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Commentary vs Plans

anon_jamw said in #3161 2mo ago: received

Most discussions on the right are still largely bogged down by targeting what the left does wrong instead of formulating actual plans. Commentary vs Plans.

I think Commentary is attractive because the things to critique about the left are bottomless and you can make a living by dunking on twitter and posting on substack. The hard pill to swallow is that plans of *any variety* will always win out if your opponents have no plans, no matter how articulate the takedowns are. The bar is low. Yes the woke stuff should be pulled out of schools, but what should it be replaced with? Yes much USAID money is being allocated improperly, but where should it be redirected? The regime is choosing to yank things out or end programs instead of redirecting those faucets to other Plans.

It's also worth noting that Good Plans can come in all shapes and sizes. If you could direct the energies of just 10 competent motivated men, what would you do? Some years ago Bannon was trying to build out a gladiator school in a defunct medieval monastery in Italy. This is an exciting and concrete plan even if the end goal is unclear. Nat Friedman put up his own money for young people to read ancient scrolls. This is an exciting plan.

So, are there any Good Plans right now?

referenced by: >>3169 >>3546

Most discussions on received

anon_wyty said in #3164 2mo ago: received

Basically the only good plans that are available to "guys like us" are what have been said for the past 7 years or so. That is to infiltrate and capture. No marches, no tradlarping, and no "moobments". BAP and Patrick Casey talk about this on the Casey's podcast recently. We are not in the "dark ages" where people can do decentralized activities like that (hence why Bannon's plan got ruined). You *can* however take control of already-existing institutions and attempt to influence them.

Jonathan Bowden's thoughts on the Right Wing also come to mind:

>And The Right will only defeat The Left and The Center if it's more creative, more energetic, more radical, more intelligent, more sassy or cooler! That's the only way it will win. The trouble with Right-wing people on the whole is they're sort of pessimistic and slightly unimaginative. And they're deeply conservative people, decent people, but deeply conservative people. You've got to be more radical than that."

referenced by: >>3173 >>3215

Basically the only g received

anon_mucu said in #3169 2mo ago: received

>>3161
>the right
Let focus on the more granular level of ideas, institutions, and strategic postures, not just the first principle component of political spectacle, IMO. But yeah, commentary is bunk. Plans are where it's at, even small ones. Make it concrete and practical. I've made and executed Plans before, some good some bad. Let's start by establishing the historical transition we are coming through:

In the 20th century our whole civilization got backed into a stifling corner of self-hatred and suppression of true vital energy and drive for elevation. BAP describes this as the longhouse. Scientism calls it liberalism. Some people name 1973, or 1965, or 1945, or 1933. What happened isn't that important here. The important part is it imposed a bunch of absolutely crippling taboos and legal/political/sociological blocks on the continued development of our civilization. But it is now dying of its own corruption, and on the internet for the past 15 years and increasingly in person in the last couple years and months, those taboos are loosening up.

But we are still stuck without much serious thinking on the other side of that event horizon that could actually start to establish a new political-ideological consensus. So the highest impact plausible plan IMO is to go "zero to one" on that. Build just one institution or circle of intellectuals and political operators that really takes itself seriously and can be taken seriously that operates in ideological territory that is currently way out beyond the overton window, establishing that it's possible to be a world class intellectual operation "out there". We must break the false equation that dissent=chud, and that serious institutions all buy into the fake post-war consensus.

BAP is an extremely irreverent one-man version of this. I think a less obnoxious but equally radical 10-man version of that at his level of intellectual rigor would blow the doors off the fake system and put us in a new era. That's crazy ambitious for various reasons as we don't seem to have more than a handful of such men nor more than a few willing to fund their activities, and it's near impossible to get them to coordinate, but we aren't that far off. This remains my big picture "give me a lever and 10 competent gentlemen and I'll move the world" plan.

