Amarna Forum

What is Nigel Carlsbad? Nigel Carlsbad was an account on Twitter 2 years ago or so with about 8000 followers. He was known for posting extremely boring threads about Nazis being bad or something. He also had a terrible blog I can't believe anyone read that has been deleted about "restoring the political science" and "conceptual history", basically excessively wordy bullshit. I think he was also a Hegelian (also wordy bullshit).

Here a man can access an archive of his blog, which was taken down for reasons that will be explained.

It's hard to understand how this guy got any followers at all. The power of spam I suppose? Looking back, it was never that many people. Most of his onlookers would probably never read his dry, dusty, pedantic blog. Instead, they came because Carlsbad started getting involved in Twitter drama.

Essentially, he started posting leftist takes, and also ran a sock puppet account called "Long Knife Enjoyer" where he would parody his "enemies", which were people who weren't pretending to be Thomas Carlyle online in 2022. Eventually, this gay op was found out and it showed everyone just how terminally online Carlsbad was.

Soon after this, he, embarrassed, deleted everything and disappeared.

Now, he may be back on Substack. His only new post is a "critique" of BAP that roughly boils down to "what would Thomas Carlyle say about BAP?" It is quite cute that this sperg tries to keep 19th century political intellectualism alive, with its bizarre dogmatic fads, pompous vocabulary, its childish ignorance of Darwin and everything after him, without realizing that this is all gone for a reason. He writes for an audience that no longer exists: a classically educated aristocracy with only access to books and essays, which knows no modern math or science but only Aristotle and similar antique writings.

I am no expert on Carlsbad, so please, whatever I missed, do add.

I thought consensus was that gymchad is carlsbad

There's a couple things missed. First of all, Nigel didn't spam his way to respect, he earned it more or less fairly like any other account. People recognize those who put thought and effort and scholarship into their posts and Nigel did all three. In fact as far as his falling out goes, it was specifically his propensity for e-drama that did it more than his actual ideas. Nigel was a poster on Amarna 1.0 from what I understand as well. His specific idea of "true conservatism" was always on the outskirts of conensus among this group but he was one of its best representatives and I don't think he got epically deboonked or anything. It was an ongoing bait up until the time he spoiled it with gayops. Though yes, practically nobody actually read Carlsblog.

From my memory the Nigel Carlsbad fallout is a saga in three parts...it all begins with BAP and his friends calling him out, saying he is just like Kantbot, I remember Nigel making a post about how he was definitively cast out from the sphere when that happened. That's probably the impetus for creating LKE, though maybe LKE was already around. Nigel had lots of unresolved tension with the "amarnites" as an anti-nihilist. LKE was created to become a new "successful" account in the amarnasphere, and then after it "succeeded" as a prominent voice he would use it to subtly imply there are pro-communist and pro-tranny amarnite sensibilities. The problem with this gayop is it wasn't so black and white. Some people believed it was Carlsbad almost immediately and started retweeting the account to mock him. It also doesn't help that Nigel whored himself out DM'ing other accounts asking for promotion, unlike he did with his normal account. To some degree LKE was accepted, but it's not clear who or what. And Nigel wasn't charitable enough to care anyways, from the outset of LKE it was intended to reach a specific conclusion and Nigel ignored anybody from the amarnasphere or adjacent spheres who argued against LKE posts seriously.

It also wasn't "found out", other than the speculation from certain people that it was him. Nigel came out of the closet and admitted he ran the account and began a deluge of "incriminating" information which was intended to be an exposé on amarnites. The tweet was actually widely received and promoted by petty legions of amarnite "enemies", for example both John Dios and Boiltowl promoted the Nigel thread, ironic because its now completely forgotten in spite of being generally "successful" at the time.

I'm fuzzy on this but the reception to LKE varied in the immediate week after it. I remember Nigel being in an out of smeed/ER server during this debacle and people were going back and forth on whether the thread had any value or not. His adverserial relationship with Mikka (positive) was not immediately damaged by LKE, but eventually Mikka adopted the LKE personality himself as a refutation of Carlsbad's entire project and that's when the Mikka-Carlsbad dialogue broke down completely and they became actual enemies rather than "frenemies". It fizzled out slowly after that. By the time the blog had been deleted I think he was inactive ans basically out of the game for months.

Some say Carlsbad still occasionally haunts the forum and other amarnite circles as a ghost. RIP Nigel Carlsbad.

