#TopTen | No. 7: Time for SOLO to change its name [updated]

 

Last year I wrote and posted 801 posts. (So readers, I guess “we are the 801s”).
    Of all those posts, this from 31 August was the seventh most popular, a reluctantly-written report that became sadly necessary to write about an Objectivist website gone bad. Sad, because I was once associated with a site that’s now a cesspool. Necessary if only to say “it’s not what it says on the label.”
    And for reasons that should become obvious, I start with some joyous words of wisdom and conclude with a picture of a Muslim smiling …

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Time for SOLO to change its name

Why have I posted so many recent posts exposing or explaining the odious Alt-Right movement? Because too many people I know and once valued have become infected by its virus, and intellectual hygiene demands that be acknowledged and rebutted (or an attempt at least made).

One local place that’s become a carrier for the virus is a site that’s still confusingly labelled “Objectivist,” although it’s now clearly anything but.  “SOLO” stands for sense-of-life Objectivism, as the site itself once did. It would be abundantly evident now however to any visitor of Lindsay Perigo’s site “for Sense-of-Life Objectivists” that it promotes neither – and should not be confused by anyone for an example of either Objectivism or a healthy sense of life.

Like me, many of you will know and will once have admired Lindsay. What he and his site have become, however, are no longer worthy of any admiration. It’s necessary to say this now publicly because Lindsay and I have shared stages together and been long-term collaborators on any number of projects over many years – and because some of my writing is still archived there on his site – and due to all this any reasonable person may assume I share all his odious views of today. I don’t. I very definitely don’t.

Mr Perigo’s once admirable obsession with opposing Islamist’s thuggery has now sadly morphed, as it has become more single-minded, from being just anti-Islamist to anti-Muslim to now being odiously anti-human. And repellent. After not having visited his site for some time I was dismayed to see what he had allowed his writing to become. Here are some few examples of how odious it’s gotten, discovered without even digging too deep after:

“We need to recognise that most existing ‘humans’ are just that: humans in inverted commas—anti- and sub-human, but existing in human form.”
http://www.solopassion.com/node/9935#comment-123072

   "Yes, people are, by and large, scum. That much has become irresistibly apparent to me..."
    http://www.solopassion.com/node/10060#comment-124011

"Humanity as a whole (my God, how OrthOists will hate that expression) is still *sub*-human. "Sub" must be circumvented and superseded  ... I cannot imagine it will come about without an intervening cataclysm wherein all sub-humans are Karmally wiped out by the effects of their own mindlessness, and we can start over.
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10253

These were not isolated views or from posts by rogue commenters, but a representative selection written and posted by the site’s host himself – who now quite routinely and without objection from the site’s regulars pronounces that Humanity “as a whole” is “sub-human.” This from a man who once excoriated what he then called “humanity diminishers.”

The diminishers have now been embraced. “Yes, people are, by and large, scum,” says Perigo as regularly as breathing and without any apparent irony on a site labelling itself “Sense-of-Life.” (Can you see that sentiment fitting anywhere within the parameters of that pic above?)

So blind has he become to what he’s embracing he can even suggest “OrthOists” (his latest neologism) will hate the phrase “humanity as whole” while failing to see that they may have an even greater problem with their condemnation as sub-human scum to be wiped out.

And who you might wonder are all these “sub-humans” for whose end he so fervently hopes? It seems clear it’s now anyone who disagrees with him. Including me, I guess, who was so labelled after suggesting earlier in the year that he had chosen an introductory selection of classical music for my blog not from the many more dramatic moments of romantic music he could have but from the more “tepid” end of the spectrum – his indirect response to my riposte arrived that very week; an answer, said Perigo, “to the pig-ignorant mewlings of the sub-humans who say Romantic-era music is ‘tepid’." That was me being pig ignorant, by the way, except it wasn’t – accuracy too being another casualty these days of Mr Perigo’s increasingly inward focus. [File it next to the amount of money he pathetically claims George Soros is handing out to Yaron Brook, who is apparently handing it all on to me. - Ed.]

And how about those he labels “OrthOists,” you ask, of whom he’s often so critical? It’s hard to know since neologising at the expense of clarity is an unfortunate Perigo fetish, but I think (this week at least) it must mean anyone who subscribes to the views espoused by Ayn Rand instead of those emanating from the fever dreams of the conspiracy theorists and worse with whom he now converses daily in his comments section of his site, where most of his site’s work is done.

So vast amounts of weirdness and worse, none of it emanating from either a healthy sense of life or the Objectivism he boasts as the site’s reason for being, and not just from his regular commenters and bloggers – many of whom are now explicitly white nationalists and “self-described “race realists” under whose influence, it appears, Mr Perigo is now…

    …leaning explicitly towards eugenics…

"There is no such thing as a right to breed.  Breeding is an imposition upon the bred without the consent of the bred. It's a form of initiating force. Then, Objectimorons will tell the involuntarily bred they have a duty to stay alive simply because they've been bred. This is rational??!! Benevolent??!! In this shitty world of Peter Keatings??!! ... The most important thing as far as the survival of Western Civilisation is concerned, aside from stopping Islamofilth immigration, is stopping The Filth from proliferating. In most cases, it's the only thing The Filth knows how to do. The Filth must be thwarted."
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10253#comment-125444

