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The Moneyman Behind The Alt-Right


dream_weaver

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I define a man of the left as a cultural universalist and social egalitarian. I, on the other hand, am a cultural particularist and social pluralist; I applaud a variety of cultures each populated by their discrete swath of humanity. I do not support world improvers who seek dominion over others in the name of a utopian ideal. Personally, I am most comfortable not only among my tribe but more specifically with members who agree with Robert Frost that “good fences make good neighbors.”

Already Regnery is subdividing his white tribe into those who agree with Frost and those who don't. After he kicks out the anti-fence whites, what's next for the great ethnostate: street brawls over what color to paint the damn thing? If "comfort" with one's tribal members is the standard, then maybe we had better establish a universal level of discomfort which everyone must tolerate for the sake of national unity.

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37 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

If "comfort" with one's tribal members is the standard, then maybe we had better establish a universal level of discomfort which everyone must tolerate for the sake of national unity.

That sounds Kantian. We "must" tolerate that which we do not like, for the sake of "national unity?"

I'm no fan of Nazis, and this Bill Regnery doesn't sound like someone who I would want to grab a beer with... but that being said, it seems as though he has established a level of comfort for himself by moving to a majority-white community. Are we to deny him his right to freedom of association? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the most evil pieces of legislation to have ever been passed in America. I never see Objectivist articles from the ARI which describe why it was evil... it destroyed freedom of association in this country. One of the most fundamental rights in the Constitution.

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35 minutes ago, MisterSwig said:

If "comfort" with one's tribal members is the standard, then maybe we had better establish a universal level of discomfort which everyone must tolerate for the sake of national unity.

An interesting thing to note is that way back in 1786, some anti-Federalists supported states' rights or a focus on lower-level government in order to gain more harmony among local regions and comfort among those people and like-mindedness. Federalists, in particular Hamilton, did not like that because it would incline people towards groupthink. He preferred a system where people would argue and all that, perhaps to extreme ends (not violence) so that no one would just accept what one hears without someone dissenting. In other words, Hamilton was for something like a "national discomfort" as far as how the government operates.

"Comfort" and "harmony" is dangerous despite its attempt to be kind.

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2 minutes ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

That sounds Kantian. We "must" tolerate that which we do not like, for the sake of "national unity?"

"Tolerate" is perhaps the wrong word, but it fits as far as how, all things being equal, one should accept the errors of others on a political level even if distasteful. 

CRA is misguided in method, but it's far from "the most evil". There was and is a lot worse out there.

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5 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

CRA is misguided in method, but it's far from "the most evil". There was and is a lot worse out there.

That's why I said "one of the most evil" rather than the most evil. One can debate whether or not other laws are more or less evil, but that would not gain you anything... especially if your opponent agrees that what you mention is "still evil" even though it does not fit in the hierarchy of "most."

All that aside, why has the ARI refused to write even one article surrounding this piece of vile legislation? Instead we get rehashed article after rehashed article from Onkar Ghate and others on Donald Trump and why he's evil. We get article after article on the welfare state and why it's evil. Yeah, it's evil, gotcha. No need to write over a hundred articles about it. Blind repetition gets us nothing.

The ARI supports diversity, yet has very little diversity in its own content. They're the most basic of jokes.

14 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

some anti-Federalists

Would you consider yourself an anti-federalist? I've seen some Objectivists argue against the existence of state governments at all. This is, in my view, a giant mistake.

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I'll talk about it if you start a separate thread. There is a role for state government I think for geographical reasons for some local laws, but not much past that. The Federal government ought to be primary in order to keep its role constrained and running well - and to avoid groupthink or over-valuing "comfort" among one's tribe.

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31 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

In other words, Hamilton was for something like a "national discomfort" as far as how the government operates.

If the Bill of Rights were written today, it would probably be called the Bill of Tolerances.

1. Thou shalt tolerate freedom of expression, except if one should use a non-preferred gender pronoun.

2. Thou shalt tolerate guns, except for those used in mass shootings.

3. Thou shalt tolerate soldiers, except when they kill innocent children and babies during wartime.

Etc.

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19 minutes ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

I'm curious as to what you mean by this. Does this deserve its own thread?

Well, I'm not being serious here. We should not seek national unity based on universal tolerances. That would be completely subjective. It should be based on inalienable rights, like the Founders discovered, even though they got it a little wrong.

I was having some fun with this idea of tolerance as the basis for a legal system. For example, we should also not tolerate toy guns that look real, because kids might get shot. Oh, and ban old guns, because they've been known to blow up in your hand. Let's only have new guns that haven't been used in mass shootings and don't look like a toy.

Edited by MisterSwig
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2 hours ago, MisterSwig said:

If the Bill of Rights were written today, it would probably be called the Bill of Tolerances.