It is a shame what happened, I did read some of the Carlsblog before he took it down and his Kondylis's Konservativismus series on j'accuse (which is now paywalled?) and found both interesting. I think some were introduced to Kondylis via Carlsbad and I've kept him on my "to read" list since. The propensity for drama was what took him down, though I don't know who threw the first "punch" in the LKE saga as prior to it I wouldn't say he was anything like Kantbot but beyond it basically lost it (as far as being understood as part of the space) with the support for the Groypers and the retard Joel Davis in November of 2022 which turned many off him, he understood and then deactivated as the new year came around. I do hope he's still at work as he was quite the intellect (and poster).

I don't understand why anyone would think carlsbad was smart. Seems clearly like a 118 IQ intellect with a verbal tilt and not much of use to say. Can someone summarize his contribution to amarnite knowledge?

Guest Wrote:I don't understand why anyone would think carlsbad was smart. Seems clearly like a 118 IQ intellect with a verbal tilt and not much of use to say. Can someone summarize his contribution to amarnite knowledge?

The phrase "restoring the X science" is immortalized because of Carlsbad, that's proof of his influence. I think the question here is not a good one, how do we even summarize what Anthony or Mikka or Meredith or Contrary or any other core user contributes? Some of them have singular words like "sensitive" and "meritocracy" that they can be associated with, but the ideas are too complex to just summarize instantly. Hence their value as interlocutors. 

Carlsbad's particular role was similar to JSGroyp in maintaining a hard line, principled conservative edge to counteract the nihilist progessivism of other prominent posters.

a system is failing Wrote:Carlsbad's particular role was similar to JSGroyp in maintaining a hard line, principled conservative edge to counteract the nihilist progessivism of other prominent posters.

Carlsbad's particular role was to be a retrograde moron who could impress a select few with his knowledge of early 19th century Germany and then suffer a complete meltdown in public after trying to dishonestly get one up on a group who had engaged with him honestly in debate up until that point. He was born into this world to serve as a warning against trying to halt the unstoppable march of progress. That anybody still respects that hysterical woman is incredibly disconcerting. A meme phrase employed ironically isn't proof of any influence whatsoever -- I invented the term "Amarnite" when people were still calling this "our thing", but I wouldn't say I have any particular influence on Amarnite thought in general.

Your characterization of LKE as some sort of principled stand against the "trannies and commies of the Amarna Forum" (Non-existent demographic, btw. Meds.), which Carlsbad supposedly considered a distinct group from Mikkacrats, is laughable. LKE's entire shtick was restating Mikka's points in slightly coarser language, which he would later characterize as communist. By the time he tried to lionize trannies, everybody had already jumped ship.


Here is LKE quote-tweeting a (completely correct) Mikka post in agreement, as a deceitful attack.

Carlsbad came crawling back and tried to rebuild burnt bridges with Mikka once he didn't get the knock-out victory he hoped for because he's a cowardly snake; hence, why he didn't just debate Mikka directly and made LKE instead. Mikka didn't humor him. Again, the level of historical revisionism is completely baffling to me. How can anybody think a respectable figure would participate in this sort of behavior? This is what elementary school-aged girls do to each other. In the end, he truly was like Kantbot. The Bronze Age Pervert was completely correct, as usual.

So we can all agree that Carlsbad is in this thread. The question is, how many of you are Carlsbad?

Carlsbad's memories of "honest engagement" would probably bring back traumatic memories of submarnites and bleppsama followers calling him nigcel assmad, nigeria far-from-chad, etc. His meltdown was not entirely his fault, although he was unhinged.

I do find it amusing that all the Christian amarnites are sympathetic toward him (Skorr, ASIF, Jawn, etc) which really says it all regarding his role in The Thing.

Just a little memory jog (for myself): I recall one Carlsbad space where he read excerpts from this book on the development of bohemian aesthetic sensibilities, and this boomer entered the space to incessantly praise him.

I stumbled across this article last night and was astonished at the contrast between the quality of it and most of what I know Carlsbad for. I discovered the BAP sphere around summer 2022, right around the time of LKE and witnessed his descent into promoting Ye24 to own the Amarnites. When the Morrison piece came out I skimmed over it and was amused both at the obvious seething resentment that pervaded it and its attempted superficial presentation of "mature and serious scholarship" while displaying clear illiteracy in classical scholarship on several points. But this American Sun article, written two years earlier, is levelheaded, considered, and strikes at the heart of an interesting problem. It's one of the few criticisms of Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism I've seen that isn't either completely ignorant or partisan. It would do Carlsbad a great deal of good if someone introduced him to the venerable academic tradition of paraphrasing or footnotes, but otherwise I was impressed by it and I think it's worth responding to.

