site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29553 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

20
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Did Hamas debunk the "Bronze Age Mindset"?

There has been a lot of discourse among the American Right about the recent Hamas attack on Israel. This specific attack has caught this attention of the "vitalist Nietzschean" sphere of the Right, often followers of Bronze Age Pervert.

This sphere is known to be against moralizing and all "slave morality" coming from either the liberal establishement, the left or religion. An example of this would be the meme culture of the BAP sphere, which openly celebrates murder, rape and death. However, with an ironic twist of reality, Hamas is precisely getting accused of what these BAP rightists vitalists uphold. But when they are faced with Hamas's "barbarian vitalist attack" on Israel, utilizing non-modern warfare techniques, they suddenly all cowered out.

All of the BAP sphere has stopped celebrating "vitalism" when it came to Israel. This is because it is now "low IQ Muslims" that do it. It is very clear that Islam challenges the ontological foundations of the Nietzschean worldview. They can not explain Hamas on their terms.

Since you are forced by the rise of the world market to take a position (the American people's money is going into this), the Nietzschean BAP sphere can not say anything. They are practically rendered politically irrelevant. Thus, their position is reduced to fence-setting or straight zionism, a position completely and utterly in line with the political establishement in America. All of this to claim to be "right-wing dissidents". All of the rejection of moralizing now became an endorsement of moralizing. BAP openly retweeted a post denouncing "the rape & genocide" of Hamas (unproven by the way) while he himself, a couple days earlier, celebrated the killing of a leftist journalist saying it turned him on.

This reveals a huge hole in BAP's worldview. A gap between his "complete surrendering to natural instinct" and "transcendetal Platonist moralizing". He has now suddenly decided to start moralizing! He has found the exception to his Nietzscheanism! This single event has proven the complete bankruptcy of the Nietzschean outlook. It can never explain REVOLUTIONS, it can only react to it in its own moralizing sense through its metaphysical lense of "will to Power". It is fundamentally a whining ideology.

The Nietzschean outlook does not understand that high culture is only secondary to material harmony of society. Only when inherent tensions are solved in modernity can "high culture" be produced once again. Harmony is directly derivative of political & economic realities. Thus, taking the metaphysical lense of "will to Power" becomes non-sensical when faced with a pre-modern (non-aristocratic) revolutionary force. It is what creates (or destroys) aristocracy itself. Faced with the deep ancient Islamic spirit, the Nietzscheans have no answer. In the same way that the revolutionnaries of the 20th century rendered Nietzschean fascism politically useless (this was done by Mao and the creation of Neo-China), the same is happening with the new Hamas partisan. This is material Being asserting itself against ideology.

This has forced the online political sphere, specifically the Right, for a re-alignement. You either oppose the current political establishement (left-wing) or you support it (right-wing). BAP has chosen to support it.

The choice is clear.

BAP's reply:

The main objection against the aesthetic admiration of POC violence whether Pali or BLM joggers or Somalis is that they are only allowed to exist in a limited playpen situation, dependent as wards of the state or other powers and a humanitarian ethics. It is therefore sterile.
Gangsta violence can be made to look transgressive only so long as the power of the USA state in this case stops nature from taking its course—50-100 military cadets could probably pacify all of LA or Chicago in a couple of weeks. Now extend this to the world—virtual playpen.

Edit: I should put a disclaimer that I have never read BAP and only vaguely understand what any of this debate is about, but those posts randomly drifted into my twitter feed and were clearly a response to the critique above. If anyone thinks it's worth the time to read BAPista philosophy so this all makes sense, could you give me an elevator pitch? I got filtered pretty hard on him right off the bat.

So maybe I just don't understand what people have been meaning by having a Bronze Age Mindset, because to be BAP's position seems perfectly ideologically consistent. Them raping and pillaging is bad, us raping and pillaging is good. What's more Bronze Age than that? For anyone reading this forum, the Palestinians are not your allies and never will be, so it seems only natural the Bronze Age response is "slaughter them and salt the earth"

BAP has already been discredited by a large portion of the Dissident Right for being a Jewish Zionist, he is a known quantity as a Zionist posing as a Nietzschean. The real Nietzscheans in the DR don't have much of a dog in the inter-Abrahamic wars beyond the impact on their own civilization. That doesn't mean necessarily killing civilians, although context certainly matters. One pattern we saw in WWII was that shooting civilians is seen as much more barbaric than bombing civilians, and that pattern seems to hold today as well.

I also don't think "you are barbarians for your practices in war, so we must subjugate you and civilize you" is really contrary to Nietzsche. That was the M.O of the Roman Empire, who would basically denounce everyone outside their sphere of influence as a "barbarian." So the "barbarian spirit" is a little more complicated than glamorizing the most grotesque things any people does. Being Nietzschean doesn't mean you have to glorify all acts by the barbarians, it also means you subjugate them and impose your morality onto them.

Uh…did you write this? Write commentary for it? Or are you just sharing?

Also, what’s up with his love for letter “e”? There’s quite a fewe extras sprinkeled in.

I’m familiar with the concepts of BAM but not the culture. So it’s hard for me to tell if the author is representing it fairly. The piece feels like a strawman, even though I know edgy memes and bad optics are in line with the Mindset. Is he trying to bait Bronze Agers into his position?