 

Perhaps, but it's important to note that the founders who supported anti-Federalism lost the debate to Federalists, who had a lot more to say than a mere statement of balance, piety, and patriotism. The comparison I'm making is that the alt-right is making the same type of argument. They 'd rather argue for an ethnostate in the sense that ethnic and cultural unity is fundamental to a proper society. They'd see a solution as some sort of pullback on the Federal government. I'd argue that that any Bill of Rights or Tolerances is just to appease people who fear "big government" for no other reason than it's "big" - whatever that means. If anything, good foundational principles will be lost to concrete-bound Buzzfeed articles listing "The 10 best rights". 

My wider point is that Regnery is a false ally. He may seem to be bad and good, good as far as promoting freedom of association, bad as far as being racist. But that's the thing. Freedom of association demands  people to be condemned on moral grounds, in the spirit of Hamilton (contra Jefferson who didn't like conflict). The enemy isn't a neoliberal who wants egalitarianism, but an alt-rightist (and his ally's) who stands against how the Constitution was actually supported and argued for. I support the Constitution not as a relic, but something that has grown from its whole history of discussion.

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3 hours ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the most evil pieces of legislation to have ever been passed in America. I never see Objectivist articles from the ARI which describe why it was evil... it destroyed freedom of association in this country. One of the most fundamental rights in the Constitution.

Are you aware that Rand's "Racism" article that popped up in your search contains this quote?

Quote

 

The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another example of a gross infringement of individual rights. It is proper to forbid all discrimination in government-owned facilities and establishments: the government has no right to discriminate against any citizens. And by the very same principle, the government has no right to discriminate for some citizens at the expense of others. It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments.

No man, neither Negro nor white, has any claim to the property of another man. A man’s rights are not violated by a private individual’s refusal to deal with him. Racism is an evil, irrational and morally contemptible doctrine — but doctrines cannot be forbidden or prescribed by law. Just as we have to protect a communist’s freedom of speech, even though his doctrines are evil, so we have to protect a racist’s right to the use and disposal of his own property. Private racism is not a legal, but a moral issue — and can be fought only by private means, such as economic boycott or social ostracism.

Needless to say, if that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in respect to that subject.*

It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently — the Negroes — are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

A word of warning: do not become victims of the same racists by succumbing to racism; do not hold against all Negroes the disgraceful irrationality of some of their leaders. No group has any proper intellectual leadership today or any proper representation.

 

The CRA is 53 years old. Nobody listened to Rand back then, and nobody will listen to us now. Why waste energy on it when we have much bigger fish to fry? Besides, Rand was against the CRA because it violates private property rights, not on account of some vague idea about "freedom of association" whose specific wording isn't even in the Constitution. If you want to fight the CRA, help re-establish the concept of private property rights, which ARI writes and talks about all the time. 

Edited by MisterSwig
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1 hour ago, Eiuol said:

The comparison I'm making is that the alt-right is making the same type of argument [as the anti-Federalists]. They 'd rather argue for an ethnostate in the sense that ethnic and cultural unity is fundamental to a proper society. They'd see a solution as some sort of pullback on the Federal government.

You mean like reserving the right to deport undesirables? This would be an extension of private property rights given to the state and not the feds. A private citizen of a particular state has the right to remove whomever he pleases from his plot of land. Likewise, an anti-Federalist might argue, the state should have the right to exile whomever it pleases for whatever reason it pleases. So if white Idaho votes to banish blacks, they'd have to move to a black-accepting state.

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15 minutes ago, softwareNerd said:

I understand that Robert Mercer is the money guy behind Bannon.

I see "Bannon" in the linked article. There's "Mercer" on wikipedia. Are you linking "Regnery" to "Mercer" via "Bannon"?

Off the cuff, it appears that "Regnery" and "Mercer" are behind "Bannon". When it comes to "follow the money", I understand the epistemological root better than the political veins.

Edited by dream_weaver
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7 hours ago, dream_weaver said:

Are you linking "Regnery" to "Mercer" via "Bannon"?

I'd not heard of Regnery before this. Mercer has been in the news a little bit, reported as being a co-owner of Breitbart News, and the person who pushed for Bannon and Kelly Ann Conway to be part of Trump's team.

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On 11/13/2017 at 5:48 AM, softwareNerd said:

I'd not heard of Regnery before this

Nor had I. Two things dragged me thru the article. The Alt-Right label, and "follow the money".

Follow the money is like walking upstream of a tributary to investigate the source. A question that occurs to me is: Of what significance did discovering that George Soros was in part enabling people to get paid for showing up to protests? A little front and center media time, until the media finds another distraction to move onto.

Whether memes, or shills going out to spread this or that cause, it ends up looking like noise on my facebook stream.

Starting off with people I knew, and adding others along the way, the ripple effects of say, the Alt-Right, can be assessed at a "gut-level". Some folk are frustrated by it, others bewildered, others seem bemused, etc. If the purpose is to continually subdivide and form and/or reshape groups, this happens at a slower pace, and is somewhat more difficult to detect.

 

Back to the central issue, I found an article on Digg regarding Regnery. You supplemented it with a wikipedia entry on Mercer. They have Bannon as one particular commonality (there may be others, if I could find within me a motivation to dig into it more.)

 

 

Edited by dream_weaver
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