The thesis essentially seems to reduce to the idea that, unlike in Stirner, Nietzsche's praise of egoism and his ideas of the Overman and "order of rank" are incongruent. It is interesting that Carlsbad mentions reading Stirner induced in him a crisis of faith, which he could only resolve through the rediscovery of Christianity (would that imply that without "faith" Stirner remains unrefuted in Carlsbad's mind?), but I want to address the thesis because it's a critique I've been grappling with myself, independently, for the last few months. I read Stirner as basically a solipsist, someone who took ego cogito or possibly Fichte's philosophy to its logical political conclusion. This, I think, is part of what makes Stirner immediately appealing to people- the West's philosophical tradition, as distinguished from the ancients, in a very fundamental way begins with subjectivity. But already on this point Nietzsche and even Kant diverge with Stirner and represent a deepening of Cartesianism. Ego-ism, far from being the only and absolute fact, contains within it myriad assumptions. The ego and consciousness itself, certainly modern subjectivity, are the most recent constructions in the history of mankind and consequently must rest upon certain unexamined faculties, which themselves rest upon certain drives, which in turn in Nietzsche's view ultimately rests upon will-to-power as a fundamental ontological fact. There's an aphorism in BGE that talks about this explicitly that I'm too lazy to find right now and there's also the transcendental deduction for Kant. 

Nietzsche is not a solipsist, he is a metaphysician and a systematist that hides this fact out of a sense of propriety, and egoism is for him the fundamental drive of the will-to-power operative at the level of individuals. Since Nietzsche holds this thesis about nature in which metaphysics and morals are identical he can in good conscience speak of order of rank, egoism, and the Overman in the same breath- especially because, as Carlsbad alludes to, Nietzsche sought to undermine casuality. It is possible and necessary in Nietzsche's view to think in extended historical terms- one is the summation of everything that came before him and he is a link in the ladder that will proceed after him. We might borrow a phrase from Land and speak of the Overman assembling himself from the future. This is not an unegoistic view, because "egoism" in practice entails subordinating oneself to others either out of necessity or pragmatism, as Carlsbad says one could read Stirner and adopt his views with no difference in outward behavior. The difference in the case of the Overman is that one is subordinating oneself to an individual who does not yet exist, and not an "ideal"- that is the essential point. Anyway that's the gist of it, I elided a lot of details and actual Arguments but they're not directly relevant, I only wanted to illustrate how Nietzsche's view differs from Stirner's and is, unlike what Carlsbad claims, consistent. He isn't a mere polemicist.

Some concluding miscellaneous thoughts on Carlsbad: conceptual history is interesting and I've been meaning to look into it. I can see the appeal of Haller if you're a parochial tradcath but ultimately his thought amounts to nothing more than a Moldbuggian thought experiment with no connection to political reality or history. On a personal level he seems like someone who was relatively intelligent and did interesting scholarship but his judgment has been tainted by resentment and "e-drama."

He never had much influence in the first place, he was always a wacky side character curiousity which is why no one really cared about the feud; Bap’s thread in response to Carlsbad was the only reaction that seemed real. Mikka affected rage at him for content and his retarded underlings started attacking him. He was somewhat of a coaler nonetheless.

I don't care about any of these characterizations. I'm not on or off team Carslbad and if you want to read that into it's your business. I don't think amarna is pro-tranny and it's not even close to communist, but that was clearly what LKE was designed to accuse "amarnites" of. Anybody who was present at the time would know this term, especially when wielded by Carlsbad was extremely meaningless and would be applied to any progressive nihilist right wing twitter user whether or not they had any connection to Amarna. If Carlsbad truly was an unremarkable idiot though this website would be beseiged by people regularly within a similar "league" as him. Most other criticisms of this website, insofaras there are any, are not intelligent in the slighest. I am pretty sure we can say Carlsbad went the furthest out of anybody in trying to form some argument against vaguely "amarnite" ideas.

Guest Wrote:I don't understand why anyone would think carlsbad was smart. Seems clearly like a 118 IQ intellect with a verbal tilt and not much of use to say. Can someone summarize his contribution to amarnite knowledge?

