Steve Bannon

[camouflage]

The Art Of War is a rather short book that you could read at one sitting. It's not nearly esoteric enough to an impressive recommendation. It's a 5th century BC Strategy For Dummies. What's notable here is there are actually folk around Trump's spinmeister who haven't read it.

Oh come on: Bannon recommended a book by Sun Tzu to some guy, it's not even a very long book, the brute. +50 evilness points.

This is not much for discourse imo.

 

[DotCommunist]

but does he lend out his bespunked first edition of Atlas Shrugged, thats what I'd like to know

 

[CrabbedOne]

I suspect he's secretly a Conan book kinda guy.

 

[J Ed]

The Art Of War is a rather short book that you could read at one sitting. It's not nearly esoteric enough to an impressive recommendation. It's a 5th century BC Strategy For Dummies. What's notable here is there are actually folk around Trump's spinmeister who haven't read it.

Worse than that, they don't even read about books, let alone the books themselves.

 

[DotCommunist]

I suspect he's secretly a Conan book kinda guy.

likely some chronicles of gor in there as well. He seems the type

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Oh come on: Bannon recommended a book by Sun Tzu to some guy, it's not even a very long book, the brute. +50 evilness points.

This is not much for discourse imo.

It's a book for spotty teenage boys, whose reading list extends only so as far as Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. You can just about tell someone's a dick if they list any of them as an influence.

 

[Gerry1time]

Funnily enough it was recommended in a reading list in The Guardian last year - How to be a winner: the books that inspire Mark Zuckerberg and other high flyers

"Indeed, the book has become essential to western business leaders, not only if they want to – as they must – understand their new Chinese masters, but also if they want to get ahead in their chosen field. Hence, only recently, the US business bible Forbes magazine printed 31 tips culled from Sun Tzu’s classic."

 

[camouflage]

It's a book for spotty teenage boys, whose reading list extends only so as far as Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. You can just about tell someone's a dick if they list any of them as an influence.

It's a book from the 5th Centuary BC, it's not really fair to say it's for spotty teenagers of today. Students of military strategy tend to not hold it in as high a regard as many imagine ("misleading" is the word that applies there I suppose). As far as what it tells you about the character of someone who says The Art of War was an influence... that's simply not enough information to draw any conclusion, what if the influencee in question studies ancient Chinese history? Fair play really. Tell us how Bannon reckons Mein Kamf or the mad scribblings of Rand is really super and cool and should be read immediately so that we can all be more impressively shocked and outraged. But if in 2500 years time a person says Atlas Shrugged was for them some kind of massive insight in their study of the 21st century... I'd hold fire on judging them for it at that point. Same thing re psychologists looking to glean some insight into the fevered mind of Austrian fecaphiliacs in Main Kamf.

Yes I have read the Art of War as a teenager (I wasn't spotty though), and it was a fascinating example of how far people thinking about things extends back in time. All in all I'd say the Oxford edition of the Bhagavad Gita was far more impressive influential and recommendable as far as ancient texts go.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

likely some chronicles of gor in there as well. He seems the type

Houseplants of Gor

 

[camouflage]

Houseplants of Gor

Bet he's not into Morcock, lol.

 

[Casually Red]

It's a book for spotty teenage boys, whose reading list extends only so as far as Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. You can just about tell someone's a dick if they list any of them as an influence.

It was on the Viet congs reading list .

 

[Casually Red]

All this talk of Rand has me confused . Bannons on the record he strongly opposes the Randian view . Calls it " disturbing " , among other things . Even cites Marx as a refutation .

Steve Bannon's worldview of Marx, religion, and capitalism is much more complicated than you think



Forbes Welcome


And a pretty definitive quote at the end of that article

Subscribe to read

Doesn't mean he isn't a cunt, just not that type of one .

Eta

Bloody links don't work.
But the last one said as regards Bannon " the arrow of history's not pointing in Paul Ryan or Ayn Rands direction "

 

[CrabbedOne]

It was on the Viet congs reading list .

