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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3437 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 16, 2023

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but I wonder what Kulak thinks of the exhortation for men to form piratical bands of mercenaries, biker gangs etc

I think this is just, like, politics as aesthetics totally divorced from practice? Biker gangs and pirates never really stopped existing, they just stopped being effective. People defend BAP by saying there's a lot of irony and aesthetics mixed with deep truth, but after interacting with many people who love his stuff - either BAP is very wrong, or all of his followers are failing to parse the Straussianisms.

I've generally been very ... confused ... by the last three years of the new right/dissident right. Moldbug's dream of a new elite that is just visibly better and more correct than the existing elite just didn't happen. Almost all of the big personalities in the new right are now visibly less scientifically literate than good vox writers.

and the recent abortive coup in Russia would seem to provide support for the BAP-ian worldview.

Given the (very effective!) private military company couldn't even make progress in russia, what chances do a much smaller operation have in the much more stable and hostile environment that is the west! Again, it's not like BAP invented the idea of a junta or a coup. And Russia isn't just weak because of the ukraine war. Like, a lot of Bellingcat's exposes come from the fact that you can buy cell phone data on the black market and use them to expose Russian spies.

Actually, could you elaborate on how that supports the BAP worldview? I'm having trouble parsing that. How is a coups by an army run by a single person in an unstable state surprising to a liberal but not surprising to a bap? "Russia: no democracy, poor economy, political instability and coups".

Russia has the world's second most powerful military, but even they are largely reliant on a private army to provide their most skilled and motivated soldiers. So much so that the leader of such a force has the apparent ability to reach Moscow from Ukraine to express his displeasure, defy the government and even if he's assassinated tomorrow, live to tell the tale.

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