[observation]

There is something in what you say.

I have to say I think this conflation of altright and neonazi is lazy in the extreme. By the media and most posters here.

Democratic socialism has overlapping territory with communism but we wouldn't say Sweden == Soviet Union.

> those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.

I find the most incisive statements are to be found among the neoreactionaries and technocommericalists, with Thiel's loosely associated Stagnation Hypothesis being compelling to me.

> The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.

He says "we can't sit and wait for the movie of the future to unfold", it's the same idea.

The ray of light there is that it is put forward that our funk is to do with social changes in how we think or past civilizational technical debt. A good example of that thought from Hollywood is Interstellar.

I feel like it used to be the case that "change how we think can change who we are/what happens" used to come from the left but now it's coming from the right. The right looks at past glories and says we must change to get to something better, the left says it is all terrible and we must prevent anything from going wrong which means everything must stay the same.

There's been a weird role reversal of some sort.

> This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future.

I've yet to hear of an example of that from the left, the utopians have lost faith. I've listed some examples in my other post but like I said to people like Stross they likely smell of sulfur.

[api]

There are some very good criticisms from the alt-right. There are also great criticisms from the left and from the conventional right. It's easy to criticize. I always skip to "what's your solution?"

The solution offered by the alt-right is neo-monarchism and race nationalism. No thanks. Not only are these irrelevant and backward-looking but the latter is morally evil. Ironically it represents a rejection of the core of Western moral thought from Christianity through the enlightenment.

I agree to some extent with Thiel's stagnation hypothesis. I used to be really excited about him, thinking he got it and might work behind the scenes to try to re-invigorate a culture of genuine innovation in the West. But then he jumped on the alt-right horse and I lost interest.

One of the core hallmarks of a declining or at least demoralized/disillusioned civilization is looking backward. The right is now looking back to the Middle Ages, the 1930s, and the 1950s, while the left is still looking back to the 1960s. Reaction is what decline looks like.

[0x445442]

> America has a lot of problems but I would not prefer to live in Russia or Saudi Arabia.

Would you prefer to live in Japan? Like most, I consider the "alt right" to be on the margins but I also think it's healthy to challenge conventional wisdom.

Japan is not nor does it strive to be diverse and they do not have a lot of the problems the US has.

[api]

Japan? It has tons of problems: chronically low birth rates, one of the highest suicide rates in the world, extreme workaholism, decades of economic stagnation, and probably the world's most intense forms of social alienation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

The latter seems a direct refutation of the alt-right's contention that racial uniformity promotes social engagement and unity. The Japanese are so alienated they barely even have sex anymore. A recent trend in Japanese restaurant design centers around making sure patrons never see another human being, not even a server.

In addition to moral reasons a big reason I can't take the alt-right's racism seriously is that I live in a very racially diverse area (Los Angeles/OC area). Being white I might even be in the minority, or nearly so. My neighbors are more often than not hispanic, asian, or black. Our kids play together, and my daughter's best friends are pretty close to a random sampling of the planet's genetic diversity.

If anything I've found the more recent immigrants to the USA to be more friendly, more socially engaged, harder working, and even more patriotic than multi-generational American natives.

Last year I witnessed the spectacle of a bunch of first and second generation immigrants actually celebrating the Fourth of July. Like really celebrating it. I've seldom seen white Americans genuinely celebrate their country like that. I'd say a good half the white Americans I know are depressed, cynical, and disengaged. This is true on both sides of the usual political divides.

Japan's problem might actually be too much isolation. At the very least some immigration probably would have prevented three decades of economic stagnation.

The neo-racist thesis is bullshit. There is no "white genocide," though there might be a bit of self-inflicted white suicide. Sometimes I think white Americans suffer from the same problems as native Japanese, namely the social diseases that stem from multiple generations of extreme wealth. Wealth promotes social alienation, laziness, a sense of entitlement, and generally taking things for granted.

I've long wondered if the cycle of civilizational rise and fall is caused by wealth. Civilizations rise on a tide of innovation, cooperation, and optimism, but then they get rich and succumb to the social diseases that result from wealth and power.

Edit: Yes there are racially segregated high-crime ghettoes in the LA/OC area, but this seems to happen when you have racial isolation combined with poverty and criminal enterprises like illegal drug trafficking. The entire metro area is incredibly diverse and the majority of it is pretty safe. The area I live in is extremely diverse and has among the lowest crime rates in the state.

Edit #2: If I didn't live in the USA I'd probably want to live in the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. I'd like to add the UK too since I love a lot of their culture, but the UK's government seems just as insane and dysfunctional as ours.

[EdwardDiego]

Out of curiosity, why NZ?

[hackermailman]

What you want then is to follow the work of Slavoj Zizek who also wants to toss all failed political ideology like 20th century communism as it consistently led to authoritarianism. He is often pushing for a new political theory age. One interesting theory was Murray Bookchin's 'Libertarian Municipalism' as it is designed to operate within a state as a horizontal not vertical power and gradually reduce the centralized control over populations https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/murray-bookchin-ecology-k...