"Anyway, there should be a new party proposing licenses to breed and to vote, wresting education from the child-molesters, along with my Not One Muslim immigration policy. I'd like to call it something provocative like the Western Civilisation Party."
http://www.solopassion.com/node/8744#comment-125979

    …denying individual rights …

"We don't have a right to life just because we're alive and have a human body, though that's what the OrthOist position amounts to..."
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10253#comment-125418

    …expressing unrestrained support for the likes of Pauline Hanson …

"Move Over Brexit! Yoooooooge Setback for Filth in Australia!: Move over Brexit! Pauline Hanson, reviled by Filth, has just won a seat in the Australian Senate, and will possibly pick up two more once this weekend's election results become more clear... I personally delight in contemplating how horrified Obleftivists across the ditch in New Zealand will be at this advance for civilised values and human freedom.”
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10270

    …and for political assassination.

“If ever Obama were to be targeted by [a mass-murderer like a recent Islamist assassin], that would be poetic justice. I have no hesitation in saying that Obama is one ‘faggot’ whose martyrdom at the hands of the murderous bigots he has enabled would constitute Karmic justice ….”
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10259

Lest you think any of this is intended as humour, it isn’t. I wish it were – but that too seems another casualty of this new turn

As for reason (what Rand called “the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men”; “the supremacy of reason” being, she said, “the primary concern of [her] work”) in the view of Mr Perigo today that pours out of his site like a torrent, reason is now such an impotent force in the world with none of the power the “Filth” has to move the world’s minds, that we must all lock ourselves up behind walls while embracing those like Hanson who repudiate it.

Reason is impotent at SOLO, it appears, and evil an actual force in the world – an explicit repudiation of the Objectivist position and an object lesson in how a single obsession held beyond reason has morphed into a near universal reason- and humanity-diminishment.

The single obsession was Islamist thuggery. Or so it began. And yet in all his years of opposing and writing about this, a decade-long singular obsession, while the targets have morphed his thinking about it has never matured beyond saying “Death to Islam” in several dozen different ways. No solutions at all, zero; his only attempt at a policy being “not one Muslim,” a policy enthusiastically embraced at the fever swamp of his SOLO site. As if it were possible to simply ban or bar or wipe out 1.5 billion people from existence.

And a man who once cheered Ronald Reagan demanding a Soviet Premier “tear down this wall” can now be found seriously insisting that America must “build a wall” itself, and not just along its Mexican border but along its Canadian border as well !

So much for sense of life and reason.

Furthermore, Mr Perigo has not just repuidated several of Objectivism’s tenets, but explicitly repudiated Objectivism itself, which he now calls "Obleftivism" (whatever that means). Instead, while repudiating the philosophy that the very masthead of his site trumpets and by which he attracts unaware young readers, he is now promoting something he calls "Authenticism" -- which in all the years he’s been talking about it has never bothered to fully define apart from arm-waving about most humans not possessing rights (which humans? "Filth?" sub-humans? people with whom he’s had a disagreement?) and putting humans' animal side before their human. And his own personal cultural and highly unphilosophical heroes now hail not from Objectivism at all but from the explicit alt-right of his commenters, including internet bores Stefan Molyneux (a white nationalist known to SOLO’s visitors as “Molly”), Paul Joseph Watson (who helps runs conspiracy sites like “InfoBores” and “Pathetic Planet”) an entity whom Perigo calls “my new hero,” and Milo Yiannopoulos etc., Milo for President! enthuses Perigo, echoed by those with whom he now converses on his website -- which wears the banner of an Objectivist site while repudiating the Objectivist philosophy.

So as sense-of-life goes, yet alone commitment to reason and just basic intellectual hygiene, there’s every reason to shun the site and demand he change the name, if not yet his direction.

Because, you know, Mr Perigo is free to adopt whatever repellent views and associates he chooses. And you, dear reader, are quite free to join him in the fraud. But just basic intellectual honesty demands he not label those views and the site they frequent as something they are not.

Time to change the name and just go full retard. (Or, if it’s not too late, to reconsider.)

But since, like the pic at the top of the page, this one at the bottom also represents almost everything to which the site formally known as SOLO now stands opposed (including the grin), I thought I’d finish with this:

.[Pics by ObjectivismForIntellectuals and PlanningForLiberty]

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Tomorrow I post last year’s sixth-most popular post here at NOT PC, which as it happens is an exposé of one of Mr Perigo’s retarded new heroes. Stay tuned …

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UPDATE:  A comment on this post is too good to leave lying fallow in the comments section, alerting me that just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it actually just becomes more explicit …

Perigo waxing statist upon the "problem" of being outbred by Muslims:

"Licence to breed and licence to vote. Not One Muslim immigrant. Nothing uncivilised or unlibertarian
about any of that. Quite the contrary."
http://www.solopassion.com/node/10371#comment-127052

As more simultaneously asinine and chilling statement you'd be hard pressed to find. It is now NOT uncivilised or unlibertarian to have the state examine your suitability for reproduction. Yet the state should not dictate our social or sexual choices. Or how much we drink. Or smoke. Or what we eat. Yet a huge bureaucratic apparatus vetting would-be parents is perfectly acceptable.
    This is an example of jumping the shark and advocating for the shark all at once.

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