Carlsbad was a mechanical engineer actually. Back to HBD twitter with you now Joseph Bronski

GymChad Wrote:What is Nigel Carlsbad? Nigel Carlsbad was an account on Twitter 2 years ago or so with about 8000 followers. He was known for posting extremely boring threads about Nazis being bad or something. He also had a terrible blog I can't believe anyone read that has been deleted about "restoring the political science" and "conceptual history", basically excessively wordy bullshit. I think he was also a Hegelian (also wordy bullshit).

Here a man can access an archive of his blog, which was taken down for reasons that will be explained.

It's hard to understand how this guy got any followers at all. The power of spam I suppose? Looking back, it was never that many people. Most of his onlookers would probably never read his dry, dusty, pedantic blog. Instead, they came because Carlsbad started getting involved in Twitter drama.

Essentially, he started posting leftist takes, and also ran a sock puppet account called "Long Knife Enjoyer" where he would parody his "enemies", which were people who weren't pretending to be Thomas Carlyle online in 2022. Eventually, this gay op was found out and it showed everyone just how terminally online Carlsbad was.

Soon after this, he, embarrassed, deleted everything and disappeared.

Now, he may be back on Substack. His only new post is a "critique" of BAP that roughly boils down to "what would Thomas Carlyle say about BAP?" It is quite cute that this sperg tries to keep 19th century political intellectualism alive, with its bizarre dogmatic fads, pompous vocabulary, its childish ignorance of Darwin and everything after him, without realizing that this is all gone for a reason. He writes for an audience that no longer exists: a classically educated aristocracy with only access to books and essays, which knows no modern math or science but only Aristotle and similar antique writings.

I am no expert on Carlsbad, so please, whatever I missed, do add.

He quit because a Carlsbaddian sphere formed kek, mostly submarnites and anti racist Fuentesites.

GymChad Wrote:and also ran a sock puppet account called "Long Knife Enjoyer" where he would parody his "enemies", which were people who weren't pretending to be Thomas Carlyle online in 2022.

The best part about this is that his parody of people he didn't like was quite accurate and, more importantly, a hilarious account. Because it was so, the LKE account quickly became popular in the sphere and received a lot of engagement. When he dropped the act as a "gotcha" he was mocked even moreso than before. I really believe that this is what caused him to quit, though I'm no Carlsbad expert myself.

My impression was Carlsbad's blog was one of the last vestige holdovers from the NRx culture days. He wasn't truly NRx but he originally interacted with people from that sphere and was slowly grouped in with them as he was sympathetic to the Catholic wing of NRx. Similar to the development of the terminology surrounding Amarna but with NRx. His first appearance was boosted by accounts like Tantum () who came out of the blog culture around 2015-2016. Carlsblog was one of the last "big blogs" from that sphere (so about a couple dozen active readers) to make a twitter account. If you ever looked at his comments he was similarly cantankerous as he was on twitter. His entire personality was holding an extremely specific legal-historical ideology based in patrimonial which was influence by one specific guy, beside Haller, who I can't remember the name of but Carlsbad always pointed to him in his blog posts. It allowed him to be an extreme contra-contra-contra-contrarian no matter the situation. His personality meant he slowly became enmeshed in drama and allowed his blog to gather dust.

He also finally deleted the GG21c substack after making a big deal over the project in his mothes before departure.

Still remember how BAP lowkey wanted Carlsbad's approval, he even went to one of his twitter spaces and everyone's mocking BAP, and the bap cuck didn't even utter a word, the thing with Carlsbad was that he wanted to dethrone BAP (my personal theory) as the leader/most infuential person in the online dissident right, of course, if he didn't deleted his account, he would've achieved that rank by this point if he was still around.

Like said before, Carlsbad had the same magnetic personality as world historical leaders, he had the knowledge most dissidents would kill to have, but he sooner or later found out that being on twitter it's a waste of time, it wouldn't surprise me if he surfaces again with a newly released book, he was a proud of being considered an Antiquarian after all

Guest Wrote:Still remember how BAP lowkey wanted Carlsbad's approval, he even went to one of his twitter spaces and everyone's mocking BAP, and the bap cuck didn't even utter a word, the thing with Carlsbad was that he wanted to dethrone BAP as the leader/most infuential person in the online dissident right

For You:

Imaging how drab and sombre a world where Carlsbad usurps BAP. It wouldn't really look like an usurpation. Unsweetened tea in an eternal autumn.