Somewhat less ambitiously: run a similar 10-man plan in your city for a less radical agenda. Figure out the basic normal good governance agenda your city needs but that might be possible but is a bit outside the current overton window for dumb corrupt reasons, and start rallying the best people you can find around it for private parties, dinners, civic campaigns, etc. Then get those people involved in various positions and institutions, map the whole place out and network with everybody. Build political capital. A friend of mine just got elected senator in his state doing something like this. I've been thinking of doing it in my city. The key for this, short of the big picture victory, is messaging discipline and being rigorously normal. No activist antics, no chudding out, no pronouns, just normie civics with clear vision and lots of youthful energy.

referenced by: >>3173

Let focus on the mor received

anon_coki said in #3173 2mo ago: received

>>3164
>take control of already-existing institutions
I completely agree, but I think we need to undo a false dichotomy that idiots like Bannon and other chuds have created: it is possible to create new institutions that are not complete larp or mere money funnels. It is, as >>3169 says, a question of discipline and intelligence: having concrete goals, clear leadership, an intelligent purpose, and an attractive presentation that attracts prestigious capital, etc.
Not everything is infiltration, and there is a limit to what can be done in certain institutions through infiltration.

I completely agree, received

anon_kezo said in #3192 2mo ago: received

You don't need a plan. Just pursue personal political power. There are lots of books written about people who have done this successfully. Read a few of them and then do it.

The map of power is extremely straightfoward. All of your esoteric political philosophy is worth less than one high school civics class. Run for office. Eventually you want to be a congressman or a senator.

The type of person who is cut out for that tends to not have very much overlap with the type of person who enjoys discussing ideas and ideology and plans on message boards. Make a decision about whether you want to be in the arena or not. There's not much you can do from outside the arena except vote and donate.

referenced by: >>3197 >>3204 >>3215

You don't need a pla received

anon_nuny said in #3194 2mo ago: received

> The map of power is extremely straightfoward.
> Run for office. Eventually you want to be a congressman or a senator.
> There's not much you can do from outside the arena except vote and donate.

Disagree with this. Many men have achieved impact from appointed office without ever winning an election, often exceeding that of the people who put them there (not to mention outlasting them). Robert Moses is a famous example. And the Chris Rufos of the world achieve political impact without holding any office at all.

"When there's a crisis, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around at the time"

This is not an excuse to be just an esoteric online thinkboy, the impact of which is limited. But pragmatic applied ideas do matter. Pursuing a single goal relentlessly for years matters. Books matter. Electeds are generally not the ones actually developing policy or writing laws. There are effective ways to build & exercise political power without becoming a politician.

referenced by: >>3198

Disagree with this. received

anon_coki said in #3197 2mo ago: received

>>3192
This can be done and it’s very useful for some people.

But, again, let’s avoid false dichotomies. Yes, there are many plan-addicted wordcels, always talking about their grandiose schemes and doing nothing… But there are also very effective planners who are able to gather wills and guide them towards concrete aims. There have always been and have always been crucial.

This can be done and received

anon_sodu said in #3198 2mo ago: received

>>3194
> the Chris Rufos of the world achieve political impact without holding any office at all.

Chris Rufo is an good test case of focused activism integrating online and IRL work. Quite apart from the content of his activism (let's not get distracted by the object-level details of his work), what do we think about the form of his activism?

referenced by: >>3215

Chris Rufo is an goo received

anon_mucu said in #3204 2mo ago: received

>>3192
This anon is right that civics education is hugely underrated in online political philosophy, but wrong that philosophy is pointless and its all just personal political power. Where do politicians get their ideas? What coordinates the activists? Who persuades the voters? Someone has to actually come up with the visions of the future and paint them well. The thinkers need to be fluent in real political mechanism, and socially in touch with it, but they do have a very important role to play defining priorities.

The classic formula is that a serious party has a mix of intellectuals, politicians, and on-the-ground activists. If you only have one or two of these you get wrecked.

referenced by: >>3215

This anon is right t received

anon_jamw said in #3215 2mo ago: received

>>3164
Infiltrate and capture and then do what with the power? The hard truth is that most people using that line have no plan for what to actually do with power if they actually got it. We're seeing that with MAGA now – they are taking massively powerful levers like USAID and just collapsing them instead of redirecting them. A Plan involves directing the power towards your projects, whatever they may be, and opting not to use the levers is just an admission that there was no plan to begin with. Also as much as I love BAP we need to take him at his word, he's an entertainer and not providing anything to take action on. Yarvin is similar, he is brilliant and can explain in detail the locusts of power but then ends the conversation at the describing step when the interesting things only come after that. The thing to say next is "wow, enough power exists out there to do [bad leftist woke projects], maybe if we captured even a sliver of that existing energy we could [send people to Mars, build more monuments, improve manufacturing capacity]."