The more I think about it, the more this scans like a Tumblr hit piece. The Mindset must be bankrupt, perhaps even problematic. It’s insufficiently REVOLUTIONARY. And all of this based off of a retweet! Truly, the most decisive endorsement of slave morality. Bronze Agers simply must smash their idols, and cast aside the false dichotomy of “fence-setting” or “Zionism.” They must travel a third road. They must become… anti-Semites.

Oh. Wait.

Uh…did you write this? Write commentary for it? Or are you just sharing?

Just sharing. Ran into it on a certain anti-Western Muslim account I follow and this is the only other place I know that gets into BAP.

I’m familiar with the concepts of BAM but not the culture. So it’s hard for me to tell if the author is representing it fairly

Same here, got his first book but never really finished. Was interested to see how more familiar people take it .

Going around raping random women and killing defenseless civilians as an prelude for your home to get leveled by heavy artillery by a powerful military doesn’t seem very Nietzschean to me…

BAM's exhortations run counter modern technology. You can't be a pirate or a steppe raider when the people whose settlements you want to conquer or raid can get you bombed.

Same problem as anarcho-primitivism.

Who could have guessed that a bronze age mindset had been rendered obsolete by technological advance!

Is it incumbent upon dissidents to oppose every single policy of the current establishment? If it is, there have been very few (perhaps no) dissidents in human history. In general this is a relatively weak defense of a form of historical materialism, misunderstands Nietzsche and so on, as many others have noted. The author writes with the eloquence of a 13 year old, which is somehow even more grating than Costin's shtick.

More generally, BAP is Jewish and has longstanding sympathies for some of the early zionists, if not the degraded and spiritually void religious zionism that exists in Israel today (and which Costin has not infrequently criticized).

Faced with the deep ancient Islamic spirit, the Nietzscheans have no answer.

Perhaps in an Israel that had embraced BAP's nietzscheanism more wholly, there wouldn't be much of the population in question left at all, certainly not in its current form. So this is a somewhat weird point, in that it hardly disproves the relevant political program (not that anyone, of course, knows what that is).

It is very clear that Islam challenges the ontological foundations of the Nietzschean worldview.

Only if you've never read Nietzsche.

The Gay Science #306:

Stoic and Epicurean. The Epicurean selects the situations, the persons, and even the events which suit his extremely sensitive, intellectual constitution; he renounces the rest that is to say, by far the greater part of experience - because it would be too strong and too heavy fare for him. The Stoic, on the contrary, accustoms himself to swallow stones and vermin, glass-splinters and scorpions, without feeling any disgust: his stomach is meant to become indifferent in the end to all that the accidents of existence cast into it: - he reminds one of the Arabic sect of the Assaua, with which the French became acquainted in Algiers; and like those insensible persons, he also likes well to have an invited public at the exhibition of his insensibility, the very thing the Epicurean willingly dispenses with: - he has of course his "garden"! Stoicism may be quite advisable for men with whom fate improvises, for those who live in violent times and are dependent on abrupt and changeable individuals. He, however, who anticipates that fate will permit him to spin "a long thread," does well to make his arrangements in Epicurean fashion; all men devoted to intellectual labour have done it hitherto! For it would be a supreme loss to them to forfeit their fine sensibility, and to acquire the hard, stoical hide with hedgehog prickles in exchange.

I don't really know what he thinks, he seems to be obsessed with the Ukraine war and the Gaza conflict (RT galore) but thinks it is stupid to fight (and die) as a low level grunt?

https://twitter.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1711513938511196289

The “Bronze Age” ruler would have smashed your idol group identities in a thousand pieces. Literally every state and group today is fake. And my book isn’t about celebrating your preferred ethnic pathic affectations when they engage in chimpouts or fake modern wars.

This seems to be saying in many words that $cool_thing suddenly seems not so cool when it becomes associated with the despised outgroup. It's not even the first time this has happened recently: the whole Russia/Western Europe/Eastern Europe/US empire/traditionalism/progressivism graph has been a wellspring of cognitive dissonance and stomach aches to anyone trying to bipartition it into good ingroup and evil outgroup, as seen with the Trump-Russia association, Ukrainian neo- and paleonazi gaffes or Germany's very mixed feelings about the rise of PiS Poland. For a cast more reminiscent of the Israel scenario, recall also the "Islam is right about women" trolling campaign.

the BAP sphere, which openly celebrates murder, rape and death.

Citations needed. I highly doubt they are celebrating Hamas style barbarism, or else we are nutpicking.

It's not always exactly easy to see what BAP and his followers are actually supporting, seeing how it's couched in layers of comic exaggeration (or... IS IT??) and memespeak.

I don't disagree. But some prominent examples would really buttress this crux, and I do think it's the crux of this position. Do they really advocate and celebrate Hamas-style barbarism?

The overwhelming majority of conservatives and right wingers are firmly on the side of civilization, on the civilization-barbarism axis.

Can you link any tweets from the BAPsphere that are endorsing Hamas, even ironically?

I'm not really that familiar with BAP, since I don't like his writing style (see above), and strictly defining who is his follower and who is not is similarly beyond my ken.

The whole "vitalism" "Bronze Age Mindset" just basically comes off as fantasizing and wish-fulfillment for the masculinity-based sector of the right, no wonder it would get instantly thrown aside (with some scant justifications about not supporting brown barbarians or whatever) whenever it might conflict with actual politics.

This is Bulverism.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats