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Salty K. Pickles's avatar

The anti-Semitic passages in BAM got under my skin... until I learned BAP was half Jewish. Then it all made sense.

“Bronze Age Mindset” isn’t the 21st century’s “Mein Kampf” -- it’s the 21st century’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”

;p

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John Pistelli's avatar

Right, even "tuna-stained blazer" is sort of lovingly observed self-abjection none of his followers (except of course Anna) could have come up with.

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Tardigrade_Sonata's avatar

Is it nativist to notice the prevalence of Slavic immigrants in this extended universe...

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Tardigrade_Sonata's avatar

Ha. Fascinating. I mean I do wonder about the extent that post-Soviet-breakup immigration patterns set this up, maybe not dissimilar from Jewish-Americans punching above their weight post-WWII (Roth, Mailer, Bellow, on the right Podhoretz & company). The internet won’t give me a good answer for the geographical origin of surname “Yarvin” but I’m going with Russian or Lithuanian.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Even if it's just BAP, Anna, and Dasha, it would prove your point. I think Yarv is of an earlier diaspora; his grandparents, if I recall, were CPUSA in the '30s.

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John Pistelli's avatar

Probably, but it may be a little bigger than that. An old alt-right blog in the Steve Sailer orbit, which Anna and Dasha of course promoted, got out the calipers and found that the post-left (now pretty much co-extensive with the new right) is full of not-quite-whites of every variety, including that of yours truly, is in general a peripheral-white phenomenon:

https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2019/08/ethnic-composition-of-anti-woke-left.html

(I take no responsibility for whatever you find at that link nor do I endorse its findings.)

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

There’s a good choices for the Novelas! On the BAP I wonder what you think makes Jones and Brand unacceptable vis-à-vis our Romanian vitalist? All three are ridiculous personas, but there is at least a Bronze Age pervert program, however comedic, whereas unless something has changed with those two since last I checked, that can’t be said for the others!

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John Pistelli's avatar

Thanks! I think "they" (the corporate boards, the Ivy faculties, the state deep and superficial) really and truly believe America is ethically obligated to rule the planet and that only a Nazi/Confederate could object. They have had since the '90s (since a certain spirit of Holocaust commemoration coincided with the breakup of Yugoslavia, signifiers since updated with reference to slavery and the Civil War) perfected a rhetoric of pro-war progressivism, one with roots in the early 20th century before Vietnam and the New Left got in the way. They are profoundly hostile, I believe, to even half-persuasive voices raised against this sensibility. The anti-war position was briefly fashionable among the same constituencies re: Iraq—including the deep state as witness the now forgotten Plame affair—only because the Bush gang genuinely got too greedy and threatened to blow the whole thing for everybody.

As for Costin, he just provides his readers a very complicated route to the old bellicosity; his very verbal style means war, and the recent article in Man's World explicitly decries the worldview he sums up, datedly, with the name of Chomsky. Now Jones and Brand are entirely imperfect vessels for this anti-imperial consciousness, and the issue itself is more complicated than the old hippies ever allowed since the leadership of Russia and China then and now are genuinely awful, but if I had to guess, I'd say that's what's going on.

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Gnocchic Apocryphon's avatar

Yes, I think as guesses go that’s not a bad one. They were both anti-vaccination, right? I think those sort of contrarian outside people got hit maybe the hardest by the Trump era liberal loss of faith in the critical thinking ability of the masses- but then I repeat myself.

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Tardigrade_Sonata's avatar

I remember a (rotoscoped) Alex Jones in Linklater’s Waking Life (a movie I requested my mother rent post-my-wisdom tooth surgery at 16, doped up on opioids) and thinking “that guy’s funny and angry. I bet Austin Is a trip.”

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