legitimacy narrative stuff, often including the insanity of actually believing it. But again I think he's failing to see the distinction between what you believe internally and how you justify yourself to the rest of the world (who you do in fact have to make some peace with). The mistake of the Nazis likewise was in going full Critias on foreign policy: "the right of the stronger and better" is hardly comforting to one's neighbors. Trump et al can't just go goblin mode not because they are cucked in their minds but because there is no such working strategy.

This mixup is an ancient issue for philosophy. Thrasymachus (Greek BAP) starts Plato's republic with "the right of the stronger", Plato has Socrates poke a bunch of holes in it, and the rest of Plato's whole project is trying to get philosophers to properly make the distinction between truth and political legitimacy.

As a matter of truth "the right of the stronger" is of course just true. This is the basis of all of life and all relations between man. But it's also a tautology: if the masses conspire with the priests to come up with some lies to bamboozle and enslave "the stronger and better" (as idealized by the philosophers), as far as nature is concerned that is still the rule of the strong. The system of moralistic lies created by the masses and their priests is stronger. But of course this doesn't satisfy the philosophers because what they actually mean is a particular transcendent ideal of man as the product of great breeding for beauty, health, strength, genius, civilization, etc. This man has great "physis" (physique) but is not always favored by "physis" (physical nature or in this case political nature). In particular, he seems to be favored in pre-civilized times but creates a civilization which becomes taken over by decadence to his detriment. This is the central problem in philosophy: how to recover the breeding environment of idealized man in such a way that it remains robustly favored by nature including political nature. BAP's program amounts to ignoring political nature.

He's right again when saying you can only rely on your friends organized into philosophical fraternities (which he vulgarizes as "mafias") and must not have any faith in the exhausted nations and their taboos. This is both pragmatically true and a correct application of the philosopher's "atheism". But the central problem for these fraternities remains the problem of finding a *legitimate* path for the city that actually favors idealized higher man in practice, which may or may not favor him in rhetoric. LKY and Bukele show that much is possible, but in both cases they succeed by finding effective legitimacy formulas, and in neither case is it "muh strength".

We know what BAP mea received

anon_tocu said in #3425 6h ago: received

>>3382
> He's posted pictures of the British countryside with rolling fields and villages and called it "overpopulated".

I think you are missing his point here. He says this in reaction to the idea that just because there is apparent "space" does not mean that there is any semblance of room for man to grow. British countryside is completely owned and mostly a gerontocracy. An underpopulated space would be one in which you could hope to spread and control, the British countryside is resistant to this.

To say this is degrowth neglects what is right and good about growth. Cancer is growth, and that is what would take place if the countryside was "appropriately populated." How many people could we fit there if we blend them into a human slurry? Have you considered this?

I think you are miss received

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