And at Langley. Always tended to make me worry about thick necked CIA types.

I mean you could at least expect a spook to wade through Clausewitz and Machiavelli not some thin fifth century BC Chinese pamphlet. If you are going to get practical with that school read Giap.

Notably Salafi-Jihadi theorists tend to draw on Mao.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now.

“What we are witnessing,” Bannon told The Washington Post last month, “is the birth of a new political order.”

Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable | The Huffington Post

Evidently, Bannon is a fan of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001RKFU4I/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

 

[DotCommunist]

And at Langley. Always tended to make me worry about thick necked CIA types.

I mean you could at least expect a spook to wade through Clausewitz and Machiavelli not some thin fifth century BC Chinese pamphlet. If you are going to get practical with that school read Giap.

Notably Salafi-Jihadi theorists tend to draw on Mao.

angleton was keen on his agents reading lit theory in general. Never did work out why really, just assumed he thought that you could learn to read people by reading analysis of those peoples literature. Odd thing, but no weirder than goat staring

 

[mojo pixy]

It's a book for spotty teenage boys, whose reading list extends only so as far as Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. You can just about tell someone's a dick if they list any of them as an influence.

Nietzsche is OK, he can't be blamed for dicks who quote him out of context after he's dead. Ayn Rand can fuck right off though, there is no un-dickish way to enjoy what she wrote.

 

[CrabbedOne]

Nietzsche is OK, he can't be blamed for dicks who quote him out of context after he's dead. Ayn Rand can fuck right off though, there is no un-dickish way to enjoy what she wrote.

 

[CrabbedOne]

...
By coincidence or design, these are the issues on which Donald Trump and his most prominent advisors agree with Huntington and disagree with both traditional Republican and Democratic foreign-policy thinking. The emerging “Trump doctrine” of abstaining from providing global public goods (like security and trade) and cutting “deals” with great powers over issues like Ukraine’s sovereignty look like the abstention rule and the mediation rule in action.[v] Certainly domestic audiences in the United States and in other great powers will find a closed world attractive. This is especially true for second-tier great powers, who will find the prospect of retreating U.S. power will give them far more influence in their near abroad. As Ashford notes, the great risk is that Huntington’s thesis may prove a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Another likely volume Bannon rereads obsessively in The Head.

 

[CrabbedOne]

...
The source of those profits, ultimately, was operations like the one owned and operated by 26-year-old Liu Haibin in Jinhua, China, which I visited a few years ago. With about 30 workers on staff, Liu was able to keep a gold-farming setup running around the clock. While the night shift slept upstairs on plywood bunks, day-shift workers sat in the hot, dimly lit workshop, each tending three or four computers. They were “playing” World of Warcraft, farming gold at an impressive clip by hunting and looting monsters, their productivity greatly abetted by automated bots that allowed them to handle multiple characters with little effort. They worked 84-hour weeks, got a couple of days off per month, and earned about $4 a day, which even for China was not a stellar wage.

Liu’s income was better but not always by much. “Sometimes in a month you can lose all the profit you made in a year,” he said, admitting there were days he regretted getting into the business in the first place. Why bother? “We also love this game,” Liu told me.

Most American WoW players at the time knew little about how the farmers lived and worked. What they did know was that there seemed to be more and more of them in the game (broken English and repetitive playing patterns gave them away) and that WoW‘s publisher, Blizzard Entertainment, did not look favorably on their presence. A Blizzard policy statement reads: “They spam advertisements, use bots that make it hard for players to find the resources they need, and raise the cost of items through inflation.” As the gold-farmer population grew, opponents flooded message boards with anti-Chinese invective and increasingly took note of the role a company called IGE seemed to play in the phenomenon.
...

You couldn't make this shit up.

 

[bimble]

This is an interesting read, dissecting Bannon through a film he made (called generation zero).
He comes out of it looking like a malevolently unhinged Adam Curtis.
Steve Bannon harnessed the spirit of revolt that the Democrats gave up | Thomas Frank

 

[camouflage]

You couldn't make this shit up.

