Swinging Dicks

All politics is sexual politics; the president is supposed to be the Big Swinging Dick of the nation. This is usually a bit below the surface, but the topsoil of reason is eroding leaving the bedrock of the id exposed:

Pro-Trump Twitter is such a weird place pic.twitter.com/fEISAk8Bqe

— Andrew Kaczynski (@BuzzFeedAndrew) August 23, 2015

In a similar vein, there was an idiot on Press the Meat this morning (Alex Castellanos) repeating the line about how Obama was "the first female president" and how we need a "manly" president for gladiatorial combat:



Politics is always something of a dick-measuring contest, and Trump's power (and the reason he is a threat to the system) is that he brings it into the open, he's far too obvious about the fact that he's running for the post of alpha baboon.

His current surge of popularity was kicked off by his remarks about alleged Mexican rapists, an issue with approximately zero actual impact on society but exactly the sort of thing to rouse primal fears. That the Democratic candidate is likely to be a woman is also inflaming the lizard brains of threatened masculinity.

All this is crushingly obvious and an old story; I don't have any new insights to offer. Since I've been giving rationalists a hard time for being repulsed by politics, let me acknowledge that it can be pretty repulsive.

In post-Soviet Russia, eschaton immanentizes you!

Nick Land (a philosopher who is now a major neoreactionary) links to this video of the genuinely scary Russian reactionary philosopher Alexander Dugin calling modernity “pure satanism”. On the other hand, the National Review (!) calls Dugin՚s philosophy not only satanic but fascist and an effort to immanentize the eschaton:

Repeating the ideas of Nazi theorists Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Carl Schmitt, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Dugin says that this liberal threat is not new, but is the ideology of the maritime-cosmopolitan power “Atlantis,” which has conspired to subvert more conservative land-based societies since ancient times. Accordingly he has written books in which he has reconstructed the entire history of the world as a continuous battle between these two factions, from Rome vs. Carthage to Russia vs. the Anglo-Saxon “Atlantic Order” today.

Meanwhile Hamas claims to have captured an Israeli spy that happens to be a dolphin. Robert Anton Wilsion may have passed into the universe next door, but this one is increasingly beginning to resemble one of his novels.

More seriously, to any nrx-fellow-travellers who might be reading: how far are you going to let your anti-liberalism take you, and to where? A lot of you seem to want to get to Singapore (that is, a modern state run like a tight-knit corporation, authoritarian but highly rational and technical). But mostly what you actually get without liberalism is this sort of violent ethnic Blut und Boden nationalism, which is anything but nerd-friendly. That՚s a hell of a thing to aim for just because some SJWs were mean to you or whatever the motivation is.

The backpfeifengesicht primary

Backpfeifengesicht is a German word that means roughly, “face that cries out to be punched”. After last week՚s debate I was drawn to rank the Republican candidates in order of how much this word seemed to apply to them.

Cruz^†
Walker^†
Huckabee
Christie
Trump*
Paul
Rubio
Bush
Carson
Kasich

^†Cruz and Walker are basically tied for first place; they inspire an almost Lovecraftian level of loathing when I see them on the tube. 

^*Trump is really in a category of his own, because while he is eminently deserving of a punch, it is actually pretty entertaining to watch him act out his version of the archetype of America՚s asshole id. Unlike the others, he՚s a professional showman who knows how to draw and keep the attention of an audience. He is beyond embarassment so somehow transcends punchability.

This is pretty much the exact anti-correlate of electability in the general election. That is, it is conceivable that a normal person would not be completely repulsed by Rubio and Bush, so the best hope for the country is that the primary will continue to propel the more aggravating candidates to the top of the pack.