>>3192
Political power is not the only power that exists.

>>3198
I don't mean to blackpill but for the sake of this conversation he is unfortunately closer to Commentary than Planning. He's pointing out what the left is doing that's Bad and never points to what Should Be Done Instead. But even with that, he's a point on a positive line.

>>3204
Agreed civics education is important but having a plan for what you would do with the power is what's upstream of everything.

My sense is that there's a sort of "magic soil" phenomenon going on when approaching power from this side, where if you specialize in getting power, everything else will fall into place. What all of the Commentary should teach us is that the people who win are simply the ones who have a plan and there's boundless power available to commandeer and steer towards Your Plan.

Silicon Valley is plagued by a similar magic soil perspective. They believe that creating "moar technology" will somehow get everyone to a vaguely "better world". Increasing energy capacity via nuclear is a topic right now, but have these people ever verbalized what they want the energy to be used for? The reality is that they have no preference. They want to make these things available and will sell to/ work with anyone who wants to use them (the people who have a plan for how to use the energy). This is why SV is spiritually a labor cohort instead of a political cohort. If they really felt strongly about being a political cohort, they would group up and say specifically what outcomes they want and then produce tech exclusively for those outcomes instead of the current situation where they make things with no objective at which point the people with Plans step in to steer them.

referenced by: >>3217

Infiltrate and captu received

anon_vufa said in #3217 2mo ago: received

>>3215
> We're seeing that with MAGA now – they are taking massively powerful levers like USAID and just collapsing them instead of redirecting them

As much as I am relieved that we got this instead of the Harris admin it still doesn't bode well for the future. MAGA is a revolutionary movement, and revolutions tend to move fast and break shit. Actual building is much harder and few people want to do this nor have a concrete plan. Beyond that, its still to early to say but if the courts strike down most of Trump's EOs what has MAGA really been accomplishing ?

As much as I am reli received

anon_nuny said in #3218 2mo ago: received

> We're seeing that with MAGA now – they are taking massively powerful levers like USAID and just collapsing them

Some organizations should be reformed, others deleted. The macro trend is metastasizing bureaucracy---we simply have *more* of everything to the point of sclerosis. Cities with 100s of committees, insolvent states, uncountable federal agencies. If we have alternating political factions that only try to redirect this morass towards their own ends and occasionally grow it further, we lose.

Reform is also hard. What do you do with a 10,000-employee organization composed of half camera-off retirement-benefit-farmers and half zealous wokes? Reforming that to useful ends may not work.

--

> Silicon Valley is plagued by a similar magic soil perspective

Very true.

The best writing I've seen on that topic:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2020/04/30/its-time-to-build-for-good/

Some organizations s received

anon_zakw said in #3513 3w ago: received

0: The following plan is gradually doable; can expect a relatively high ROI for the institutional funding; and almost certainly is not going to fail due common pool or coordination problems after establishment of it. The plan avoids most or all issues Kropotkin found representative democracies to have and over time becomes the demographically most representative possible democracy. The risks are very likely all predictable and near-certainly can be dodged by professional work in their corresponding fields.

1: Imagine a slightly-modified sortition system with a strict one-term limit, a strict lobbying ban at pension sanctiond, a some time of "attend 1/5th of lectures to pass" education for the winners, a blockchain for entropy storage & running whole lottery again as an app for mathematical proof of correctness, and smartphone restrictions for the winners.

2: It is very likely, that by forming a Random Party and getting it admitted as a legal "identity" of the candidates in the lottery (it is more of identity as small chance to chosen), such system could become part of the landscape in some of the economically smaller and less significant to nation's strategic nuclear deterrence in Europe. With a Random Party existing, and votable, there would be no need to immediately gain constitutionally-affective parliamental control required for a staying reform.

3: The motivation besides removing long political "careers", next elections pressure, influence of campaign ad spending, and many other diseases of politics obviously is improving economy for all. It is not only very likely that such mechanical permit would be juridically feasible, but also very likely that between 6% and 36% of the seats the party would begin to drastically eliminate market inefficiencies such as regulatory capture. Because the members of the Random Party have no re-election or donor-driven incentives, only their public image and post-term quality of life, their views will approximate those of the actual population. The added noise "brings the median voter theorem" to the (electoratial) parliament.

4: A website with strong European identity verification and the blockchain can be made with relatively low cost to expected improbable but large impact.

5: Things to do that affect success but are not "needed" would be proper mathematical and sociological and legal study to fill up all holes before any moles can raise (afterwards changing a system is difdicult so formal proofs and study to leave "nothing" unconsidered is nexessary), public education program, behavioural data using marketing and emergency PR team, a face that can do the inevitable hearings and interviews without ruining the project, and small group of financially and bureaucratically literate bookkeepees to handle labor of being a "party".

6: The blockchain part is not related to cryptocurrencies but ensuring that entropy comes from many sources, potentially even "anyone who wants to insert their own bits" in addition to institutional entropy sources, that the whole of entropy remains immutable such entropy pushes, that it and the candidate registrar as well as the source code is available for download in a manner resistant to low-to-medium difficulty censorship attempts, and critically that the hashing function can be rerun on consumer decices from source. It should also make use of for history proofs, however, the Open TimeStamps (OTS) project, which is based on Bitcoin.

7: All of this is both possible and sane to implement, and the when is likely a question of time. Almost none of this is original work except for the "how to actually execute it" planning. It is very probable that if a small nation implements a sortition system such as described above, that conditional to them not getting immediately sabotaged, their economy will eventually begin benefit from sortition compared to other nations.

referenced by: >>3520

0: The following pla received

anon_mucu said in #3520 3w ago: received

>>3513
I like the idea of sortition and I think we should make more experiments with it, but your claim that the random candidates won't be improperly motivated doesn't seem to follow. In particular, they are very much open to bribes and manipulation by those who can sweep in and tell them what to do and reward them for doing it. It's bad enough for career politicians to be politically skilled enough to cut through the crud that builds up in the antechambers of power. A normie off the street would be hopelessly outmatched by the evil viziers who showed up to take advantage of them.

referenced by: >>3540

I like the idea of s received

anon_zakw said in #3540 3w ago: received

>>3520
Most manipulation relies on filtering information and keeping representatives ignorant. Term limits (constantly rotating candidates) and randomness (wisdom of crowds) make this much harder.

People agree with experts when experts agree with each other. With few dozen representatives, there will be disagreement because one or more knows about the issue or knows someone who does.

Indeed also "The Politician" is a very specific type of human. Most humans can be manipulated with concentrated effort, but they lack the specific biases and vulnerabilities politicians already have. They also can't be manipulated without public backlash as easily.

There's a threshold to accepting your first bribe. Average people start believing there should be no bribing.

Manipulation often uses divide and conquer. If evil viziers must start fresh every term, they can't easily turn representatives against each other.

Many views NEVER reach current parliaments. These would destabilize the scene. Since the world is finite, if evil viziers don't want certain discussions and they end up in parliament anyway, repeated over time this hurts the viziers.

Bribe detection and anti-corruption efforts actually hurting you when caught is more realistic in sortition.

Will normies within their first-term accept bribes from entities involved in past corruption scandals?

Is it not easier to just to not to get corrupt? The normie probably is less greedy than the average politican and the decent pay from job + pensions prospect theoretically mean they will be quite well-off.

If then some start to pursue money and some don't, would that not stand off? It takes only a handful out of few dozen who do not need money (maybe they were rich as normies, maybe they are pious (!), maybe they don't see the risk/reward as wprth it) for effective coalitions to form.

Those will in the long run form a group of past random representatives which also has its own reputation to guard and quite lots of inside information.

If you truly did not take bribes AND were a politician, those who took bribes fear you because your ass is covered and you can legally show them corrupt.

Non-sortition makes it easy to brainwash and bribe representatives but in sortition every new term is fresh and it is not at all obvious how evil viziers would be more successful than some natural minimum or limit (few biggest ones' probably will find ways to get their way in specific issues but even then they become vulnerable).

Most manipulation re received

anon_kebu said in #3546 3w ago: received

>>3161
If I could redirect energy of 10 men ....

I would try to maximize childhood independence and agency. Lower age to work, driving tests age lowered by test much harder. Child predators executed. State provided child safety devices for neurotic parents where it's pretty much a safety beacon they can carry around in their pocket or on a necklace easy. They must roam and explore and play much more.

If I could redirect received

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