Actually you could...

sort of.

 

[brogdale]

This is an interesting read, dissecting Bannon through a film he made (called generation zero).
He comes out of it looking like a malevolently unhinged Adam Curtis.
Steve Bannon harnessed the spirit of revolt that the Democrats gave up | Thomas Frank

Nothing new is there? This is just Bannon ploughing the 'Blue Labour' furrow of blaming everything on the hippies.
The neoliberals can't have their sacred markets blamed, can they? No...no..look over there folks...it was all the fault of the cultural marxists; throwing a dead (cool) cat on the table.

 

[brogdale]

Tempting to cast this a Neoilliberalism, but I won't.

 

[J Ed]

Nothing new is there? This is just Bannon ploughing the 'Blue Labour' furrow of blaming everything on the hippies.
The neoliberals can't have their sacred markets blamed, can they? No...no..look over there folks...it was all the fault of the cultural marxists; throwing a dead (cool) cat on the table.

Interesting that you mention Blue Labour in reference to this, Glasman referred a lot to Distributism just as Bannon does. I listened to a lecture by fellow Blue Labourite Milibank today, available here. It was pretty incoherent in a lot of ways, seemed to mark a real break with reality for him - Milibank claimed that liberals were simultaneously too tolerant of and not intolerant enough of Islam, for example while apparently there is boundless potential religious energy in Lincolnshire. The good yellow bellies apparently are crying out for Christian banks, which Christians will have and they will be in opposition to the Islamic banks or something. What really struck me apart from the incoherence though was the absolute dearth of suggestions of policy or actual politics, the policy of these people really does seem to be a strong shift in rhetoric. A strong rejection of neoliberalism but only in the abstract.

 

[mojo pixy]

Tempting to cast this a Neoilliberalism, but I won't.

Good idea, that -eoill- in the middle is really hard to say.

 

[gawkrodger]

To paraphrase Spencer Sunshine ' mainstream media finally realise Bannon Has referenced Evola before'

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html

 

[bimble]

So this is Bannon's feature length 'documentary' from a few years ago:



I'm not even halfway though (despite the jazzy collage of vintage footage that comes on in between talking heads it is not fun to watch) but this is probably the most direct way to find out what it's like inside his head.

In a way I'm finding it reassuring because this is really just another youtube nutter conspiracy video, its not a manifesto by an evil genius.
But still, some seriously alarming bits, including how, when it comes time for the next inevitable Great Crisis (in the 4 repeating cycles of time theory):
"History shows that if an event does not trigger a Fourth turning, a Fourth Turning leader will actually encourage one to happen" .

edit: changed my mind as continued watching, it's not just another conspiracy vid, it's a political and economic agenda.

 

[brogdale]

So this is Bannon's feature length 'documentary' from a few years ago:


I'm not even halfway though (despite the jazzy collage of vintage footage that comes on in between talking heads it is not fun to watch) but this is probably the most direct way to find out what it's like inside his head.

Certainly a very effective way of seeing what he wants you to think is going on inside his head.

 

[bimble]

Certainly a very effective way of seeing what he wants you to think is going on inside his head.

It's not really what he thinks, its just what he wants me to think he thinks. Could be. But i don't think he was intending to make a film about himself.

to add:
I really do not think this film intends to distract, it's an attempt to convey a set of ideas.
It is very striking how many of the phrases and tropes in this film have popped up in Trump speeches already.

 

[brogdale]

It's not really what he thinks, its just what he wants me to think he thinks. Could be. But i don't think he was intending to make a film about himself.

to add:
I really do not think this film intends to distract, it's an attempt to convey a set of ideas.
It is very striking how many of the phrases and tropes in this film have popped up in Trump speeches already.

Well, it's based on the two notions of inter-generational division of the working class and the cyclical inevitability of catastrophe. Both very convenient screens/distractions for an oligarchic agenda.